Eye and heart

First order of business: I am grateful to Antares-Cryptos for his recently-presented blog awards, on which list I was included. Thank you for your ongoing comments and for beginning your own posts, which entertain and inform. I am delighted to be in such rich company.

--------------

In a previous life I worked in network television, tangentially connected to the departments involved in selecting the pilots which would become series on the fall schedule. The first of May meant longer office days, weekend work, seeing my family less and, often, having to be at my post on Mother's Day. That was two decades ago and I have tried to pay attention to what spring, or May, means now. To judge by the past few weeks, it signifies an unhealthy lust for new art supplies.

Some of you will recognize the symptoms and others may see their own obsessions, translated into the language of paper arts. After learning what local artist/teacher Kelly Kilmer considers the best permanent glue stick (I KNOW! A question you never thought to ask), I spent too many hours on line trying to find a source of fewer than ten sticks at what I considered a reasonable cost for shipping. This took place over two, possibly three, days.

Earlier I devoted much of the week looking on-line at floral scrapbook papers, now plentifully available as opposed to their non-existence last year when I went ahead and created my own. My eventual choices cost as little as 20 cents a sheet. I felt like my child self with a nickle to spend on candy at the neighborhood market, my Puritan ancestors whispering, warning me not to make any foolish choices.

It may come back to recent thoughts about being in love with beauty, the ways in which what pleases the eye gladdens the heart. A glue stick may not be beautiful, but the Coccoina brand, in its silver tube with its almond scent, comes close. The papers and a small but choice clutch of Mrs. Grossman's stickers make me smile. So do the commemorative stamps, including Negro League Baseball, that will further brighten decorated envelopes.

The relationship between eye and heart is as indelible as first love, as inseparable as macaroni and cheese. The past week also brought the gift of a couple dozen poetry books to expand my slim collection and explode my imagination. Looking at their spines, titles and writers, I swear made me light-headed. As I began to flip through the volumes, thick and thin, what my vision took in began to fill my heart and caused tears...and laughter.

To compare flowered cardstock to words of immortal significance is not to trivialize poetry but to indicate that we love what we love, we respond to beauty where we find it. It may be the new drill press, sewing machine, game console or designer bag. It may be Chanel lipstick or the Houdini biography. The yearning and delight are not restricted to spring; we are allowed to lust year-round. But when the clouds part or retreat altogether, the sun glints off shiny new growth, the heaviest of the blankets can be put away and our hibernating minds return to life and its possibilities, what is good becomes better in the company of visual happiness. If I could only decide which is the most perfect spiral-bound journal.