A Slow Thing Stirs in the Shadow of the Bougainvillea

I love the line above, from a poem, In January, by Lorna Dee Cervantes.  I think it would make a perfect short story title for some sort of weird Florida story, full of magical realism.  For pure strangeness on the Wierd-o-meter, Florida wins hands down.

In the poem, that slow something is the end of a man's life.  Since death is inevitable, there is a certain acceptance of that finality.  That slow something is neither good, nor bad, or perhaps it's both, but it's there nevertheless and inexorable, inescapable.

Of course, it doesn't have to be death in the shadow of the bougainvillea.  It can be love, awareness, joy, sorrow.  It gets to a sense of anticipation, the waiting that sometimes takes over when your life isn't quite what you want and you feel change at your edges but it moves at its own perfect pace, beyond you and your influence.  Which, as I write it, reminds me of another brilliant line, this one from an Auden poem, For What is Easy: "fate is not late."  I found that poem after my heart attack and understood perfectly, in that moment, how all things come at the right time, even if you are sure they haven't, are too full of what ifs and if onlys.

The Face of the Man She Loves

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.  Honore de Balzac

The World As Meditation

J’ai passé trop de temps à travailler mon violon, à voyager. Mais l’exercice essentiel du compositeur — la médiatation — rien ne l’a jamais suspendu en moi … Je vis un rêve permanent, qui ne s’arrête ni nuit ni jour. — Georges Enesco

Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
That winter is washed away. Someone is moving

On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.

It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement.
The barbarous strength within her would never fail.

She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.

Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955

Sea Grapes

Sea Grapes

by Derek Walcott

That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband's

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like
the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name in
every gull's outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility will
never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now
wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since
Troy sighed its last flame,

and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough from
whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the
conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Those last lines.  They pull me up short today with Mercury retrograde exactly half-way, Saturn turning direct in Scorpio, a Grand Water Trine activated for the next week, emotions spilling everywhere, mine and everyone else's.  How many times have I turned to the Odyssey to soothe me, to help me navigate some rough water?  And always it has consoled, but the rub is, not enough.  In the end, I have to find a way to live with uncertainty, insecurity, and failure.  At least that's the hypothesis of Oliver Burkeman and his recent book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.  And looking back over the last few years, that's exactly been the lesson for me, at least one of them.  You can't be certain; you can't always work with a net.  And Lord knows, it may not always look like success, although 'failure' may be a much more relative term than we often think it is.  

The classics can console but in the end, it's not enough, they're not enough.  They can provide wise counsel, those classics, but ultimately it's our lives and we are the ones that must do the living - good, bad, indifferent.  

This Place We Call Home

I long, as does every human being, to be at home  

wherever I find myself.  Maya Angelou

Now that I've been in Florida for a year, I'm beginning to think of this as home.  The boating life is, by it's nature, a vagabond life.  That doesn't mean that people don't find the dock and stay there.  In this marina there is a couple that has been here twelve years, the boat never once leaving the dock in all that time.  She's ship shape, built to cross the seas and more than capable of it, and yet, she's landlocked and will be for years more I suspect.  Other boats come and go.  There are a few year-round live-aboards here, but mostly it's boats, here for a while and then gone, which is the nature of boats.  

Susurru is my home now, truly, not just in name as she was in the beginning.  I have even begun calling her that - home.  I talk to her before I go to work and when I come home, when winds and water make her dance or shiver, when she's feeling frisky, or nervous, or sad.  Houses speak in their way, I suppose, but they play it close to the vest.  You don't always know with houses; they can keep secrets.  Boats are more loquacious.  They wear their hearts on their sleeves.  You know what they're feeling.  There's a quote about souls and songs in the wood of boats.  I think that's true of boats like this one, boats who are more handmade.  

The marina is becoming home too, though frankly that has been a harder sell.  Calling Florida home has been an even harder sell.  I'm reluctant to let go of California.  I don't want to get use to this warmth and humidity, this flora and fauna.  And yet, the truth of it is I might be here for a while and I can either stay a stranger or begin to learn about this place, the good and the bad, the beauty and the horror.  And I only know one way to learn a place, to make it home, and that's walking it, learning it step by step, block by block, watching it through the seasons, discovering the plants, which is what I'm doing.  I'm trying to figure out this place I  may call home, someday, maybe.   

Strawberry Moon

Apparently the full moon in June was called the Strawberry Moon, named by the Algonquin tribe who knew this moon as a signal of the short harvest of strawberries.  In Europe, where strawberries are not native, it was called the Rose Moon.  

This moon was at perigee, its closest point to earth this year.  They called it the Supermoon - bigger, brighter, more potent.  It's pretty but not noticeably bigger.  Maybe a little brighter.  For me, with a Capricorn moon in my natal chart, it can be a very grounding moon or it can be dark, playing on my fears.  For me, this one is dark, her harvest poor.  Last year she was more steady and sure, the slow, hot burn of new love.  Next year, who knows?  The wheel turns, round and round, down is up and up is down.  The one thing I can count on is that it will be different yet again.  For the first time in many years I am experiencing the vagaries of life personally as opposed to vicariously, through my daughter.  It is not always pretty, but it is living and I want to live.  I decided that after my heart attack, fought for it, for normalcy, for what other people take for granted. The highs and lows are a given.  I can wait for the wheel to turn.  And while I wait, there's this, on of the first moon songs I remember, one of the first I learned, to remind me what I love about the moon and life and living.

Place park, scene dark, silvery moon is shining through the trees;

Cast two, me, you, sound of kisses floating on the breeze.

Act one, begun. Dialogue, "Where would you like to spoon?"

My cue, with you, underneath the silvery moon.

By the light of the silvery moon,

I want to spoon, to my honey I'll croon love's tune,

Honeymoon keep a-shining in June,

Your silvery beams will bring love dreams, we'll be cuddling soon,

By the silvery moon.

Act two, scene new, roses blooming all around the place;

Cast three, you, me, Preacher with a solemn looking face.

Choir sings, bell rings, Preacher: "You are wed for evermore."

Act two, all through, every night the same encore.

By the light, (By the light, By the light),

Of the silvery moon, (The silvery moon).

I want to spoon, (Want to spoon, Want to spoon)

To my honey I'll croon love's tune.

Honeymoon, (Honeymoon, Honeymoon),

Keep a-shining in June. (Keep a-shining in June)

Your silvery beams will bring love dreams,

We'll be cuddling soon,

By the silvery moon.

Your silvery beams will bring love dreams,

We'll be cuddling soon,

By the silvery moon.

Learning a Place

My first months here in Florida were strange and disorienting.   I felt a bit like Alice or Dorothy.  I certainly wasn't in California anymore, that was for sure.  Sometime around February or March, the strangeness began to wear off and I began to pay attention to this place I had come to call home.  I suspect some of this was time here.  I think too, Bryan and I had begun to think we might stay more than a year or two, maybe call this place home.  And so, at the possibility of setting roots, I did what I always did when coming to call a place home, I began to walk it and study it, learn it with my body and my senses.  I read it's history too, but the body has to come to know a place if there's any hope of calling it home.

Bryan's folks came this last week and we took the little boat up the New River.  Bryan sees these canals every time he drives, but I see them less frequently.  In such a temperate place, seasonal changes are small, barely noticeable to someone used to greater variations.  Take the birds, for example.  In the extreme heat of July and August, the birds grow quiet.  Perhaps here it's opposite and instead of migrating in the winter to warmer climes they migrate in the summer to cooler lands.  All I know is that for those few months, the day starts with an odd quiet and ends that way too.  I didn't know last year when we arrived how deliriously the birds sing, how strange the songs are, even the grackle exotically tuneful here as it wasn't in Phoenix.

Apparently in June the Poinciana blooms, glorious and gaudy in her scarlet blossoms.  I didn't know there was a song about them, but Bryan's dad knows tons of songs, many obscure.  He sang this one as we traveled the New River one rather lovely morning.  He didn't know all the words but I searched and found them.  The melody is haunting, fitting the magic of this tree, this place of big dreams, many realized, just as many not.  And I wonder if there is a message for me in this tree, in this song.  I came here for love and sometimes I find it hard to live in that "love, come what may" way I want to.  I don't know but I suspect I will figure it out.  The universe understands I'm a bit dense and gives me plenty of hints, sometimes knocks me over the head with them.  

Here are the lyrics and a link to the Nat King Cole version of the song:

Blow...tropic wind...
Sing a song...through the trees.

Trees...sigh to me...
Soon my love...I will see.


Poinciana,
Your branches speak to me of love.
Pale moon is casting shadows from above.

Poinciana, 
Somehow I feel the jungle heat
Within me, there grows a rhythmic, savage 
beat.


Love is everywhere, its magic perfume fills the air.
To and fro, you sway, my heart's in time, 
I've learned to care.

Poinciana,
From now until the dawning day,
I'll learn to love forever come what may.

Blow....tropic wind,
Sing a song through the trees.
Trees...sigh to me
Soon my love... I will see.

Poinciana...

Words Belong To Each Other

When I was writing my thesis, one of the books I found that was pure magic was The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard.  One of the memorable sections reflected on the amorousness of words, especially in languages which still retain masculine and feminine words.  Bachelard's native language is French and his description of masculine and feminine words in French sentences rolling about and cavorting in the confines of sentences was my first real understanding of the Eros of words and language.

Looking back, I wonder if some of my need to write and the prolific nature of my writing came from my unconscious need for Eros somewhere in my life.  I wanted to be fertile and fecund.  I wanted to love and be loved and if the only way was through stories then so be it.  I wrote of love in all its forms - parent and child, husband and wife, writer and story - but in all of them there was some loss, something incomplete. I had to write that, I think, because I didn't know any other way of being.

But what now, that Eros has entered my life?  I've done some writing this past year, but not anything like I used to.   There is a fear at the core of me that I may not write again, certainly not as I did.  Maybe my life will be my work of art now.  I'm not sure one necessarily prohibits the other, but it may for me.  I guess time will tell.  Maybe my words will find their own ways to come together again, not so much be design but by their own hunger for one another.  If so my writing will be different, or at least the process different, more collaborative, more wonder-filled.  It's past better or worse; it's just the writing and the words and feeling again the sparks between them.

Virginia Woolf wrote an essay on the craft of writing.  She captures it best, I think, the way words belong together, drawn by their own desires beyond our willful insistence that one follow the other.  "It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid."  It's time to go back to words and trust in their hungers.  It's time to write again.  

Good days vs. Good Life

On the heels of my last blog, comes another voice weighing in on the debate.  From Annie Dillard, and The Writing Life:

"There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur’s life a good one, or Thomas Mann’s?"








http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/29/craftsmanship-virginia-woolf-speaks-1937/

LIving as Art

"Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts. Being born and growing up are such common experiences that people seldom consider what they involve. As most readers of books pass from cover to cover, realizing not at all that the letters which form the words are the product of painstaking craftsmanship and that the imposition of the type upon the page, the composition of the title-piece, the binding of the volume, are the result of centuries of study and design, so also we take as a matter of course the miracle of being alive, and the comings and goings of the men and women about us."

"For man is not born into a world made to fit him like a custom tailored suit of clothes, or a house built to order. He enters a universe that was eons old before his appearance, and that in all likelihood will continue for eons after his departure an infinitely complex, eternally changing universe that evolves its processes unmindful of his presence. It sets the conditions. It is man who must do the fitting."

Karl De Schweinitz

I'm a writer and I've toyed a bit with thinking of myself as a collage artist.  At a recent exhibit at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts I saw an artist who, with collage and pop-ups, created unique art books for each of her artist residencies.  And then I came across these quotes and the connection was made.  Our lives are our art and our art is filled with our lives, whether we know it or not.  

So how does one make their life a true work of art?  I suppose it could be argued that our lives are art whether we live them well and fully or not.  Still, if our lives are our magnum opus, then what does that look like?  Or, perhaps more accurately, how do I want my life to look?

I had a good life, but a small one.  It was filled with the fine details of work and home.  It was like my photographs of roses and flowers, taken on my daily walks, all of them cultivated, small bits of wildness in a world that was mostly man-made.  There was little passion in my life, except my love my love for my daughter, for my dogs.  It reminds me of the lines from the Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie, Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain : “Amelie has no boyfriend. She’s tried once or twice, but the results were a letdown. Instead, she cultivates a taste for small pleasures: dipping her hand into sacks of grain, cracking creme brulee with a teaspoon, and skipping stones at St. Martin’s canal.”  I cultivated small pleasures and I believed for many years, that was enough.  

Of course, it wasn't enough for me.  One day I came to the realization that I wanted something more.  I wanted life, something big and bold, something that would make me know every morning when I woke up and every night when I went to bed, and all the times between, that I was truly living.  I leaped from that life to something I only had a hint might be the more I hungered for.  And for the first time in a long time, I truly, truly lived.

I'm not really sure what making a life a work of art looks like but I do think there are people we can learn from.  For me, Bryan is one of those people.  He is one of the most vibrant, authentic people I know.  He paints his life in broad, bold strokes and small delicate tracings.  It's not always pretty, his life, but you feel it at a deep visceral level.  And it stays with you, long after.  It's not conscious really, his life, but instinctual, from the gut, done without plotting or planning, certainly done without a care of what others may think.  The people who love him, love him fiercely, friends for years.  My art will never be Bryan's but I think it can be grander than I thought possible, more than an exquisite miniature, but something that fills the wall and demands your attention, maybe even a second look, something gloriously me, not just a whisper.  All I have to do, is truly live it.  

The Limits of Your Longing

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rilke, Book of Hours, I 59

It's hard to believe such a stretch of wildness exists in a place as built-up as South Florida.  Yet there it is, right along the beach, between Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood - John U. Lloyd State Park.  Back in the days of segregation, this was Florida's Negro Beach.  It wasn't the first one.  That was a stretch north of Sunrise called the Galt Ocean Mile.  There the races inhabited the same stretch but never the same place.  Separate but equal was a pretty accurate description.  And then that mile of beach was bought by a developer and another one had to be found.  What is now known as John U. Lloyd was a barrier island.  It could only be reached by dune buggy or boat.  Families in Pompano or Deerfield had to leave early in the morning to get to the beach by noon.  

It's a beautiful beach.  It's the only one around here that still has trees, part of the natural beachscape in Florida, what this land was before development.  But it's a land filled with longings.  A hard beach to get to, separate and unequal, it spurred 'wade-ins' as protests.  Ultimately the beaches in Fort Lauderdale were integrated.  John U. Lloyd, a local attorney and the man for which the beach was named, was instrumental in getting the beach state park status.  It is, perhaps, one of the loveliest and unsullied stretches of beaches in Broward County.  On the afternoon I found my way there, also by boat, to snap this picture, I could feel it, standing there in wind and waves, the longing that lived here still, and not just for a beach you could drive to.  No, it's hungry this stretch, filled the kind of yearning that the horizon brings and a vast expanse of ocean at your feet.  It tugs at you, fills you with a need to just keep going.  There is also a timelessness here too, a reminder amid all the manmade of the land that was here long before we arrived and will be here long after.  It reminded me so much of the Rilke line, "Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness," and his urging to live life fully, let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.  This I remembered at last.  This is why I leaped.  We are meant to live.  It's why we were born, why we are here.  We forget that sometimes and it weighs on us, breaks our hearts, urges us to reach and grapple, to deeply engage, to love and lose and love still, regardless.

Perhaps every place can illuminate the limits of our longings, but some places possess a special power, a hunger and timelessness that reminds us why we are here and how fully we must engage.  Every reminder is a good one and every reminder is necessary, not for everyone perhaps, but for those of us called by bad hearts and accidents, by close calls and near misses.  For those that have seen our edges and resided there for a span, there's no losing it, unless at our own peril.  I don't think you get another chance if you've gone to the edge and forget what that taught you.  No, you hold on to the hand and let every feeling come, because none are final, and all we can do is go on.  It's what we're called to do, what life demands.

Whom We Love

"In a relationship, one mind revises the other; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors [coteries of ingrained information patterns] activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love."  From  A General Theory of Love 

It was this last line that stopped me in my tracks.  If it was the only thing I got from the book it would have been worth three-, four-, five times its cost.  Here was the essential truth about love, what no one told you.  It made perfect sense to me, perhaps because my leap was so recent and I could see how such a change in choosing who to love would alter me as well.  It rung me true, that line, and I'm reverberating still.  

A day earlier, I found this quote which summed up, in many ways, the last 10 years of my life or so.  It takes courage to take off the gloves.  It's scary and then wild and then joyous.  And it's so necessary, if you want to live life as opposed to having your life live you.  Here's the quote from Mark Nepo and The Book of Awakening:

We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.

When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.

It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable."

Loving Bryan changed me and is changing me.  I am no longer quite that woman who felt more dead than alive, who bound herself tight to keep herself safe and looked out her window at the world but never really was a part of it.  And all sorts of unimaginable things suddenly seem not just imaginable, but possible.

By the Light of the Moon, the Moon

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
    They danced by the light of the moon,
          The moon,
          The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
The Owl and the Pussycat,
     Edward Lear


I never thought I would have a man in my life who possessed a relationship to the magical world, a man who understood that if we came to things with a pure heart, with joy, there, within reach, was all we could ever want, all we could ever ask.  I work with the seasons and the moons.  I set my intents and send them on fire and smoke.  I held close the dictate to do no harm, and I try to live in gratitude for all that has come to me.  I have done all this quietly, not secretly, but alone.  I've been able to talk about this intellectually, but I've never had a partner who spiritually matched me.  I've never really understood before the promise, "where two or more are gathered...."

In our beginning, Bryan and I both claimed Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat as a favorite childhood poem.  It suited us, these two different creatures who had fallen in love and set sail to find a place where they could marry and be together.  As for dancing by the light of the moon, it seemed a sweet little device but nothing more than the delightful stuff and nonsense that was so much a part of the poem.  I never thought there was anything more to it until just recently.

The last few months I've grown a little more open with myself with Bryan.  I tell him what kind of influences are at work at large.  I remind him of the moons and their energy.  I have returned to working with herbs and Bryan has embraced them.  I am more myself spiritually, than I ever have been.  It seems I've unfolded slowly, the physical, the emotional, the mental, and now at last, the spiritual.  We are both sensitive to the moon's influence and we use it, he and I, beginning from our start, but more and more as we go along.  We dance by the light of the moon, Bryan and I.  We have from our beginnings and will, I suspect, for all the rest of our days. It still feels a little strange, but wonderful too.  And I wonder what I can become, at last having body, heart, mind and soul touched, treasured and loved.  May all of us be lucky enough to dance by the light of the moon.

For a Year and a Day ....

At the Jaffe Center for Book Arts was an amazing display of collage/ pop-up books.  The form of the pop-up element was often lost in the battle between figure and ground.  They are whimsy with a touch of malice, a dose of medicine with just slightly too little sugar to make it go down.  They are disorienting in an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of way, and I loved them.  Each were made as an artist in residence in a different place.  One of the books had images of a meatpacking plant and steak, another, a mountain of toilets.  I think I may have to go back and study them again once summer comes.  They are a lot to digest.  Do I want to do them?  Hell yes.  Will I?  Probably not.  They're require a type of vision I don't have but in words, and even then.

This one puts me in mind of the Edward Lear poem, The Owl and the Pussycat, which was one of my favorite childhood poems.  Can't exactly tell you why this ship makes me think of their pea-green boat, but it does, in a dream-kind of way where it doesn't look anything like it but you know it is.  I think this kind of book would be perfect to tell the story of that year and a day, all the highs and lows, the romance and the ordinariness, the thrill of romance and then the steadier thrum of a truer love.  Anyways, here's the poem:

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are, you are, you are,
What a beautiful Pussy you are."
Pussy said to the Owl "You elegant fowl, 
How charmingly sweet you sing.
O let us be married, too long we have tarried;
But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows,
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose, his nose, his nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling your ring?"
Said the Piggy, "I will"
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon.
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand.
They danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

When Oracles Speak

For most of my life I've paid attention to the world around me, looking for signs and symbols.  It's in the blood I think.  My grandmother was full of mysteries and meanings.  I may not always know what they mean, the things I see, though I often know they have meaning even if I can't decipher it.

Yesterday, I went to the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the Florida Atlantic University campus.  I had the opportunity to take a lot of pictures but I had to do it quickly since our time was limited.  Many I took automatically.  This was one of them.  When I came home and uploaded the photos I recognized the words.  It seems a both a reminder and a command and the deep kind of wisdom that comes to us at times, seemingly from beyond us, something we know but have forgotten.  So, I encourage you too to:

     "Go Get Amazed By The Day"

Connections, Missed and Otherwise

Today I learned about this particular artist, Sophie Blackall, and her project, turned into a book,  Missed Connections.  The illustrations are sweet, nostalgic picture-poems about almosts and if onlys.  They set you to thinking about the slender threads that link us to one another, fragile things really, the difference between touching and not, knowing and not, loving and not.  There's no telling really why sometimes we let the moment pass and others we must say something, do something.

The young man of this missed connection saw a woman he thought stunningly beautiful and was filled with desire to ask her out, but didn't.  There was enough juice in the attraction that after the moment was missed, for some time, maybe for a lifetime, he regretted it, but there wasn't enough to make him act.

They get me thinking, these captured moments of nearly and almost.  It wasn't that long I made a choice to reach out, to forget what if and say 'yes!"  I might just as easily not have.  I could have sat days, weeks, months down the line wondering what I missed, trying to make the connection I denied.  I might still be where I was, but for an action made and answered.  What makes the leap though from nearly to yes?  That still eludes me.  And why is one call manifested, the other just a dream?  It's hard for me to imagine that someone could look at a picture of me, read my words, and fall in love enough to brave years, distance and circumstance, and yet this is what happened.  Of course, I did just the same.  Actually it was just words and voice for me, and I moved mountains.  And maybe it's projections, and maybe it's chemistry, and maybe it's just magic of the most potent kind.  I don't know and I probably never will.  In the meantime, though, there is life and its myriad connections, missed and otherwise.

I Walk the Line

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds
Because you're mine, I walk the line.

                      I Walk the Line, Johnny Cash


This is a Soul Collage card, made around 2011, I think, when I was still making them and just beginning to think they were more, maybe even art.  It was made post-heart attack, after my father's death, when I had found a certain peace with a road ahead and walking it alone.  I was married, not unhappily but not happily either.  

According to Seena Frost, the woman who created and trademarked the concept, they are "a creative and satisfying collage process. You make your own deck of cards - each collage card representing one aspect of your personality or Soul. Use the collage cards intuitively to answer life's questions and participate in self-discovery. Joyfully deepen your understanding of the relationships between your personality parts, you and your family/community/world, and you and your dreams, symbols, and Spirit."  They are definitely works of the unconscious and while they may represent parts of my personality or Soul, they also are art, and perhaps even prophecy.  You can use the cards as a kind of Tarot, not so much foretelling a future as revealing the forces within you being called on either positively or negatively.  They are kind of a wisdom school, part magic and part psychology as all good wisdom schools are.  I came to find though, the cards themselves can be a kind of oracle.  One card actually predicted my coming heart attack a month before I had it.  Another, Wolf of my Heart, predicted the man who would come into my life who would encourage me on the path hinted by this card, I Walk the Line, made a year after.  

Of course when I made the card, it made perfect sense the road the color of fire and blood, a little arterial, the ocean, actually a Santa Barbara Beach, reflecting a hope that I would end up in a way where I started, by the water.  The planet, I was never sure of, maybe a new world, certainly a distant future, definitely an adventure.  The angel, isn't so much hubris as it is reflective of a certain alienation that was always mine, but so much more so after the heart attack.  That she is black and white against such a vivid background only amplifies the difference.  I see her as becoming, not quite giving up flight, not quite embracing the earth.  She is nearly grounded, but not quite, nearly of this world but not completely.  This was how I felt, how I still sometimes feel although that is changing.  I am coloring myself in, letting life paint me, and not the cool blues I prefer but vivid oranges and reds, fierce yellows, the colors of ocean sunrises and sunsets, of flesh and blood.

When I rediscovered it the other day, it struck me that this is exactly what happened to me when I left Sacramento and flew to the Virgin Islands and completely new life.  I suppose you could say, what I did with the body I now repeated with my heart, or the physical healing was now echoed by an emotional one.  It's not Google Maps, exact location, possible routs, and estimated time of arrival (as well as traffic conditions), but it's eerily exact.  The unconscious loves its symbols and prefers a more sphinx-like approach to prophecy.  I find I like that a little better than a psychic's predictions.  I like the frisson of realization, that look back that Machado talks of, the one that reveals the path we've made by walking.  It makes me wonder what card I might make now, for what is to ahead and I think I might almost be ready to find out.

One day ... Some day ... If only ....

"If only I could feel about sex as I do about writing! That I’m the vehicle, the medium, the instrument of some force beyond myself."  Susan Sontag, 11/1/64

I've sat with this quote for a while now.  It felt too revelatory  to share in any venue, but especially this one, even as it seemed somewhere, somehow, it must be written down and shared as a truth, in any venue, especially this one.   I recently came across it reading Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks.  I've always thought her brilliant, but there is something chilly about her that never quite sat well with me.  I know my own tendencies to intellectualism and emotional distance.  I am not a better person when I give myself to cold logic.  This might have been Sontag's path, but it is not mine.

These days though, I feel a little easier braving the element of air.  Life on the water keeps emotions on the surface, keeps me emotionally engaged in life instead of the spectator I had become.
I can read a little Sontag, dwell for a while in the heady heights of mind she called home.  Which is how I came to the quote above that stopped me in my tracks.  

When I write I do feel inhabited by something more, vehicle or a force beyond me.  It's not that I'm merely a scribe to some greater power.  No, it's more that I am somehow fully what I should be when I write, more than just this body, this self, but a larger Self, maybe even a Soul.  I suppose I understand when I write, the personal unconscious and Jung's collective unconscious.  However, I haven't that way in my life for a long time, maybe ever, but certainly no the last 20 years or more.  There have been moments, not no real surety, not until this last year.  It struck me, reading Sontag's quote, that I do feel this way about sex these days.   I feel it still about writing, but feel it about going to work too now, and coming home and the hours between.  I feel it sitting at the table having dinner with Bryan.  I feel it nearly every hour of every day.  I have gone from a distant observer to a full participant to something more.  I can't tell you what that more is, just that it feels the way Sontag describes  writing.  I wonder if this is how life and living should feel, andI wonder how long it's been since I felt that way, if I ever felt that way.  The heart attack, a lost love, a found one, a change of venue, a sailboat and the ocean, they all brought me to this place.  They turned me on, lit me up, and I pray to any and all the gods that my light never dulls and dims again.  

We, Unfolding.

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.
                               Max Frisch


One of the gifts of a mid-life change is the opportunity to watch a life unfold, your's and if your lucky, maybe the life of another, the one you love.  We come to it with our children, that little bit of distance necessary to see the broad picture of where they've been, where they are and hints of where they might be headed.  In my primary relationship though, I had long lost the ability to see much and, to be honest, to want to see much.  He had so set himself on a path, was so set in who he was, there was no unfolding.  He kept himself tightly closed, shut down; there was no becoming allowed.  And I came for a time, a long time actually, to believe that there was no becoming for me as well, just small, meaningless accomplishments, mere busywork, really, as I made my to the end of my days.

My mother has asked me on more than one occasion why my life change had to be so big, why I couldn't keep everything of my old life but that one that no longer fit -- my marriage.  There was a time I would have told her it was the man I came to love, and that was part of it, but it wasn't all.  It's never about that person although it's easier to think it is.  They become a convenient vehicle, the outward form, but not the soul of the change.  I felt around the edges of why, kind of knew, but it wasn't until a few month ago that I realized I had to make this big of a leap, I had to move across the country, I had to change everything so completely there was no going back.  For me, a small change would never be enough.  I settle into grooves.  I follow trails already made and so small changes would have ultimately been more of the same.  I guess my own 'blue screen of death' had come up and I knew I needed a complete reboot if I was going to actually live my life.

I don't know if I ever explained it enough for my mother to understand.  I'm not sure she has to understand although I'm not sure I'll tell her that.  I've found the kind of changes I've made make some people uncomfortable, especially my mother.  It doesn't fit the societal narrative of success I grew up with, my mother's narrative, and if you can turn your world and other's worlds upside-down, if everything people knew about you or thought they knew wasn't true at all, then what can be counted on?  The world is shown as the astonishing and unpredictable thing it is.  But more importantly, there are no more excuses for compromise and making due.  You can change, even late in life and you can watch yourself unfold (and what air sign doesn't want that little bit of distance and the wisdom it brings).  You can write yourself and re-write yourself.  It is astonishing really how that one chapter changes all that came before and opens up worlds in all the chapters that will follow.

I'm growing used to unfolding. It was an odd feeling at first, not particularly comfortable, but not completely unpleasant either.  It's a catch in the throat kind-of-sensation, a yearning in the gut, the pull toward something more even while you have no idea what that more is.  It's like that first touch of love, that is it or isn't it point when you're still on the edge, just at the beginning of falling but still have balance enough or think you do, to stay right there, not fall at all. It's not for everyone, unfolding.  Which doesn't mean we get out of it as much as it means we have a choice whether to be aware or not, to be conscious or not.  It reminds of that Anais Nin quote:  “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”  We can fight the unfolding; we can deny it.  We can live whatever prescribed life we think we should be living, and if we need to unfold, that life will unravel one way or another.  We don't always have to be aware of the unfolding, but unfold we must.  We were born to bloom and question is whether we manage just a few petals, staying mostly bud, or bloom thoroughly and completely, giving ourselves up, living gloriously and ending just as gloriously.  I want to be that bloom, that rose, that lives it's life so completely and ends it so completely too. I think Bryan wants the same and I think that too is part of the gift of this.  It is hard to stay a bud in the company of flowers.

For Most of My Life ....

.... I followed the safe path.  

A few days ago I came across this first line of a commencement speech made by Debbie Millman to the graduating class of San Jose State University.  From it she wrote an essay titled "Fail Safe," which is part of her 2009 anthology, Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design.  What follows would be inspiring to anyone just on the edge of starting out, at his or her beginning, but for someone like me, someone who made the kind of leap she talks of at mid-life, the one she gives words to, practical, 21st century words, not Dante's Italian or Shakespeare's English, well it sent me reeling.  I felt nothing short of wonder to see the last year of my life in print, to realize I was not the strange creature some people seemed to think I was.  Even I wondered now and again how I found the strength and hope I found to do what I did.

Unlike Millman, I had never stood at a crossroads early in my life choosing possibility over surety.  I too had wanted to be a writer, had believed I might have talent enough to try, but bravery enough to consider that risky, possible path.  I chose certainty.  I chose practical.  I limited my possibilities for many reasons, and I blame my father for not believing in me, but the truth was I didn't believe in myself.  I suffered from an extreme case of lack of imagination, which plagued for many years.  I couldn't believe in the possibility of a life doing anything artistic.  From there I stopped believing in the kind of love that meets you in all the ways you want and need it to.  I stopped believing in change.  My world narrowed to the narrowest path I could imagine.  In this narrowing, my imagination proved all too powerful.

Millman writes: "The grand scheme of life, maybe (just maybe) is not about knowing or not  knowing, choosing or not choosing.  Perhaps what is truly known cannot be described or articulated by creativity or logic or science or art - but perhaps it can be described by the most authentic and meaningful combination of the two: poetry.  As Robert Frost wrote, a poem "begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.  It is never a thought to begin with."

She continues with the advice for those at their beginnings or those, like me, at midlife in a dark wood and reconsidering, that we take Robert Frost's advice to heart.  She continues: "If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now."  Which is exactly what I did.  

It doesn't mean the path is suddenly easy.  It doesn't mean courage and strength aren't required of us, more perhaps late in life than would have been required earlier at our start.  I would say there really is no other choice, not if you want to truly live each and every day of your life.  I was lost and now I'm found.  I was the walking dead, and now I'm one of the living.  It's never too late.  And I could tell my daughter that, or I can live it so she comes to it as real and true and embraces her many amazing possibilities.