Category: Labyrinth

A quick look into the labyrinth

Posted on by Dale

Yes, I’ve been “quiet.”

Have a couple of photos of the labyrinth from this afternoon.

The bowl from the west point.  The maple leaves were everywhere; I tried to get a nice shot of the freshly mown labyrinth with a couple of them scattered about, but I needed a real photographer to do that.

Our dancing fawn, aka Dionysus.  Look carefully at his right hand—his thumb has cracked off.  I’m sure I will have to replace him after the snows of winter, but as Shakespeare always reminds us, “Every fair from fair sometime declines.“

My center

Posted on by Dale

I have been so focused on sewing skirts for 3 Old Men that I haven’t really had time to get out to the place that is my center: the Labyrinth.

Here’s what I’m seeing:

Click for full size photo.

Why is this the most beautiful spot on earth for me?  Let us count the ways.

  1. It’s a labyrinth.  Duh.
  2. I built it.  By myself, with my own two hands.
  3. I designed it.  It includes a couple of features that I have seen nowhere else in my research:
    1. The western path, i.e., a path of bricks that lead from the center to the west.  Sometimes, you need to take the high road home.
    2. The hidden path, i.e., there is a fully paved path leading from the entrance to the center.  I dug a trench, laid out the full walkway, allowed myself to walk the path to the center and back once, then covered it and laid out the labyrinth over it.  So there is a path straight to the center—but we can neither see it nor use it.
    3. The center is an omphalos: a navel, an axis.  The black granite circle rims a ceramic bowl that I made—and the cracks that happened as the clay dried are now golden hieroglyphs.
  4. It’s green.  Green and white are the only colors I’ve used down here, although the spider lilies that show up right about now are a lovely and welcome surprise.
  5. It has a firepit.  I cannot over-extol the virtues of a firepit.
  6. It has four points: the gate at the eastpoint; the Richard Hill “Sun” sculpture at the southpoint; the Brooks Barrow limestone bowl at the westpoint; my earth sculpture at the northpoint.  Each offers a post at which you can hook into their specific energies.
  7. It, further, has a sculpture of the Belvedere Apollo (near the southpoint); and a sculpture of the Dancing Fawn, stand-in for  Dionysus, at the northwest point. You get to choose.
  8. It has a sound system.  Yes, it does: two in-ground speakers, one up by the entrance, the other in the ferns by Dionysus.  At certain points in the evening, it’s nice to be able to walk the labyrinth and be able to hear even the quietest pieces no matter where you are.
  9. It has a great view of the full moon—but you have to get out of your seat by the fire and go stand in the labyrinth.  This is a feature, not a bug.
  10. It has an energy that you have to experience and cannot be described.  Arrive early, an hour before the sun sets.  Sit.  Watch.  Listen.  Then we’ll light the fire.

The firepit

Posted on by Dale

Well, that turned out nice:

There are a couple of interstices that I have to plug—naturally, chair legs ended up going right where the stone ends—but otherwise it’s done.

When such things come back on the market, I want to plant creeping thyme or some such in the joints.

Have I said recently how much I love my back yard?  All of this—the labyrinth, the fire pit, the stone walls, the compass point sculptures, the patio, the hammock, the work tables—has come about since September 1, 2008.  Before, it was just weeds and scrub grass.  (The Child was not an outdoors kind of kid, at least not at 24 College St.) Then, for some reason, I decided to build the labyrinth.  It really was a Close Encounters kind of moment.  All the rest has followed from that.

I’ve learned some things—or at least had them confirmed—through my experience in transforming that space.  Grand plans can be awfully fun, but slow organic growth is usually a better way to go.  Nothing is permanent: if something doesn’t work, change it. Rip it out. Discard it.  Improve it.  Whatever it is, it will grow back.  Unless it doesn’t.  Make the space conform to your needs, not to some Platonic ideal of what the space “should” look like.  Be alert to what is missing and fill the gap with meaning.

At this point, there’s only one more major project to achieve, and that’s replacing the old bamboo fencing with something more permanent—and taller, for privacy issues.  (For kicks, click on that link—the difference in the firepit area is wonderful!)  Ideas for said fencing are already bubbling up in my head…

Fireside additions

Posted on by Dale

I think it’s absolutely insane to compose in the morning and then get out to work in the labyrinth after lunch when the day is at its hottest.  Don’t know why I do it.

At any rate, I’ve been slogging away at putting down flagstone around the fire pit.  I’m about 80% finished:

It’s going to be a nice touch.  Going barefoot won’t meant stepping on unexpected gravel any more, if by “barefoot” you mean “with no clothes on” and OF COURSE I DON’T MEAN THAT WHY WOULD YOU SAY SUCH A THING EVEN?

Those who visit on a regular basis will be relieved to see that I am leveling out the area on the right, where it’s still a pile of dirt.  No more feeling as if you’re falling over backwards.  Well, not from the horizontality of the chair, anyway.

It looks as if it’s going to be one more trip to the flagstone store, and then I will be done with that project.

Still struggling with the orchestration of Ariadne’s big outburst. It’s getting better. I’ve added a snare drum, a tam-tam, and the xylophone to the big moment.  Probably too much, but I’m going to let it sit there and annoy me for a while.  I keep avoiding brass for the simple reason that we’ve just heard the brass underscore Icarus’s big moment, and I hesitate to repeat the motif.

In general, I feel as if I really need to start exploring percussion more—it is a 21st century opera, after all.  I can kind of hear all kinds of wild rhythms on the quad toms, but I have no idea how to do that.  (Spoiler: just start slapping notes up there, idiot, just like you do with everything else…)

The Patio: done, for a ducat

Posted on by Dale

So today I finished the patio landscaping with the paving stones for the back gate:

Still a tiny bit of mulching to do, but otherwise, the patio is done.

On to the firepit:

That’s a little over 500 pounds of flagstone there, and it looks as if it’s going to take another 1,000 pounds to lay out that area.  Excelsior!

Orchestration and landscaping

Posted on by Dale

I spent the morning attempting to discover a way to make Finale do a very simple thing: using the ScoreMerger option in the program, take the soloists/chorus/piano staves and append them to an orchestral template.  In other words, take the music I’ve already written and copy it over to a file with all those extra instruments in it.

It would not.  It would append, but then it also copied over the page setup, so that I’d have two pages of 11×17 orchestral score followed by x number of 8-1/2×11 pages of piano score, along with all the title page stuff of the piano score.

I could go in and tell it to forget all page formatting, but then the 11 staves of the piano score would end up in weird places: the sopranos above the soloists, or the piano staves distributed amongst the vocals.

And under no circumstances was it bringing over dynamics or tempos.

Blergh.

I posted on the Finale online forum, but so far no one’s answered, except one person who has had the same issues.  Their solution was the same as mine: re-order the orchestral score so that the piano part is below the vocals (normally it’s above them), then copy and paste the piano staves into the orchestral score.  Not difficult but hardly elegant.

That took all morning, so no actual orchestration got done.  But the template is set up now, and I should be accomplishing something tomorrow.

And I finally got that little wall on the back end of the patio done:

When autumn ferns come back on the market, I’ll plant one there.

Soon, but not tomorrow, I will revisit the stone store and drag home some medium-thickness flagstone for the gate entrance, and for the area around the firepit.

More patio work

Posted on by Dale

I took yesterday off because it was such a gorgeous day, but I was back at it today.  When last we left the remaining bit at the far end of the patio, it looked like this:

After a little work today, using some paving/wall stones I had lying about and the remaining flagstone, it looks like this:

On Monday, I’ll go fetch some more flagstone and finish this part up.  Finally, I’ll get some medium-thickness flagstone for the gate area, and the patio area is largely done.  (This will include some fern plantings in the new wall part, plus cypress mulch EVERYWHERE YOU GUYS.

Build that wall…

Posted on by Dale

No work on Seven Dreams today, because—in case you didn’t notice—I finished Dream One yesterday.

Not that it’s done by any means.  We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Today, I ran all kind of errands and ended up back in the patio, finishing the little wall on the far end:

Little bit by little bit, sweat drop by sweat drop (it’s humid out there), it becomes reality.

No work today either

Posted on by Dale

Unless you count getting all sweaty and gross out in the yard.  But progress on the opera?  None.

As promised, I fixed the curve on the walkway:

I started the stone wall on the far end of the patio and got it about two-thirds done:

The ferns are Silver Lady Palm Ferns—from our very own Coweta Greenhouses—and they’re just placed there to show the final effect.  I have to go get another load of stone and then put in another couple of layers on the left-hand side.  This will happen Monday, since tomorrow I get back to the labyrinth.

After I finish the stone wall, there’s one more area to deal with:

It’s ugly.  I think what I shall do is use some large pavers and the little pavers (shown here) to build a kind of raised bed and then just plant Autumn Ferns there.  Maybe Dixie Wood Ferns.  Maybe both.  Something simple.

And now… MargaritaFest!

No work today

Posted on by Dale

You know how on TV shows a crew will sweep in to a person’s back yard and move mountains of stuff and then by the end of the day there’s this gorgeous retreat where before there had been nothing but sand and crabgrass?

It might not work that way in real life.

Sure, that looks fine from a distance, but this is after I sweated my way through yesterday afternoon digging and mulching and tearing down old bamboo fencing.

Notice the five stepping stones.  I ran out of materials to reset the last three.  Back to the store.  And it still has to have landscape fabric and mulch.

And over by that fence?  I still have to move all the old pavers, clip the wisteria, install a little stone wall on the upper half, lay out pavers along the fence for an eventual wooden creation, plant, mulch, etc.

Then I have to trim the cherry laurel and install pretty little lights in it because lovely first wife.

And that’s not even getting the herb garden/side of house weeded…

What I’m trying to say is that I will not be attempting to solve Theseus’s aria problem today.

Update:

Here’s all I got done today, between all the errands necessary to get ready and an afternoon jaunt to invest in Apple stock.  Plus rain.

Yes, I will smooth out the curve.  Tomorrow, the far fence.