I used to bring my coloring books to rehearsals and fantasize about the characters in the operas, imagining I was one of them.

Many of those rehearsals were for operas she directed, and I became well acquainted with the music of Gounod, Mozart, Prokofiev, Strauss, Bizet, and so many others. I watched as she bound her music scores in three-ring binders and attached sheets of college lined paper to the edge of each page, which she used to notate in her scrawling looping hand exactly what moves the singers should make exactly when. Many directors have copied that method. 

She gave so much to this world with her beautiful voice, and now with her passing there is silence.

And I have inherited those scores with the binder paper attached to each page. Some of her life’s work.

When I open the binders, I find lots of scribbling on the score, notes on the binder paper edge, and red pencil marks pointing from her annotation to the exact moment in the score where the singer turns left, stands up, grimaces, cries, laughs, reaches out, reacts to another singer, or leaves the stage. Her vision of the interactions between the characters is clearly drawn, indicating which of the soprano notes prompts the tenor to run forward, or which chord in the orchestra drives the bass to run off the stage. Or perhaps the chord only reflects the bass’s need to run. 

Seeing these opera scores propels me back 55 years in a matter of seconds, and I remember not only the performances, but also the dinners afterwards, where the conductor told outrageous stories of past performances, and the room rang with the rich musical laughter of the opera cast.

But what should I do with those scores now?

They fill an entire cabinet, floor to ceiling. I have sent some to a music school, others to a college, but I still have about eighty big binders, with the words “Rigoletto”, “Carmen”, “Figaro”, “The Magic Flute”, “Faust”, “Merry Wives”, “Three Penny Opera”, “Les Mamelles de Tiresias”, or “Transformations” in block letters across the spine. I will contact a few more schools to see whether they want to house my mother’s directing legacy, but surely there will still remain quite a few scores in that cabinet. I could imagine myself reading through one or two of them, or keeping them just so I can see her handwriting, which still makes me catch my breath, but if I’m honest with myself, I don’t really have the time. And if I did, I’d probably do something else. But to throw it all away, recycle the paper and donate the empty binders, seems sacreligious. How can I dump my mother’s work in the recycle bin?? In what form should it be preserved? And who will benefit?

This brings me to a larger question: what should we preserve?

What skills? What art pieces? What crafts? Will things that were valuable to me, my mother’s Waterford crystal, or my great aunt Josephine’s silver coffee and tea set, have value for my daughter? Will anyone need or want to know how to make bobbin lace? What will happen to all my antique bobbins? What of my grandmother’s gossamer lace doilies, or the mosaic table my mother made? What should I do with the box of string quartet music that I have? What will my daughter do with all the old family photos of people she never met, but whom I loved dearly? In addition to my own grief for people who are gone, there is a grief for the world, a grief for lost skills, and grief for a lost appreciation of things that are beautiful but no longer very useful. 

Some skills and arts that seemed like they were disappearing, however, have now returned.

I’m thinking of knitting, crocheting and other textile crafts. Just look at Instagram, for example, and you’ll find an amazing array of young artists and designers who create textiles of astounding beauty. There are Russian tatting artists, Belgian bobbin lace makers, English spinners and weavers of wild fibers like nettles, young American knitters, Turkish crocheters, and drop spindle spinners from all over the world. It appears that some very old crafts are not only being preserved and revived, but improved. People are making paper, brooms, inks, calligraphy pens, herbal delicacies, baskets from wild plants, makramé furniture, three dimensional origami, shoes, ironworks, ancient armor replicas, viking ships, jewelry, and so many other things. 

When I scroll through Instagram posts of people making a dress out of spun nettles or preserving heirloom fruits or simply living off the land, or when I watch a young woman restoring antique furniture or a man doing a mix of Chinese and Arabic calligraphy on YouTube, I’m reminded that social media isn’t all bad. Yes, it can be a waste of time, and it can also be a source of very negative information and hate. I get that, and I’ve seen quite a bit of bullying on various platforms. Nevertheless, the arts are thriving there. Some of the most beautiful paintings I’ve ever seen are found on social media, many made by Russian and Chinese artists. I would never have seen these paintings if it weren’t for Instagram. I also wonder if these platforms do more than just give these artists a chance to be seen; perhaps artists see the work of other artists and get inspired or even feel a little competitive and driven to improve their own work.

The gloves I knitted.

Socks being made…

Now you are probably wondering what this has to do with my mother, her music, my grandmother’s lace, Josephine’s silver, or the explosion of creative artists on Instagram.

Ever since my mother passed away last summer, I’ve been swimming in a sea of beautiful memories.

They are both a great comfort and a source of sadness. It’s easy for me to view the world through a lens of loss, a conviction that everything is going downhill and all the best people are leaving the planet. At the same time, I realize that I had the extreme good luck of not only having wonderful parents, but also growing up in a region that was blessed with brilliant creative people and vibrant culture. I grew up in the beautiful bubble of Palo Alto/Menlo Park in the sixties and seventies, and I often feel uneasy about that, if not downright guilty. So many didn’t have the chance to have such a rich upbringing, and so many were dispossessed in the past in order for that place to flourish the way it has. I ponder the question of how we can reconcile the beauty of what we had when I was growing up with the devastation that occurred before, not to mention the injustice that continues to occur? (Now it’s so expensive to live there that the population of homeless people is exploding.) 

I wrestle with the guilt, but in the end, I think we can never reject beauty. We need it, now more than ever.

We need to find it in the small things: the dandelions bursting through concrete, the harvest of crabapples from a tree we used to ignore, the slowness of a cold fall day, the bouquet of autumn flowers, the carpet of leaves underfoot, or the richness of a cup of coffee roasted by a friend. And we need to cultivate it wherever we go: by planting something every day, picking up beach trash, finding ways to reuse old clothes to make a gift, taking a class on saving native seeds from the indigenous farmer down the road, making a beautiful meal from homegrown or foraged foods, caring for abandoned stray animals, covering part of a lawn with sheet mulch and making it into a pollinator garden, learning to knit, or using our smart phone cameras to document the beauty of nature. Everything counts, even if only a little bit. Everything affects the collective consciousness. Just as people get inspired when they see beautiful arts and crafts on social media, our little actions cause a vibration, and I believe that we influence others for good by doing and making more than by debating and complaining. 

So it’s time to start to view the world differently.

This planet we live on is beautiful beyond words. Let us fall in love with it, its plants and animals, its diversity, and its perfection. Let us rescue the lost or nearly lost skills and lore, and let us care tenderly for this beloved planet of ours. Let us approach each other and our environment with humility, and yes, as writer Derrick Jensen said, let’s fight for our beloved. Fight for the plants, the animals, and the ancestors. My mother would smile and remind me to grow things to feed the hummingbirds, her favorite, and my grandmother would tell me to get people to stop killing owls. We’re willing to fight for what we love, so let us fall in love with planet earth.

Only if we fall in love with it do we have a chance of saving it.

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