Christmas Toast

It's Christmas eve. I slept late today, unfortunately missing the opportunity to get ahead on the multiple tasks of cooking, cleaning and wrapping. I worked at the English garden madhouse for a while, fought my way through an incredibly busy and absolutely humming grocery store, and walked home through the sunshine and past the hummingbirds to ready my little house for Christmas. It's looking pretty good here by now. There's plenty left to do, but there are lights on the tree, fire in the hearth, food in the oven, dogs begging in the kitchen, Tim in the bedroom wrapping, glass of wine in my hand and sugar cookies rolling on the counter for dessert. I propose a little toast. Here's to all the makers of Christmas. The sleepless, tipsy or hungover stuffers of stockings, the tired bringers of magic under the tree, the empty bank account granters of Christmas wishes, the fighters through traffic and airport security lines, the kitchen slaves of festive dinners, the sufferers of school Christmas concerts and cartoon Christmas specials and everyone who digs withing themselves to find more energy, more patience and more love to make special moments and experiences for their families and loved ones. May you all have light and sparkle in the darkness, warmth from any cold, love in your hearts and may all your deepest, most important Christmas wishes come true.

Magic Thankfulness

It's been a busy few weeks here, and between waitressing and grad school and everyday life it feels as though I've had very little opportunity for reflection lately. There have been a few wonderful, magic days though that I am going to take this opportunity to document my thankfulness for. First, a couple of weekends ago we started out on a hike up the canyon from our house through Temescal Gateway Park in the Santa Monica mountains. We started at our house and headed up the street, through the park, up the canyon trail, past a weak but precious little waterfall, and up and up the side of the mountain to a ridge where we could see studio city, part of downtown and across Santa Monica and Venice to the beach. A passerby stopped to tell us that we could make a loop down, and we crossed the ridge and walked back with amazing view after amazing view of the hills and coast headed up to Malibu on the right and the city stretching to the beach on the left. As we descended we could dissect the town that we live in and begin to recognize landmarks. It was a wonderful serendipitous journey; walking from our house up the canyon, over the mountain and coming home with a whole new perspective on where we live.

I had another magic day last weekend, when one of my dearest cousins and his old buddy came to visit, bringing the fun as they always do. They introduced us to an incredible ramen dive in Little Tokyo that is worth it's weight in gold. A culinary pinnacle of the ramen form. Also, they brought some wetsuits and enticed me out into the waves with them for a couple of hours in which we frolicked in the sun and rolled in the surf on an empty beach in November. It was lovely, and made me so grateful for cousin/friends and to live near the ocean in this beautiful climate.

I'm grateful that my garden is up! Especially thankful now that it is almost December and I will have fresh peas and greens soon.

In the larger picture I am grateful for where I've come in my life. Five years ago I was on my homestead putting on a really work intensive Thanksgiving feast. We had grown the potatoes, squash and pumpkins ourselves, and had also raised, killed, cut the bung from and plucked the turkey ourselves. (Plucking turned out to be another one of those time consuming, largely forgotten and now anachronistic traditional skills that I really took to and am pretty good at. Where was I in the 1800's? Why didn't I get the texting and twitter aptitude?) Anyway, her name was Ferdinand. I cried when we killed her, but she didn't suffer much and she wasn't afraid. We brined her and cooked her the next day for our families. As I washed the free-range turkey from the store this morning and rubbed it with oil and fresh herbs from the garden I said thank you for it's life and I could imagine what it's rib cage was like as a living, silken cage for it's turkey soul. I am glad that I know such things with my hands. I'm glad that I know what I know, and I'm glad that I was brave enough to leave what I knew to expand my life and have the creative path and the loving family that I have now.

And I am very thankful for today. I walked the dog down to the bluffs last night and watched the sun set over the Pacific and felt the whole next day stretching out ahead of me. We are having a very quiet Thanksgiving. Just Tim, Shannon and myself. I have no obligation today other than cooking (a store-bought, pre-plucked turkey), which seems like a good deal to me. A happy and magic day of thankfulness to you.

English Garden Madhouse

Waitressing shoes.

Many, many, many people work in restaurants at various points throughout their lives and if you have or do you will probably relate to this post. I am going to devote some writing here to my newish restaurant job. I love food, and I love eating out, and I don't mind waiting tables and I am often pretty good at it. Although I am qualified to do other perhaps more fulfilling work, (I should note here though that working for a really good restaurant, where excellent ingredients are used and real care and creativity are put into the food and the place is mindfully and compassionately organized is as fulfilling as any other work I've ever had), because I am juggling grad school and family life and occasional health issues waiting tables is pretty much the best way for me to make some money on the side. It's flexible and generally the financial return on the time and effort put in is pretty good. Plus, there's good coffee and free food!

Because restaurants are so team oriented and relatively high paced and high stakes, (reputation, which is all important, can be marred or ruined in an instant), this kind of work creates an immediate little family whose roles and duties and personalities are all intimately enmeshed and interdependent. Like all families, these groupings are often dysfunctional and serve to bring out the best and the worst in it's members. I have worked in quite a few restaurants, and they all have their own interpersonal feel to them. My new place of employment though, Doyle's Cafe,(all names changed here), is perhaps the nuttiest in my experience yet. Granted, I just came from Maine where I worked for a wonderful restaurant with a very sane,(for a restaurant), and nurturing environment,(oxox Mel and In Good Company), so I am a little bit spoiled. But after only two days of searching out here, where there are no jobs at all, I wandered into this little place just a few blocks from my house and was almost immediately offered a serving position. Convenient! So convenient that I can overlook a lot of madness and thus am still working there. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

They call Doyle's an English Garden Cafe. It is an intimate affair of a cozy hallway opening onto a brick patio overflowing with white lattice work covered from top to bottom in ivy and geraniums. Covering the patio are wrought iron chairs and tables with little flower pots on top and flowered cushions and a fountain flowing. It's very beautiful and peaceful and feels very much like you've stepped into an English garden except that the weather is so great and you can see palm trees peeking in overhead from the patio. In the midst of this proper and pretty Englishness is Doyle, the owner. He's English all right, but not exactly proper or pretty. Doyle is a very large, slightly grumpy, unwashed looking fellow in his 60's from Cockney with the accent to prove it. He's actually very generous and a big softy but you might not get that at first. Before owning a restaurant he apparently made quite a bit of money supposedly selling Italian shoes in south London and then doing some real estate deals down in Baja, all of which required him to do business with some famously shady characters in Naples, Italy and in the regional Baja government in Mexico. That put together with the neighborhood he grew up in and the colorful companions of his youth could give you a vague picture of the kind of folks he can hang with, to say the least. He's basically a hard working, regular guy though and at this point it appears that he is retired from any former occupations and lives comfortably in a nice but not ostentatious house in Pacific Palisades with his family and their mercedes and jags. This brings me to his wife of many decades, Imogen. Imogen actually is proper and pretty and also English. I think she was beautiful once, and she has a dry sense of humor and can be quite fun. Her main contribution to the cafe seems to be watering the plants and drinking wine. They have a couple of sons, born in London but raised here in CA. One of them I have yet to meet, but the other, Oliver, I've had plenty of opportunity to get to know. Dude is 38, lives with his folks, and helps them "manage" their cafe. His "managing" seems to consist of not showing up for work on time, or at all, and making lots of free coffees for himself and his girlfriend, Daisy. That brings me to his girlfriend. Someone else at the cafe rather aptly described her as "a piece of work." I'll just leave it at that. Bless her, she does absolutely adore Oliver and sees something in him that convinces her that he is a prince. There was a period where Oliver's old girlfriend and he and this new one were all working at the cafe at the same time, but thankfully that's over. Apparently Imogen was a bit depressed over the new girl at first, but now Daisy's devotion has convinced her to cut her losses and slug back some more wine and encourage the match in hopes that Oliver may actually leave the house someday. Soon.

And that pretty much covers the leadership at the cafe. Oh yeah, and none of them had ever owned or even worked in a restaurant before opening this one a year ago. But, luckily they hired a bunch of nice, young, football loving would be actors from Texas. These are real stand up kids and they have held this place up quite a bit. It works for them because they are all friends, they can all work together, the money is not too bad and they don't have to work nights much so they can go to rehearsals and classes and auditions.

The real backbone of the restaurant though is the kitchen, and like most kitchens in L.A., and everywhere else in the country, world maybe, this English Garden Cafe is going Mexican. Three young guys from Oaxaca are there often more than 12 hours a day. They trade off being cook, prep and porter. Two of them are cousins and the other is a friend. The kitchen is a totally different world from the rest of the cafe. The guys listen to Mexican radio all day long and gossip in Spanish about friends and girls and joke with each other and the waitstaff while they make quiche and sandwiches and salads and wash dishes and mop floors. They themselves eat guacamole and rice and beans standing up at the counter. The cousins were abandoned by their parents at an early age and raised by a traditional grandmother and thus grew up speaking not Spanish but an ancient Mayan dialect that they still use privately between the two of them. The oldest one, aged 21, is living on his own now with his pregnant girlfriend. He supports his family back in Mexico and is putting his younger sisters through school. He beams with pride and joy over his impending fatherhood. You would think that since this 21 year old guy bearing the financial responsibility of his entire family, working 12 hours a day and taking a bus from Hollywood to get there can show up on time at 8:00 am, then Oliver, at age 38 with no financial responsibilities and his own mercedes and living around the corner could get to work by 11, but no. Funny how that works.

Oh, I almost forgot, the last addition to the extended family is the woman's boutique owner next door, Diana. Diana invested in the restaurant to start with and now she is entitled to whatever she would like to eat, whenever she would like it, for free. She really takes advantage of this and appears to eat most of her meals there. She has an amazing, uncanny ability to come in and take a long time to order something complicated and not on the menu just as we are getting really busy. We bring the food and drink to her, and she leaves the dishes on the doorstep for us when she's done. So thoughtful. Oh yeah, and she doesn't tip.

The last addition to the family are the customers. Hard to exactly put a finger on that group. The Palisades are full of very rich people dressed very casually. A few specifics come to mind: soccer moms lunching, older couples getting out, people writing screenplays, people making high end real estate deals. Pretty normal stuff except for the high occurrence of millionaires in leisure suits. And dogs. We allow dogs.

Anyway, this is the Doyle's cafe family. It's like a weird but probably not atypical little cross-section of L.A. The maybe ex- English mafia parents and rich, failure to launch son, the "piece of work" girlfriend, the batty, clueless boutique owner next door, the wholesome future actor kids from Texas, the Oaxacans speaking Mayan in the kitchen, producers and real estate moguls in leisure suits on the patio.... oh yeah, and me! It's a madhouse, but most of the other nutjobs there are growing on me.

Death and Gardens

[The butterfly is one current guide for me. Not only does the monarch have a special pact with death through its ceremonial role of bringing the souls of the dead back for Dia de los Muertos, but it is also a dramatic symbol of metamorphosis. It heads inward to the cocoon to completely transform itself for it's next phase of life.]

Day of the Dead and all of its joyful eerie revelry in the mingling of the living and the dead has passed, and the door to the spirit world is largely shut for another year. This time of year in New England is accompanied by a palpable death of the year. Departing and silencing of wild creatures and faded bones of formerly flowering plants. In my old homestead this time of year was the dark time. We lived on limited solar power and didn't make much in the winter, so during these short days we would light candles and oil lamps at night and save the electricity for the water pump and the cd player. It gets hard to stay up more than an hour or two past dark in a quiet house in the woods lit by candles and woodstove fire. I almost became part of the wildlife in a rhythm of hibernation. Like the squirrels and birds though, the few free daylight hours would be full of busy activity to be ready for winter, like hauling, chopping and stacking wood. Becoming ready for keeping light and warmth in the darkness. Seeing the death of the year and feeling the cold and hearing the silence, accompanied by all those hours of solitude and darkness always turns my mind to thoughts of death and closure.

Even here, where it is almost always warm and sunny, it is cooler than it was a few weeks ago and I can hardly believe it but the leaves are falling from the sycamores and some other trees of northern origin on my street. Although the temperatures aren't much different than summertime, the trees still feel compelled to uphold their inner cycles. A time for outward growth, and a time to turn inward and still. The light slants differently now and the days are dark earlier. It's less dramatic and compelling than the north, but the season has turned here as well. The year is dying.

It is sad, another year going by. But as the festivities of Dia de Los Muertos remind us, death can be a friend, an ally, and a guide to experiencing the present and doing the most that we can with what we’ve got. I recently read an essay by Shaman Maggie Wahls on death and being impeccable. She writes:

"The [shaman] has a personal relationship with death, not one of adversary but one of necessity and even sustenance. Walking with this understanding allows one to see the beauty in every vision, every action, and every moment of one’s life. It is not about becoming perfect. Perfection is striving to be one better than your neighbor, to achieve status, to break a record. Perfection causes striving and since it is never attained, it leaves the striver unfulfilled, unhappy and unsatisfied. But a life lived impeccably is filled with joy, with wonder and with satisfaction that every action, thought and word was the very best effort one could make."

This is a good message for me. I am taking the death of the year as a guide. Life has felt pretty emotionally challenging to me for a long time now. (Who isn’t it emotionally challenging for though? That’s kind of the nature of life if you are paying attention.) I guess I mean that I have been plagued with some unnecessary and troubling emotional baggage. Sometimes lately I feel lonely or depressed, but I've decided to stop with that. These same feelings of loss and depression have been visiting me periodically since my divorce and departure from the homestead. I felt like the life I had in the beautiful woods with my ex-husband was so perfect for me in some ways but not in others, and then my new life with a wonderful husband and family but lots of moving around and chaos is so perfect for me in some ways but not in others. I’m letting that feeling go though. I’m done with it. I’m letting it die. I’m deciding that it is all perfect, I just don’t always understand how. (Kudos here to Rill, up on her mountain in Shrewsbury, for telling me when I was 12 that “everything is perfect we just haven’t figured out how yet.” I thought it was the most confusing and possibly the stupidest thing I had ever heard, but it has lived on in my psyche all these years and I finally embrace what she meant!) Perfect in this case doesn’t mean always nice or beautiful or easy, it just means that it is all as it should be and every choice and happening is aligning and evolving in a harmony larger than what we can fathom. I tell myself this a lot, but for some reason now I finally believe it. Changing my idea of perfection is going to allow me to be more impeccable and appreciative of this current time of change and growth. Metamorphosis.

Last bit of news for the week, which brings me incredible joy in the death of this year, is that here in my yard in Los Angeles I borrowed a wheelbarrow from Jose, bought some seeds and compost, and today since I don’t have to work I am planting my garden! This is certainly a first for me, a garden on November 5th! I saved some heirloom tomato seeds from the farmer’s market, and got some peas and greens and carrots and I’m going to do some snap beans, cucumbers and soybeans. I also put in some nasturtiums, chamomile and calendula. The days are short and the nights are cool, but it’s sunny and in the 60’s and 70’s, kind of like midsummer in Maine!, so I’m expecting these babies to get going pretty soon here. I have dirt under my fingernails and my back is kind of sore and I feel just like my old self here in Los Angeles.

Lila Downs, Rudoplph Valentino and the Monarch Butterflys

In the last week or two the monarch butterflies have been making their way down here. Before we moved in August I had my eye on a patch of milkweed in my garden back in Maine, looking for the caterpillars that would soon be hatching out to begin their long journey south to Mexico by the end of October. Such a long way for such little bodies with papery wings to go. But so important that they arrive! In Mexico, the arrival of the monarchs means that the souls of the dead are returning back again, in time for the most beautiful and important holiday of the year, Dia de los Muertos. I keep smiling as I see their fluttering golden selves pass over the highways and through the neighborhoods, potentially bearing precious invisible spiritual cargo.

Last night I went to the best party that I have been to in L.A. yet, (not that I have really been to many others...), but maybe for the first time ever I was really able to fully enjoy and connect to an event that was completely and totally L.A. This couldn't have happened the same way anywhere else. It was the Dia de Los Muertos celebration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. First of all, it wasn't the real Dia de Los Muertos, which is actually November 2nd, the same as All Saints Day on the Anglo-Catholic calendar. I think that they may have held it a week early so as not to conflict with some more traditional events. In any case though, Dia de Los Muertos, or Day of the Dead is a traditional Mexican holiday wherein it is believed that the spirits of our ancestors can come back for one night to visit us and once again enjoy some of the pleasures of the material world. Families construct alters in their homes or at the cemeteries, and eat and drink and make merry by dead family members' graves. The alters are full of photos of the loved ones, candles and fresh baked sweet bread, "pan de los muertos", to symbolize the sweetness of this life, fresh flowers, to symbolize it's beauty and brief, passing nature, and often incense, liquor, specially prepared dishes, cigars, and other things that the dead relatives would have enjoyed on earth and would like to have again for the festive celebration. Alters and the ground around them are strewn with marigolds, or "flor de los muertos" to help guide the spirits back home. Streets, homes and places of business are decorated with papel picado, colorful tissue paper with skulls and skeleton images meticulously cut out of it. Children decorate and eat skulls made of sugar. There are processions in the streets with brass bands and people dressed up and dancing in crazy skeleton outfits. Skeleton puppets and dioramas enact scenarios of life after death. Skeletons drinking and dancing in a cantina, getting married, walking in the park with their babies, doing just about everything that we do in life, but with permanent grins on their bony faces and a very laissez-faire attitude about being dead. I love it. I looooove Day of the Dead! I love that idea, that the dead aren't gone from us forever. They just live in another place and we can still spend time with them once in a while, they are still part of our lives. I also love the making light of death, laughing in it's face while at the same time accepting it and welcoming it in as a normal part of life, like everything else that we do. I mean, why not?

We used to have Day of the Dead parties back in Maine, and build an alter in my friend Pam's apartment. I hosted a few times in my house way out in the woods. I have never really lived before in a city though where a large portion of the population celebrates this holiday. Last night we were a few souls in a teeming crowd of revelers trying to get into the cemetery. Lots of Hollywood hipsters and goths got on their best clubbing skeleton outfits, and many Mexican families went as calacas themselves, from grandpa all the way down to the baby in a little black onesie with white bones on it. Hollywood Forever, the hosting venue, is a big cemetery right next to Paramount Studios where famous movie business folks are buried. Dr Phil is apparently filmed next door. We walked by the entrance for his studio audience as we and the many skeletons streamed by. Inside Rudolph Valentino has a huge white mausoleum surrounded by a moat on which candle lit skeletons on rafts were floating around. While the Hollywood Forever version of the Day of the Dead is somewhat commercialized, there are many delicious food vendors and incredible artisans, and some of the alters and calacas are as much art exhibit as they are tribute to the dead, or maybe just art as a tribute to the dead, in any case it was full of all kind of L.A.ers, and it was truly full of beauty and fun and music and an honest spirit of appreciation for the holiday.

We wandered past amazing alter after amazing alter, (If you go to my facebook page you can see the album. Get ready, I took a lot of alter photos!). A band and procession of dancing skeletons passed us by. We ate cheesy tamales and spicy beef soft tacos with cilantro and crisp cinnamon sugar cookies. The incredible smells of sage and pungent herbal incense and grilling beef and roasting churros filled the air. There was a stage with really fun bands, and the main act of the night was one of my favorite musicians, Lila Downs, accompanied by a very cool video montage of Mexican political propaganda art and scenes of food and life. She is almost too cool for words to describe, but her refrain, "...en este mundo material, solamente pasajeros," kind of says it all. Or maybe it was, "Dicen que la fiesta, torito se habe que mal." I am so glad that I got to go to this fiesta!

Rain and Wrens

I can't believe it is Wednesday. It has been one of those times lately where suddenly I look up and I just don't have quite enough time to do everything that needs doing, much less reflect and come up with something intelligent or insightful to say. I'll try to at least skim the surface though, and maybe some wisdom will float to the top.

This period of busyness started last week with an incredible rainstorm. It was the first time that it had rained since we arrived here, and the last time we'd seen rain since somewhere around Nashville a couple of months ago on our trip out here. It wasn't just a shower either, it was a deluge for over 24 hours. In a dry place like this you can almost feel the hills exhale with relief when it rains. Even though it hasn't dipped below 60 people hesitate to drive and go around wearing winter parkas and fur lined boots. (Silly, huh Mainers?) Now a week later what were once dry patches of dust are now covered in tender green shoots. Everything smells fresh after the rain, the eucalyptus and rosemary more fragrant. Also, the rain (briefly) cleans the smog out of the air here. The morning after the rain you can see the mountains in the distance from downtown. You can see everything! L.A. is almost transformed into another city, sparkling and clean. The veil of pollution that usually clouds up our long distance vision is washed away for a day or two, and we can appreciate the basin of angels, between the mountains and the sea, filled with streets lined with bouganvillia and palm trees and dreamers. Rain here is pretty special to say the least.

Just after the rain I woke up for several mornings in a row to the call and then the busy little image of a house wren flitting around my back yard with her tail set at a jaunty angle, cheerfully and chattily going about her business. Setting a good example for me. And busy we have been with work and school and home and trying to dig ourselves into a life and community and survive the winds of fate in these uncertain times. I did find time to paint her image though.

I guess one thing I have reflected on somewhat this week is how much the painting of these images helps me. It gives me incredible joy, and when doing it I am immersing myself in the characteristics that I see embodied in the creatures that I am painting. I call these animal icons, because they are inspired by icons that I have seen growing up in the Catholic Church and in my travels in Latin America and Eastern Europe. I love to stand in far flung churches and admire the many beloved, beatified faces lit by votives. An icon is an image of the divine, usually believed to have protective and miraculous powers. I've read stories somewhere of icons that turn away hoarding armies, heal the sick and maimed, and many other amazing things. I don't think that my icons can do anything like that,....but who knows, maybe we just haven't had any hoarding armies to try it out on! In any case though, if the wren helps remind me to be cheerful in my busyness and to be hopeful for prosperity and success in my life, then that is kind of the same thing as support and protection.

May your saints come to visit and protect you as often as mine fly into my yard and life.

The Wilshire Blvd Dove

(Written Friday night.) Last week on a rare windy day Tim happened upon a baby pigeon fallen from the nest and sadly huddled in a doorway all alone. He was moved to pity and scooped it up into a box and brought it home. Now we have a pigeon. It was a forlorn and subdued little creature, and I thought for sure that it would probably soon pass from this world. Shannon asked over the phone if it was cute and we had to admit that no, he isn't cute. He's pretty ugly, with bald patches and whispy yellow baby feathers sticking out between the big grey feathers and these bald lumps on either side of his head that I'm assuming are his ears. He's no looker for sure but he's docile and sweet. Thanks to google we soon had a plethora of scientific, mythological, historical and practical information about pigeons throughout the ages and we decided to try to feed him some cooked corn. He's too young to know how to eat solid food by himself, but when I hold him and open his little beak and put the corn in it goes down no problem. We fed him a handful which he thankfully swallowed and he made it through the night to our surprise. The next day we opened the box and he peeped for more. He was dirty and covered with disgusting big black mites so Tim washed him. Now he's fluffy and clean and mite free. During the course of the week he has grown and gotten new feathers and aside from a droopy eyelid incurred when one of the dachsunds snapped at his head, he is looking pretty good. Almost cute! Sort of. He sits in a box on a clean towel and dozes or peeps and flaps excitedly whenever we come near. He seems to be thriving!

There's a dove thriving in our house. We are caring for it when it was abandoned in the cold world. This seems an auspicious arrival in some ways, especially in our recent times of disappointment and financial worry. Ok, it's a pigeon, not the white variety with the olive branch in it's mouth, but a pigeon is a member of the genus Columbidae all the same, and they are intelligent birds that have served mankind for ages. There was one pigeon used in WWII named Mon Cher Amie who flew important messages across battle lines. He was shot in the belly and lost a leg on duty but he survived and never failed to deliver his message. He was one of several doves used during the war that were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. They are reliable and loyal and mate for life. They can return to their home from any location within thousands of miles. They can remember and identify something like a thousand images in lab tests. It is estimated that at maturity they have an intelligence level equivalent to a three year old child! (I don't know about this one since our pigeon still hasn't learned to open it's mouth on it's own to put the food in, but what do I know about pigeon development....perhaps that will come in time?) Anyway, all those sidewalk and street corner pigeons pooping on passerbys are maybe smarter than they look. And even in the dirtiest city, they are still beautiful on the wing, lifting of in unison and flying in arcs over the streets and parks and fountains. Cooing to each other peacefully under the eaves, thriving handsomely amongst our trash and pollution.

The dove is the bringer of peace. In Christianity it is associated with the resurrection and the Holy Spirit. The Pueblo people believed that the dove could coax rain from the sky. The Celts thought the dove's cry was in mourning, to mark a soul peacefully passing to the next realm. The Slavs believed the doves helped carry souls to heaven, and the Gypsys believed them to be messengers of divine love. Messengers of hope, gentleness, peace, loyalty, compassion, love. That is a pretty great reputation.

Is this a message for us? I've been thinking a lot about faith and acceptance. I had hoped this time in L.A. was going to be a time in when I was going to be putting my life back together, concentrating on school and the future, having a fresh start and a new perspective, getting my feet on the ground and finding my stride again, but instead sometimes lately it seems possible that it might just turn into a time of struggle with further obstacles and complications. After several years of struggling through divorce, health issues, adjusting to a totally new lifestyle with a new family and finding a new orientation for my career I feel ready for it to come back together again. I feel ready to feel in control and confident again, but that may not be what life is holding for me now. It takes a lot of faith and acceptance to have patience with that reality.

****

Next morning. Sadly the pigeon is gone. He ate and peeped heartily yesterday and we heard him shifting in the night as I wrote the above passage but this morning when we opened the box he had died. It was kind of unexpected and sad. I guess it shouldn’t have been. He is an abandoned baby pigeon from the street…his survival was never a given. We had been impressed with his growth and improvement though. He was here a week exactly. Whatever was wrong with him, he didn't seem sad or weak, and he accepted what care and attention we gave him with enthusiasm and something like appreciation. His arrival in our house was a welcome distraction for the past week and it was amusing and enjoyable to care for him and see him thrive for a little while. I’m sad that he didn’t continue in this world but I’m glad that he came into ours.

Peace comes with faith and acceptance. That appears to be my message of the week. Pigeons come and pigeons go. Times of confidence and ease come and then they go, and the same with times of struggle. It’s just the way it is. I think maybe now is not a time for me to ask questions or reflect any more on this. It’s a time to get down to work again. And working I have been and will continue to do! I’m completing my third semester of grad work and still managing to do one piece of my own work every week in hopes for a good portfolio and future career, writing this blog to work on my head, I just landed another waitressing gig to work on our finances, and it’s time now to clean the house for the week to work on some order and diminished dog hair in our lives. This week’s painting is a memorializing of the brief arrival of the sweet little Wilshire blvd pigeon in our lives. He looks peaceful, huh?

Crow

Crow. Last weekend we went to Napa and Sonoma for a film festival. We drove up the state on I-5 and on the way passed through an incredible landscape of dry yellow hills and valleys. With almost no vegetation other than dead grass it was so stark, the shadows on the hills stood out and described their round and simultaneously angular forms. It struck me that the hills up there are like no others that I have ever known. We rolled through this landscape for hours with very little life marring these sun-baked hills set against a cloudless blue sky, except for the occasional crow. Lone crows hovering, perching, swooping over the barren hills. I really like crows. They seem so self-contained and free and joyful in their solitude, and when they band together, into their so poetically named plurality, the “murder” of crows, they are raucous and appear to know no rules, but still are orderly in their unison movements. Crows seem to have a rich inner life and an unconventional but ready understanding of order in the universe. In hardship I imagine that a crow would never feel sorry for itself or act foolishly or give up. It would coolly examine its situation and accept it or figure a way out, or maybe appear to be accepting it while figuring a way out. It seems like it would be hard to get the best of a crow.

I have been trying to channel a little crow this week as we have had some disappointment. We believed that a much anticipated and hard-earned financial reward was coming our way this past week, and at the very last minute it turned out that it very potentially isn’t. I’m sure that I don’t need to tell anyone that matters of finance are a tough point for us and most everyone else these days. Tough times come and they go and this isn’t the end of the world, but it was bitter. It all gave me an opportunity to think about disappointment and examine it in my life. Being disappointed makes you feel stupid. We are in no way at fault in our current personal situation, and we weren’t the only ones who believed, but it still makes me examine myself for the flaw. As if, if we were perfect there would be no problems. Where do we get that idea? I always think critically about how I don’t lead a “safe” life. I do in a physical sense these days, but I don’t make decisions or choose paths for myself based on a secure or safe outcome. I live pretty much from the heart. If I don’t believe in something or feel moved by it, I can’t commit to it. Yes I don’t want to be worried and I do want financial security and a good job and kids and a secure life for them. Believe me I really do. But I guess it turns out that I don’t want those things as much as I want to feel inspired first. When I got tired of being a teacher and an activist I decided that I wanted to be, (even better from a financial standpoint!,) an artist,(sarcasm) and I fell madly in love with and married a writer/moviemaker and entrepreneur,(not exactly secure income there either,) and we have an un-luxurious yet still very expensive and complicated life arranged totally around our loves, passions and dreams. I suspect that this mode of living is somehow an affront to the corporate banking system, since they always seem to be punishing us for not having some “t” crossed or “I” dotted. Making financial decisions based on love, passion, and dreams is maybe not always the most conventional or secure way to go. Suze Orman would probably be disappointed in us if she knew. I wonder though, if I played it a little safer, would I actually hit these bumps in the road less frequently? Or does disappointment hit us all the same? I think of the various ways that it manifests and it does seem pretty universal: a missed opportunity, a failed relationship, a lack of recognition for effort spent, an unexpected outcome, an inability to obtain something sorely desired. I think of crow. Probably crow doesn’t have any expectations, and thus can never be disappointed. That seems smart, but totally unattainable to me with a complicated and wildly creative human brain. Also, I know that not getting what you want can often be a blessing in disguise, but really, how are you supposed to feel that in the moment? You have to grieve for your lost dream. Which sucks. But then, the really hard part that separates the men from the boys, spiritually speaking anyway, you have to keep your heart pried right open and not become bitter and closed in yourself and your life. Tough one. Very tough. What are the alternatives though? Going through life with fear and a hard heart? Not dreaming anymore? What a tragedy. With every new chance taken those sore spots hurt in anticipation of another disappointment. I guess that’s a tough thing about getting older and having more life behind you. As a kid I fell off of a horse once, flat on my back and had the wind knocked out of me. The instructor, bless her, made sure that I didn’t have a spinal injury, picked me up, brushed me off, and made me get back on that horse before going to the nurse. I’m not afraid of riding horses today.

Maybe mute crows alone hold the whys and hows of the universe since they can be at peace with it, no questions, no fear, no disappointments.

Ode to the Fair

(This is actually from last week, sorry I'm behind)
I have always loved the fair. Being a Vermont girl, to me it is an exciting event marking the last hurrah of the summer. In my childhood we would load into my mother's big blue tank of a Pontiac station wagon and drive the 20 miles through corn and squash laden valleys dotted with red barns between our old, rounded green mountains to the small city of Rutland for the Rutland County Fair. School would have already started and it would be hot and dusty during the day and chilly and crisp at night. Our journey out, usually on a school night, to meet my cousins and grandparents and sample the wholesome and hedonistic delights of the fair would seem like such a precious, exciting adventure next to the expanse of routine and orderly school day conduct stretching out ahead of me. As a young child I couldn't get enough of the bunny barn. There are pictures of me as a toddler in overalls with my face lit up in delight, pressed against the bars of rabbit cages at the fair. I actually got my first rabbits there. I couldn't believe my incredible good fortune as they sat there snuggled in an hay filled cardboard box in the car next to me on the way home. There is a picture of me at about age 7 joyfully squeezing them in my lap. Two fuzzy baby red satins, both supposedly girls except then in a few months we suddenly had like 14 rabbits instead of 2. I also loved to ride on the rolling backs of the shetland ponies trodding with their colorful saddle blankets around in a ring, and see the barns of sheep, cows, goats and pigs, some of them sporting shiny blue and yellow and white prize ribbons on their stalls.

Eating at the fair is fun if somewhat dangerous. Cotton candy and fried dough and french fries and hot dogs. This being Vermont we also had a dairy barn and a maple barn. In the dairy barn they made cheese and you could sample the curds and whey, just like little Miss Moppit in the nursery rhyme. The smell of the maple barn still haunts my memory. They must have frozen and saved some sap from the spring before because they always boiled during the fair and you could smell the warm, hot, mouthwatering sweetness of the sugar across the expanse from the Zipper to the grandstands. Inside you could get maple milkshakes, maple candy, maple fudge, maple-covered donuts, maple cotton candy, and that amazing transforming treat, sugar on snow. (Not really snow because it as September, but they would throw the boiling syrup onto cups filled with ice and it would become chewy, translucent maple taffy before your eyes.) And more lasting than food, the array of fair prizes were memory treasures to be won or bought and then deposited in the back of my closet for eternity. A neon yellow foam lizard on a wire that you could make dance, a fringe bottomed airbrush t-shirt of a unicorn, and a hair clip with turquoise feathers hanging down are a few that I remember. These were the eighties in case you haven't figured that out yet.

I like snacks, and having the stomach fortitude of a dachsund, (if you know dachsunds you will understand this, and it's not good,) I always shy away from the scary and fast rides. But the ferris wheel, the moon bounce, the haunted house, the bumpercars, and those wavy slides were and are just enough to get a laugh, give a little thrill, feel a little wind. Sometimes at night my family would stay for the evening show. We saw Box Car Willy one time. In high school my friends and I would go flirting and laughing and falling all over each other to sit in the grandstands and watch other teenagers run each into each other in brightly decorated jalopies at the demolition derby.

It all sounds pretty wholesome but there was another element to it. Yes, there were the 4-H kids and the farmers and the quilters, but Rutland is one of the few tough places in Vermont, so there were also the toothless elders and the screaming, slapping families and rowdy, reckless boys without much to lose, and as with every fair, the scary and seedy carnies themselves, greasy, unwashed and leering in their low riding jeans and ripped black heavy metal t-shirts. You didn't want to wander away from the family alone, and the dark areas in back of the rides, against the fences and behind the trailers held a suggestion of the sinister. In short, the delight, the gluttony, the joy, the thrill, the shiver of fear were an incredible sensory experience of which such vivid memories were made.

Actually, I don't know how to write an ode, as promised in the title (sorry!), but if I could I would write one to another particular Fair that I have spent a lot of time at in my later life and that I missed this past weekend. The Common Ground Fair. If you have never heard of it you should check it out at www.mofga.org. The Common Ground Fair is the largest all organic fair in the world I think, and it is put on by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardener's Association in Unity, Maine. It is a combination agricultural fair, farmer and crafter's marketplace, music festival, sustainability symposium and workshop extravaganza. This event has been going on for over 30 years, and it is something to behold. The pastoral landscape of Unity is transformed into a carnival of brightly striped tents, demonstration gardens and orchards, and it is peopled with families and college kids and gaggles of teenagers wearing flower crowns and some incredibly interesting, skilled and knowledgeable people. It is humming with energy and ideas. If you want to learn how to spin or weave, log with horses, turn your home solar, save your seeds, keep bees, lobby for universal healthcare, become a midwife, make bean hole beans, (old new England tradition that is basically just what it sounds like: beans cooked in a hole in the ground,) you can find out about it all and so much more here. It is a really special event, largely pulled off by an army of volunteers, that is a tradition incredibly dear to peoples’ hearts. It has become so to me. I used to go with a crowd for work and set up and man a table for the duration, spending the nights camping in the fields nearby with hundreds of other volunteers and vendors. Staying at the fair for three or four days is like being part of a strange, peaceful village. It is usually hot and dry during the day, and after the sun wanes and the crowds clean out, the tents light up as people quietly get out guitars and sleeping bags. The weavers always have a shapenote singing session on Friday nights in their glowing white and red tent. The dairy farmers are up early in the frosty dawn to milk. Permeating the entire event is the patron herb of the fair, the green, clean, cheerful scent of sweet annie, sold in bunches. I wish I could attach some right here and we could all inhale deeply.

Last week we continued the fair going tradition by taking the family to the L.A. county fair. I was excited and a little apprehensive. What kind of indigenous industry would be represented here? Tents for plastic surgeons? Drug cartels? Porn? The entertainment industry? We drove through brutal highway gridlock to get there, picked up my stepdaughter at college nearby, and cruised off the highway to an incredibly massive complex of parking lots and pavement. After finally parking and paying a whopping fee just to get in, we entered the fair. There actually was a red barn with animals. It did have a McDonald’s logo on the top (see photo), which I would certainly find suspect if I were a cow showing up there. But the animals didn’t seem to belong to farms as working or livestock animals like you would see at an agricultural based fair in New England. They were more like petting zoo animals. There was a demonstration going on in various corrals explaining to crowds of young families about the lives and care of the farm animals. Almost all of the animals in there were incredibly clean, fluffy baby versions of the real deal. The main attraction was feeding the sheep and goats in the petting zoo area. In part this makes my heart sink, because it just shows how removed we are from an agricultural society these days. Kids need to see demonstrations about how a chicken lays an egg? But…Brick, my 10 year old stepson who is from L.A., had never fed a goat before, and he was delighted and hysterical over the charming, cheeky goats with their intelligent, inquisitive eyes and floppy ears softly nibbling the pellets out of his flat hand. Every kid in there was as happy as he was, so I guess that’s better than nothing. As an old professor of mine said, “You gotta meet people where they’re at,” and people in L.A. are at the entertainment level I guess. Those goats were entertaining.

As for my fears about plastic surgeons etc, the fair turned out to be pretty wholesome and typical. There was a great representation of Mexican food and culture. Roasted corn, chimichangas, chorizo, tamales, tecate, photos, flags and folk music. There were a ton of rides and opportunities to get your name airbrushed on a hat and such. We all rode a gondola over the fairgrounds and then went up on the ferris wheel. The lights sparkled and the excitement at night was palpable. The appealing smells of hot food and the squeals of excited children were everywhere. We ran around and ate and had fun. After all, it was the fair!

Frog Icon

I painted this frog for myself last week. I thought it could compliment my last post about illness and healing. Supposedly frog teaches us that tears cleanse the soul. I am just relearning watercolor after about a 15 year hiatus, and this is my first attempt outside of class. Could use some improvement for sure but I'm satisfied with the peaceful air about the frog. This is one of a series of animal icons that I've been painting every week or so. I'm noticing that they seem relevant to my life and mental state at the time so I think I'll start including them sometimes.

The Physical State of ME in CA (sorry bad title)

(my dog, who will never be a candidate for adrenal fatigue)

This week some of the past caught up with me. It turns out that wherever you go, there you are, and all of your strengths and weaknesses and neurosis and spiritual tasks are right there as well. I think it's time for a little introspection.

I was thinking about my original goal in this blog :

"I intend to revisit my memories of my recent past in an attempt to knit myself together again and heal the chasm of the last five years so that I can step onto higher ground on the other side. Bring the old me integrated into the new me, pull together the east and the west in my life."

This week I am taking an opportunity to examine where I am at with one of the fairly recently emerged parts of my life that has been the hardest for me to come to terms with. Physical weakness.

For part of this week I felt really, really tired. Tired like my heart is pumping really hard and I am breathing heavy just lifting laundry into the dryer and I am forcing myself, step by step, through an effort of will, to complete simple tasks like cooking lunch and reading an article for my class. In between I flop on the bed and close my eyes. Now, I didn't go out drinking, or do a really intense workout yesterday. I didn't party or overextend myself accomplishing something or take a whirlwind trip or anything that would account for my level of exhaustion. These periodic episodes of extreme fatigue have become part of my life for the last 3 or 4 years, and have had a huge role in shaping it from day to day. My hormones, that wash of intense stop and go signals running through the bloodstream at all times, have just dipped into some unfortunate imbalance. I have a condition called "adrenal fatigue", wherein my adrenal glands and the necessary hormones that they produce are not working up to snuff. Simple, yet disastrous. In my journey with this illness, I am now at the point where what it is and why it came to wield such a heavy hand in directing my life don't really merit much more consideration. I have already spent endless hours lying somewhere feeling crappy and pondering them. I am weary of the incredibly expensive, time consuming, largely unhelpful and sometimes demeaning experiences that I have had with the medical establishment in my quest for answers and help. If information about this illness is of interest to anyone else, and I do totally recommend researching it if you or someone you know could be ill, here are some links that have found to be helpful. You really need to be your own advocate:

http://www.drlam.com/articles/adrenal_fatigue.asp http://www.articleclick.com/Article/Chronic-Fatigue-Syndrome-and-Adrenal-Exhaustion/1009817
Also the book, "The Shwarzbein Principle."

The only part really worth thinking about though for me at this point is how do I live with it and manage it to the best of my abilities. Yesterday I may have been fine. Today I may feel like I got hit by a truck. In a few days I will probably feel fine again. That seems to be how it goes. I do remember though, filling out a form for a doctor's office three years ago this fall, when I was trying to diagnose this strange illness, and estimating that at that point I was spending 30 to 40 percent of my life dealing with extreme exhaustion or some of the other myriad unsavory side effects caused by unruly hormone levels, and I can say now that it is probably less than 5 percent of my life that is affected. I have put an incredible amount of effort and work and sometimes money into recovery, and it has largely paid off as I am usually a normal person now. (At least physically, I know what you all are thinking!) But the experience of being incapacitated, of having to reconsider the assumptions that I had about the strength of my body and the level of my ability, has changed forever the way that I see myself and the way that I live my life.

I used to run. Often and for long distances. Even when it was freezing cold. I was always outside, always up for physical activity and fun. Swimming, hiking, biking, backpacking. In my late teens and early twenties I led back country trail crews, swinging an axe or wielding a cross-cut saw while hiking through the woods. Then in my mid to late twenties I started farming for work and for fun. I would shovel truckload after truckload of manure, turn over large patches of earth with a pitchfork by hand, haul buckets of produce and water in the hot sun and pouring rain and morning mist and evening dusk. I often led crews of other people in this work and I loved every minute of it. It was very hard work but I felt so strong and healthy and alive.

A few years ago my vitality had waned and I started to feel sometimes like there was a grey curtain between myself and the world. I couldn't get motivated for work or much of anything anymore. My body ached, I was often tired, had a headache or felt nauseous, overly emotional or depressed. My heart beat erratically and the simplest tasks could feel dangerously difficult. It was hard to explain this to family, friends and employers and I often didn't even try. I became unreliable with work and social engagements, and my poor family have seen me through some extremely broken down states. All the hard work that I had known previously was nothing compared to learning to be strong and happy and alive in a weak and tired and nauseous body. I am still working on it, and on accepting my body in whatever state it is in every day. I am so far from being good at this.

I have learned a few things though, that I may never have learned otherwise. At first I waited to get better, assuming that this would be pretty quick and easy, because I was so strong and healthy and have never had any real health problems before. I couldn't wait to get back to normal and forget that I had ever felt weak. That was not the future that the fates held for me. Three years later I can barely remember what I used to feel like before the illness, and I have come to accept that what was normal for me never will be again. This illness has been a great teacher for me. I learned to rest. Simple as this sounds, it does not come naturally to me. I learned to not care so much what others think. People have often been disappointed as I, who used to be one of those people who never said "no" and organized everything, broke engagements or didn't follow through with plans or missed meetings or parties. My social world has shrunk, but my family and dearest friends have still been here for me. I also learned the joys of fat and protein! My Dad and husband were pretty jealous when I received a medical recommendation that plenty of Americans probably wish for: eat MORE fat and protein. Bacon here we come. And I learned to ask for help. As well a very difficult one for me, that I am still working on. I thank the universe regularly for my husband, who is a strong, trustworthy and caring person. This would have been so much harder without him. The biggest one though is that I learned a little better how to let go and trust. It was extremely hard to get this illness diagnosed. More than half of what doctors told me or prescribed for me to do just exacerbated my problems. I have improved with the help of a few wise healers, but mostly by listening to my own body, and trusting my own instincts on what will work for me and make me heal. It has often been a question for me as well, while wracked by intense nausea for hours on end, or catching my breath from blindingly terrifying heart palpitations, if I will indeed ever heal? And it is really only trust of the universe and of my own instincts that reassures me that I will completely emerge from this someday, and I will be stronger from it. My fledgling trust has proven correct so far, because as each year goes by I slowly climb toward complete strength and wellness again.

I still wish that this had never happened to me. I still wish that I was one of those people who could remain strong and active and healthy with the strength of a 20 year old into my 30's and 40's. But I don't think about it that much anymore. No one survives the years intact, life takes it's toll on us all. And the gifts of stronger faith and trust and patience, while they are not as fun or flashy as the ability to run 5 miles and barely break a sweat, are probably more useful. I am starting to be able to even feel a little bit grateful.

Joining the Flowing River of Headlights and Taillights

(Bounty from the trip to the farmer's market.)
Life is starting to come into focus a little more. We did some errand running this week. Got some furniture. Had to take one of the dogs to the vet. Found the nearest Trader Joe's. Got a home phone. Made some dinner dates. I started another grad school semester. The free time is sliding away and my mind is honing in, focusing.

As I have more social experiences, I have more opportunities to match my expectations against the community scenarios that are presented. It is a different culture here. For example, we went to a "back to school" picnic at my youngest step-son's public elementary school the other night. I baked a dish from scratch, expecting when it said to bring food that this must be a potluck. I thought that we would meet is teacher, see the classrooms, maybe hear a little speech from the principal. This is what would have happened in Maine, or even southern Arizona, where I first started out teaching. When we arrived though, there was no sign of any teachers or other school staff, and no potluck table, but all of the parents were camped out on the over-irrigated lawn on blankets with picnic baskets or take-out containers of their own food, sipping on wine and beer and schmoozing it up while rock music blared over the p.a. and the kids ran around like happy little animals. There was definitely no speech from the principal, but sitting there with their wine were some famous actors and many of the minds sitting at the writing tables behind network sitcoms and Hollywood blockbusters. West L.A. is a weird place, man. It's dripping with money, which I find to be unappealing, but there is an air of irreverence and a laissez-faire attitude about structure, (school schmool, who cares abut meeting the kids' teacher? Let's have a drink), that is kind of conducive to the creative mind. And I do have one of those.

While I am on this topic of cultural expectations, those Northeasterners among you will appreciate the fact that the local NPR station seems to play mostly reggae and world music! That is just a little different from MPBN's Bach and maybe letting loose with some classic jazz on Friday nights. But you know, I prefer reggae. I'm just not used to it mixed with my Scott Simon and Nina Tottenberg. It's not all bad, just different.

Tonight I was driving home from a visit to my step-daughter in Claremont, passing over the endless miles of highway, watching the mountains, the lurid billboards and the city skyline darken against the incredibly beautiful sunset. (One benefit of smog is that it can help produce really colorful, striated sunsets. Everything really does have a positive side to it somewhere!) As I was traveling in the flowing river of other headlights and taillights I was thinking about the myriad lives that are existing all around me here. I, with all of my garden love and dirty, wood chopping hands now live in this huge, beastly city amongst all of these other people and all of the lives that they made or brought with them here. And the coyotes and the owls and the pigeons and the rats. We all live here. Before arriving I just couldn't picture it, me as part of all this. Now I feel the pull, I'm sinking into life here already. I'm glad to have this time when my head is still above water, and I can see it all fro the outside, because I can already feel how that won't last. I'll admit, I am still a little afraid. Will diving into this world make me different? Will it change me in ways that I wouldn't like now? Will that matter later?

Fears of change aside though, there have also been some immediate opportunities for affirmation of my existing skill set and experiences. The first woman that I met at the aforementioned picnic is a fellow Vermonter who went on with me to extol the virtues of Vermont living and in comparison disparage everywhere else on earth, (as all good Vermonters will do when we meet each other outside of our native homeland.) Also, it turns out that the woman who lives across the street from me is the Community Service Coordinator for the local high school, and they just inherited an overgrown plot of land and want to make a garden. Not many people can say that they have a lot of experience with that kind of thing...but for better or worse I can! Perhaps my talents will be put to use here. And as my mind turns to the future, I am dreaming big dreams for my backyard. I see a garden, I see tomatoes spilling over the pots in the driveway, I see nasturtiums and cucumbers overflowing the flower beds. I see a couple of hens eating kitchen scraps and laying eggs in the side alley. I have already begun talk to our gardener, Jose about this. (I've never had a gardener before but he came with the house and though frankly he is kind of old and I could weed circles around him, he's very sweet and methodical and he rakes the yard once a week and helps us bring in our trash cans and I'm very glad that he has a job here.) Anyway, once I get organized I'll have some garden beds up and planted in no time. (At least this is what I tell myself now.....) I wonder where I can find a wheelbarrow around here?

Endless Summer

We've been in CA for a little over a week now. It's like suspended summer here. Ever day is sunny. Being from Maine, this is still hard for me to believe! In Maine we study the forecast, holding onto sunny day predictions like guiding lights that sustain us through the fog. Those sunny days in Maine are the prefect gems that remind you why you live there, and if you miss them..buddy you are in for some sad times. You have to pay attention and hurry, get in that picnic, that day at the beach, that camping trip in the mountains quick, this weekend, let nothing interfere because it might be our last chance! And you must remain vigilant and not give up hope. If it is rainy for the entire months of June and July you can't give up on summer...you just need to rearrange everything and cram it into those two golden weeks in August. Otherwise you miss it until next year!

If I were home in Maine right now I would be scurrying like everyone else to pack as much as possible into the last precious days of summer. Every swim could be the last. I would be hauling the biggest, heaviest, most precious items out of the garden: the tomatoes, the eggplants, the peppers, the melons, the squash. If I were back on my old homestead I would be caning over a hot stove late into the night, stacking up those jars on the shelves. I would be feeling the pressure to get the wood chopped and stacked on the back porch before snow. I would be studying the forecast and keeping the frost cloth ready, and closing the hoophouse doors at night. This has always been such an exultant but bittersweet time of year for me. I am usually tan and muscled and dirty and tired much of the time from the summer's labors. It's my favorite time of year, but it marks the end. The harvest has come in, the work is done, there is bounty everywhere and the days of warmth are numbered and silvered around the edges with frost. They soon slide into a slow decline of warmth and light....into the darkness. The activity is over, the rest of the year is a time to rest and wait. It seems a long time until it will come again.

Here...there is no such pressure. Each and every day is a shining array of sunshine, ocean breezes and 80 degree weather. It is ALWAYS cool and refreshing in the morning and in the evening, ALWAYS hot in the afternoon. Variations include perhaps a slight bit of fog in the early morning or a slightly stronger and usual breeze in the afternoon. Ther are ALWAYS fruit and flowers here. To my New England sensitivities this seems wrong and suspicious somehow. Truly, how do people ground themselves and orient their lives without commanding and punishing weather patterns? I guess I will have to find out. As it stands for me right now though, I feel suspended in summer, with time on my hands stretching out ahead of me. I can hardly remember the last time that I felt that way. Probably my early twenties? My suspicions about the unnaturalness of the climate really hold very little clout in my mind at the moment. Perhaps it's the sun already causing a haze in my thinking? Soon I may have a perma-tan and spend my days rollerblading Venice beach in my bikini with my toy poodle. Anyway it is just too nice to not just enjoy it. It's a quick bike ride down the hill to the beach from our little rented house, and over the last week I have experienced a few incredibly precious moments of complete lightness, complete opening, while watching the sun on the waves. It was like I stepped outside of my life and even my mind for a moment and floated above it all on the breeze. Complete joy. For no other reason than just...'cuz.

Another much more mundane element helping to create my suspended life at the moment is a temporary cash shortage. The move and the family transitions of the last few months have been very expensive and we are in a period of just trying to catch up from that. I am not crying poor because we live very fortunate lives and I am sure that we will be fine very soon, and the only reason that I mention it is because, although some moments of worry and annoyance have come of it, some really good and important things come clear when you are .....well, broke, even if it is just temporary. We don't drive around running errands all of the time. I hate errands. We don't go out much. I love to cook! Many meals from the last week have included the delicious and free mint, rosemary and lavender that happen to grow in our front yard. ( I would use these anyway, but I am extra appreciative of them this week.) We don't have a TV yet so we read at night. This reminds me of a time in my life when I lived a life relatively disconnected from mainstream society and I had pretty much forgotten how nice it can be. I can hear the crickets. We look for fun nearby, like the beach! I have been to the beach more times in the last week than in all of last summer in Maine. And I lived near the beach! In the larger picture, I have thought this week that we, probably like most people, more often look up the socio-economic ladder than down, and that is not a good thing. I have also thought that the things for happiness and survival are simpler than we realize most of the time. This sounds really cliche, sorry, but it is true. I hope I remember it next week.

Someone asked me today what I think of living here, and it is still much too early to say much for sure. As I said, I feel suspended, and parts of me are slowly arriving, as I suspect they will for a long time. I am outside the heavy turn of the season in my native home for the first time in a long time, and I am outside of the rituals and routines of any community at the moment. My life is feeling pretty wide open, and I'm not finding it hard to appreciate that.

The Sparkling Pacific

I am really grateful that we made the trip by land over this massive country of ours. It was such a huge transition that I needed the long hours of driving and watching the land change. I have been through many corners of this country before, but mostly in my early twenties, and the wild western landscapes reminded me of my wild, indomitable spirit at that time. The wild mountains and ranges of the southwest feel like part of my personal landscape and past. This time I viewed things more calmly, but no less lovingly or critically. As Ani Difranco said….”and you’re surrounded by a world full of things that you just can’t excuse.” I love this country, there is no place on earth like it and our story is like nothing else, so full of hope and promise and brutality and almost magical good fortune on occasion. This country of ours is so rich in beauty and resources and story. And sometimes so horrifying in its abuses of those gifts.

In our drive through the belly and the bowels of America over the last week we have seen some excruciating beauty and some stunning horrors, next to or juxtaposed on each other on the side of the highway. The desolate, abandoned downtowns of Oklahoma ringed by corporate chains and lot after lot after lot of evangelical churches. The welcoming bustle and pride of a popular small town burger joint at lunchtime on a Saturday. The muddy, stinking factory farm beef feedlots in the Texas panhandle. The smell of sage and the magic and energy of the high desert in New Mexico. The incredible charm and plethora of beautiful things in Santa Fe. The unnatural, orderly, layered earth of strip mines and leachfields cutting into the mineral rich buttes of western New Mexico and Arizona. The red rock canyon walls of Sedona glowing in the sunrise as Oak Creek flows through the sycamores and the canyon wren trills its descending song. That miraculous, green jewel, the true desert oasis of Palm Springs amidst the creosote flats, using its precious groundwater on pesticide laden golf courses and misters evaporating gallons upon gallons of water each evening over bar patrons sitting on the patios. So much beauty and horror right next to each other!


Our arrival in L.A. was no different as drove through the scorched desert passes in 100 plus heat, and down into the LA basin, descending into a cloud of blue hazy smog. LA spread out in front of us like the great, stinking, hulking beast of a city that it is. The box stores and highway passes woven together over islands of trash, with flashing billboards of seminude women and famous TV stars sparkling overhead. We sped and wove through the traffic, still headed west. The I-10 finally dipped into a tunnel and shot us out onto the edge of the sparkling blue Pacific, with big sandy beaches stretching ahead and bluffs covered with glass mansions and outrageous flowers waving in the refreshing breezes. We tucked back up Temescal Canyon to our little rented house with the big back yard full of ever blooming flowers and a seemingly endless stream of hummimgbirds and butterflys. Beauty amidst the horror.

In the last three days we have celebrated Shannon’s birthday as we dropped her off at college for the first time. We have scheduled Nick for classes at his new school. We have moved a truckload of furniture off of the lawn and into the house. We have figured out what we forgot. We have dressed up and attended a movie premier. Nick had his first job as an extra in a film. We have driven quite a bit on congested highways and ridden our bikes on bluffs above the pacific. We have heard the waves early in the morning. We have eaten Mexican. We have seen and smelt the massive plumes of smoke from the wildfires in La Canada. We have witnessed the pain of teenage hearts in transition. We have played with the dogs in the backyard. We hung some pictures. And today we walked through the local farmer’s market with fresh figs and berries and gorgeous purple eggplants overflowing amongst the children and dogs and friends chatting under the flawless, sunny blue sky. The journey through this big, wild country of ours is over and the bigger adventure is beginning. Right now I think that I am just trying to keep my feet on the ground, and feel out the earth here as my spinning head comes to rest it’s eyes on this place as my new home.

Made it to the Mighty Mississippi!

(this is actually the banks of the Oconaluftee)
Today was an epic road trip day! We started out in that lovely haven of the hip hillbilly, Ashville, NC. I felt so right at home. Vermont, my native homeland, is kind of a northwoods Appalachia, and the combination of food traditions, folk art, local farms in the hills, a mixed population of hippies, yuppies and hillbillies, plus those lovely, comforting green mountains made me feel settled right in. This morning we were still pretty full from a dinner last night at the Tupelo Honey Cafe including fried green tomatoes on basil grits garnished with tupelo honey of course (yum!), and the butteriest, sugariest, yummiest pecan pie ever. Anyway, so we grabbed a quick breakfast bite and headed for the hills. The Smokey Mountains actually. We drove off of the highway and up and up through winding valleys. We stopped and bought some sourwood honey, fresh peaches and muscadines from a roadside stand. We were listening to Levon Helm's new album "Dirt Farmer", which is a beauty. He's returned to his roots and he's really got that 'high lonesome sound' as they call it. He's redone some old traditional songs, and his own songs blend with them seamlessly. There was one line sung in his ravaged voice that has been ringing in my head all day "I was born on this mountain, a long long time ago..." and then another sad one about a family that gets permanently separated from each other with a chorus of " I'll return to you dear, in the dimming of they day, as the sparrow return to the nest." As we entered into the Cherokee reservation, I was feeling overcome with waves of beauty and melancholy. In part from the misty, leafy, heartbreakingly beautiful scenery, in part from the sadness and struggle of all of the Cherokee and Appalachian people trying to make a living and hold onto their culture in this crazy world, and partly just sad because things can be just so beautiful, but they always have to change. Every time there's a change there is a loss. I know there is a gain too, but there is still a loss. Sometimes I get so sick of people and all our desires and dreams and projects and movement. I wish for a simpler life, a simpler time. There is an old Irish saying though that kind of sums up this way of thinking, "nostalgia isn't what it used to be." And I've tried the simple life and it turned out to be not that simple, and I am not a simple person, so a simple life may never actually work out for me....if such a thing could even exist anymore.
With me still slightly steeped in melancholy, we arrived at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center and walked the dogs along a trail by the Oconaluftee River. The sun shone through the leaves and dappled the river's surface. We stopped to turn around near a kiosk that said that rivers are sacred to the Cherokee, who would wash themselves in the river every morning to get rid of all bad thoughts and to bring themselves closer to their god. It also noted that 80 percent of freshwater originates in mountains, and that the water passing by our feet would end up in the Gulf of Mexico, to eventually evaporate and become freshwater again somewhere else. Now everyone knows this but I don't think about it much and that is some really cool shit! Certainly gave me an example of some healthy changes that take place in this world, and knocked my melancholy right on its ass.
We came out of the mountains and passed through Nashville for a late lunch of blackened grouper at BB King's. We asked the bartender if she was from Nashville and she admitted that no, no one in Nashville is actually from Nashville anymore. Well, maybe 5 or 6 people she said. She was from Michigan herself though she had acquired a bit of a southern accent. Tim asked her is she had country music ambitions and she said no, but her ex-fiance did, and that's how she came to be here. Now he's apparently moved on to Denver. Tim told her that she is living her own country music song. She agreed. That's about as much country music as we got in Nashville. On the way out we listened to a cd of "The Everybody Fields", a talented young group from Johnson City, Tennessee that I bet doesn't get much attention in Nashville these days.
By the time we left Nashville, and the hills changed into plains, all my bad feelings were washed away. We were rolling down the highway, listening to "Heart", (which Tim and I just discovered we both had a love of in the 80's.) We realized we ahve been on the road for a week already, (totally shocking somehow), and a week from now we will have spent our first night at our new home in CA! We were feeling pretty good and excited about our lives. After a few more hours we made it to Memphis, full of rocking and rolling energy. We drove into the city and caught a RedBird game, their local AAA baseball team. At the park I had a chicken stick for dinner, which looked like a shish kabob of very deeply friend chunks. The contents of the friend chunks ended up being not only chicken pieces, but also cheese, pickles, onions and potatoes, all fried to within an inch of their lives and put on a stick! Now that's an all-American dinner for you. Now we are parked for the night at a La Quinta owned by a very fastidious Indian family. There are lots of roses and fountains lit up with different colored lights outside, and inside everything is very clean and smells of various strange cleaning supplies. For example, the hallway smells like piney scented cleaning supply, the hallways smell like pepto-bismal scented cleaning supply, and the room itself smells like some kind of floral cleaing supply. They've done a lot of work and take great pride in their chain hotel here in Bartlett, TN. I'm glad I landed here.
Tomorrow we will cross the Mississippi. May that river as well wash away any bad thoughts and bring me closer to my God.

Prickly Burden

Written around August 8th

(me and crew at age 23 in Portland)

It’s been 3 months almost to the date since we found our L.A. house and I wrote my birthday journal entry.

I think it’s interesting that I am so not a morning person, but that’s when I write these. Fighting my way through insomnia, in the raw, exhausted moments and the clear morning quiet my most jagged feelings about my life situation come fighting their way to the surface in extreme clarity. The sun is coming up over Casco bay out the front window of my friend’s east end apartment. My first apartment in Portland, a tiny crooked little 3rd floor place with a view of the water and a rotting back porch that I loved, was just 3 houses down from here. I have seen the water from here in all it’s seasons, ice floes, fog, and glorious sunny mornings for the sailboats and tankers and tugboats and ferries like this one today.

It is exactly 1 week from the day we leave, and I am falling apart.

No move is easy and I have rarely been part of one that has involved so many life changing events at once. My husband is completely rearranging his professional and our financial lives in hope of being more able to pursue his dreams of writing and filmmaking. My step-daughter is leaving home for the first time and going to college. My oldest step=son is about to be able to really pursue his dream of acting in film in the competitive L.A. market. My youngest step-son is about to have his life changed completely by living with us half of the time during the school year, which he has never done before. And this is the end of an era of my life. And a big one. My twenties are over and I largely spent them here. I went from just out of college into my first real satisfying realm in the professional world here. I owned my first home here and went through a divorce here. I fell in love and got married again and became a fulltime step-parent here. I have watched my friends get married and have babies. My last childless friend here informed me yesterday that she is having a baby! This is a very old, very close, very good friend. The news is so bittersweet in that I am so happy for her, but so sad that I will miss it. I will be doubly losing her to a new life.

My heart doesn’t want to leave. My heart wants to stay here with my apple trees and watch my garden finish for the season. My heart wants to be able to drive to my parent’s house in VT. My heart wants to stay here and have a baby and raise him or her with my friends. Isn’t that what most women want at this point in our lives? It’s a longstanding biological and social tradition. I long for a home, a community, and a family in it. I long for the security of trusted friends and family. It’s time for me to settle down. My husband would remind me that I have that here. We aren’t selling our house. We will come back. But……we are leaving for 10 months of the year. We will cease to be a part of our friends lives in the way that we are now, and we will need to find new lives in L.A. to fill out the other 10 months of the year. We are embarking on a totally unsettling new adventure. Next week we will begin driving through the belly and the bowels of America on our way to our new westward home, visiting family, friends and old ghosts. It will be the first time that I have made the trip in almost 10 years. Pretty fitting I guess.

Today in my heart I wish it weren’t so. I wish that I was pregnant too and that I lived here and didn’t have to leave.


But I’m not, and I do.

This move has been coming for me like the tide. My love for my husband and his children has pulled me into it. I have to go. They need to go for so many reasons, and I need to be with them. And it also answers some wanderlusting some unsettled, seeking part of myself. I long to settle, I long to have a baby of my own, I long to sink my teeth into that slice of life. But…..the truth is that I have no baby, and at 32 I am finished with one career path and uncertain of the next, and the truth is that I am not settled, inner our out. Except in my love for my family, and that makes the purity of this decision trustworthy to me. I am going out there with my love for them, and a prayer. There has got to be some greater reason for this for me. What am I going to find? Faith is such a prickly thing to hold.

Leaving the Garden

Written sometime around August 6th
(this is my first peach on my peach tree to the left here...still too green)

I am preparing to leave my garden for the season. This feels quite premature. It is not even the middle of August yet here in Maine, and several of my crops have not yet come ripe. I don’t really feel ready but I need to go. Goodbye Maine, sweet land of fog and potatoes!, of fish and blueberries!, of coldness and dampness!, of tradition and roots! (like beets etc.) My life is about to change. I am pulling up and following my family to Los Angeles, that Pacific precipice of American ambitions and delusions, a place I NEVER thought I would end up.

Five years ago now I was living on a solar powered, off the grid homestead at the end of an un-maintained road in western Maine with my first husband. I had chickens and turkeys and extensive gardens that we had built by hand. We saved quite a few of our own seeds and canned or froze much of our produce. We had just incorporated as a CSA. We also worked within the surrounding communities as educators and community youth leaders. Occasionally people would come and visit our homestead and I felt that we provided an example of sustainability that could help the world, or at least help our local communities embrace more resource conservative living. My extremely unconventional lifestyle was an incredibly satisfying expression of my beliefs and ideals. I felt very strong and confident much of the time.

But my heart, that mysterious organ of true desires, didn’t agree. And I very unexpectedly fell in lightning-bolt love with another man from a very different walk of life. I got a divorce and left the homestead and all of its trials and satisfactions behind. I moved in with my new love and his several children, we married, and I became in an instant a live-in caregiver of teenagers. They’re really great teenagers, but tofu scramble or roast chicken, hand plucked and fresh from the yard were just not going to cut it for dinner anymore. It was a big adjustment in many ways. And then I unfortunately became quite ill and couldn’t work my nonprofit job or anything like it anymore. During this period I couldn’t live so starkly by my ideals, I lost many of my comfortable relationships, I lost much of my physical strength and stamina, I didn’t even have a garden for a while there. In effect everything that had held up my world and made me feel sure….it all systematically fell apart, and this emptied me out and totally broke me open.

Luckily for me a guiding light through the depths has been the complete and utter sureness of my love for my new husband and his love for me. It grew and blossomed in the darkness and saved me from a crisis of faith. I can’t argue with it. It’s so right, which must mean that through all of the upheaval, my life is headed somewhere right for me as well! I just really want to know what the destination might be though. So….as they say, (sort of), the universe helps those who help themselves. I intend to try to write my way back onto my feet.


Here is a slice of my journal entry from last May during our first visit to our new house in Los Angeles:

“It is 4:30 on the morning of my 32nd birthday. I wake up lying on the floor……like, flat on the hardwood floor on a top of a very flat, slightly damp air mattress. (In the usual mad rush of kids and dogs and work we forgot the charger for the air mattress pump.) There is no furniture, no lamps, and no hot water. It is just before dawn and it sounds like a jungle in the garden out there. Yesterday at this time I was waking to foghorns on the stormy, grey, austere Atlantic outside my house. Now the fog from the Pacific rolls through the outrageous tumbling bouganvillea and hummingbird filled trumpet flowers and jasmine that populate this strange seeming fairyland that is California.

All of this reminds me of my backpacking days in my early 20’s. Living out of a bag, sleeping on floors, surrounded by birds all of the time. Only then I was young and energetic. I feel infinitely older now, and it’s not just from the night on the floor.

The previous five years have proceeded like a ravine slicing through my life, carving the way from my twenties into my 30’s. My transformation has been dramatic, extreme, full of depths and heights, and totally unavoidable in order to get to the other side. I prayed for change and it came, as always. I just haven’t made sense of it yet.”

In this blog I’m going to try to make some sense of things…I hope. I intend to revisit my memories of my recent past in an attempt to knit myself together again and heal the chasm of the last five years so that I can step onto higher ground on the other side. Bring the old me integrated into the new me, pull together the east and the west in my life. I am going to try to write at least every week, reaching back into my memories of the adventures and routines of my previous life, and at the same time document what kind of new life I find and build for myself in the City of Angels.