Necco wafer sky

Winter color mimics the iconic candy disks

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Stillness

Pierre Bezukhov, one of the major characters in War and Peace, at one point in the novel is taken prisoner by the French as they invade Moscow in 1812. Leo Tolstoy writes that Pierre was admired by his fellow prisoners for many things, including

. . . his capacity for sitting still and thinking without doing anything (which to them seemed incomprehensible) . . .

Sitting still and not thinking are indeed difficult if you are not used to it. But success comes with intent and practice.

Now is a good time to practice stillness. The season of Advent, which begins tomorrow, December 1, is a time of quiet and reflection leading up to Christmas.

December for many of us is filled with a frenzy of shopping, baking and otherwise preparing for the year-end holidays. This makes it especially important to step back each day for a time of calm and quiet.

How to get quiet

The New York Times ran a handful of “10-minute challenges” earlier this year, inviting readers to spend 10 minutes contemplating a single work of art, such as “Sudden Rain” by the 19th century Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige or “Nocturne in Blue and Silver,” by the American artist James McNeill Whistler

This practice is both challenging and rewarding. Readers come away with not just a greater appreciation of the art, but also of their own place in the Universe

Stepping down, settling down

Many people tell me they cannot meditate. As in, they’ve tried it but it hasn’t worked for them.

It can be hard to sit quietly for a period of time, to quell the jittering of our brains. Our lives are so full of distractions, so overflowing with stimuli, that it take real effort to slow down. And stop.

Yet the benefits of stillness are so profound. Just 10 minutes of calm and quiet can reset your body and mind. Quell your questing heart. Comb out the rest of your day, busy as it may be.

Be still, if only for a moment

I hope you will try this.

Sit calmly and comfortably in a quiet place. It could be in nature, where you will find yourself listening acutely to the little rustles and calls of leaves and birds and water. It could be in a quiet indoor space: your study or the living room, a library or a chapel. Someplace where you can sit comfortably with your hands in your lap.

Close your eyes. That is easy.

Empty your mind. This is hard. I find it easier if I imagine a familiar scene behind my eyelids. For me, it is winter by a lake: gray sky, snow, broken sedges, the land holding its breath.

Many people concentrate on their breath. This does not work for me; I get light-headed. I’m more inclined to listen to my heartbeat, feeling it in my breast, my ears.

I don’t smell anything. I don’t taste anything. Sometimes I sense the texture of my clothing against my skin.

Sit like this, holding onto the tail of the animal that wants to pull you away from quietness. Move into yourself.

Breathe quietly, even if you are not counting or controlling your breaths.

Tumble farther into the mist. Let the lakeside scene go out of focus. Just sit like that.

Eventually, you will open your eyes and come back slowly to the world around you.

You may have been gone for mere minutes. It might have been longer. You really have no idea of how this time has passed. You weren’t asleep. You were at once present and not present.

Assess how your feel. Most likely, you’ll feel lighter—in your body, in your spirit. It may even take awhile for your mind to catch up with any new tasks that are now at hand.

You, though—you are changed. Something happened while you were away. You were meditating. Perhaps you did doze off. But your body and mind are now in a different place from where you began.

Stillness did that for you. Stillness did that to you. Over time, you will come to crave the quiet rapture that comes with stillness.

I found some images amid my photographs that might help you to meditate. Lose yourself in contemplating each one as a whole and in parts. Follow lines and patterns and angles. What do these images mean to you?

Billowing curtains and a garden of herbs. A birdhouse.

A pink window with restful horizontal siding and a sweep of sweet greenery.

A few leaves stick to the side of a bus shelter, lording it over the leaves on the pavement.

Necco wafer sky

These wintry days, with their stormy weather and glancing light, generate fascinating sky scapes. Clouds swirl and mound atop one another, with dark smudges on their bottoms. Sometimes the sky turns a bruised hue that reminds me of purple Necco wafers.

The color almost always fades before I can get to where I can frame a shot (blame the disability), but I did get an approximation over the I-205 freeway.

Ninety degrees north of that, I saw a double rainbow against a bruised sky.

But Necco wafers! There are an odd type of candy. Wikipedia says the flavor of the purple disk is clove. The other seven flavors are orange, licorice, wintergreen, chocolate, clove, lemon and lime.

Factoid: There are 35 pieces in each candy roll. The flavors are distributed randomly. There are only 34 in this photo, as I ate one. It was pink.

“Necco” is an abbreviation of “New England Confectionery Company.” This company made the wafers from 1847 until it went bankrupt in 2018. The wafers disappeared from store shelves until mid-2020, when the Spangler Candy Co. brought them back.

Spangler makes a lot of cute candy: Bit-O-Honey toffee, Dum Dum lollipops, Sweethearts candy hearts, Circus Peanuts (peanut lookalikes that are really marshmallows) and soft Canada Mints. Possibly their biggest seller is candy canes.

You can buy a package of 2,300 Dum Dums in assorted flavors for $134.95 from the Spangler website. That’s 30 pounds of high-sugar fun. Pass them around at the office.

First poem

Oldster

How will you spend your golden years?
Well, there’s golf.
Pickleball.
Maybe bridge.

You could deliver meals for a soup kitchen,
Or play with
The grandkids,
Or take up the oboe.

You’ve plenty of time now to binge-watch “Matlock,”
Or bake cookies,
Paint a picture,
Stare out the window.

You could play Scrabble.
You could read a book.
You could just sit and remember
The life that lead you here.

Coffee update

I found another small coffee roaster this week. And, oh, their coffee is good! I bought a package of beans from the roaster called Exilior on Wednesday at the Shemanski farmers market in downtown Portland.

The coffee I bought, the Champion roast, like all of Exilior’s beans, is from Kenya.

Taste memory

My memories of the flavor of Kenyan coffee go way back. In the early 1970s, I lived a few blocks from the original Peet’s Coffee in Berkeley. Fifty years on, I still remember the taste of their Kenyan coffee. I’ve always thought of beans from Kenya as brewing up lean and bright, not my favorite profile.

For years—decades—I favored coffees with a smoother, more complex flavor profile, like Indonesian Sumatra. For the last several years Robert and I have been kvelling on soft, rich Peruvian Chanchamayo.

But now, I am beginning to appreciate the brighter-flavored coffees of Central America and Africa. And Exilior’s coffee fits right in. The Champion beans are grown by small-scale farmers in the Igegania Cooperative, and they are roasted in Dundee, Ore., by Francis Kungu and Maya Benham.

Exilior also sell macadamia nuts that are grown alongside the coffee in Kenya. The macadamia trees add minerals to the soil that promote the good flavor of the coffee beans.

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Synchronicity and death

I was listening to a podcast from The New York Times featuring Robert Caro on the 50th anniversary of the publication of his first book, The Power Broker, when the author mentioned the 19th century British novelist Anthony Trollope. He said his wife, Ina, had found a copy of The Prime Minister in a book exchange at a hotel and that both Caros enjoyed reading it.

I was ready to try The Prime Minister based on memory and the Caro recommendation. I had enjoyed Trollope’s Barchester Towers many years ago.

The thing about Trollope is that, though you might think him a stuffy Victorian writer, he’s very easy to read. His characters are interesting and the plots satisfying.

I couldn’t find The Prime Minister at the Multnomah County Library but was able to check out a copy from the Portland State University library.* I was charmed that it was an Oxford World Classics edition from 1951, a small book bound in Oxford blue.

*Allowing patrons of the Multnomah County Library to check out books is a new feature of the PSU library, which used to limit circulation to students and faculty. The library has a deep collection of old novels and children’s books that aren’t in the county library’s collection anymore. That library ruthlessly jettisons books that don’t circulate.

One of six

I discovered that The Prime Minister was actually the fifth of six novels Trollope wrote about the career of a politician named Plantagenet Palliser.

By now I was hooked by the charm of reading Trollope, so I backtracked to the first of the series, Can You Forgive Her? Multnomah County had an ebook, but I wanted a book.

A quick online search turned up a set of five of the Palliser novels, complete with book jackets protecting their blue binding, for a very reasonable price. All of them have “London, England, July 1967” inscribed in light pencil on the flyleaf.

My new collection does not include the sixth novel, The Duke’s Children, but that is okay because a new edition, adding material that was excised from earlier books, is now available. I’ll want to read that book instead of an Oxford edition.

Finally, I discovered that all the novels are available—for free!—on audiobooks as part of my Audible subscription.

Read by an actor

The Trollope novels are all read by the veteran British actor Timothy West, who does a marvelous job of voicing the various characters. The plebeian Mr. Cheeseacre, for example, is going to sound way different from the bounder Burgo Fitzgerald or the upper-crust Lady Midlothian.

I looked up West on Wikipedia, discovering that he took on meaty roles like King Lear and Macbeth during his long career. Searching on November 22, I found that he had died only 10 days earlier, on November 12, 2024. He had just turned 90 on October 20.

I feel I just missed him, as if we had passed each other on the street and I hadn’t recognized him. Like we had a chance to connect and I blew it.

Last poem

Winter buttons

Buttoned up, buttoned in,
Parka with a zipper.
Making warmth within
Against a polar night.

Carving caves in darkness,
Our souls yearn for the stars.
Colors in the night sky
Painting over our pain.

Winter bleaches us,
Snow scours scabs away.
While asll our hidden sins 
 Are wrapped in winter’s chains.

Another sky color

As I am working at my desk this morning, I have a new description for the color of sky I see from my west-facing window. It is the soft hue and texture of pussy willows. If it were a Necco wafer, it would be gray, a few shades lighter this one.

This is a lavender Necco. The flavor is clove (Wikipedia mistakenly says it’s cinnamon). Tune in next week, when I’ll introduce you to the lavender sky in that most trippy of children’s books, Beyond the Pawpaw Trees, by Palmer Brown.

—30—

Until next week

Thank you for reading Becoming. I appreciate “likes” and I love reading and interacting with comments.

Thanks to my paying subscribers! Your number increases every week. A yearly subscription is less than $1 a week. That’s less than a roll of Necco wafers (I remember when you could buy one for a nickel).

Or just buy me a cup of coffee.