Blessings of the Sun

Fuchs found Southern California, 1937, "still undeveloped, fresh and brimming and unawakened, at the beginning everything in this new land wonderfully solitary, burning, and kind."

"What is the secret elixir that we must look for, the thing that gives a story life...It's the melodic line-when it all comes together, it sings."

'It is sometimes to do with the light, I suppose, and the airiness and bareness an frugality of life in the Midi which includes a simplicity of thought, and a kind of whittling to the bone...Sunlight reflected from red tile floors on to whitewashed walls..and an air so soft that you live equally in and out of doors, suggest an experience so sweetly simple that you wonder that life ever appeared the tangled , hustling and distracting piece of nonsense you once thought it....Your mind relaxes, your thoughts spread out and take their shape, phobias disappear...'

---Stella Bowen.

~~~

The old sun on our backs, a life in the open, out of the cloister, away from the cramped, stifled and pointless conversations, the crabbed existence of dreary drab afternoons, the mind vacant of any lasting thoughts, churning out anxieties for a halfpenny.

The old sun, its ancient pathways, the timeless within the turnings. The sun's light: 'tight and loose': fidelity to the centre; the dream of periphery. Like a pagan you look to the sun, and all falls away. No chain of being, no thought of the same sub-atomic processes working in both of us, but the simple fact that a life under the sun erodes our names. My hands are burned, my face has darkened. The north survives in the small mirror but leaves my eyes...