Looking Ahead

The Fun's Just Started

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started. - John Updike

I’ve recently discovered Eddie Izzard and I love him. Maybe this is like my discovery of the reality TV show, Survivor. Everyone rolls their eyes, and I can actually hear them thinking “that’s so last millennium.” I suppose the result of not having a television is that I’ll never be a hip trend setter in the glamorous world of pop culture. If you don’t know what’s happening until it comes out on DVD, it’s hard to even feign being bleeding edge about such things.

I do in fact feel a great deal of optimism about the aught seven. It’s going to be a good year.

It’s been a terrific day. I woke to morning coffee – soft and lazy, blog reading, internet perusing like some people read the newspaper (but without the crinkly pages or newsprint on my fingertips.) LB called and asked if I wanted to hike today, so I took a shower, did a few loads of laundry, emptied and filled the dishwasher and dressed for a sojourn with the Honey Bee. It was a brilliant crisp blue perfect day. I took my camera but I wasn’t inspired to take pictures. After all was hiked and done I walked to the post office (tubes on the way, Alison!) and then to the bank and then home. Secret loves these little tool about town things. She walks about like she owns the place, little captain of her band of grrrrrrl gang.

I heated up some perfect chicken vegetable soup. Have I mentioned what a soup kick I’ve been on since the weather turned? Each week I roast a chicken and after a fabulous feast of that I start deconstructing the bird for all its pieces, the good meat in this pile for the soup, the stuff we don’t like for the Monster Girl, the carcass in a pot with an onion, three chile d’arbole, celery scraps, garlic, parsley, a whole mess of seasoning for a three hour boil and simmer into stock. The house smells brilliant and alive. There’s something about using the whole thing that feels so graceful. When the time comes the next day to add the potatoes, celery, carrots, corn and onion (when I’m feeling frisky a daub of chipotle paste for a kick) it feels wholesome and good. Anyways, that was lunch, a small bowl – a late lunch, around four.

After this I hopped on my mountain bike (which is in bad need of biannual maintenance) and road for a good hour up the back side of the mountain to five corners, from Phoenix Lake, down through Deer Park and then back home. I’ve been rather lazy and I haven’t done this trek in a while (I could tell.) My back (ouch) felt it more than legs or lungs (yes, I’m even optimistic I’ll lose that weight I gained when I stopped smoking frill’n three years now…) So after the last mile or so, which is a lovely coast down hill the whole way, I pulled up to the house, tossed the bike aside, tossed the clothes aside and plopped in the hot tub with a shot of top shelf Captain Morgan’s spiced rum and wallowed in the warmth under a quickly setting sun. Stars illuminated in a deep indigo blue night sky behind the silhouette of the towering redwood trees.

Once the heat had found its way deep to my marrow, revitalizing a kernel of me that felt spent and done, I dressed and LB and I went to my favorite fondue restaurant for a seven oclock reservation from which we just returned, just a shy bit before ten (talk about slow food!) It was awesome (as always.) I just finished folding the laundry of which I spoke earlier and I’m cozied up to the fireplace with a good book, a tall cool glass of blood orange Italian soda and that electric throw (which mom contends will give me cancer, but three cheers for the deadly electric throw! Every home should have several!) You know, if sort of feels like the fun just started….

On Beauty

In every book I read there is a line, sometimes two or three, that can’t be turned away from. I have to underline them, defile the book, because they are that revealing – they command something in me, in my heart, beyond me. If a book doesn’t have at least one sentence like this, I wonder if it was worth reading at all.

I think I found one or two in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.

A Farmhouse In Flanders

Rather than be confronted with an overwhelming proof of the limitations of our understanding, we accuse the dreams of not making sense. - Erich Fromm

Just because someone boyishly etches, mixes creamy pastel watercolors and dabbles in daubs of oil paints doesn’t mean that they have a heart – doesn’t mean that they are anything less than evil. My mind keeps drifting back to this the past few days. Is it really possible to discover the heart of a monster in a farmhouse in Flanders? And even if it is, who sees the value in that lump of coal? Does someone really believe that the pressure of history will turn that blackened, shriveled thing into some diamond? Clearly, yes. Obviously yes, people will pay richly and imbue it with value. Is it the saffron of historical voyeurs?

I want to make lavender extract. Ideas on how to do that? I’ve read to soak 48 flowers in 16 oz of vodka. Does this make sense to you?

Waiting For A Miracle

I went on an ambitious bike ride today – it was a mere fifteen miles, but a brutal fifteen miles. A good mile and a half of that was less than a bike ride and more of a bike push. My back tire started spinning on the loose gravel, the road was so steep, and I couldn’t get my bike shoes out of the clips. I was stuck on my bike when it tumbled. I was virtually standing still when it happened, however, so I didn’t end up with even a scrape – just a bruised ego and my feet stuck on the peddles. I was planning to round Lake Lagunitas, but I was so exhausted when I peaked Fish Gulch – the murderous incline – that I skipped that intention and just took it all back on home. I wish I’d have had the camera with me (I wonder how it would have faired the fall…) I ride through this area with my friend P when we walk our dogs together at Bon Tempe, but it was qualitatively different on the bike – in slow motion, being closer to it. I saw some beautiful things that I guess we pass by too quickly. That’s saying something because I keep my camera out, always, when we drive this road and he stops whenever I ask so I can take pictures – but I just didn’t see the light or the low hanging trees the same way before. And well, I didn’t have the camera so what’s the point in waxing on about it, right?

I took a shower when I got home and rinsed the dirt of the mountain off me. I still don’t bathe very often – I feel like I’m doing good if it’s once a week. Such a far cry from City living where I couldn’t leave the house until I’d had a shower. I’m dirtier here, but it’s good dirt. The dirt we live in.

I tried to stop by the art/glass – stained glass lady’s store. I need to design the bathroom windows before fall gets too much further upon us and the rains threaten to commence. It’s already August. I’ve got to move on that. There was a note on the door that the lady was ill and how she’d be in tomorrow. I guess I’ll try to stop back.

I called P and asked him if he was willing to try a walk with me, the gimp, to the waterfall at Elliot. I haven’t been walking or hiking lately and it’s driving both myself and the dog insane. I wore open-toed sandals and just hobbled slowly. I’m not sure if it was the right thing to do or not. The feet hurt like the dickens – but my spirits are lifted. How does one weigh the relative value of these things? Or perhaps more importantly, the relative harms? It was beautiful and Secret Agent Dog was sooooo happy to be trekking as opposed to stimming on the same blasted ball all the time. She needs the diversity of activities – she gets kind of tweaky when it’s just fetch day in and day out.

I have to push myself to be a bit more creative than I have been of late. I find myself waiting for something – this sense of waiting. I sit back and I wonder what I’m waiting for. I’m often filled with this pensive sense of anticipation. It’s driving me a little nuts. I have this inner desire to just let go in a big bad way. Part of me says, just do it! and another part asks, sure, but what the hell does that mean??? Let go of what, exactly? Just do what, exactly? No more waiting…

Shelter

I’ve was tagged again.. this time five most embarrassing things. This task has stirred no small amount of distress. I’m low on the spectrum of someone who does foolish things and/or if I do them I’m simple enough not to be embarrassed by them. I’ve had fun inquiring after the most embarrassing moments of friends and acquaintances – but this has not jogged my mind to produce more of my own.

1) I went to the store and forgot to wear my pants. I was at the grocery store and it suddenly dawned on me that I was only wearing a t-shirt and underwear. (I wasn’t drunk and hadn’t been drinking. I have no excuse. No, I was not wearing a thong.)

I’m certain I’ve had many embarrassing moments – I really just can’t think of them. Denial is powerful. I can’t keep the love on that one going because it’s just too difficult.

Wiley showed up for a surprise visit this past weekend. Back space. On my way to DC on Thursday the tail wind was incredible. We broke the sound barrier over Ohio and arrived an hour early. Fighting nature all the way back, we were an hour late arriving home Friday night. I met Cassie for coffee Saturday morning. Surprise. She was wearing a beautiful hat and I took pictures of her with my new camera. The wall behind her was mustard color – I didn’t even notice until after I downloaded the images. Just a perfect color.

Anyways, M bought me a bitch’n cool lens for the camera – just as an out-of-the-blue gift. He said I can’t have such a cool new camera without having an awesome lens. I was never happier to receive it because his heart seems to be working – the angioplasty has relieved symptoms. Damn, it’s so nice to have something make a difference for a change. And for some reason this allows me to really appreciate and indulge in enjoying the gift and feel even more grateful and happy about it. I love it!

So Cassie and I arrive home after a nice lazy morning with coffee that reminded me of when we first met, in The City, when we’d just sit in cloudy cafes and drink coffee for hours and talk about nothing and everything – you know, back when I smoked cigarettes (sigh). So we arrive home and there, surprise, is Wiley – he’s come for a weekend visit. Surprise. With him he returned two books I’d leant him forever ago – Paula (Isabel Allende) and Shelter (Jane Anne Phillips.)

For the observant among you, you’ll note that Jane Anne Phillips is listed among my favorite authors. I loved her collection of short prose Black Tickets. This, her novel, Shelter is quite another story – I’d call it a delectable mountain in its own right. (Betraying, of course, that cummings truly was another of my favorite authors and this betrays my highbrow ways – I’m not a fly by night fan of cummings recounting memorized poems recited in dubious chick flicks, but the harder stuff – ami, the enormous room, the non-lectures, every last piece of him…) I remember when I read it, cozied up in a window seat of the Morgan House at Irish Beach on the Northern California coast. The Morgan House is on stilts on the bluff – in the window seat there is a view of nothing but ocean forever. I cried just because it was so beautiful – not the view, but Shelter. Though the view was something too.

There is a temple in Mendocino, when I sit on the front stoop I feel a vibration, an energy, a tone of bliss. It’s unmistakable. If you’ve ever been to Mendocino and stopped by this temple, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Irish Beach is about twenty miles south of Mendocino on the Coast. I have so many good memories that were born there. Like reading Shelter the day of the night that I saw Gary Oldham play Mozart in Beloved.

2) I was a late something-teen in Mexico and my sister and I went to a night club in Manzanillo with two Mexican boys we’d met at Las Hadas. I wanted to say that the swimming pool at the resort was beautiful. Instead I said that the goat was beautiful. When I went to say I was embarrassed, instead I told them I was pregnant.

Paula is a beautiful… a beautiful… what.. memoir? She wrote it for her daughter, Paula, who was in a coma. If she came out of the coma, she was sure to have no memories. So as she sat at her daughter’s bedside for months, she wrote her memories, so when she surfaced from that sleep she could relearn herself. This is who you are. This is who I am. This is where you’re from. I don’t remember where I was when I read that.

On Sunday Wiley and I walked the crest trail to Phoenix Lake and wandered slow back, the short loop to Woodlane, passed the stables home. But Saturday night Ed’s friends from work showed up and watched zombie movies until the small hours of the morning. I need more time alone and more time together, all at once. And I like having the books back. He even brought back one I’d never leant him.

Friday Night, Almost

We’ve slept in the new house since Tuesday night (and no the kitchen floors are not done.) I wasn’t accustomed to the new place, the new bed, or my head facing a new direction. Secret was fidgety. I was fidgety. No one slept well. I’d pondered the idea of taking Secret back to the smaller cottage to sleep on the day bed. I stuck it out, however, not without regret. Each night the sleeping has been a little better, a little sounder, a little deeper. We adjust to new awkwardly despite the length of time we’ve waited, wished and craved for it.

Ed woke early, bought the boards for the fence and began nailing. (He’d sunk the posts last weekend.) It had to be done today – and it’s almost done. Everything is in a state of almost being something other than what it is. He left and I began faking my way through it. I did okay (just okay) until I no longer felt I was doing okay. That’s when I stopped. At that point there were only four boards left and we probably need at least ten to finish.

Tonight I lay floating in a kaleidoscope of colors, under the towering redwood trees and a canopy of stars. The neighbors were having a drum circle in their backyard. Normally I would find this somewhat annoying – tonight it was just fine. In fact, it was almost pleasant (there’s that almost again.)

Monday

Just like millions of others, our new Harry Potter arrived in the post on Saturday morning. The day was spent lounging on the lawn while Ed read aloud. On Sunday I remembered I was capable of multitasking and while we plowed through another few hundred pages I weeded, pruned, preened and otherwise beautified my sorely neglected garden. It looks so content and cared for right now – it’s just magnificent. With all the bother over Hell’s Kitchen, my lovely yard and garden has taken a back seat. It took Harry Potter in the side yard to provide a window for this clever endeavor. Not only did I not mind doing chores while I listened, it was immensely gratifying to take a project from start to finish and see relatively immediate results. Quite happy making indeed!

It’s taken two weeks for me to sink into a routine of nothingness – of waking, of puttering, of dabbling, of drinking coffee and surfing about on the internet, checking in to read my favorite this-and-thats. This is the week I’ll begin adventures and the whatnots - you just wait and see!

So Damned Predictable

It’s still awfully quiet here. Is this the best you can do, offer me this profound silence?

So something… for something I haven’t touched on before. You know besides the fact that I’ve harvested several Roma tomatoes today, in addition to a small handful of yellow pear tomatoes and this would be the first time ever, in my life, that I’ve harvested my own crop of anything. Last night it was the third bountiful harvest of basil, which was promptly, as expected, turned to pesto and placed in the freezer. This, in the midst of winter, will remind me of summer. As now, in the midst of summer, I’m preparing for winter and imagining a cozy feeling. I’ve been pulling up onions now for weeks, nearly months. I’m not certain when to harvest the garlic. I’ve started snap peas for a late summer season crop.

Yesterday we walked around Lake Lagunitas. A bug flew down my shirt and bit me twice on the back. It left welts and then buzzed away. Now, what’s the likelihood of something like that happening?

The Mission

We cozy onto the sofa, limb touching limb, legs splayed, the soft hum of the dog snoring against my belly. We watch The Mission and I invariably fall asleep before they slaughter the Indians above the falls. In my world the film always ends merely in foreshadowing debate before Eden is sacrificed.

When I first saw the movie, many years ago, the most poignant scene was when the Indian man severed the rope on Robert Dinero’s penance. I craved that kind of liberation and surrender. Now find the most moving scene to be when Jeremy Irons first meets the Indians whilst sitting on a rock near a river, playing a beautiful melody on a reed instrument. I take this to symbolically mean, perhaps, that I’ve changed from a person seeking freedom to a person seeking beauty.

I love this place. I adore the wet earthy smell in the shade of the towering redwood trees, the smell of the dried grass scorched by the summer sun, the rich black dirt of the land. I love weekends at Stinson and Bolinas – how in the summer the beach is soft and warm and sandy and how in the winter the waves break with more force and rocks wash in from someplace far away. The sheer beauty of this land is transporting – magical, mysterious and beautiful.

This is where I always should have been. This is more home than the City ever offered. It leaves me quiet and thankful.

It Just Happened

How it all happened is so mysterious despite science trying to explain everything. The colors of the bay, blinding white, sky blue, forest green. That this or that would reflect in such a way, divine beauty. No one said, “This is beautiful,” and then made it. It just happened. The unintentionality, the accidental nature, how unconscious it all seems is perhaps the largest wonder. No one could have deliberately made it all so perfect.

The Origin of Love

I wonder how many people have actually read Plato’s Symposium.

The last time I saw you, we had just split in two. You was looking at me. I was looking at you. You had a look so familiar, I could not recognize. You had blood on your face I had blood in my eyes. - Hedwig (and the Angry Inch)

Lowering myself off the back of the boat into the deep blue waters I had resolve to just face whatever it was I had to face. The cold made me catch my breath, draw her into me with reflexive conviction – as though my body were saying, one last time. And in she came, doing nature’s bidding with pure abandon. Once in, there was little point or thought about going back. Maybe just a moment of hesitation. I looked at Ed, he looked at me, and we laughed then situated our masks and bit down on the mouth pieces and alone, together, one last glance and smile, we laid our body’s prostate and peered into her soul.

It was the most amazing moment. It was like going home. And home is a hard place to describe, as much if not more of a feeling as it is a place. We laid adrift and stunned – something beyond awestruck, looking down at the reef shelf below us, hundreds, no millions, of brilliant coral as backdrop to millions of the most amazing fish of every color and variation that I could possibly imagine. And I felt my heart skip a beat as I saw what we were heading into -the edge of the reef - dropping down perhaps a hundred feet or more – not into darkness, but into depth. Again I hesitated as we moved toward the edge and then suspended over a huge underwater canyon. At varying layers of depth larger fish lumbered about as next to us in this vast expanse beautiful fish of indigo and emerald swam with us, not below us, through the pristine clear waters. Across this great divide was another reef shelf where a sea turtle glided peaceably, like a bird around us. In every direction there was something. As far as the eye could see, this was an endless feast.

They called this place the Super Highway. I have never seen anything like this before in my life, didn’t know such a place could exist. I’d read books about these places, had heard that the most amazing underwater places on earth were off the coast of Niihau and now I’ve seen and nothing has come even close to describing it. I feel somehow forever changed.

Dumbstruck, afterwards, Ed and I looked at each other. That was amazing, he’d say with a complicit understanding of the frailty of words. I’ve never seen anything so spectacular in my life, I’d say like a fact. We grasped at someway to speak it, but could not. It was holy – sacred.

I’ve been to the Caribbean and was rather nonplussed despite the brilliance of random triggerfish around a sad lump of reef off the coast of Saint John’s. I was much more impressed with the amazing caterpillar of a rather drab moth in the rainforest there.

The shores off Miami coastal waters divulged rather dull sea life and a gaggle of piranhas that I could have lived my life without encountering. I’m not ashamed to admit that the restaurant I went to, in the hotel with the infinity pool, curtains of fabric, two stories tall, wafting in gentle breezes embracing the pool area and a life-sized chessboard was more titillating then the subterranean spectacles I saw there.

In cities across Europe while other young twenty-something’s were chasing beer halls and adventures, I was chasing aquariums and flea markets with my backpack in tow. While rather unkempt and not well attended, in all regards, the aquarium in Barcelona was strangely among my favorites (although the Baltimore aquarium is certainly something to behold). But perhaps it was just that it was in Barcelona – among the most beautiful cities in the world with its magical Rambles, Miro mosaics tiled into the very streets where one walks and melting architecture.

In the great halls of the Hermitage in what was Leningrad, the place they now, again call Saint Petersburg, there are divine works by human hand, in the Metropolitan or MOMA in New York, in the museums of Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin, Paris, London. I’ve been to all of these places and been witness to their treasures. But nothing, absolutely nothing, even begins to compare with what I saw off the coast of Niihau. It was organic and alive and mutable – a metropolis of color, species – a living art untouched and unspoiled. There was a pain that ripped down to the very heart of me, a deep soulful pain of finally coming into contact with that which makes one whole.

All This Beauty

Maybe the definition of home is the place you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.

-Reflections of Alphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, from Gregory McGuire’s Wicked

Perhaps there’s more truth and wisdom in that than I’d prefer to believe. Living this guiltless life as I do, never having felt too tethered to the earth. Strange for me to consider since I have longed to experience what I’ve conjured to be an enormous and cathartic surrendering and letting go called forgiveness, yet know so little, maybe even nothing, of guilt. Perhaps I’ve chased after Forgiveness with such reckless abandon that I’ve never considered her consort and familiar. If I must seek out Guilt to brush elbows with her benefactor I might well reconsider the chase.

I want nothing of guilt, just the unburdened freedom of forgiveness.

So we tie things together in a bow. Tell me gentle reader what all of this means. What symbols emerge that are oh-so-telling to you that escapes my vision for my simple proximity?

Where is my hand? My left hand sits firm on the head of a sober Contemplation and my right hand turns up toward the sky, a cozy night chair for Creativity. And what of everything in between?

Out the port side of the airplane loomed thunderheads in the distance, filled with tremendous electric charge. At the feet of this billowing and rising pillar crashed a wave of blood red as the last vestiges of sun filtered through the hazy wet horizon of cloud. Lightening rose up from the ground and formed balls of spectacular color in the bulbous monstrosity that occasionally arced and sparked golden bolts.

As the sun sank and the moon rose, a star spangled sky canopied rows of sparkling golden lights that danced as the storm raged somewhere on the ground below. I recognized this horizon of lights, snaking across the sky, from dreams I’ve had.

Sometimes it is so defeating to realize that we are responsible for making our own magic and mystery. How when we’re bored it’s our own damned fault and failing for lacking imagination. How when our lives are void of adventure and possibilities we only have ourselves to hold accountable. It really sucks how ultimately responsible we are for all this God damned beauty.