Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 58th post, Helena marvels at her late summer garden, finds solace in the persistence of art as resistance to the world’s unknowing, and shares some of her students' publications. Enjoy!
Summer’s end
This has been the most beautiful August, and now September, that I remember here. The gardens are lush and gorgeous, teaming with greens, oranges, yellows and reds; late blooming lilies. Lisa’s heliotropes are not near up to my bedroom window. They usually have reached the sill by July. August is scruffy, and by September the garden is withered and disorganized, the leaves from the woods already falling and sitting here and there in my plants, all coming to their end-of-summer cycle. June is gorgeous, and July, the peak. I feel sadness on the first of August, when we turn the corner to autumn. I’ve waited all year for the snow to thaw and give way to spring, then to the wonder of the Catskill Mountain summer. But this year there are three Julys.
Patches of my garden are the blooms of gifts from friends, some of them gone—Jane, Janice. Leslie’s Joe-Pye-weed would be listing by now, bent and chaotic. But not this year. If I were to paint them, the stalks would make a pattern of curves, like Cezanne’s last paintings of his woods, still growing toward the sun, still full of the thrust that overcomes gravity. Janice’s red basil, perennial in my Long Island garden, replanted here 26 years ago, still grows here and there in patches, having just survived the mountain-night temperatures of winter. I’m still planting. Mums are growing with summer roses, zinnias, and wild geranium. A shift of seasons, an overlap. July was all rain and humid nights. Now the days are clear, the nights cold enough to turn up the heat. I haven’t built a fire yet. This is a garden I’ve never seen.
Still, I feel the burning forests in Canada at the back of my throat—the planet caught in the crosshairs of human politics. The planet—from humanity’s point of view.
David and Goliath is a ridiculous metaphor. Human politics of greed are small. Of course, the Earth will have her way. She’ll win. On what terms? On the terms of a planet. On that scale. She’ll shake the poisons off. Humanity is still evolving, said Teilhard, and so are, says the mystic G. I. Gurdieff, the planets. I read that when I was 15. Planets have consciousness. That sounded like a fairy tale then, yet I knew it was true. I knew it intuitively; how else could I have taken that in? Now we know that the forests are communities of trees that communicate with each other, take care of each other. The knowledge of the world is catching up with the visions of the mystics, and with the understandings of the nations of Indigenous peoples. Power politics seem like shadows in the sun when I ponder this way. We’re caught, like Joe-Pye-weed, between the pull of the sun and the pull of earth, its molten core and underground rivers. Humanity’s awareness is growing. Up against the wall, our eyes are opening to the old men’s dreams. I vote for the cosmos.
I’ll buy some more plants this week, perennials. And I’ll buy some bulbs to bloom next spring. And with the coming winter, I pray the fires in Greece will have been subdued by the rains. I’ve read that the snows will quell the fires in Canada—for a time. Of course, I will vote, though I didn’t take that responsibility seriously until I was in my twenties and somehow had awakened to the concept of citizenship. Growing, even in human beings, is a pull, it seems to me, of forces greater than I can imagine. A long, long July, crown of our mountain summers, the energy of autumn already thrilling, living in this overlap of times.
Maybe the late beauty of my garden will last through September this year. Whether or not, without thinking about its meaning, I vote for the cosmos.
Art is our response
After a long period of mourning Jim (it soon will be a year) and my cat, Sebastian (just four months), a time of seeming fallowness of my earth, I am pondering again. And one night last week, images of the cosmos moving through me as I was falling asleep, I heard it: Art is our response to the immeasurable immensity.
Or poetry, writing. Dance, or friendship. Sewing, and any good thing we can do to make order of life around us and inside us; threads and paints and letters and white pages. When we stay rooted with gravity, and, like the forests, grow toward the sun, we are order-makers. We are storytellers.
Here is a quote from a writer friend. Its profundity made me see stars: “…And the most amazing highlight of the…day was discovering how powerful words are…Spoken or written, they call forth the limitless unmanifest from the reservoir of creation—like strands of cotton candy being drawn from a spinning drum—as if made from nothing.” –Gail Perlmutter, “The Forest Chronicles”—November 19, 2022
I am so pleased to share three of my students’ publishing credits:
B.J. Jewett’s books You Don’t Fall Out of the Universe and The Ancient Oak
Robin Schepper’s book Finding My Way: A Memoir of Family, Identity, and Political Ambition
Michèle Alexandre’s essays “Black Love: Crossing Time and Space” (Atticus Review June 2021) and “Just Come” (editor’s pick from issue 152 of Red Fez)
Much of the writing came from the work of our classes.
Keep making—and sharing—art.
What did you think of Helena’s latest post? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
Want to receive tips and inspiration like this in your inbox every Sunday morning? Join our email list community! You will receive weekly advice, a year’s worth of weekly writing prompts as a FREE download, and be eligible to participate in our monthly photo prompt contest for a chance to share an original piece of writing with our community of more than 2,500 writers.
