light of the South

joy today
It's all about sunflowers. Sunflower season, as dictated by nature, occurs at summer's end around here, but now in the midst of winter, a beautiful yarn has brought it to me.

It's Opal's Van Gogh series of yarns and this one, of course, is based on his sunflower paintings. I enjoyed working with the yarn so much that I think it actually embedded some cheerful energy into my psyche. These socks are the February project in my year long goal of a pair a month.

Working with this yarn kept me in a sunny arts and poetry mode for a couple of weeks. I remembered walking into the Van Gogh room of the D'Orsay in Paris a couple of years ago and how the vibrant colors of his paintings nearly knocked me over so many years after they were painted. Don MacLean's song Vincent kept strumming in my head as I knitted and I remembered my friend Richard singing it and playing his guitar as we all tried to sing along with him, stumbling over the words. The colors running through my fingers kept me from descending into memories of times and friends long gone. I reread my friend Marjorie Agosin's book, Starry Night. The poems came from her embracing the light of southern France and "the spirit of Vincent van Gogh who took me there". The whole experience of poetry, music, art, transcended knitting a mere pair of wool socks with pretty colored string and four thin sticks. Highly recommended as an antidote to winter. All of it.

Mad about yellow,
faithful follower of
sunflowers
I go into the storm,
shredded by light.
I set my easel in fertile
fields
I paint blind and drunk
glorying in my work.
     ("Yellow", by Marjorie Agosin, from Starry Night, White Pine Press, 1996)