The Doldrums

I must be one of a minority of people that absolutely hates summer. My senses don't do well with harsh, bright sunlight and suffocating heat. I live in the long wait for twilight and cool breezes, a constant wish for rain, or just a cloudy day to soften all the edges. It must be my British/Russian genes, and with that, a heady dose of British repression and Russian fatalism and madness. What fun.

 Therefore until that first hint of Fall in the air I have pretty much become a lethargic hermit, a mole in my dark cave, living on art, books, Netflix, and the internet, stepping out only to teach my Yoga classes and to fetch groceries.

 Unfortunately the lethargy has also hindered my art production. I am am like Henri, the cat who suffers from ennui, I am free to go and yet I remain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q34z5dCmC4M

 Still I have lifted my feeble hands to do a few small art projects before sinking back into my chair to check my Facebook page or pin a cute photo of a puppy (or, look, here's a picture of Colin Firth in a bathtub, drinking wine!) on my Pinterest page.

 Behold my minimal efforts.
 First some small tags that evolved from my project of making prayer flags, since tags are even smaller and take even less time, but I still get to handle lovely linen and some nicely printed cotton fabric by Marcia Durst:

I've also mustered a few sketches, mainly out of my head. I have been thinking a lot lately that I need to visit England sometime in the near future. I have not been since I left as a child, and I want to still be able to walk everywhere for hours on end without collapsing, wallowing in my heritage. I'll also need to deal with that fear of flying. Soon, England, soon.

And so it goes........

Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe?

No matter when you visit Santa Fe (and my first time was on my honeymoon in 1978) someone usually says "Oh well, it's changed so much. You should have seen it "X" years ago. I'm sure they say that about any unique city, but time does march on, and we each experience a place in a moment that is only fixed in the blink of an eye. And anyway, some things about Santa Fe are just eternal. There is still a "there" there.
Nonetheless, I had decided I needed OUT of town for a weekend, so I took my daughter as my sidekick and we were off on the open road. Miles and miles of open road.

Naomi plugged in the iPod and we listened to her new(old) favorite folk/blues singer, Jackson C. Frank, whose only major album was produced by Paul Simon back in the Sixties before the downward spiral into obscurity. Check it out on iTunes. Moody broody road music.
 First stop: Muleshoe, where the town mule was all decked out for the 4th of July, and Naomi was only a hipster passing through:

Next we went through Clovis, a dismal little town that greets you with nasty, so-called Christian billboards slamming Muslims, liberals (i.e. anyone who disagrees with them), and President Obama.  ("Welcome to Clovis, bitch! Now move on!") Couldn't wait to move on. On past the grave of Billy the Kid, on to Santa Rosa and the slow gentle change from prairie to mesas to mountains. A small trip on Route 66, and then the inevitable Clines Corners, a craptacular truck stop/gift shop filled with all things wonderfully kitschy and Southwestern.

And finally the one hour drive up into Santa Fe, where we checked into the La Fonda Hotel and immediately went to eat at the French pastry shop downstairs, where all the recipes and pastries were just as I remembered. French Onion Soup! Milanese Torte! After that we were off and walking. That's what you do in Santa Fe. You walk and eat and look at art. On the second day after wandering through the new arts district at the railyard (where Naomi took her only photos of the trip, a series of images of graffiti on the walls and sidewalks) I became overheated and exhausted. If I had hoped to get away to cooler temperatures I was sadly mistaken. Santa Fe was in the middle of a heat wave. I went back to the hotel to lie down while Naomi wandered farther afield and came back with two animal skulls she had bought from some gallery owner who just happened to have them in the back of his shop. Naomi has good skull radar. It's a thing with her. I may have promised her my own skull when I pass on but some people may find that disturbing. I just figure I can 'keep an eye on her'.
Anyway, nothing major happened over the weekend. Just some good mother-daughter bonding, some good food (at The Shed Friday night, Pasqual's Saturday morning, and The Palace Saturday night) and shopping for little fun things we bought that didn't break the bank. Here are some of the photos from the trip. None are Naomi's as she hasn't even downloaded her images yet:

Cheers!

Answer #10- Savor the Mystery

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen

 

 

No one has all the answers. If they do, run away from them. If they have all the answers then they haven't asked all the questions. And what are our lives but giant question marks? Searching for who we really are, searching for what life is about. That's the great adventure. How wonderful and endless is the universe, bigger than we can ever imagine.

And now, each night, I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
Leroi Jones

 I have no problem living in ambiguity, in puzzles and riddles and mysteries, in the space between waking and sleeping, in the magic hour between day and night. In the unfinished novel, the lost artwork, the destroyed manuscript. In the confusing dream. In the lost and found, the blooming and fading, the beauty and the desolation. In the uncertainty of existence. I have no qualms about letting go of my belief system if another door opens to me. I am enjoying the journey because the destination is still enshrouded in fog. I don't know. I know that I don't know. The honest doubter intrigues me more than the passionate believer. Every day we should wonder if we have stopped growing, if we have become fixed in a time, a set of beliefs, a rigid code. Are we now frozen in amber? Are we unwilling to change? Because the world does not wait with us. It rushes onward and something new always appears to open our eyes a little further.

At the still point of destruction
At the centre of the fury
All the angels, all the devils
All around us can't you see
There is a deeper wave than this
Rising in the land
There is a deeper wave than this
Nothing will withstand.
I say love is the seventh wave
Sting

And we are our own mystery too, to ourselves and to others. There are secrets I will take to my grave. That is my right, to nurture them in the 'pointe vierge', the still point in my heart of hearts. (The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton refers to this 'virgin' point as the center of nothingness where one meets God). You don't have to reveal all, you don't have to spill your uniqueness away to strangers. It's alright to be 'misunderstood', to be an enigma, to be a world unto yourself.

People

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them in not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute
These are private.

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight
it goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?

Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?

We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.

They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.

And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

We'll Be Back After This Brief Intermission

I've still got Answer #10, the final answer to the mystery of life, to write about, but quite frankly, it's really hot, I am about to squeeze in a quick trip to Santa Fe, and my mind is not on the task. I don't mean to keep all five of my readers in suspense but trust me it's not like there will be some giant reveal, or plot twist that will change everything that went before. For that go watch "The Usual Suspects", because Answer #10 is not Kaiser Soze.
But I also promise it won't be a giant letdown, like many a final episode of a TV series that you have faithfully watched for many seasons. (I'm talking to YOU "Battlestar Galactica"! What the hell was with that last episode?)

Back to blogging next week. In the meantime here are some random pretty pictures from my Pinterest page.

Why hello gentlemen.........

Answer #9- Do The Right Thing

Life isn't always fair but you can be. OK, that's it. Bye.
Oh, I guess I should expound on that. Well maybe that's the problem, too much expounding. If all the world religions would just stick to their Golden Rule, Karma thing they wouldn't need all that other 'stuff', the parts that somehow gets obsessed over, the dogma, the weird rituals, the ancient tribal customs and prejudices, the mind-numbing and random rules, the misinterpretations, the mistranslations, the 'we just threw that part in because it benefits us politically', the 'don't ask too many questions' warnings, the need to control peoples' minds and limit their free thinking.....then we'd just have the boiled down essentials. At least atheists and agnostics can keep it simple.

 “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” 
Bertrand Russell

Or as the Dalai Lama says simply, my religion is compassion. So unless you subscribe to Ayn Rand and just hate people in general, I think it is safe to say if you are kind and forgiving, to yourself as well as others,(self loathing people tend to project that hatred onto everyone else) then not only is the world better but your own life tends to be better. At least you won't have assassins on the rooftop across the street waiting to pick you off. Unless you're in a war zone.....then duck.
That's not to say that doing the right thing always works out well. One of my personal heroes of World War II is Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who risked his life saving Jews in Hungary by granting them safe haven at the Swedish embassy in Budapest and then helping get them to safety. He didn't start out to be a hero he just couldn't NOT do something. For all his courage he was taken by the Soviet invading army at the end of the war and sent to a Russian prison camp where he disappeared forever, alone and forgotten.
This is his last know photograph:

And he's really not forgotten:

I guess none of us know how we would react in such circumstances. Sometimes we mean to do the right thing and it is just too hard. Sometimes we wonder if most people are worth the effort. Sometimes we're just in a bad mood.
If you want a real microcosm of the best and worst in human behaviour just go to any middle school or high school. We all read about the bullies and the bullied. (I am now eternally grateful I was part of the latter camp as I don't think I could handle shuddering every time I thought of what an ass I had been as a teenager). Part of me hopes that there is no such thing as reincarnation because it would involve going through school again.

                                                               (That's me in the middle....)
 I know it made me a tougher person, all that mocking and harassment, but if I'd have known about home schooling back then I would have been begging for it. Except I wouldn't have met one of my best friends, Kath. But I have no illusions about the innocence of childhood. They can be some nasty savage little beasts.

Of course, when I was teaching high school it was easy to see the atrocious behaviour in teens, the willful cruelty, the lack of empathy, the need for revenge and punishment, because it was usually in front of your face ( breaking up a girl fight was always a dangerous enterprise, as I found out the hard way). The good, the kind, the helpful often went under the radar unless it was a school-wide campaign like the yearly Canned Food Drive for the South Plains Food Bank (BTW they are short right now, in summer, so a donation would really help). I always tried to acknowledge those students who managed to show true heart and good will, just as I tried to be as fair as I could with all my students, although that was pretty much a Herculean task because you only had to wander casually by a small group eyeing you with malevolence to know someone was complaining about "that bitch who gave me the bad grade".
I got a call from my daughter's junior high principal once that she was in trouble for hitting another student. This rather surprised and troubled me until I found out she had hit a boy who was bullying another child. Good for her. She stepped in when she had to.
Maybe we all just a need a code to live by. The Golden Rule is definitely a good one. We can also ask, not just: What would Jesus Do? What would Buddha do? What would Anne Frank do? What would Atticus Finch do? What would Harry Potter do? But what would I do?

Answer #8- Just Move

Shiva, Lord of the Dance, is often depicted in this symbolic pose holding the universe in balance between creation and destruction. In the dance of the cosmos everything is in cycle, in constant motion and transition. Every atom is moving. Nothing is ever still. We're all just vibrations of energy. As I sit here typing I am on a speeding planet  revolving from day to night and orbiting around its' sun in a solar system slowly moving outward from the center of the Milky Way as our galaxy whirls through space with infinite other galaxies hurling to God knows where. (And here am I scared to get on a roller coaster.)
 I think Vincent understood the Cosmic Dance.

We are all, always in motion, and as mammals with muscle, joints, and bones, we are designed to move. Maybe we're not all thoroughbred racers or muscled beasts of prey but movement engages us with life, fills us with energy, sharpens the mind and the senses, boosts our serotonin, clears the cobwebs, and literally makes us feel more alive. It doesn't matter the age or even our obstacles.

 Twyla Tharp at Seventy:

I never imagined I would be like I am at 62. In my Twenties I would have pictured me as a white haired old lady knitting in a rocking chair. Knitting is good. I do that. I have occasionally rocked (I went to a Radiohead concert in March) but I realize I have been so busy during my life, so full of movement, that I never noticed I was "getting older" I can't imagine stopping now. Let me clarify that I hate exercise. It's a chore. I have tricked myself all these years by disguising it in dance. (Or walking the dog.) And I have motivated myself by doing it for a living. Getting paid is a great incentive to move. And even though I can't do all the things I used to do (Oh stop showing off, Twyla!) I can still embarrass my children by turning on my iTunes and doing my interpretive dance moves in the kitchen. In the kitchen in my town on this planet in this solar system in this universe I am dancing with the stars.
No, that's not going to appear on YouTube anytime soon so here's my hand in action.

And here are some of the members of my Yoga class, many my age or older. The lady on the far right, Tommie, is in her Eighties. Her philosophy of life is: "Whatever floats your boat". Look at them go!