not native fruit

crimson christmas

We've had an unusually colorful Christmas season this year due to the combination of drought and a couple of cold snaps.  Normally rain and wind would have denuded all the trees on our streets that aren't evergreen, but this year almost every neighborhood was decked out in crimson.

 

 

 

 

clean sweep

Here's to the start of a fresh year!

January First here in Berkeley by the Bay, was a day of bright sunshine and clear cool air that had a winey lightness to it like champagne.  I can't really recall a quality of air here that was quite so light and weightlessly transparent.  It was neither moisture-laden nor dry, and we speculate that its utter felt-cleanness may be due to decreased auto traffic on the holiday.  In any case, it was delightful and euphoria-producing.

In the evening, we walked down near the high school's playing field and encountered a flock of black-capped night herons making mysterious musical trillings and calls, bravely walking quite close to us.  We counted six.

I look forward to another year of simple pleasures, such as the sight of clean, beautiful, favorite dishes fresh from the kitchen sink.  It doesn't take much to make beauty, just a loving, enchanted eye.  Here's to the moments of noticing to come.

winter weather

Steam from the tea kettle jets into the space of the night-clad kitchen.  Outside trillions of tiny water-droplets permeate the air, softening the glow of lamp light in the windows of the neighborhood, and drip with the softest of sounds from the frondy branches of the camphor trees.  The lonesome wail of the north-south pacific coast train pulls towards itself my thoughts of people far-distant in time and place. I feel comfortable and intimate in my small wooden house, a bungalow built in the 1920's.  The cat brushes my ankles in a bid for food and attention.

The next day everything is different.  The temperature has dropped and now cold magnifies and emphasizes everything.  Colors glow distinct, air snaps with freshness and an oxygen load, blood picks up its pace, and movement hastens.  For a few days we are in a different world, a world of cold and clarity, of wide-awakeness and an acute awareness of distances.

grey skies

grey skies,
the world
all around
awash
in cool
moisture-laden
air
circulating
in
from the Ocean,
daily
washing
clean
my mind.

*     *     *      *      *
we've had unusually marine weather in the last few days, at a time of year usually characterized by dry heat.  I've enjoyed the sensation of floating in this silvery atmosphere.  It seems to stop thoughts.

machado poem & labor day

I Have Walked Down Many Roads

by Antonio Machado

I have walked down many roads
and cleared many paths;
I have navigated a hundred oceans
and anchored off a hundred shores.

All over, I have seen
caravans of sadness,
pompous and melancholy men
drunk with black shadows,

and defrocked pedants
who stare, keep quiet, and think
they know, because they don’t
drink wine in the neighborhood bars.

Bad people who go around
polluting the earth . . .

And all over, I have seen
people who dance or play,
when they can, and work
their four handfuls of land.

If they turn up someplace,
they never ask where they are.

When they travel, they ride
on the backs of old mules,

and don’t know how to hurry,
not even on holidays.

When there’s wine, they drink wine;
when there’s no wine, they drink cool water.

These are good people, who live,
work, get by, and dream;
and on a day like all the others
they lie down under the earth.

—Translated from the Spanish by Don Share

(from AGNI 27 & 56)

Antonio Machado is one of Spain’s most highly esteemed poets. He lived from 1876–1939. (1988)

Don Share is translating the poems of Miguel Hernandez. He has work forthcoming in The Paris Review. (1988)

*    *     *     *     *

This is the poem I considered giving to George's widow at the memorial service yesterday.  I decided it didn't really fit George, because I believe this is a poem about the workers of the world, the factotums, the day laborers.  I heard it, rather than read it, first.  The man who recited the poem gave it a nuanced, dramatic reading, and even then all of us Berkeley liberals in the audience cringed a little upon hearing verses two and three, probably because there were some actual 'pedants' in the audience, translated as 'academicians' just in case they might not recognize themselves, but possibly simply because, as liberals, we don't believe there are any 'bad' people in the world.  Just kidding.  I have to thank Dave the Bontasaurus over at Via Negativa for finding this poem in an English translation.  He gave me the title.

Anyway, it seems appropriate to publish this poem on Labor Day.

And now, a word about our weather.  It is bitingly cold outside today, the first day of the Labor Day Weekend.  It's always amazing to me how slowly winter plods along, while the summer just zips by.  Maybe it's because we don't get much true summer weather in the San Francisco Bay Area.  So many days are dominated by cold grey fog off the ocean, it makes it seem as if our summers are sharply curtailed.  No wonder they always seem so short. 

lughnasa

August 4th was the Feast of the Descending Sun, an old Celtic festival called Lughnasa.  This marks the turning of the corner from Summer to Autumn, and i usually notice it as a shift in the quantity and quality of the light.

This year, even without being aware of the date, I noticed a distinct feeling of Autumn in the air around my house that day.  it was a bright, clear and jovial feeling, edged just ever so slightly in bittersweet.

last week we had warm weather and i could spend more time outside at night just absorbing the dazzling brilliance of the high summer night.  Night is falling earlier, it's true, but the darkness of the high summer night is ardent in color and vibrant in reflected light of moon and stars.  the world shimmers in solar energy cloaked in the darkness of the night.  this convergence of opposites makes us feel that all is possible, and dreams may come true.

perhaps this is what our dear friend shakespeare had in mind when he wrote a play called 'a midsummer's night dream.'

For a modern treatment of this festival, see the film (on video or DVD)  'Dancing at Lughnasa,' starring Meryl Streep. 

fresh air

I went out for my usual walk around the neighborhood yesterday and encountered a bike race.  Bona fide, with orange cones, safety guards, timers and everything. 

I stood near them at the corner as they whizzed past.  It was a curious experience of sound, color and energy.  I felt quite a marvelous draught of health, speed, movement, and intent, all couched in a setting of simple yet sophisticated technology.

It seemed quite wondrous to me, and when I shared my impressions with my husband, I said that I could feel tremendous power, but it was clear and light, unlike the sensation of power I feel when I'm taking off in a jet, or powering on at high speed along a crowded freeway.  Gary said, "that's human power.  What you felt was human power." 

For me, this discovery is bittersweet at this particular time, just after Patrick Courant, a popular high-school math and science teacher at a local Catholic school, lost his life while training  for just such a race, in a tragic accident on  a low-traveled country road in our vicinity.  In photographs of Patrick racing, I can see his utter zest for the sport.  But the bicyclists are so vulnerable.

spring rains

We're being drenched by Spring rains here.  This is the way you can tell that winter is over: instead of hard-sounding 'tapping' rains, the new rains have a soft muted sound, because the raindrops are splashing on the pannicles of leaves.  And the world is suddenly lit by a green glow.  There are flowers everywhere as well.  I looked out my bedroom window this morning, and all of a sudden, there are deep pink camellias, white-pink apple blossoms and purple iris in the garden.

Gary and I watched 'Kitchen Stories' the other night, and Gary said to me, 'we are like those two guys.'  hmmm...is this a compliment?  But I can see that he is quite right.  We live a simple life here, together, enjoying the quality of the light, the weather and what it brings.  Enjoying the occasional friend or neighbor whose paths cross  ours. 

Gary still climbs up on the ladder onto the tops of our neighbors houses during rainstorms to unclog their gutters, to sweep the pooling rain off their flat roofs.  He puts up shelves, changes light fixtures, gives building advice all over the neighborhood.  He's at home with tools, has worked most of his life out-of-doors.  He is, perhaps, an anomaly in intellectual Berkeley, but an appreciated one.

Gary's at home more now, since he retired, and he cleans the kitchen everyday, cooks, does laundry, vacuums.  His energy has always been 'austere,' but now the house reflects his self-organization.  I'm enjoying it.  How did I get to be here?  I think it's because my father was the same kind of man: a simple, very capable man, who could cook and sew for himself, as many sailors could in the past.  Someone used to living in small, well-organized spaces: his cabin on ship, his room at home.  My father used to read to me a Golden Storybook called 'The Ship-Shape Ship.'  That's where I live now. Just Gary and me.

my birthday: happiness

On my birthday, I received an email from an old friend with this picture of us as kids.  I am ten, and the two girls next to me are eleven.  The children in front are nine.  What do you think, did I fit in?  This was my dilemna as a child.  I was shy, yet I 'stood out,' so to speak.

It rained all day on my birthday this year.  I went out for breakfast with a friend. We talk a lot about 'truth,' a very interesting subject.   I came home and found this photo in my email.  I spent the afternoon alone, embroidering to the sound of rain.  I am enjoying the colors so much.  This is something I used to do a lot in my twenties, when I was detoxing.  I would go on long walks, and then spend some time either writing or embroidering.  I liked Gerda Bengsston's botanicals from Denmark, and I still do.  I'm wondering, why did I stop doing this?  Well, I know the answer.  Because no one around here thought much of it, and, as in my old childhood quest, I wanted to 'belong' - in Berkeley, where the word 'belonging' is probably some sort  of anathema! But the reality of belonging is very strong.  I've grown a little bit wiser about the whole issue, and am finding my 'belonging' more within, and in the context of my own life, which is primarily about my marriage to Gary, my work and my volunteer work, and my writing and other 'creative' activities, including the practice of self-knowledge.  I'm enjoying the embroidery very much.

Anyway, I sat alone and embroidered to the sound of the rain and the soft crackling of a fire in our small wood-stove.  In the evening, Gary and I walked through a light rain to a little bistro in the neighborhood and enjoyed a delicious meal, and a good talk. 

A friend gave me an article on a new book entitled, "Happiness: A History" by Darrin M. McMahon.  The article was good (Wall Street Journal, Sunday, January 21-22, 2006, Books Section), and here is my favorite paragraph: "The idea was not to shut out but rather to embrace discontent, setting aside any happy-ending hopes.  The great Romantic poets mined the bittersweetness to be found in the depths of yearning.  Nietzsche declared struggle itself to be sublime.  Freud argued that an intimate acquaintance with our own anxieties can lead to a kind of mental equanimity.  And existentialists prized precisely those aspects of life that seem an absurd waste.  As for the letdown that follows a successful quest - Schopenhauer's post-achievement dissatisfaction, indifference and emptiness - classical thinkers seized on these feelings not as impediments to happiness but as portals to it.  Such emotions, (according to) Virgil, Lucretius and Seneca in Mr.McMahon's telling, should prompt us not to stage yet further quests but to minimize our desires and plumb the pleasures of a simple life of retirement and contemplation."

I would have to say that in my life-experiment I have found these words to be correct.  To be 'true.'

"As for the post-conquest sense that our best days lie behind us, classical mythology showed how a solitary achievement, even if long past, can suffice to give an individual's life its shape and purpose."  I actually feel this way about taking care of my parents in their old age, and about working through my problems and our working through 'our problems' in our marriage. These may sound like fairly simple goals, but I have to tell you, it hasn't been exactly easy.  There have been so many twists and turns on the path, but it seems as if we have found our way along our path pretty well so far.  Things may not look the way I expected them to look at this stage of the game, but they look pretty good.  So I guess we'll keep going.

inner northerness

As you know, I've been peaking on northerness lately.  Studying Danish, reading about Denmark, joining the Danish Sisterhood.  And now I'm reading 'Smilla's Sense of Snow,' and 'The History of Danish Dreams.'  In the process of going through all this, I'm getting connected to something within myself that I've always felt ambivalent about: a sort of gray, lonely space inside = inner northerness.

It's cold today and the sky is an intense clear blue with both silver-gray and white clouds piled and strewn across it.  We rarely get such cold weather here.  There is snow on top of Mount Tam, Mount Hamilton and elsewhere in the high places of the bay area. 

The hint of frost in the air is thoroughly overwhelmed by the moisture of our climate, reflected in the heaviness of our clouds.  Yet the sun is shining so brightly through them, between them, like the brightest of smiles, like an illuminated white ice in the sky.  No wonder the european northerners  worshipped the sun. 

We're living in 'northern california,' and believe it or not, it is 'northern' here, in a wet, rainy sort of way.  As a young person I resisted the silver-gray nature of winter, and yet, when I landed here in the Bay Area, I discovered that there is silver-gray-world here too.  And a wet one.  Even in our dry summers, the thick fog comes pouring through our hillside communitites.  From a distance it looks sparkly white, not glittery like snow, but pure, cool and clean.  Up close, when you're in it, it's a silver-gray world.

It' so interesting that I've always feared and resisted the lonely gray space.  I always thought it had something to do with the abandonment issues of my infancy.  It was a breakthrough for me in my thirties to claim that gray empty space as my own, and to find that the sorrow it seemed to contain melted into a sweetness and an intimate presence with myself.  'Going there' constituted my spiritual practice for several years thereafter.  But then I began to have a veritable 'light-show' within - perhaps not unlike the northern lights - that took its place and sustained me, again, for about seven years.  That was succeeded by another very intense period of emotional work, personal work, and i was fortunate enough to find olga louchakova, who is a sort of kundalini therapist, and she helped me with all of that.  Then came a quiet period of work, relationship (my husband semi-retired and we had more time together), and an exploration of my own 'secular' spirituality, ie the spirituality of 'just living,' a spirituality not defined or circumscribed by any religious tradition. 

Now that path has brought me to my studies in danish, and most especially to my reconnection with my spiritually wonderful father.  I am rediscovering jylland (jutland) with its various weather issues: snow, rain, wind, gray skies, and, of course, SUN.  And I'm finding that all of that variable weather is inside of me!  That inner northerness is not so bad, after all; it's part of me, and I find myself in it.  Yes, I find myself content with its silver-gray rains, its glittering snow, its battering winds, its sunny days, its northern lights.