After the Garden

My New Job

2012-02-06T21:07:00.000-08:00

Torin is four months old this week! Wow. I can't believe he was still inside four months and one week ago. Labor seems so long ago now, and it feels like it was another person, a free person with coherent trains of thought and endless capacity for productivity who slept at night and had time for things like getting a haircut who actually was pregnant, not me. Man, she did not know what she was in for! Anyway, that other person has been replaced by a new me. The Mommy Me!

Basically, I've realized lately that the oxytocin coursing through my veins from his birth has largely worn off by now, but sleep deprivation goes on and on, and add in the return to the real world of earning money and recalling those professional goals and aspirations,... and I am finally starting to understand a bit what the Mommy Job is going to be like.

Due to teething and a fast metabolism, Torin is back to sleeping not more than two to three hours at a time, EVER. And since he also is very firm about the fact that he doesn't like a bottle EVER, guess who else is also up every two to three hours around the clock? The little cutie also needs me to adhere to regular bed times and nap times every day! Schedules are not really my strong suit, but I comply, because the alternatiive is really not worth it. The Chief must be obeyed.

I now wake up for the day before seven am every morning. My natural sleeping hours are somewhere between 11 pm or so and 8 or 9 am. The 5 am to 8 am hours formerly being my most important sleep time. Not so anymore! I don't have a most important sleep time these days, because somebody else, somebody tiny who sleeps in my bed with me, now dictates everyone's sleep patterns in our house. And HE gets up at 6:30 every day.

I have started my script reading job again, which is wonderful because I can do it from home, but is terrible at the same time because I need to use my brain to do it, which doesn't work so great anymore. The Chief bounces in his chair and dozes or fusses or nurses or chews his hands and drools on my shoulder while I sit at the computer to work on them. He interrupts me regularly to do more important things like baby yoga and diaper changing, but I go back to them and eventually by sheer force of will and some editing help from my husband, (who despite his sleep deprivation can still spell), they get done.

And, to keep my heart happy, and to prepare for a couple of upcoming shows that I want to participate in, I need to find time to paint regularly again as well. For this I demand the luxury of someone else watching the chief for a few hours. And it is heavenly and over all too soon. No offense though, Torin, you will always come first now.

Then there is time spent eating, bathing, laundrying, bill paying, shopping, cleaning the house, e-mail, and some time stolen away for facebook and occasionally socializing as well, and on rare and ideal days I get to meditate or do some yoga....and there goes my life!

And now I see. There is NO WAY I am going to get to everything that needs doing in any given day, or week, or year. I must make choices. All the time make choices about what is important, what I can live without and what I can't. What I must do and what I can let slide. What I'm going to focus on and what I'm going to regret.

And meanwhile, this baby gets cuter and more fun everyday. How could I not want to spend every waking and sleeping moment focusing on him?

And I KNOW that I am a super lucky mom. I am SUPER lucky. I have a supportive, capable husband, we both largely work from home, and I have had nearly four months with few financial responsibilities in which to focus on Torin's early days. Torin himself is happy and healthy. I have a place to live, a car to drive, and God-willing enough money to keep having these things. I have good food to eat and am in relatively good health. I have friends and family, far flung though they may often be. And still, from my incredibly privileged position, this is one tough job.

Torin is perhaps the very most delightful job that I have ever had in my life though, and as challenging as this mommy thing is, I am so very happy to be doing it.

California Christmas 2011

2011-12-26T13:37:00.000-08:00

December in L.A. is ripe pomegranates, avocados and citrus and finally the end of the fresh tomatoes. It is the leaves falling off the sycamores, (only to re-foliate themselves in a couple of short months…) It is frost in Topanga and clear, sunny days in the 50s and 60s. It is fake snow and a holiday water fountain at The Grove. It is red bows on the topiaries in Santa Monica. It is holiday tamale season. It is parties. It is cars decorated with wreaths and reindeer antlers. It is movie premiere season and awards hype. It is Las Posadas on Olvera Street with atole and pan dulce. It is lights on palm trees. It is poinsettias growing on the front porch. It is starting to feel familiar to me. This is my third Christmas here. Can’t believe it!

I found myself remembering my old house in the woods in western Maine this week. Back then I made most of my own presents. I even made my own wrapping paper! I remember the light from the grey, snow filled skies, and the crackling sound of the fire against the silence of the frozen winter woods. How far I am from that time now in so many ways! But really, the rhythms of the season, the flurry of activities, and the spirit of warmth and giving and spending lots of time with the family remain, no matter if I am in snowy woods or the strip mall filled San Fernando Valley.

This year we threw a big party on the solstice, which was kind of a feat with an 10 week old. It was a success though and fun was had by all, (I hope!). We had Mexican hot chocolate and glug and overflowing tables of snacks and a fire in the hearth and out in the fire pit in the yard. Torin was passed around the party and managed to fight off sleep until much later than usual. Before that was the gift shipping day to family on the east coast, in which I appeared as a cross between a kangaroo and Santa, with Torin strapped to the front and a massive ikea bag of gifts on my back as I crossed the streets in Santa Monica. Before the party also came a huge grocery shopping expedition with multiple lists and bags piled in the car and more than one nursing session for Torin in the supermarket bathroom as we ran from store to store for several hours to get all of the ingredients for special holiday recipes. Then there was the last minute gift scramble and the longer than it seems like it should be wrapping session. We topped it all off with Christmas Eve Posadas on Olvera Street. There was warmth in the air and children running around and vendors closing shop and restaurants filling up on the oldest street in L.A. as we waited outside the original adobe house there and listened to the musicians in colorful ponchos singing on the porch. Mary and Joseph came out looking somber in their polyester robes and shepherd’s canes. They were followed by singers with candles and then slowly the rest of the crowd fell into step behind them as they walked up and down the street looking for room at the inn. They were, of course, turned away again and again until they finally ended up back at the stables of the oldest house in L.A. The musicians played again, people sang, and then we all had sweet atole and pan dulce on the house. We drove home and fell asleep watching Christmas movies on the couch. Santa roused himself/herself to stuff the stockings and put the last minute gifts out, and then Christmas morning came all too soon. Or not soon enough for my 12 year old stepson, but it came just the same and we had a special breakfast, which is always unappreciated by the children in their haste for unwrapping, and then presents and the carnage of boxes and wrapping paper and packing peanuts etc etc. I haven’t slept well in oh, say, 11 weeks or so at least, but I slept even less last week, and by the time that I had cleaned up yesterday afternoon I had a headache and a cold. I fell asleep before Tim’s amazing homemade lasagna dinner, but I feel much better this morning. Man, Christmas is so much fun….sometimes too much!

I am happy to see that Torin loves Christmas though, even at only 10 weeks old. At least he loves the very best and most important things about Christmas. He loves people and was so entertained to see all the guests at the party, and to see the crowds on Olvera Street. He loves when we are all together as a family too, and enjoyed snuggling together and watching movies. He was so happy Christmas morning with Nick and Brick around and everyone laughing and talking. He got his first dose of the Christmas spirit, and it filled him with gladness, as it should.

Meditations on Mothering The Chief

2011-12-01T11:03:00.001-08:00

From the persistent fog of my current, sleep deprived condition I have been craving to write, before I move too far away from this pivotal time, about the helpfulness of the tools that I gained from spending some serious time in meditation before Torin was born. (It’s only taken me seven weeks or so to get around to it….but I guess I have had other things to do.) I didn’t really realize at the time, but it was such a luxury to go so deeply into concentration during my last retreat. I think it was the last time that I will get much stillness of mind for many months. I got so sick of it at the time, but now I think back on it fondly. Isn’t that always the way?

I digress though. As I believe I have mentioned before, vipassana meditation retreats are deeply unpleasant, uncomfortable and quite a challenge, but so worthwhile. Labor is kind of like that, but magnified to the nth degree. And messier. I used the same tools though, that I had developed to get through unpleasant, uncomfortable, boring meditation sessions, to now get through those INCREDIBLY painful contractions that came to push him out into the world. I remembered that everything passes and changes, again and again, over and over. I tried to get outside of myself and observe my labors objectively. It really was helpful to manage the pain. And afterwards it really was helpful to hold onto those same lessons to ride out the incredible waves of intense emotion that came upon me in the first few weeks after his birth.

Another reason that I have been slow in writing this, is that I find it so hard to concentrate on a task like this these days. Throughout each day I am interrupted so many times by The Chief, and then a session of nursing, changing, soothing or amusing is in order, and when that job is through I don’t remember what it was that I was doing before. (It strikes me now that this is kind of like my life overall these days, in that I can’t quite imagine what I did with all my time before he came, and I also can’t quite imagine what I ever did without him.) At home though I am constantly finding evidence of my previously unfinished activities, like archeological remains of my morning, leaving clues for me to help me rediscover the narrative of my day. And then other tasks go undiscovered and slip my mind completely only to resurface days or weeks later, or perhaps not at all. (Sorry to any of you reading this that are perhaps waiting patiently for me to respond to something….I have forgotten.)

My mind works in these circles of distraction as well, which I notice most clearly when I am trying to meditate. It’s a success these days if I get a few minutes of concentration in during a 30 minute meditation session. As well, I spend much of my painting time rocking or nursing and looking at my half completed work, imagining what I would paint next if I could stop bouncing on the exercise ball with the fussy baby. It may take a few days before I actually get back to it. Slowly I plug along though!

So, those are some of the things that have changed. Now as I sit in a cabin in Big Sur where we have headed for our first family vacation with Torin, looking out at the Big Sur river flowing endlessly by under the redwoods, and as I sit here in my oh so distracted mind, in my ever changing life, I must just keep remembering that everything changes. I have to keep adjusting my goals, expectations and frequently change plans midstream. And I have to be good with all that, and for the most part I really am. Because The Chief is of primary concern. He is so precious, and every day, every week bring so many changes. So many new things that he can do, so many new articulations of who he is and who he will be. He as well is constantly changing. And the full force of my concentration is for the most part now focused on him. Just as during his birth all my energy went to his delivery to this world, and now many of the calories that I eat go to nourishing him and sating his hunger every couple of hours, also my concentration just naturally flows toward him and the protection and care of his tiny, helpless, (yet loud but incredibly cute,) little self.

Chief Bringer of Joy

2011-10-15T19:16:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it. I have a ten day old baby boy. Torin Colter Rhys. He's been on the outside for so little time, and yet every day as the sun sets I feel sad that another precious day has passed. He will only grow up and further away from me from here on. As my friend Jen, who is the mother of a nine month old said, "About twenty minutes after he was born I had the awful realization that he would grow up and get married someday,.... and it wouldn't be to me! And some other woman would be the most important person in his life." Of course she doesn't really want her son to not grow up and get married, and I would be heartbroken for Torin not to grow up and away from me. But he's just so precious and tiny now. And he's so attached to me, we're still so close. I am in an altered state these days, brought to me by my boy.

Torin is a Celtic word meaning chief. Colter is the name for the metal disc that goes before the plow. We chose it because of a beautiful line in a Philip Larkin poem, referring to the, "colter of joy." So we named our baby the chief enabler of joy. And he is, and it is such a piercing, fierce joy.

The birth itself was a good experience and I was able to bring him into the world without major complications. He was vigorous from the start, and has no trouble breastfeeding or advocating for his own needs. But he isn't too fussy either, and only complains when he means it. I love him so much. And this whole fierce rushing in of joy and love when Torin slid into the world has broken me open like nothing else. My body was broken open, my life is broken open, my spirit was broken open and my heart is so tender and open. It hurts everything is so tender and open, and I can feel the joy and pain of this life so intensely. This is the state that we can all strive for spiritually for years, and can rarely achieve. And Torin has brought me there, at least for a little while.

With his birth I've crossed a threshold. It's like I am standing on a bridge, watching a river rush by beneath me. And this rushing water is my life, running away underneath me. It has always been there running, but I just couldn't see it until now. And now I do. And it makes everything so beautiful and poignant.

Everything Changes

2011-09-29T20:14:00.000-07:00

We've been back in CA for a little over a month now. It's been a busy month. A period once again where there has not been much naturally occurring time for reflection. We brought Nick to college, and have been having a few nights each week without kids. Except for the one still on the inside that is. The days have been full of the business of life, in addition to preparations for the upcoming birth and our changing home and routines. We've got tiny clothes, diapers and little blankets around. There is easy to prepare food in the freezer, bottles in the cupboard and infant acetaminophin in the medicine cabinet.

I feel like a storm is coming or something. Something unknown is headed our way. I am reading all the books and following what seems like good advice to prepare for something that I just can't quite imagine. Somebody else is coming out of my body. I don't know him yet, but I have never been closer with anyone in my life. And he is coming out and we will meet him soon! I can't really wrap my mind around this, and I don't think there is really any way to prepare for it any more than we have...

And as much as things will change for me, I can't even imagine what it will be like for our baby boy. He has been living in water, not exposed to air or needing to breathe or eat, for his entire existence so far. He only knows light and dark and the way that things sound when muffled through liquid. He has been floating without much influence from gravity, and for the past four weeks at least he has been living life upside down in his increasingly cramped little world. He's going to get the squeeze of his life through the birth canal soon, which should help empty his lungs of amniotic fluid, and then he will be out in the air and the light and his circulatory system will switch directions, the umbilical cord will pulse and then cease to function as it did, and then God willing he will open his eyes and breathe! It's too bizarre, I can't believe it. But they tell me it's really going to happen. In fact, it's happened to all of us. I just can't believe that we all get here this way.

Yet at the same time I am increasingly aware that things cannot go on much longer as they are. My abdomen is stretched to the limit. There is little room in there anymore for anything but baby, including the air in my lungs at times. I feel the pressure of another body in there on my hips and groin when I stand up. Getting up from a lying down position has become particularly difficult, and considering how often I get up to go to the bathroom every night, it's a bit of a chore. This just can't go on too much longer.

But what happens next is a big mystery. I've imagined it many times so far, but it is still so unknown. I am getting ready to cross a major threshold. My body is about to do something that it supposedly is perfectly prepared for and designed to do, but it has never even come close to experiencing before. And where there were two of us there will now be three. I feel the magic of this time everywhere I go these days. Strangers ask me, with excitement in their eyes, when he is due to arrive, and then wish us luck with smiles. I take stock of our lives and see the baby implements piled up, the relative orderliness of the house, the waves of well wishes and offers of support from friends and family, the happiness in our household. I feel very lucky and rich. I find myself wishing again and again that all babies and mothers may be as happy and supported as me. Everything changes, always. But for me I know it will change in a big way very soon. And it will be changed forever. I wait with some trepidation but plenty of joy and gratitude!

So Long Summer!

2011-08-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

Summer in Maine is so sweet and so fleeting. We arrived here on the 14th of June, and there were a few days that still needed a coat, and one I think where I wore a winter hat. But the world had turned sweet and green and there were rhubarb and strawberries in the garden and the days were oh so long. Then so soon it all turned vibrant and sunny and summer exploded. Bricky went to camp at the beach every day and became browned from the sun and swam for hours a day like a seal. Strawberry shortcake tasted like sunshine itself. The peonies and roses unfolded. The garden came up and the wild valerian perfumed the fields. Friends and relatives and parties and festivals followed each other endlessly. Then by the end of July the blueberries ripened low in the grass, the tiger lilies bloomed, the bee balm blossomed and the tomatoes hung heavy and green on the vine. Summer at its apex in a few short weeks. Now it is not even the middle of August and the greens are bolted, there are more fruits than flowers, and the dark comes much more swiftly already. It is such a swift and dramatic turn of year here. It makes the passage of time so visceral. I fear the melancholy, utterly unknown two weeks ago, that always creeps in this season. Must everything be so fleeting? Can there never be ENOUGH time? Must I already face the tasks that won’t be completed, the relationships that won’t be renewed, and the visits and excursions that won’t be taken this year? Sadly, yes. It’s been a good run once again, and I am glad of all of the wonderful things that we have done, and all of the sun and fun that has made its way into our lives in the last couple of months. It’s almost over for this year though.

I have been all about action this summer. The pregnancy nausea finally passed just about the time I hit six months, soon to be replaced by incredible restlessness. I toss and turn at night and my legs and calves cramp up. Hormone surges got me cleaning out the barn, gardening and weeding, organizing our finances, putting together cribs and gathering tiny hand me downs. No painting, no blogging, no reflecting: all preparation. Nesting. Getting ready for the un-readyable. The magic, visceral transformation that is coming our way. I have gotten a lot done. I figured that I should just harness the energy while I could. I don’t know how relevant all of these tasks have been to preparing our lives, my mind, and my heart for the arrival of our little man, but it felt right. Babies really need organized barns, right?

Riding the tide of the summer though has reminded me, and in my labors I have occasionally paused to think, how fast it all goes. The seasons turn so swiftly. The toys and books and papers that I found in the loft were all so relevant to the kids just a few short summers ago, and are now so utterly forgotten. It takes my body less than a year to grow another new human being. A year from now when we return here again he will have teeth, and be able to crawl and to eat food other than breastmilk. The year after that he will be walking and running his way into childhood. I do try and remember these things in my busyness. I do try and pause to feel the beauty and gravity of the fleeting moment. My son and I, although I don’t know him yet, will never be as close again as we are right now, sharing one body. Life moves on, springs forth, disseminates. As the summer in Maine ends for us and we head back to L.A., I feel myself just breathe for a moment and look at where we stand. Despite my somewhat organized barn, there are many things that aren’t exactly the way that I had hoped or pictured them for this time in my life, but I just can’t care about that anymore. This is my life. I’m trying to hold onto the beauty and witness the complexity in every moment these days.

Miss Ohio

2011-08-11T18:21:00.000-07:00

(written around June 1st)

I’ve been so remiss in writing lately, it seems that I should have a lot of reflecting about my winter and spring in L.A. to catch up on. My classes and completion of approx 23 oil paintings in 14 weeks, (whew! only 2 of which I actually sort of like though), a couple of film festivals I attended, some events and screenings around town, my participation in an upcoming artshow, a trip back east for my grandmother’s death and perhaps most dynamic of all, my expanding waistline and impending motherhood should all be subjects for consideration. But no. I have nothing to say about these things today, or, at least I don’t want to talk about them except in how they relate to Gillian Welch.

So, I just got back from a Gillian Welch and David Rawlings show at the Henry Miller library in Big Sur. It was a charmed event. One of my very most favorite elements of living in CA is that I am now within driving distance of Big Sur for the occasional long weekend. Big Sur is a place where just about everything seems designed to inspire awe, reverence and joy. It’s just so freaking beautiful EVERYWHERE you look! And all of those mountains and redwoods and clear streams running down to the incredible, tumultuous turquoise surf get you all high on negative ions and the world seems big and gorgeous and full of magic. Lots of amazing, brave, creative people have made their homes there throughout the years, including the writer Henry Miller. He created a little bookshop tucked into the redwoods on route 1, and stocked it with his own books, those of his wives, girlfriends and friends, and then filled it the rest of the way up with books that he happened to like, which mostly fall into the categories of either fine literature or quirky books about adventurous sexual practices. There is also an excellent tradition of parties there that attracted the bohemian sort. Occasionally they still hold events and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings happened to be starting out their new tour in this venue.

Gillian Welch is my modern musical hero. Like all idolization relationships, I actually know pretty much nothing about Gillian Welch as a person, and I realize that. I am not going to pretend that I do, but the important part to me is what she stands for to me, and what I gain from her art. And that is not insignificant. First of all, she has big teeth, fluffy hair that she never styles, and long, skinny arms and a flat chest, just like me. And she is adopted, just like me. And she likes sad, quirky, violent, and nostalgic songs that closely follow American traditional song forms, like me (except that she is a talented and sought after song writer and collaborator..and I am definitely not). And she plays the guitar usually without a pick, and the frailing style banjo. And I am not even going to say just like me on this one, because she is an amazing musician and the most that I can claim for musical prowess is that I amuse myself for an hour or two here and there, but I do play those same instruments in those same styles. Anyway, these similarities that I notice and imagine make me feel a special kinship with her, and I have been an avid fan ever since her first album came out over 10 years ago. I feel the care and consideration in her music, and there is a deep love of American roots musical institutions in her work. Her shows generate an atmosphere of laid back fun and earnest appreciation for tradition. In my opinion, she and David Rawlings are thoughtfully and skillfully helping keep American music customs alive and relevant, and that is so worth doing.

This show was a pretty intimate affair held out under the redwoods on the lawn. They served beer and wine on the patio and people gathered round on blankets and folding chairs on the grass. I was just so excited to see my favorite musician in one of my favorite places. They played for a couple of hours, and as the sun set I sank into a music induced reverie. Without really thinking about it, I suddenly was joined by my past selves of Gillian Welch listening days gone by, and I felt the last decade and its lessons in a brief, fleeting flash of clarity.

Her songs often seem to say what I would if I had the songwriting and musical chops and could. One in particular was the theme to my life in the years leading up to its current era.

“O me o My o, would you look at Miss Ohio.
She’s been a runnin’ around with the rag top
down. She says I wanna do right but not right now.

I know all about it, so you don’t have to shout
it. And I’m gonna straighten it out somehow. Yeah I wanna do right but not right now.”

I felt my twenties during that song, and how I always kind of wanted to get to this point eventually where I wasn’t risking screwing everything up all of the time. There were some moments where I wasn’t totally sure it was going to happen. Usually I was just partying maybe a little bit too hard for the amount of work that I had to do, or maybe I was overestimating my own energy and organization skills and constantly letting life get ahead of me. All the time in my head and heart I wasn’t settled and had this strong searching energy. I wanted to know everything about everything that interested me, go everywhere that I had never been before, meet everyone that seemed interesting to me and try my hand at everything. This often amounted to me not totally finishing much of anything though. But….I finally did grow up I guess. My divorce and illness and entry into life in a family did slow me down, and somewhere along the line here I found a steadiness that I have come to appreciate.

I’m not running around with the ragtop down so much anymore. As I sat there in the audience under the redwoods, listening to this song with my future child wriggling away in my belly I felt this passage of time and the changes in myself.

busy springtime growing...

2011-04-16T20:43:00.000-07:00

I have been such a busy girl lately, I haven’t even had time or energy to blog. Although I should be working now, I miss the satisfaction of a fine, finished post and I am going to steal away an hour or two to assert myself in cyberspace.

Firstly, I sure am glad I went to meditate when I did in January, because there has been no time for reflection since then. I am in my toughest semester of grad school yet, I took on a part time job of script-reading for a local screenplay contest, (ludicrous sounding thing to actually get paid for I know, but like any job it is time consuming), and I’M MAKING A BABY! Yup, I found out I was pregnant soon after I returned from Vipassana, where I had been, ironically, letting go of my long held desire to have a child because it just wasn’t working out and I thought it was about time to move on with my life. Isn’t that always the way? Of course though we are so thrilled that some little soul decided to come into the world with us as parents. I’m almost at 15 weeks now and our first trimester screening went great so chances are good that we will actually have a baby next October! There is nothing like that reality to light a little fire under your butt. These are busy days!

I feel that I need to admit that I have suspended my meditation practice over the last couple of months of business. Vipassana brings you so into your body, and my body is so nauseous, that I have been avoiding the experience probably at the expense of some peace of mind. That said though, chronic nausea has many of the instructional benefits of meditation! They are as follows: Never get too attached to any plan or expectations you may have for your day, or your meals. Learn to live in the moment and enjoy to the fullest any vestiges of appetite and energy, and know that the moments of agony will, at some point pass. I can do most of my daily activities while steeped in waves of nausea. It doesn’t make it go away to rest or stop working, so I might as well stop judging the discomfort and just keep going. This next may be too visceral for some readers, sorry, but vomiting itself is a deeply humbling experience, it can’t be denied, especially when it happens rather unexpectedly in places like supermarket parking lots. It’s helpful for cultivating a sense of humor and compassion for the suffering of the world. That said, I will be happy when this instructional phase of my pregnancy is over. I hope that I have learned my lessons well! Feel free to tell me, any mamas out there, how coping with your nausea helped prepare you for parenthood. I would like to believe that there is something pertinent to be gained here from the last several months of acquaintance with the porcelain throne.

Life goes on though. I paint and paint for my classes, and read and read scripts to help people turn them into movies that other people would like to see. I walk the dog and clean the house and occasionally muster it up enough to cook dinner. I visit with friends sometimes, and have watched the leaves come back out on the sycamores and the blossoms burst on the orange tree and the lettuce come up in my little garden and the little lizards in my yard emerge from their winter rests. I hope that spring finds you all well, and that this beautiful time of growth fulfills its promise to all of us.

Talking Again

2011-02-07T20:09:00.000-08:00

Well, I've been back from my 10 day silent vipassana meditation retreat and talking out loud again for a week now! How quickly the silence and stillness fades. It's long gone actually, but the experience was very deep for me and made some inroads into my consciousness that will not fade so quickly. Where to start?

I actually already wrote a blog post about this experience last week and didn't have a chance to finish it in one sitting and then I accidentally erased it and couldn't recover a saved version. I hate that, but it was kind of a perfect example of one of the main themes of the retreat itself. All things must change and pass away, so don't get too attached to anything. And they mean ANYTHING. Like your sense of self or your thoughts or memories or hopes or dreams or lover or children or sneakers or car or blog post or whatever. It's all going to go someday. And that's not a bad thing, though it's hard, (like impossible pretty much,) for us to wrap our heads around the idea. But for the few brief moments that I could actually let go of some of these attachments it enabled me to do some amazing things. Almost magically amazing to myself. I’ll spare you the details about feeling my body dematerialize and head for a more concrete example. I let go of some old and some newer traumas and emotional pain that has been really hanging in there for a while. One that I was particularly amazed to be able to let go of was the pain over losing the baby last spring, and not knowing when or if we will ever have a chance to have another baby again. The childbearing route has not been an easy one for us and we are nearing the end of our emotional ability to keep trying, and this attachment has been more painful than I could have imagined before that journey began, fueled now by the physical memory of my last pregnancy and powerful hormonal surges now that I am approaching my mid thirties. It's a craving deep down in my body that has been VERY hard to let go of. But over the days upon days of striving to sit still, silent, and cultivate equanimity for every thought and every moment, the attachment and then the pain just faded away. It may come back again at times, but I know that will pass too. As will all pain, all happiness, all anger, all triumph and defeat. It sounds nihilistic but once I relaxed into that thought I could see that it doesn't mean that anything becomes less beautiful or wonderful. In fact quite the opposite. Everything in creation and each moment of passing time can be seen and felt as precious. I'm not saying that I have become an enlightened or liberated being free from attachments in any way. I have DEFINITELY not. But I was lucky enough to take this opportunity to retreat and be supported while I worked very hard to strive toward equanimity and an acceptance of the passing nature of all things. And because of that supported environment and the many hours of hard work in which I sat still and present with my own body and mind, I did find a few moments where I could exist in deep peace and acceptance of everything just as it is. Those moments didn't last long, but they were so powerful! Ah sadly, all moments must change and pass away, even my moments of union with dharma. But I haven’t forgotten them.

In between my many, many hours a day of seated meditation, my brief period of sleeping and my two small meals a day I had no responsibilities. (Vipassana is like Buddhist tough love. Lots of sitting, little sleep, not much food. It hurts sometimes but it's good for you.) When I had an extra 40 minutes I would go outside and zone out by the little waterfalls or the pond or next to the smooth, red skinned madrone trees. At night the stars and moon were so incredibly crystalline and bright in the expansive sky, and by day the silence was broken only by our footsteps and bird calls and wind and the bells ringing at meditation times. I saw every sunset and was up long before dawn every day. I witnessed a herd of deer passing silently and unhurriedly through the grounds, and I saw a male Anna’s hummingbird bathing in a waterfall at dawn one morning. With each passing day my body and mind became more and more still and peaceful. And then it was over! And the 50 women that I had been with for the last 10 days were all allowed to talk to each other finally and chatter and laughter exploded again and stillness was forgotten in the excitement of celebrating our time together and getting ready to leave. Then five hours in the car with my new Quebecois friend who drove me home and back to the world of moving fast and eating and talking and working and endless distractions where I now exist.

I have just one more tale to tell of my retreat into stillness. Whatever gains I was able to make were all made possible not only by my family doing without me at home, but also very much supported by the vipassana center itself, which provided me with instruction and space to be silent as well as with a warm, clean place to sleep, meditate and eat healthy, delicious vegetarian meals, all of which were provided by volunteers and donations from other vipassana practitioners. You must complete a 10 day course before you can give any time or money or anything back to the center, and even then they ask for nothing in particular in return. There are no fees, there is no suggested donation, no pressure to give and certainly no pressure to convert or even to embrace Buddhism. They just recommend that you try and get the most out of these ten days and then you can do with it what you will. They feed you and heat your buildings and provide cleaning products and paper goods not to mention meditation instruction and full time assistant teachers and course managers. I didn’t even realize until after the course that the construction of a new building going on while I was there, including all materials and labor, was donated or paid for by previous meditators. It’s kind of pure to think that every single construction guy on there had sat a ten day course before he could come and work on that building. In fact, it’s very pure, that he would appreciate what the center had to offer so much that he would give in time and labor. It’s hard to find that kind of purity sometimes in our culture and I was very touched by the lengths that they go to to preserve it there, thus creating a veritable fountain of huuman generosity and goodwill.

I left there physically exhausted but emotionally renewed, and feeling very, very happy. As they said to us again and again, “May you all experience true peace, true happiness. May all beings be happy.”

Golden January

2011-01-18T12:13:00.000-08:00

January in L.A. is one of the best months. It is currently nearly 80 degrees and sunny in my yard, with gentle breezes, woodpeckers, hawks, wrens and parrots flying up and down my street and the orange tree in the front yard is hanging low with golden globes of sweetness. I went ice skating in Santa Monica in 65 degree weather the other night with my sweetheart, and last weekend we put on tank tops and rode our bikes all up and down the lively beaches in Santa Monica and Venice.

I think that I am extra appreciative and aware because I am going away soon, not to anywhere very exotic, but I will still be far removed from my day to day life for a while. I'm going to a vispassana retreat for 10 days. Ten days of silence and stillness with my own mind. I've never been on a retreat like this, and never attempted any silence or meditation for this long. I don't know if I am ready for this....but I really want to do it and I have a chance right now so I am going to take it. Wish me luck on this inner journey and maybe I'll have something interesting to say when I get back. Maybe not, but I don't doubt that I, who have been on a fair amount of adventures, will really have gone on an as yet unprecedented one for me.

Maine California Memoir

2011-01-17T10:47:00.000-08:00

My dear friend Caitlin Shetterly who is also an incredibly talented and accomplished writer just published a piece in the NYTimes Magazine that is an excerpt from her new book "Made For You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, and Finding Home." If you like my Maine to L.A. stories, you'll love hers! Please check out the blog, the Times and the book which will be out in March I think. I think I might have some to give away sometimes next month too for interested early askers!

her blog
http://caitdangowest.squarespace.com/

Link to the times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/magazine/16lives-t.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&ref=magazine&adxnnlx=1295107288-s6mdwm4wuvg6ESMBXFvT4g

Link to the Book
http://www.amazon.com/Made-You-Me-Going-Finding/dp/1401341462/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

Woodthrush

2011-01-03T22:35:00.001-08:00

Thanks Given to the Solitude

2011-01-03T13:02:00.000-08:00

(Here is La Soledad, purchased for something like seventy five cents straight from the steps of her Basilica, carried with me for the last 5 years and now gracing the walls of my studio.)

Through these past couple of weeks of holiday revels I've been thinking back to another holiday, exactly five years ago, when my life came to an abrupt crossroads and the seeds were planted for what is being now reaped.

Five years ago I went to Oaxaca, Mexico for 3 weeks surrounding Christmas. My ex-husband and I were living in our solar and wood powered cabin, deep in the Maine woods, and we left the cold, dark, desolate winter for our last adventure together in that beautiful, vibrant southern Mexico city at the edge of the Sierra Madre del Sur. The trip did nothing to reconcile my failing marriage, but it did leave a deep sensory and emotional impression on me. Perhaps my mind was exceptionally open as deep questions concerning my destiny and future reverberated in my consciousness. The light and sound and smells and colors of that sojourn are burned into my memory. I remember standing alone in the hushed afternoon light of the echoeing, cavernous Cathedral off of the Zocalo, admiring the gilded icons of unfamiliar saints. I also spent many hours alone among the columned walkways and stone chambers of the old monastery, which is now an art and cultural artifact museum, admiring Mexican treasures unearthed from the nearby ruins of Monte Alban. At this same museum I was introduced to some of the Mexican masters of pigment of the 20th century, like Rufino Tamayo, Siquieros, Orozco and I saw my first works in person by Diego and Frida. On Christmas day I climbed alone through the teeming marketplace of religious decorations and squash blossom empanadas to visit the Basilica de la Soledad, dedicated to the patron saint of Oaxaca, Nuestra Senora de La Soledad (Our Lady of the Solitude.) There is no solitude like that spent in unsympathetic company, and my many moments of solitude on this trip, often while pressed against groupings of jubilant Mexican families at various processions and holiday events were made even more poignant by my unhappy partnership. But, perhaps it was lucky that I was where I was because Our Lady of the Solitude is supposedly there for us at just such times, to be with us and guide us in the moments where we feel alone and despair.

Back in that cavernous cathedral, admiring the beauty of the commanding icon of a dark saint decorated with exquisite gold filigree and placed high on the wall above my head, I was thinking about what is sacred to me. I didn't know these saints, and though I attended regular worship for many years, I was never touched by the sacred in a church. I thought back to those Maine woods that I had left behind, and to all of the living web that surrounded me there in perfect ecological grace. That was my church, and the fox, the vole, the owl, the chipmunk, the moss, the grub, the luna moth et al. Those are my saints, bringing me strength and wisdom and hope and solace and guidance when I am in need. And like the icon painters of old, I feel the desire to glorify them in image. It's a fairly puny offering and it's the least that I can do.

It was during this trip that I said aloud for the first time that I wanted to be a painter. Those weeks in Oaxaca, through those moments of solitude and in the speaking of my heart's desire my life was incontrovertibly changed and set on its new course. My heart had quickened with joy and excitement looking at the paintings of the Mexican masters in the old monastery, crystallizing my aspirations. In the cathedral, with the desire to create art glorifying my own version of the sacred came to me a new purpose. I also said that I wanted to live in Oaxaca and be a painter, and obviously part of my wish hasn't come through. But rather miraculously, part of it has. It was a long journey from the city of Oaxaca to where I sit now at the edge of Los Angeles. It took almost 3 years from the end of that trip before I even re-acknowledged my conviction to paint, and then even more deliberation before I got the courage up to take the first steps down that path. It's hard to completely change gears in one's life and career, especially around the age of 30 with a fairly large and needy family and limited resources. I couldn't do it without support. There are sacrifices to be made, and I live in near complete uncertainty every day as to how this life path is going to work. But I am overjoyed that I have made it this far. I have gained enough skill and time and tools to begin to paint, and even to paint icons! To glorify and thank that which is sacred to me. The images that I imagined so many years ago are actually coming into being, so I must thank Soledad, and all my other saints, known or as yet undiscovered for helping me get this far.

A Christmas tree in Maine

2010-12-19T14:45:00.000-08:00

My dear friend and the talented author Caitlin Shetterly and I have been leading interconnectd and parallel lives for the past couple of years. She and her husband moved to L.A. from Maine just a year before we headed out here, and she wrote a wonderful, poignant blog about their colorful experiences here in L.A. and their eventual decision to move back to Maine just as we were getting ready to move out here. Her blog about their year of misadventures is now about to become a book called "Made for You and Me," and she continues to update us on her life back in Maine. Her latest segment is about getting their family Christmas tree in Maine, and I highly recommend it as a cultural compare and contrast to our experience in the City of Angels!

http://caitdangowest.squarespace.com/

Our Lady of the Plastic Donkeys and Stripmall Christmas Trees

2010-12-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

The reality of things is often unromantic, but no less wondrous somehow I think. Mistletoe, that comely green sprig adorning many of our doorways these days to sanction the holiday smooch, has a pretty amazing if slightly scatalogical back story. It's actually a parasite on trees here in the southwest, though rarely a very destructive one. It has beautiful, translucent white berries that birds nourish themselves with. The plant, looking out for itself, happily produces these lovely berries for the birds, and sets the seed within them, coating it with an irritating film. The birds, upon digesting the berries find themselves in some discomfort when expelling the seed. To relieve themselves they wipe their, ahem, posteriors on some nice tree bark, and thus the seed is then deposited on another tree, and primed to produce more mistletoe and beautiful white berries for bird consumption or for doorway decoration at the holidays! Cool, huh? Marvel at that while you kiss your sweetheart under it.

Christmas in L.A. is.....weird. Like lots of things in L.A. But that doesn't really make it less wonderful somehow. In preparation for the holiday I went to a craft fair last weekend at the L. A. Historic Park, just outside of downtown. It was really hot and dusty, which kind of makes things feel decidedly un-Christmasy and the traffic was terrible, but we finally made it there. This was not your grandma's craft fair and all of the silkscreen t-shirt printing hipsters were there and endless funky cards and beautiful jewelry and wonderfully weird little stuffed animals. There was also a dj and food trucks and lots of dogs and babies. It was a slice of etsy in real life. Totally worth the traffic and dust for sure!

While I was still fighting my way back through traffic Tim and the kids picked up the tree from a Home Depot lot down in the valley. Home Depot Christmas trees are a tough cultural pill to swallow for me. I'm from VT, where as a child we would drive through picturesque country roads dotted with red barns and farmhouses between snow covered mountains to places where we would cut our own tree out in the snowy, silent woods and then pay $15 to an old guy in a checkered hat with earflaps. Back in Maine we have a small balsam stand in the field in back of our very own old red barn which we can cut our tree from and bring it in by hand on a sled. Norman Rockwell all the way baby. But here in L.A. there is not a balsam growing in the woods for thousands of miles and Xmas trees on the west side cost in excess of $100. We sold a little bit of our souls and saved a fair amount of money by heading into the sea of strip malls that is the San Fernando Valley and buying the tree from the Home Despot for only $35. I've come to learn though, that the sacred is not elusive. Wherever it came from though, and whatever it's been through, it's our Christmas tree. It's very pretty standing in our front window and it smells fresh and cool, exhaling piney forest breath and basking in our adoration. It has made a great sacrifice in leaving its home and riding on trucks for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles and sitting in hot sunny parking lots bound in plastic netting. I'm happy for it to spend its final days being fragrant and regal as the centerpiece of all our holiday joy, and an evergreen reminder of the yearly perseverance through darkness again into light. Thank you little tree!

We may not have snowy, silent woods but there are some special Christmas delights for L.A. only, and I'm not talking about L.Ron Hubbard's fake Winter Wonderland on Hollywood Boulevard. We have a big pot of poinsettias on our dining table outside, and X-mas lights adorning the orange tree in our yard, which is heavily laden with ripening yellow oranges. Last weekend after we dropped Shannon off at the train we went to visit the Mexican market at Olivera street just across the way from Union Station. We were in luck that it was the feast day for the most highly esteemed holy lady of Mexico, the Virgin of Gualadelupe!!!! The protector of home and family and special patroness of all things Mexican. The Olivera Street market was teeming with families out to celebrate the day and do some Xmas shopping for pinatas, gorditas, jamoncillo, saint candles, ponchos with pictures of the Virgin on them, tote bags of Frida and countless other low-cost treasures. And to order their holiday tamales! We passed a troupe singing rancheras to the Virgin statue that was all festooned with flowers and candles and small offerings. In the square at the end of the street under the huge, ancient oak tree a troupe of Aztec inspired dancers clad in feathers and bells led children in a dance circle. Perhaps best of all, there was a line of people waiting to have their pictures taken in one of a stack of velvety sombreros while sitting on a life sized plaster donkey in front of a huge painting of the Virgin on the hill in Tepeyac, where she first appeared to the indigenous peasant Juan Diego in 1531 to give him the message that Mexico was forever more blessed and protected by her presence. L.A was part of Mexico then I think, so I figure she claims us too. I really wanted to stand in line for a photo on the plaster donkey but I thought I might creep out or offend the Mexican families. So I just ate a tamale and some burnt milk candy instead. Yum! Seriously.

I'm sure there are more L.A. holiday delights headed my way over the next weeks, and I wish all the best to everyone this season as we celebrate the turning of dark to light and the end and beginning of another year!

Dia de Los Muertos, Hollywood Style

2010-10-31T20:15:00.001-07:00

The heat wave here is long over and as New England gets colder and darker, and L.A. gets greener and cooler, my grumpiness about living here wanes, at least until it starts to get nice in Maine again next spring (wink, smile). I have been a very busy, antisocial and very productive girl this month as I have continued work on my masters, started a self imposed storyboard course, finished another book illustration, started another icon, built a website, and written a grant to the Maine Arts Commission for Tim and I to finish our book. Whew! The last week I have had some good fun in L.A. though, and I want to share it.

Last weekend on an overcast afternoon Tim and I rode our bikes down the beach to the boardwalk in Venice. The Venice boardwalk is an L.A. must-see in my opinion. If you ever wanted to feel like you are in an '80's high school movie set in California, go down to the boardwalk. Rollerblading in bikinis is still totally hip, and you even still see the old school skates sometimes. I've actually seen people bopping along on bikes or skates with big boom boxes blasting hip hop on their shoulders. On this particular day we saw actor Johnny Holiday, who has been called the French Elvis, cruising along on his bike. We rode a little further with all the speedracers, the vintage cruisers, the be-bopping bladers, past the homeless caravans in the parking lots, the swinging gymnastic rings on the beach, the drum circle down by the waves, and into the skate park between the boardwalk and the beach. As if this scene wasn't fun enough, we happened into a rollerskating and hula hooping dance party! It was almost too much fun. There was a couple doing choreographed dance moves on their skates together. Their skates moved in absolute synchronicity and although she was small and Caucasian and he was very tall and African American, they moved like twins. There was a shirtless guy with corn rows doing splits on his skates. There was a nutty old guy with white hair dancing like crazy in the middle of everything, even though he had no skates on. Perhaps most amazing though, there was another young couple dancing with hula hoops. These were serious hula hoops though, large and made out of metal. The young dancers could put their bodies inside them, like Da Vinci's Vetruvian Man, and spin themselves around and upside down like living gyroscopes. It was beautiful and stunning, and just another Sunday at Venice Beach.

This weekend, since all the kids were with us and not too busy, we went in search of a traditional fall experience, u-pick apples! Believe it or not this is available in the L.A. area, you just have to drive inland and out of palm tree zone, and up into the San Bernardino Mountains. We headed east for about two hours, then wound up from the highway. In the 10 minute drive from the I-10 to the orchard the temperature dropped about 15 degrees and we exited the car into brisk fall weather in a picturesque, hilly orchard under a conifer studded white rocky peak shrouded in misty clouds. This orchard aimed to please, with a general store, BBQ pit and lunch hall serenaded by bluegrass musicians in vaguely colonial costume, (in fact, everyone working there was in vaguely colonial costume, I don't know why, since colonial American culture never actually made it to CA in real time. It would have been more authentic to have Spanish missionaries and Native Americans, since that's who lived in CA during colonial American times. I guess that wouldn't attract homesick New Englanders like us though.) Anyway, they had a press your own cider tent, several pick your own pumpkin patches, and yes, apple trees with low hanging fruit. It cost a lot more than u-pick orchards in Maine, but we had fun eating, picking, and we did press our own cider in one of their pretty hand turned presses. It was really good! It was nice to find something earthy and rural and with a patina of age here in SoCal.

Next event of the weekend is one long awaited and anticipated by me. One of my favorite holidays ever, and very favorite events that L.A. has to offer, Dia de Los at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery! At dusk last night we made our way through the inching traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard and parked on a side street. Then we followed the streams of people in Mexican peasant outfits, clubbing gear and full-on calaca makeup past the street vendors selling hot dogs with roasted jalapenos and on to the gates of the resting place of the moviemaking elite of days gone by. We entered and wove ourselves through the crowded walkways, past illuminated altar after altar. We saw retablos honoring and celebrating lost sons, brothers, fathers, grandmothers, soldiers, Mexican cultural traditions and movie stars. There was an altar celebrating Mayan Gods, with beautiful paper mache figures. There was an altar celebrating the old sitcom The Golden Girls, (las Chicas Doradas), with gold painted skeletons with wigs and dresses sitting on a couch together drinking what looked like pink zinfandel. Some were art, some were statement, some were just people humbly remembering lost family members. It's mostly a family event, and there were lots of couples and kids, but it is Hollywood, so plenty of young hipsters as well, and some abueltitas out late. Chorizo was grilling and beer was pouring, musicians were playing and people were dancing, incense was burning and Mayan dance troupes were performing in full body feather suits with torches in front on Rudolf Valentino's moat surrounded white marble mausoleum as people remembered and celebrated the spirits. This event is wildly artistic and creative, deeply spiritual, and the Hollywood location and makeup and costumes also make it fun and cheesy, all at the same time! It's so awesome. Good times! So sad I have to wait until next year again to celebrate it again.

As I sit writing this the kids of Topanga have finally finished streaming to the door in droves looking for candy while their well-costumed parents stand by, drinks in hand, talking about their latest documentary or photo-journalist assignment. We live in one of the few relatively flat, neighbor-hoody parts of the canyon, so we see a lot of Halloween traffic. Now the Jack-o-lanterns and luminarias are blown out. It's been a fun evening, to cap off a fun weekend. I'm the last one up, on the now dark and quiet street. Just me and the spirits, reminiscing about the fun we've had.

The Absurd, The Ironic, The City of Angels

2010-10-04T21:27:00.000-07:00

I so want to complain about L.A. in this post. But I won't. Not much anyway. I've been putting off sitting down to write it because I knew I would feel like this, and I don't even want to sit and listen to it myself, much less make others read it. It's just......it's October! It's colorful foliage and pumpkin season, it's my favorite time of year in New England, when everything smells frosty and smoky and the light is so bittersweet, golden and beautiful. My Dad is harvesting his grapes in VT this week and starting this year's wine. It was 114 degrees downtown last week with air quality warnings. I would just rather be there. Ok I'm done now.

Whenever I have trouble appreciating life in Los Angeles, I look for evidence of the absurd, because I love absurdity, and I find that L.A. rarely disappoints on this subject. I love a flyer that we got in the mail the other day for a local realtor, touting her capability, 20 years of experience and solid knowledge of the market alongside her photo, in which she appeared with windblown hair, sultry half closed eyes and parted lips covered in wet-looking red lipstick. She looks experienced and competent maybe, but real estate is not what she's really bringing to mind. I guess it doesn't matter, she got our attention, and that was the point. Sex sells just about anything, so why not real estate?

Another funny thing about L.A., in not such a good way, has to do with the fact that everyone is so friendly and laid back. Or at least they act like that in person. I'm always like a confused beat behind in delivery of these over enthusiastic greetings that seem to be expected when seeing other parents from Brick's school or friends of friends that I have met just once or twice before. Anyway, there's the facade, or perhaps the reality of extreme friendliness face to face, but it all disappears as soon as people are safely locked away in their automobiles. Then, most interaction turns to greed, incredible impatience and barely controlled rage. No right of way for bikes or pedestrians, honking automatically if the person in front of you is moving one iota more slowly that you would like them to at a stop sign or red light, screaming obscenities at each other in parking lots, and weaving around each other like madmen on the freeways. But then out of the car and those ultra-bleached pearly whites flash again!

Another, more sweetly ironic L.A. thing we noticed just the other night on an evening stroll down the pier in Santa Monica. The pier and the 3rd street promenade shopping area are some of the biggest tourist attractions in L.A. There are tons of nice hotels, restaurants, shopping, the beaches, a bike path, fountains, landscaping, lots of people dressed very stylishly and a real upbeat, modern, consumer vibe. At the very end of the pier though, all through the evening and late into the night, lower income, decidedly un-stylish and un-consumer and un-tourist Latino families hang out together with poles and buckets and fish for their dinners, or for fun, or for some extra cash. Who knows, but there they are just out of view from the fountains and lights, talking and playing with their babies and gossiping in Spanish on folding chairs on the farthest, fish smelling, worn concrete deck leaning over the rhythmic, dark ocean below.

A hundred years ago L.A., as a town, barely existed. Now it is one of the largest cities in the world, with most of this growth happening since the 1930s. Most everything here is fairly new, and most everyone here is from somewhere else. Sense of history in L.A. is very short, evidenced by this example that Tim gave of a situation in which a couple of middle aged dads at one of Nick's baseball games were complaining about the Dodgers and their east coast influenced management and how the team should go back to its roots, to being a real west coast team, like it was 20 years ago in the '80's. Apparently these guys are forgetting that just 20 years before that, in the '60s, the Dodgers were still playing at their actual roots, in Brooklyn!

Perhaps one of the most absurd L.A. events of late happened for us at parent's night at Nick's high school, where we sat in a small classroom in a row of plastic chairs behind comedic genius, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" star and "Seinfeld" creator, Larry David and were introduced to the school's film classes by a couple of stuttering grad students. It's just so weird to see someone you watch on TV suddenly standing with you in a real life, unglamorous place, like a high school. He looked sort of washed out and somewhat confused, like the rest of us, shuffling through the florescent hallways, sitting in rows of narrow plastic desks, listening to the teachers of our kids' classes. The one difference being I guess that he's a genius billionaire, and I'm, well, me.

I may not be a genius billionaire yet, or likely ever, but I am working pretty hard these days. I'm taking some pretty demanding classes again this semester which keep me heading back to the drawing board, literally, much of the time. Also, after a few unsuccessful trips looking for waitressing jobs left me wanting to shoot myself in the head, and that was just at the thought of actually getting a position at one of these places, I've decided to take the next few months and build a website and some more finished work so that I can go looking for some actual illustrating or storyboarding work. Wish me luck!

Beginning Year Two In the City Of Angels

2010-09-21T20:17:00.000-07:00

We’re back in the City of Angels. We had a wonderful, golden summer in Maine! It was full of fresh food from the garden and the farm market and family and friends visiting. It was the kind of summer where your bathing suit never fully dries out because you go swimming every day and your feet get dirty and dry from being barefoot in the garden. I feel refreshed, and as the seasons turn to busier times I reluctantly re-purpose myself.

I can’t believe that it’s been a year since I started this blog! I promised that I would keep it up for my first year in L.A. I had envisioned that I would have reached some kind of peace or have some kind of clearer purpose in my new home by now, and I’m not sure that I have lived up to my own expectations on this point. I definitely need to keep writing, digging through words to help me find my footing in my life these days. Thank you so much for being with me. Writing this helps me so much, keeps me clearer and more honest and positive than I can be when my words are just for my eyes alone.

So far this week sort of feels like an, (albeit much milder,) echo of my disoriented arrival last year. A little over a week ago I was eating fresh peaches from my tree in Maine. I was closing up the house, cleaning for our winter renter, putting the garden to bed and trying to squeeze in some last minute visits with friends and family. Then a long plane trip away from the cold northern coast and finally a descent into a sea of lights. Tim agreed, the first few days back in L.A. after a summer in Maine are disorienting. The dusty sunshine, the traffic and freeways, the city blocks stretching on and on, Carnicerias and lowriders with la Virgen stickers on them, and all the stylishly dressed and coiffed people on the west side. These are just things that, for better or worse, you never or rarely see in Maine. We went to the farmer’s market in Hollywood and wandered through the crowded maze of amazing fresh figs, jewel-like plums and tomatoes piled high. I ate a fresh date, which was lightly golden in color with surprising flesh the texture of an apple. It was like something wonderful from another planet. And speaking of another planet, the first day that I descended into the asphalt solar collector that is the San Fernando Valley to go on some soul scarring errands to a series of big box stores, I felt like I was on one. I really can’t complain too much though, now that I live in sunny Topanga, in the mountains between the sea and the valley, where the sun almost always shines, but not too hot, and we hear coyotes and owls in the night. Even here though, in this new place I love, my heart goes out to Maine with its bad weather, dilapidated houses, bumpy roads and poor dental hygiene.

I can’t say that I am always particularly happy to be back here right now….because sometimes I’m not. But a week in Maine alone without Tim and the kids was enough to remind me of how much I love and miss them and don’t like to be far from them for long. And this first week back has brought me that wonderful taste of fresh date, a celebratory dinner party with some good friends and a visit to the hospital in Burbank to meet another friends’ beautiful, brand new, elfin baby daughter. I’m so happy to be here for these events with these people that I care about. And I’m happy to have the anchors of friendship to tie me to both my homes.

Last Dog Days of Summer

2010-09-01T10:12:00.000-07:00

These are the last dog days of summer. It has been clear and sunny and in the high 80s and 90s for the last several days in a row. The sky is blue. The sun is burning. The flowers are browning. The garden is drooping. The dogs are comatose under the furniture. The children are sweating in their school desks. We are packing up to leave and it is almost like L.A. is coming to get us!

My agricultural impulses chafe at me. I made pesto and froze it. I want to make more, but why? We leave in a week and it won’t be good by next year. I can’t ship it to myself in CA. I have a tree full of apples, and a foley food mill. I could can sauce. A pile of cukes ready for pickling. Tomatoes heavy on the vine for jars of marinara. But what am I going to do, spend probably a lot of money and fossil fuels shipping this food to myself for the winter in CA where oranges hang heavy on the trees and the markets are bursting year round? That isn’t very reasonable, thrifty or ecologically sound, which are some of the major factors in favor of the work involved in preserving your own food. Another is pleasure and another is pride. In this heat it wouldn’t be such a pleasure to stand over a hot stove canning anyway. I guess that just leaves pride. There’s my real problem, pride.

In my twenties when others were perhaps interning and career building and building an economic future I was traveling and having a good time and learning how to feed and prepare the soil, preserve the harvest, save the seeds and propagate the important heirloom varieties of food crops. It still burns me sometimes that I can’t fully use these skills in my life these days. Now I’m 33 and I can speak Spanish, play guitar, draw and run a small subsistence farm. But you can’t run a small subsistence farm in a split life on two coasts. And more than I need canned tomatoes these days I need to make a living. I haven’t figured out how to draw on these, my hard earned skills, and turn them into my career and economic future. I may have some ideas but I am not there yet. It kind of hurts my pride sometimes. Shouldn’t I have this stuff figured out by now? Ah well.

To use some farm terminology, this is what “gets my goat” about going back to Cali more than anything else. I need to put aside my farm girl self, the one that I made when I thought I knew what I was doing with my life. My comfortable, simple old farm girl self that I revisit in the summer. Back to the work of creating a place for myself in the big, strange world of L.A. No resting on any agricultural laurels, I’ve got so many more and different things left to figure out!

At least at this point, as opposed to a year ago, L.A. doesn’t feel so big nor so strange. I’ve got a home there, some neighbors, some friends. I’ll be slowly chipping away at the masters program again this fall and looking for part time work again. (Not going back to the English Café full of English fruitcakes, bless them.) I’ll build myself some new garden beds at the new house that we rent in Topanga. I have galleries and stores and places that I look forward to going. I’ll be so happy to see the beach, the wild parrots, the coyotes. It’s really not L.A. that I have a problem with, I know that now, it’s my concept of myself in it. I wonder when I will feel as at home there as I do in Maine and what will happen between now and then?

Summer Party

2010-09-01T10:06:00.001-07:00

There is nothing like a good party to really stir up a bunch of good energy and memories. It’s also handy for cleaning up and getting things done around the house that you’ve been meaning to do for a while. We had a party last weekend and cleaned the barn, mowed the yard, painted the bathroom, took a load of stuff to goodwill, and made a lot of food. We also got to see a lot of old friends and some new ones and visit and play together. It’s particularly rewarding to see the many kids we know and love as they grow and change from season to season. We ate potluck, played whiffle ball, had homemade ice cream sandwiches, (thanks Anna!), and finished the day off with a quick trip to the beach, and then a houseful of guests overnight. We drank a bottle of Dom that night to celebrate Tim’s recent sale of the magazine, and as I wandered around the house with a flute in my hand looking for Cortaid for 3 year old Kate’s sore bottom, I was aware of my life feeling particularly full and satisfying. I sat on the kitchen floor gossiping and telling stories with Tim’s cousin Sonja late into the evening. Or at least it felt late after that day. I really appreciate the infusion of joy and fun that came with that gathering though, and it was a perfect end celebration to what has been a near perfect and beautiful summer.

Food!

2010-08-20T09:32:00.000-07:00

(First of my potatoes headed for my table!)

I love food and love to eat. I was a horrible picky eater as a child and my picky eaterness has continued in some version into adulthood and perhaps gotten worse because while now I will try just about anything, I have become a very informed eater, perhaps an overly informed eater some would say, and I am quite picky about what I buy. I like to buy my food with love! I do have to meet the needs of my family, most of whom are not happy with bulgar salad and beet greens as snacks, so we do have to have frozen pizza and boxed mac and cheese around at all times for the independent snacking needs of growing boys. But it is one of my great pleasures in life to find and buy and cook good, fresh, healthy, whole food for our meals. Having worked in agriculture I can really appreciate the work that goes into well produced food, and it deserves some love. I do keep to a budget, and even though we try to keep it on the generous side I don’t frequent gourmet shops and I almost never buy processed anything except jam and condiments. Even in my most impoverished periods in my youth though I always bought as high quality fresh food as I could. As my husband’s father liked to say, “You cheat your stomach, you’re cheating the wrong man.” Or, another way to look at it is, you are what you eat. Who wants to be a factory farmed beeflot cow or a genetically modified chemical laden dorito just because it saves a few bucks?

I don’t want to talk about how bad mass produced, processed, factory famed supermarket food can be though. It’s becoming common knowledge and Michael Pollen, Barbara Kingsolver, Vandana Shiva, Alice Waters and many others have already written just about everything there is to say on that matter. I just want to crow about how GOOD my food is these days, and what a joy it is to buy it and support the hard efforts of farmers, fishermen and other producers in my economically strapped area.

I’’ll start with one of the joys of my life here in Warren, ME. Beth’s Farm Market, hidden up a quiet road on the way to the transfer station, this place is a hub of activity because it is seriously the best farm stand that I have ever been to or can even imagine. They’re not strictly organic and they’re not perfect but their vegetables are so perfectly fresh and delicious and they run such a tight ship over there and everything is so good….it’s pretty impressive. They must be serious overachievers. Plus, in this busy age they cater to the one stop shopper. You can get your all your produce needs, frozen local grass fed beef and all natural pork, fresh bread, biscuits and donuts, oysters, lobsters, jams, jellies, fresh eggs, cream, canned juice, and absolutely the very best ever, perfect strawberry shortcake! All day every day all summer. I love to go there, can you tell?

If I want fresh local bread I can buy really excellent sliced or shaped loaf bread in at least 5 different locations in close vicinity.

If I want wine I can ride my bike right up the road to my favorite wine makers in Maine and also my neighbors and buy their Villager white blend or a nice dry tobaccoey merlot with grapes from long island. If I drank harder stuff I could also get an excellent locally made gin or passable rum right up the road the other way to Union.

If I want fish I am seriously in luck here because 5 minutes from my house is a fish wholesaler with very fresh stock, or there is another great fish shop in Rockland and there is just no shortage of fresh fish buying opportunities in my life now.

There are two stores nearby that focus almost completely on locally produced goods, and there I can be sure to find local meats of all kinds, as well as fresh local cheeses, yogurt, milk, butter and the ever present eggs and bread and vegetables.

I can even get local, organic milk, butter, shrimp, smoked fish and some produce at Hannafords.

I do also have my own garden full of green and cukes and potatoes right now, and my neighbors across the street have some really happy organically fed chickens and I can run over there and chat with her and get some super fresh eggs most any time.

Even though I live on 8 acres in the middle of a blip on the map called Warren, ME all of this wonderful food can be bought freshly every day within a 15 minute drive from my house.

This food is really fresh, and often surprising and varied in its taste. Granted the yogurt that I buy doesn’t taste even remotely like yoplait. Yoplait is its botoxed up Valley girl cousin. This food is not homogenized. It tastes like the soil and the rain from right here that went into it. It reflects the practices and preferences of the hands that made it. It is varied and influenced by the seasons. I find it to be so fully nourishing and grounding, tying me to this small patch of earth and the other people that live on it.

Empty Nest

2010-08-20T09:28:00.000-07:00

(This is an image created from the nest for an auction to benefit animals affected by the BP Gulf oil spill)

A few weeks ago I was cleaning up my very overgrown vegetable garden. I was pulling milkweed and goldenrod from between the beds, and preparing to saw down a Christmas tree sized thistle. As I get closer to the thistle I saw, about 2 feet above the ground hidden in the branches, a fresh bird’s nest with four small, pale blue speckled eggs in it. I gasped and backed up, suddenly terrified of what I had almost done. I hadn’t touched the nest and hoped that I hadn’t disturbed it too much, but I had almost exposed it. I propped brush back up around it and wrapped string around the outside of the pile and didn’t go near it for a week. Tim checked on it though and told me that he had seen the bird back on the nest again. I was very relieved.

Then a week or two later I was back at work in the garden and thought I would check it myself. I peeked through the thick brush and was heartbroken to see that the nest was upset and empty. We hadn’t ultimately been the cause of this nest failure, but something else much lower to the ground had reached up, tipped the nest, and devoured the eggs without leaving a trace. I pulled the nest out and cut the thistle and brush down. The nest is about 6 inches in diameter, with a center hollow of about an inch and a half. It’s soft and thick and perfectly round, all created one blade of dried grass at a time carried by beak and wing. A wonder of engineering and a work of art. I’m so very sad for the mother bird. It is such a tragedy. A small, common tragedy perhaps, but no less truly sad.

I’ve seen a lot of small tragedies lately that would probably never have haunted my thoughts before. I am attuned to them, and each one hurts these days. A perfectly plumed seagull truck down by traffic, a tiny mouse running in the gutter inches from truck wheels, a friend’s disappointment. There have been a few moments when I feel overwhelmed by despair. How can we stand it? This world full of unfairness and small and large tragedies and no way to ever fully protect ourselves. My skin got thin and exposed in the recent loss of our baby, and it hasn’t fully thickened up yet. I do heal, I am fine. I spend most every day very happily right now, and feel quite healthy. I just know something else about the world to be afraid of now. I have experienced a little more of the world’s darkness, a little more of our fragility. That knowledge will seamlessly become part of who I am, but while it is fresh and new now it feels heavy and raw sometimes. This is part of the work of healing. Feeling the sore spot and acknowledging it and watching it fade to a pale scar on your consciousness.

Home Again!

2010-07-14T20:23:00.000-07:00

I love Maine in the summer. Love love love love it. And I love my life here. I work sometimes at one of my favorite restaurants, where we love to drink wine and eat great food and get silly at the back table after the customers leave. I love to get my groceries at a network of small fish shops, farm stands, neighbors’ gardens and local businesses. I love my weed filled, neglected garden. I love my studio. I love my simple, beautiful old house filled with picturesque, sentimental and endearingly shabby things. I love driving to cool, clear Megunticook lake to swim, or to sheltered Birch Point to dip in the frigid ocean. I love how half of life here looks like a Wyeth painting. I love getting our old car fixed cheap from Kirby Mank down the street. I love the clean, dry smell of fir trees in the heat. I love the sweet perfume of greenery as you pass through a shady glade. I love the ripe, briny smell of the ocean breeze, as refreshing as a cool compress on the forehead. I love the magic action of fireflies filling the air above the tall grasses in the fields on a humid night. Truly, could there be anyplace else as beautiful and pleasing in all the world?

I’ve been so happy the last week or so that it frightens me sometimes. I wasn’t happy, couldn’t imagine ever being completely happy again 3 weeks ago. But I’ve been so blessed by friendship and family and beauty and a bunch of fun in the last few weeks that every day, happiness has been filling me up a little more, getting in a little deeper, winning me over. But happiness has burned me before! And not long ago. Some moments I catch myself paroling the edges of my days for the next struggle or pain. Examining each decision, each turn of events, could this be it? Which way will the trouble come from next?

I know that’s no way to live though. Tim and I have had some major personal, professional, and financial disappointments in the year since we left this house, in fact, probably some of the worst that we could have imagined for ourselves because they were tied to our greatest hopes for ourselves at the time. But the reality is that we’re back here again, and all in one piece too. And much worse could have happened, because technically it always could. But it didn’t. And these days we’re really, really happy moving through our fields, our beautiful old, junk filled barn, the time worn rooms of our house, and at night falling into our creaky, soft, old wrought iron bed to sleep while the fireflies make the most of the night outside. May these days last as long as they possibly can and fortify us with comfort and peace.

Ciao Cali

2010-07-07T19:02:00.000-07:00

I am back in Maine now and living it up in the thick high heady delight that is sweet, fresh, green, firefly filled summer here! But, before I get into that I need to write a bit about my last week in the Golden State. California really had quite a send off for me.

Within a few days of our personal tragedy of late being over, and me being not nauseous anymore, my friend Rinko and I went on an L.A. adventure that was so weird and great and fun, you really couldn't have it anyplace else.

It was a Wednesday. It was hot. We met in Burbank around noon, and hopped on the freeway in my old Volvo without air conditioning. In about 45 minutes of un-luxurious highway commute we were in the southeastern edges of L.A. in a neighborhood known as Little India. I'd heard about this place and wanted to check it out ever since last fall, but just hadn't made time until suddenly I was going to leave L.A., and also was really in need of some fun. Rinko and I both love to eat and cook and are both really visual people who can spend a lot of happy time just looking at interesting little things. Little India was a good fit for these enjoyments. As may be be inferred from my uninformed account here, I know pretty much nothing about Indian culture except that I find it pretty and interesting and I like the food. We went immediately into a restaurant to get some lunch, thinking along the lines of saag paneer and nan. Well, were we in for a treat! A unexpected treat but no less delightful as we realized that we didn't have to order but instead were to be served a complicated and extensive set menu on a silvery tray, consisting of an incredible myriad of strange and often delightful little silvery cups of food the likes of which I have never seen nor tasted before. There was the bean and vegetables in red sauce, something of cabbage I think, the toasty dry crunchy noodles in spicy sauce, a potato dish, a cup of sweet, vibrantly orange pureed mango, and perhaps my favorite, a bit of fried donut immersed in rich, watery yogurt with spicy mint sauce. I am forgetting a few things I think and I should also mention the refilling pile of fresh, hot flatbread. The waitress tried a little to help direct us on what to dip with what and which bread goes with which dish but it was too confusing so we just mixed and matched and tried our own combination. A culinary adventure! To wash it down we drank ice water and salted buttermilk. Yum. We did get to choose our own desserts though, and perhaps my favorite happening of the day was the arrival of the last dish that Rinko chose. I had a dense, dark yellow cardamom mousse with pistachios, but she had scoop of bright pink, flower flavored ice cream garnished with basil seeds soaked in rosewater until they resembled chewy caviar all topped with a spray of chewy rice noodles. All the floweryness made it taste like whipped commercial perfume but as far as creativity goes I have never seen the like. Soaked basil seeds and rice noodles on ice cream! It was a brand new experience for us.

Then we ogled our way through the food market downstairs, wandering through stacks of rice and lentils, 5 lb bags of turmeric, toothpaste with Bollywood stars on the label, dried chilies, strange, inedible looking silver candies and much much much more. We went to the pastry store and with the aid of the very polite and helpful young man behind the counter bought some soft milk candies and a few pieces of a complicated but delicious nutty, pistachio layer bar. I'm sure that these sweet delights have real names but I was so sensorily overhwelmed that I don't remember them. We moved away from food and browsed housewares at this point, looking through stacks of pillows and embroidered curtains and wall hangings and quilts, every inch of them covered in colorful handstitched animals, little mirrors or gossamer ruffles. I could have perused the stacks all day but our adventure was FAR from over yet, and so we bid Little India goodbye to head on down the road again.

Next stop DISNEYLAND! Can you believe it? I went from Little India and flower ice cream to Mickey Mouse and Disneyland all in one afternoon!!! I think you can only have that kind of fun in L.A.

Anyway, because Rinko's husband and our other friend, David, works for Disney she has the privilege of bringing herself and a guest for free. Thus at 33 years old, overall feeling kind of sad and old and in need of cheer, I entered a Disney theme park for the very first time in my life!! Thanks Rinko! We drove the 15 minutes further down the road to Anaheim, parked in the massive parking structure and took the tram in to the hive of fun. And it was fun! As we entered the village I had a childlike feeling of awe as we came upon the statue of Walt and Micky with the Magic Castle behind it. The remembrance that this now huge corporate empire is originally built from one animator and his creation of those incredibly endearing characters that have lived in the hearts of Americans for generations brought a tear to my eye. To create something that is so well loved, that is a great thing. At some points in my life I would have felt judgmental about or alienated by the consumer and corporate aspects of the park, and if I looked closely I still probably would, but that's not why I went. I went for a new experience and to be cheered, and it was impossible not to feel the cheer from all of the happy people enjoying themselves around us. There were so many people there, even for late afternoon on a random Wednesday! Excited children and jostling teenagers and overstimulated families on vacation. From a child's perspective there are endless delights. Every time we turned around there was a parade or a show of some kind beginning. We rode the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, which is older than the Johnny Depp movies and fun and campy with robotic pirates lighting port towns on fire and singing. We also rode a riverboat ride past characteristically Disneyish cute plaster jungle animals. Disneyland was the first of Walt's great theme parks, and it has an old fashioned feel. The kinder, gentler Disney of days gone by can be experienced there. We could have stayed for a light show, we could have seen another parade, the fun never ends at Disneyland though, so we decided to call it a day at about 8 pm. We watched fireworks going off from the top of the parking garage as we got in the car to leave. What a send off to an amazing day!

Thanks Rinko for having some fun with me when I really needed it. Thanks Walt for the inspiration. Thanks Little India for the invaluable gift of new flavors. Thanks California for my first year with you and all of the life experiences that you've given me to work with. See you in September!

Recent Losses

2010-06-17T21:23:00.000-07:00

The past three months or so have been really transformative in some deeper ways than our external environment. Right around the time that we moved to Topanga I learned that I was pregnant. This was a fairly long anticipated and an incredibly joyful development for us. I’ve been working really hard and using all of my energy for most of the time since just keeping my body going through fatigue and near constant nausea, thus the lack of blogging or painting for the last three months. I’ve been in survival mode, but also basking in gratitude, joy and hope for the arrival of this new person into our lives. It’s been a pretty amazing journey to totally give over my body and undertake this kind of biologically creative work. Unfortunately though, this particular journey doesn’t have a happy ending. At about 12 weeks we learned that this baby had some very serious problems. Over the last 3-4 weeks we have had a lot of testing done to understand more the nature of these problems, and we arrived at the very sad knowledge of this baby’s inability to survive into this life. I can’t really think of any news that I have received in my life that was more immediately crushing than this. I didn’t quite get to the halfway mark with this pregnancy, and was never able to feel the baby move, but I did get to see it very clearly on the high powered ultrasounds, and I heard it’s heart beat. I did give over my body to the process of growing and nurturing it and I had enough time for the strong surges of love and protectiveness to develop. For however short and ill-fated this pregnancy was, this was my baby and I’ve never had a baby before. It changes everything. For a few days after receiving the bad news I didn’t know how life would go on. But of course it does.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this through the last 3-4 weeks as we waited for answers and tried to learn more about our situation. For the past few weeks I wake up almost every day at about 5:00 am and re-examine the facts and feelings in my head and heart. Some things have come clear, and others probably never will. First of all, I can accept this. Growing life and giving birth are dangerous events and there are so many things that can go wrong. Having worked as a farmer and gardener these are facts with which I am familiar. Not every seed planted will bloom, not every chick hatches, not every piglet or kitten born into the litter will make it. There are natural laws that we will never understand and to which none of us are exempt. I know that I am also far from being the only woman ever to experience this, and breaking this news to my grandmother and mother in-law, two women in their ‘70’s and ‘80’s, I was certainly met with sympathy but no surprise. A story like mine and stories more tragic than this were very familiar to them, and probably are more familiar among my peers, even with all our advanced modern technology, than I had before realized. Concerning western medicine and modern technology though, which I am not always convinced solve more problems than they create, I am glad to say now that I have regained some confidence and gratitude that I was lacking for some time. We were saved a surprise late term miscarriage, still birth, or dying baby by the amazing advances in fetal diagnostics. We were also able to get clear answers about what our baby’s problems were, what might have caused them, and if they are likely to repeat themselves in future pregnancies. We were lucky and relatively comforted to know that our baby’s problems were not genetic or chromosomal, not caused by anything that we could have done or not done, and extremely unlikely to repeat themselves. And this then leads into the fact that we will never understand why this, and things like this have to happen. We were the 1 in 5,000 or so to have a baby with these particular fatal problems. Why us? I feel so disappointed and abused by life, to have waited so long for this, to suffer through some of the toughest parts of the journey, to have come so far, and to end with a loss. It’s very bitter. Sometimes lately I feel old and scarred, and marked with a mantle of tragedy. I’m afraid that I’m wafting the scent of sadness wherever I go, and I’m socially reluctant and protective lately. I was waiting to tell friends and family that I don’t see all of the time about this pregnancy, thinking that if it didn’t work out I wouldn’t need to mention it to everyone, but now I find that it would feel too isolating to try to hide this. While I know that I am really ok, and in a few months of taking care of myself mentally and physically I will be totally fine, I will never be quite the same as before this happened. It’s been a very powerful life event.

In our last 3-4 weeks of waiting and agony it’s been particularly painful to continue with the fatigue and nausea knowing that it was in service to developing a baby with pretty much no hope for its future. The pregnancy ended a few days ago, and I could almost immediately feel energy and appetite coming back to my body. We’ve done everything that we could to see this terrible, grueling episode through, and it is over, and I’m ready for the healing to begin. The grief still comes and goes, but I think I’ve seen it’s peak, and the same goes for my misery at this point as well.

Despite all the pain, some really good things have come out of this. As discouraging as this experience could be, I am almost surprised to find that I finally feel sure that we will actually have a baby someday. I used to wonder and feel much less sure of it than I do now, and that is a strange relief to find that I just don’t feel worried about that anymore. It was also good for me to realize that my body, for all the trouble that I have had hormonally over the last few years, was doing a great job supporting and growing this baby. I felt pretty miserable, but in a totally normal way for the first trimester. My overall health has been good, and I feel strength and energy restoring quickly to my body. Also I understand that although this was our personal tragedy, it was a straightforward, inexplicable event that doesn’t need to scar or torture us into the future. We’re healthy, we’re very lucky and happy in our marriage and family, we have an interesting and happy life where we get to spend a lot of time doing things that we love. It’s also been interesting to realize that the most recent chapter of our life in CA, including the move to Topanga and this pregnancy, seems to have effectively effaced whatever remaining unsettled feelings or unsolved questions I have had about the direction and turns my life has taken in the last few years. It’s been a wild ride, but I feel myself coming to a more fixed point. I started out over five years ago as the homesteading, activist, young New England farmer and that identity disintegrated and morphed into where I stand now, which I’m still defining but seems to be coming more clear as something along the lines of a bi-coastal, artist, wife, mom type figure. We did lose this baby, and that is very sad, but I also lost some questions and anxieties and confusions that I didn’t need anymore, and so they just fell away. The transition doesn’t plague me anymore, and I feel fully pulled into the present.

New Chapter: Topanga

2010-06-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

Well a lot has happened in the three months since I wrote last, and this will be one of my last entries from the first year in L.A! It’s been a very transformative time, on a very deep level, especially these last three months. I’ll start with the external changes. First of all, I found my spot in L.A. Everybody loves to hate L.A., but in order to stay here, you gotta find your neighborhood that you CAN love. Some friends of ours love their work project of an edgy/artsy neighborhood in east Hollywood. My youngest stepson’s mother, no matter how broke she is, will live nowhere but the palm lined high rent shopping areas off Montana Ave in Santa Monica. There is a fierce pride amongst my new Chicana artist friends for their neighborhood around Cesar Chavez Avenue, where many of them are third or fourth generation residents. I have fallen in love with Topanga Canyon, our new home, and it is my sweet spot in L.A. First of all, I think I partially love it because it is so NOT L.A. Except it is. We have the same school district, the same water system, have to drive the same freeways etc. etc., but we are separated from the smog and the glare by the largest preserved track of wilderness this close to a metropolitan area in the U.S., Topanga State Park. The park stretches up over a mountain range, ending a corridor of wilderness stretching to Oxnard and is home to countless coyotes, deer, mountain lions etc. When we drive up off the Pacific Coast Highway toward home now we pass along a narrow, windy road through the canyon in between mountains and bare rock outcroppings and see no houses or sign of people for several miles. It’s only about five minutes in the car up to the town, but in those five minutes it feels like you pass into another world. Topanga is known for its heyday in the sixties as the L.A. hideaway of various famous musicians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, and for the herds of dirty hippies that flocked up here around them. Being close to Palisades, Santa Monica and Malibu, it has gone up a bit in price and esteem around here as the years have gone on. It’s still dusty, and you can still find plenty of hippies, but now they’re mostly old and rich, and intermixed with famous actors, young families, artists and ultra pure living yoga instructor types all at home in their houses and compounds tucked into ravines and the sides of mountains. There are so many Om signs and Buddha statuettes in this canyon that archaeologists are going to be very confused someday. Topanga has a small town feel and takes community very seriously. When we moved onto our street we got several welcome visits and a community roster with everyone’s names and contact numbers on it for communication and for coordinating the shared green space at the end of the street. We found a car pool to Nick’s school, and it seems like there is always some community event or festival going on that is much anticipated and well attended. It’s nice. Most of all though I think I love the mountains, the coyotes at night, the wild parrots, and the feeling that the natural world here is close, right outside your door, fluttering in your window. As the seasons turn and spring has passed into soft, beautiful summer in my beloved Maine, the lush greenery and regular rains of winter here have given way to Santa Ana winds and stronger sun, to browning hillsides and dusty roads. It’s harsh summer in L.A., and I am ready to be back in Maine. But I know it will be all too soon before I come back again in the fall, and I am glad to feel at least that I’ll be happy to dig in more deeply to this landscape and community when I get back here again for year number two in L.A!

Out With the Bad, on With the Good

2010-03-30T10:59:00.000-07:00

(bear for introspection and protection)

This is another one of those rare early morning blogs. Usually I am rather like a mute beast in the early morning, shuffling and groaning, but once in a while a piece of insight comes bubbling to the surface in my sleep in surprising clarity. Clear enough to wake me up to write about it! Even though I may still get frustrated about the ways that I think my life is not coming together, (moving again, tight money, stuck somewhere in an abyss of career change), I had some clarity this morning on a part of my life that has come quite a long way in the last five years of transition. I want to talk about my perspective on a certain situation because, well, I never have before, and the weight of not talking has sometimes been a burden that I want to let go of now.

Once I was in a bad relationship. I was with a partner who often disregarded me and regularly made me feel bad and small. It didn’t start out this way at all, but slowly over the years the more em-partnered we became, the less I seemed to matter. I think that when people basically feel bad about themselves, they sometimes have a desire to make something or someone else feel bad too, and under these circumstances for my partner I was the safest, easiest target because I was there, and as my loyalty became more proven, I became more and more a chosen recipient of bad feelings. I’m not saying that I am at all without blame here. It takes two and I was never able to make this person feel better about himself. In foolishness, carelessness and youth I often made him feel worse. Also I don’t mean to paint my ex-partner with the mask of a monster. We were very young, inexperienced, passionate and sometimes unbalanced in our early, relationship building years together. He may well have regretted treating me with violent anger, apathy or verbal cruelty sometimes, and I’m sure that he did because we all do those things once in a while and then feel bad about it. The difference between an outburst of frustrated anger or a verbal dig and an ongoing, corroding, abusive situation lies in what happens after the anger or the hot words. If there can be an apology, a conversation about what deeper emotions were really at play, acknowledgement of a misstep, then the hurt can be quickly resolved for the time being. Pretending that it never happened though, that it didn’t mean anything, or worse, sticking to the conviction that one has a right or is justified in treating another in this way, that’s when the painful web of lies begins. And it is a web of lies. It keeps one person tied in the position of perpetrating abusive behavior again at will, because it’s been established that they can, and it keeps the other person stuck on the receiving end because it is established that they will.

The saddest thing for me now is that I let this happen to myself. I don’t generally believe in spending much energy on regret in life, but the fact that I let myself live in that situation for as long as I did is a small tragedy for me. I chose to believe, because it was somehow easier and less painful for me at the time, but worse in the long run, that it must really be my fault somehow. I complied with the justified act. I chose to believe that he wouldn’t really treat me like that unless I deserved it, because a lot of the time he was such a good guy, and he was really so nice to everyone else in the world. I was the only one that he was cruel to, and only in private, so it must be something about me like he said. I know now that that’s never true though. Nobody deserves to be made to feel small by the people they love most. I transgressed myself deeply by thinking that, and it has taken years and some help and a lot of luck to recover.

People who have never been in an abusive situation may not be able to understand what I’m talking about here, or may wonder for the umpteenth time why other people are foolish enough to let themselves be treated like that when they don’t have to be. For those who know though, these situations build slowly over time with the right combination of neurosis, manipulations and blind spots. It’s incredibly insidious and disorienting from the inside. If you have been in an abusive situation, then you probably don’t even need to read this, you know what I’m talking about immediately. I now realize that some pretty nasty things go on behind closed doors all of the time, and really smart, sane, normal or even extraordinarily wonderful people are sometimes taking part in them. If you are wondering if your relationship is abusive, and believe me I know that convoluted headspace well and climbed those walls for a long time before it finally ended, the answer is probably already there in the question. Human rights are a part of our biology. We instinctively know when we are being treated unfairly.

My final realization is that this is not some secret I need to keep anymore. I don’t want to talk about it all the time either, but I don’t need to not talk about it. When we broke up and my social world shattered I felt like I needed to keep my lips zipped for some reason. I guess I didn’t want anyone talking about me any more than they were already. I also still hadn’t fully realized that this wasn’t my fault, and quite honestly I had let my ex-partner assume such a role of power in my head that I was quite afraid of him and of the ways in which he could hurt me with words. I even found out about some ridiculous lies that he was spreading about me, and I still didn’t want to talk about the truth. Once an ugliness has been planted in secrecy it is hard to dig up. That plant is withered and gone now though. It was quite a while ago, and seems far away because I think that I finally understand it enough now that it will never happen to me again. I don’t think that I will ever be in that same dark place again, because I would never do that to myself now. And that is a huge step that my life has taken, with help from my loving husband and family who I thank so much.

(I just want to say thank you as well to my Aunt Judy here who by her example and subtle encouragement helped me a lot! Thanks Aunt Judy! Oxoxo)

Saturday in L.A. Without a GPS: Circling the Culver City Triangle and Finding the Dosa Truck

2010-03-22T22:18:00.000-07:00

This Saturday morning we awoke, made some breakfast, and went out to run a couple simple errands before getting on with the rest of our day. That's an uncertain presumption to make in L.A. though, that you will be done with something quickly and then get on with something else. Perhaps we should know better by now, but here is a tale of how we don't. Setting out to do much of anything in L.A. has an element of stepping into the void, mostly because of traffic. That famous, incredible traffic that we have here, created by our complicated web of clogged freeways and arguably the worst public transportation system imaginable for a city of this size in a country of this wealth, is a mysterious force influencing our every endeavor. Will the traffic gods be with you today? Or will there be a lane closed, a sports event getting out, a detour, or god forbid an accident in your path to impede your progress and remind you of how insignificant your plans or desires may be in the face of the universe. For those of you who aren't familiar with driving in L.A., when you request directions within the city on google it will give you the route, the mileage, and your best and worst case scenario, with the same trip often ranging from something like 23 minutes at best case to something like 2 hours and 15 minutes in traffic. And there's usually traffic.....and then inexplicably sometimes there's not! It's quite absurd. L.A. traffic is a mirror of that terrible reality of life that we all fervently yet pointlessly try and keep ourselves from facing all of the time in order to hold on to our sanity; you can't control anything and you never really know what's going to happen. And so it went with our day on Saturday, driving the streets of L.A.

So we needed to get some tools to start fixing up the yard of our new rental house. (Yes, we are moving and we did find a nice place but I am still in a little bit of denial about the whole thing so I won't start in on this subject until next week!) It was hard to find the tools that we needed without paying exorbitant prices near our house so after checking a slim yet very expensive selection at a local garden store we headed for the nearest awful chain store that I feel really guilty to support but I knew they'd have what we need at a price that we can handle. Anyway, off we head to Culver City. I had been to this particular Home Depot at the request of our landlords last fall to procure some garden supplies, so I knew about where it was but couldn't remember the street name. We don't have a GPS, which is somewhat unusual in L.A. I think, and leaves us prey even more to the whims of traffic chaos. Tim has a free navigation program on his phone which we have used once or twice with mixed results, but we decided to check the address on there. It came up and looked right to me so we worked our way along the freeways and then surface streets heading for the location. As we drove further and further east toward Hollywood the road became more and more detoured and complicated and the directions more and more incomprehensible. We drove back and forth and around and around this little area at the eastern edge of Culver City looking at warehouses and overpasses and stores and apartment rows and a sad river trickling through a concrete riverbed and the empty construction mess where in 3 or 4 years if we're lucky the metro train running through East L.A. may actually extend to the western half of the city. We became hungry, thirsty, exasperated and gave up. We couldn't find a phone number for this Home Depot and when we finally got through to another Home Depot they explained that this one had closed. Apparently all traces of it had been obliterated since I had been there last fall and shifting detoured streets and vanishing corporate retail spaces were creating for us a small Culver City Twilight Zone. We drove away from the vortex to Inglewood, a bit farther but nothing like the driving we had done so far in search of the lost Home Depot. We bought the tools, made one more stop on the way, and feeling alternately grumpy and slap-happy at this point we fought the traffic home five hours from when we had set out on a 45 minute to one hour errand, best case scenario that is I guess. But the day was not over yet!

We got home, unloaded, I made some late lunch and cleaned the kitchen up. Bricky's friend came over to play video games but the battery ran out so I helped them make and paint wooden swords to battle in the back yard sunshine. I made the kids dinner and then rushed into the shower to get ready for a fundraiser that we were going to for Nick's new school. I kind of dread schmoozy things like that where people stand around all dressed up and you have to make conversation with people that you don't know and usually don't really want to know. Nick's school has GREAT financial aid though, and fifty percent of the kids enrolled benefit from it including us, so it was totally worth it to support this cause. I put on my one cocktail dress and glued my black heels together in the car. We dropped off Bricky's friend and headed to the school, only like 35 minutes late. Except no one is at the school. So we call Nick and he finds out where the event actually is, somewhere in Culver City. Hmmm. We put the address into Tim's phone, head into Saturday evening traffic. We inch along the highway, we get off onto surface streets, and things begin to look eerily familiar. We're back!!! Back on the same detoured streets, underpasses, apartment rows etc. We're in that Culver City Triangle again! And once again the navigational system is making no sense and once again we are hungry and thirsty and exasperated only now we are dressed up! AND, now we are getting to know this mysterious little vortex of confusion. Much like the hero on his journey, we have acquired some powers and skills from earlier trials that we will use to overcome this one. We systematically drive the nearby streets, spotting sights that we recognize from before, until finally we find the right street and pull up to the valet parking for a converted warehouse event space. We're like 2 hours late. Whatever though, we're there. We go inside, get our free glass of wine, talk to some jerk, talk to some nice people, look around hungrily and fruitlessly for food. We get tipsy and bored. We go have fun dancing like crazy to some pretty bad d.j.'d music, find out that we didn't win the audi in the raffle, then we leave. We drive to a nice gallery nearby to see an opening, and amazingly don't get lost. The opening is ok, but we're getting tired though and starving at this point. It's been a very long day, and our trials have been many, but they are soon coming to and end for now. Luckily parked outside the gallery is the Dosa Truck!! Now as bad as L.A. traffic is, that is how good its truck food can be. It can be bad too, of course, but Dosa Truck is one of the good ones. Their cuisine is southern Indian and their motto is, "Ommmmm good." We stood on the curb with the other hipsters in our heels and tie and ordered a dinner of fresh off the griddle thin lentil pancakes filled with delicious sweet potato, spinach and ginger goodness and fresh ginger limeade all for under $20. Ommm good. We've faced confusion, uncertainty, frustration and felt our lives in the chaotic palm of the unknown. But we triumphed in the end, and it's over for this Saturday, and we go home.

Cesar Chavez Boulevard

2010-03-09T09:55:00.000-08:00

(etching like the one I am learning to do, but not by me...)

Tim, my brave, self possessed and optimistic husband who rarely if ever complains, is often chagrined at my lack of good things to say about L.A. I know I do sometimes have a grudge against this city that I didn't choose, and that's NEVER a healthy thing. It's kind of like L.A. and I, with her botox lips and her Juicy Couture handbag, got stuck in an elevator together and I initially jumped to the conclusion that we have nothing in common, and that maybe this would be over soon, but the longer we're here together and the more we get to know about each other the more my presumptions get challenged. Like for instance, I can't help but admire her habit of sprucing herself up all over with jasmine and hummingbirds. Few other urban environments can boast those charms to the extent of L.A. Also she has an artsy/edgy side and a Dia de Los Muertos skull tattoo which I must admit is pretty cool. She is definitely Mexican-American, and this week I learned more about some righteous aunts and uncles in her heritage. I am going to try and up the ante for myself on communicating things that I like about Los Angeles. The longer that I am gone from Maine, the more I realize that we are really going to have to make friends! In fact, L.A. is probably already considering herself my friend, and I am just all self-absorbed and shy and not noticing it. Man, I live here now! That reality is STILL sinking in. I'm an earth sign, these things take time. I'm waking up, rooting in, getting my feet on the ground a little more all the time. L.A., sorry for my cold shoulder. Thanks for all the sunshine and flowers and the interesting places and sometimes beautiful scenery. I'll try to give you more of a chance!

Last week I started a printmaking class at an East L.A. community art center called Self Help Graphics. East L.A. is a long highway drive from my house, but I really want to learn printmaking, and this place has a nice print shop and the classes are very reasonably priced. Also, it turns out that this organization has a totally awesome history, and is in a really inspiring neighborhood! First of all, East L.A. is very Hispanic, and has a very strong, established community. It has its problems of crime and gangs sometimes, but the area that my classes are in has the feel of a very strong community which has fought long and hard, and is fighting still for a safe, positive and clean neighborhood. Self Help Graphics is located on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, which is a vibrant street of small businesses like carnicerias, groceries, auto body shops, panaderias, and hardware stores with broad sidewalks and parts of the street have nice, old fashioned iron streetlamps. Self Help Graphics itself is located on a corner in between a Community Youth Center and the local High School. The entire outside of the three-story building is covered in sparkling, colorful hand-set mosaics of glass and broken pottery. The back parking lot has canvas murals covering the chain link fence gates and a big Virgin of Guadelupe statue in the corner. It was started in the 1970's by a Franciscan nun and printmaker named Karen Boccalero and several other local artists whom I unfortunately can't remember their names. Their initial goal was to use art as a tool for social change in the neighborhood and in the Chicano rights movement. Their work came to be seen as part of a Chicano Renaissance of the 1970's, and many of the prints that came out of their shop are now preserved in archives and museum collections as important and instrumental art in the United Farmworkers Uprisings. I find this to be unspeakably cool, because anything having to do with Cesar Chavez pretty much reduces me to tears immediately; I admire him so much for being such a brave, powerful and peaceful warrior for human and ecological justice. Over the years the organization had a "Barrio Mobile Art Van", which drove around the area, (which is pretty rough territory slightly south), bringing art classes and materials to all. They had a punk club on the premises in the early '80's, and they currently offer lots of community and youth programs, including computer graphics and what is now a well-outfitted print shop. My class is made up almost entirely of 25-55 year old Latinas. There is one Asian fellow and myself to add some diversity. The class is taught in English but flows easily back and forth into and out of Spanish like waves crossing a line in the sand. There is warmth, "snacktime," and a very supportive and friendly environment. Many of the women in this class know each other and work together regularly on group projects and exhibitions. I am excited that L.A. has given me such a cooperative and active art community to learn from!

Home

2010-02-20T20:50:00.000-08:00

Over the last fairly uneventful month, so uneventful in fact I have been hardpressed to write anything worth posting on this blog, I’ve been brooding over the idea of home. I miss Maine but I don’t think that I would trade a sun and flower-filled winter for darkness and ice at this point. I still feel pretty ambivalent about being here though. I have flashes of affection and appreciation for L.A., like when we went to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings at the Troubadour a couple weeks ago, or driving down Sunset Boulevard coming home from a movie with the city twinkling below, and my mind is numbing to the unpleasantness of the freeway and traffic as a constant companion on excursions out of the house, so I may profess to like this place someday yet!

Despite my lack of conviction on where I feel I belong, I’ve realized that I’m ready for a home. I want a home, perhaps more deeply than I have in my adult life. I grew up in one house. Well, actually my parents bought it the year before I was born and over my lifetime it has been transformed again and again by their hands into several different houses, now only traces remaining of the one that I remember as a child with lime green seventies wallpaper where mushrooms grew through the rotted floorboards under the sink in the bathroom. But it is the same structure, with some of the same trees and those same two parents living there still. I was lucky. I really had a home as a kid and I knew most every person, cornfield, body of water and hillside. I knew every season and it’s sounds and smells and the angle of the light.

We hardly ever went anywhere though, except to Maine for a few days each summer, and I accrued such a hunger for travel that as soon as I turned 18 I went to college and took every opportunity to move around as much as possible and see everywhere I could. I moved a lot. Ohio, Texas, Boston, Honduras, New Hampshire, Arizona, The Northeast Kingdom, the border of Mexico. I lived in all of these places between the ages of 18 and 23. And in between I went to Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Italy, Paris, London, Slovenia, Croatia and Spain and all over the United States for brief visits pretty much during those same years. I owned nearly nothing and each move was full of wonder and excitement.

Then my first husband and I bought our homestead together, and my life totally changed. That place was, as inconvenient and desolate as it could sometimes be, a near complete embodiment of my ideals. I put my whole heart and soul into making it my own, painting, sewing curtains, searching antique shops and hardware stores, hauling and shoveling and spreading truckloads of manure, pounding fence posts, building a greenhouse, tilling fields, hauling brush, cutting trees and stacking wood, insulating pipes, planting an orchard! This house and land and the way we wanted to live on it were so important to me. I thought I would live there forever. I was only there three years, but it was longer than I have lived anywhere in my adult life, and I settled in like I have no place since. It wasn’t meant to be though, not for me there anyway.

Since my divorce and leaving of the homestead five years ago (this month!), I’ve been on another series of moves, but they’ve held a lot less wonder and excitement, (except perhaps for excitement over the amount of times I can lose and then find again the same bag of Christmas tree ornaments, or wonder at my new husband’s propensity for keeping precious family photos and documents in mildewy boxes sandwiched between 20 year old real estate flyers from Bangor, Maine and muscle-building magazines from the late 1980s), and a LOT more stuff. I moved to a shared apartment on the west end where I had a picturesque little garret which was marred only slightly by a neurotic housemate but then promptly ruined by a new landlord and near constant construction. I moved from there into Tim’s house in South Portland which was already pretty full of everybody else’s stuff and many of my belongings except for clothes and a bookshelf went into the basement. In two years we all moved out of that house and into a smaller house with a better school district, shedding and piling and storing and losing stuff along the way. Then we moved out of there last summer in order to clean it up and rent it out and we went to our farmhouse for two months, where we hurriedly shoved everything into the barn for a month, and then dug some of it out and wrapped it in old blankets to have it hauled out here to California. The rest of it is still sitting there, undoubtedly a playground for mice where hay bales and tractors used to rest through the winter. It’s all been rather unsettling to say the least. I sometimes think of books that I own and haven’t seen for years. I think I know what pile of boxes they are in, but I’m not sure at this point. What ever happened to all of Nick’s clothes from last summer? Where did Shannon’s prom shoes go? Who knows. Perhaps the barn will cough them all up someday…..perhaps not. Our lives and that of much of our stuff have parted ways it seems, to hopefully or haplessly be reunited at some future point.

Over the last few weeks it has become clear that we will possibly be moving again. Possibly pretty soon. There is a good reason for this move though, as there has been for all of our other moves, virtually all having to do with getting better educations for or more time with the kids. This one is happily motivated by the fact that Nick, who hated the public school here, was accepted at and is now attending a nice little progressive private school and he is much happier already. So….we don’t need to pay exorbitant rents to live in this supposedly great school district anymore. My initial reaction to this was a mild depression. I’m not that attached to this place…..it’s very nice but I don’t love it that much honestly. I just don’t want to move anymore.

I’ve been thinking about this, and wondering why I really have a problem with it. It would be better for me to just let go. Become like the wind. I mean this is America, and the era of globalization where we move around like no one else, and many people think nothing of it. We even have all these predictable chain stores set up everywhere so everywhere you go you can fill your house up with the same old stuff purchased on the side of the same identical highways. I just can’t be like that though. I believe in seeing the land and people around you, and looking for what is special and unique about it all. I believe in learning and looking deeper and striving to live lightly on our land. Knowing a place and it’s own native sights and smells and sounds, that must still count for something in this world, right? It’s a conundrum. I’m so ready for a home. Now I live somewhere that I’m not sure I ever want to be my home though, and I don’t know where I belong, and I am starting to question whether the idea of belonging in a place is something that even exists anymore.

But I want it. I want to stake out a corner of this crazy city where I must live part of the year for the next decade or so at least. I want a home where I know the neighbors and the birds and the trees and the smell of the seasons. I want to have a garden and a compost and collect rainwater and live a little more lightly on this ravaged earth.

We went to check out a house today for rent up in Topanga, a rural mountain town just a few minutes north and inland from here where the houses have great yards for dogs and are cheaper though still close enough to drive the kids to their schools. When and if we are ever ready to buy we will look in this area. A young woman showed us around her home on a secluded ridge with a nice deck and some beautiful terraced gardens where she planted fruit trees and once grew vegetables. She and her husband are getting a divorce. She doesn’t want to live there anymore alone and is leaving the gardens and orchard that she built behind to start a new life. Wouldn’t it be ironic, strange, but pleasingly so, if I could take over her lost orchard to replace my own lost years ago? If I took it over with a happy marriage and family and a rebuilt life? That would be sweet like crisp apples or California figs. I don’t think it’s in the cards for me at the moment though, but just the thought of it is something to hope for.

Hedgehog

2010-02-08T09:06:00.000-08:00

Written Approximately January 24th.

The wind and rain have pounded us here in L.A. for much of the last week. This is usually a cause for rejoicing in my book, but it wore on me this week. To match the weather I succumbed to some howling, rainy depression about the supreme court throwing our democracy to the corporate dogs, and the tarnished promise of this once so hopeful democratic regime of late. Also, like many, many fellow Americans, we continue to have enough financial difficulties at least to see some of our plans fade into a more distant future than we had hoped. I know that there are many, many people out there having such a harder time than us and I wonder when and how it will really end.

I just read a lovely novel though about finding joy, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”. It’s heavy on philosophical musings and the main characters are tormented by the kind of existential dread and ennui that pretty much only has time to occur in a socialist democratic country with one of the highest standards of living in the world, (it’s French,) but their suffering is no less real, and their unexpected discoveries about life and each other are no less profound and beautiful.

The 12 year old existentially depressed protagonist writes in her journal after a visit to her grandmother, “We have to live with the certainty that we’ll get old and that it won’t look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it’s now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there’s a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.”

And the other protagonist is an intellectual but mousy and lonely little Parisian concierge. She is likened to a hedgehog, which are very lovely, helpful and peaceful little creature with prickly outsides. She’s a wonderful character and it’s a good read. I cheered myself up this week by looking up hedgehog references for this icon. They really are adorable and there is something absurd yet noble about them at the same time.

Today, while painting in the clear, sunny morning, I had a wonderful feeling of satisfaction. I felt like, “Oh, this is all I really need to do.” Other than eating, sleeping, praying and loving my family, this is all I really have to do. Funny how I forget that about every other minute or so, and then need to learn it all over again. Creating equals happiness. It doesn’t equal community, income, fame or prestige, at least not for me, but it’s actually doing the work, making the piece, that is more important than most of that anyway. Without that nothing matters anyway.

Whether you read these or not, thanks for being on my list, because having to send one of these out a week keeps me writing, and writing keeps me cleaning out my insides and putting everything in better order. It makes me better understand, accept, forgive what I find there, and challenges me to acknowledge kernels of lightness and goodness that I might just let stay buried otherwise.

Cigarettes and Accordions

2010-01-18T07:02:00.001-08:00

Well, I've had quite an adventure since last week. I've been to Serbia and back, to attend a really interesting and strange film and music festival at the home and personal village of famed Serbian auteur moviemaker, musician and actor, Emir Kustarica, deep in the mountains of the Mokra Gora region near Bosnia. As I sit here on the couch back in L.A. at 5:30 am, (it's something like 2:30 in the afternoon in Serbia and my body, though never really adjusted to European time, nonetheless made some motions in that direction apparently, because I am usually not wide awake and craving a greasy meal and a pilsner at this time of day,) it all seems like a dream that I was in Belgrade yesterday morning. I hardly know what to write about, it was such a trip. Literally.

I should probably start with Emir Kustarica, one of my favorite filmmakers and a great artist and the benefactor of this trip for Tim and I as representatives (loosely on my part) of Moviemaker Magazine. Kustarica's films 'Black Cat, White Cat' and 'Time of the Gypsys' are two of my favorite films, but I like anything he does. His movies are not for everyone and his one foray into Hollywood with 1993's 'Arizona Dreams' produced a movie with a somewhat weak storyline and galvanized him as a studio outsider, so don't place that one as a priority, but if you like the absurd and can find patience for magical realism and lots of accordion music I recommend them all as alternately a rollicking good time and a complex and melancholy look at cultural reality/political history/social problems/psychological portraits and loosely defined animal husbandry practices of the Balkans, particularly the former Yugoslavia. He has created this festival in a historic Serbian ethno-village, Drvngrad, nicknamed Kustendorf, that he built as a set for one of his movies and then had turned into his personal home as well as a rustic tourist resort and national park. Kustendorf is a play on his nickname, Kusta, and also means village by the sea in German, which it plainly is not. Absurd, and apparently meant to be some dig at his government for their attitudes toward the Germans at the time that he built it a few years ago. As despot of this tiny kingdom of little wooden houses, cobblestone streets named after remarkable characters like Nikola Tesla, Federico Fellini, and Che Guevara, a few restaurants and bars, some kittens and happy little dogs, an indoor swimming pool and incredible, timeless views of the misty, moody mountains and humble little homesteads in the valley below he has managed to pack it over the last 3 years with lots of young, mostly Eastern European filmmakers, journalists from all over Europe, the Cannes mafia, and a few high profile lefty Hollywood rogues, like Jim Jarmusch and Oliver Stone in the past, and Johnny Depp and Ralph Fiennes this year. It was a really good program, with an interesting, sometimes claustrophobic scene of stylish people jammed elbow to elbow in the theater, the restaurant, and bars while accordion music seemed to play incessantly and nearly everyone chainsmoked in all venues like they were their own little personal nicotine factory smokestacks. Pork, potatoes and cabbage were featured at every meal, as well as beer and slivovic at most. Slivovic is plum brandy that you could strip your furniture with, drunken out of little shot containers shaped like lab beakers. I love Eastern Europe. I love the absurd and the irreverent. This phrase was actually said by Johnny Depp in a workshop that he gave at the festival, but it rang so true for me, and so appropriate for this festival that I wrote it down and it's been ringing in my head ever since. Kustarica is a master of the absurd and irreverent, which seem to veritably breed in the Balkans, along with accordions and cigarettes. The opening night band, a Slovenian and Austrian group, covered some local favorites as well as Proud Mary, Like a Vrigin and Besame Mucho in the Austrian folk tradition with an accordion (of course), trumpet, trombone, guitar, clarinet and smoking lead singer babe. It was absurd and wonderful. We unfortunately had to leave before Kustarica's band, The No Smoking Orchestra, (which now having been to a Serbia and had my clothes, skin, hair and innards no doubt fumigated in a stew of second hand smoke, I recognize as the most absurd ironic name of a band ever), rocked the house for the final ceremony. Overall I found it to be a really stimulating and artistically inspiring event, in a melancholy and beautiful part of the world.

I traveled in Eastern Europe extensively about 10 years ago, but couldn't get into parts of the former Yugoslavia with an American passport at that time, so this trip filled in some of my missing passport stamps and refreshed my sense of place to that region. A few other fun Americanized observations from the former Eastern bloc that were reinforced for me this time were the unnerving fact that although people there really are very friendly, helpful and kind, smiling is not widely practiced, but staring is. As soon as help is requested or a question is asked though the somber mask will be broken and people bend over backwards in helpful kindness. And many Eastern European women really are very hot, or even if they're not that hot they really know how to dress so that men won't notice that. Many Eastern European men on the other hand are really big and tall and often (sorry), more in the range of not so good looking all the way to ugly, greasy or scary looking and have a habit of wearing their pants up around their ribcages, yet they always have these really hot babes on their arms, making them perhaps some of the luckiest men in the world! Also, as our cab driver explained to us, Serbian salaries are amongst the lowest in Europe, but still every cafe, restaurant, bar and club are full from morning to....well, the next morning because parties start late and go all night, any night of the week there. As he said, "Serbs live like today is the last day on earth." A short, cold, grey, drunken day but filled with lots of passion, music and cigarettes. And really, who can begrudge you a few cigarettes, and plenty of passion and music if they help to lighten the tortured slavic soul because as a different cab driver explained to us, "Serbs never forgive and never forget," and that's a hard way to live through thousands of years of wars and occupations and broken alliances and broken dreams. Serbia is hopefully on it's way toward dealing with some of the horrible events of the past two decades, joining the European Union and improving its economy. I hope Serbia can change in the ways that it needs to....but not so much that its soul loses any of the beauty, just some of the torture.

I love travel. I love an adventure and am willing to go through a lot to get one. Adventures are often expensive and usually involve being jet-lagged, tired and at least occasionally lost, being stared at and not being able to understand what everyone is saying, eating and drinking strange things and for me anyway, usually being sick for at least short periods of time, and from time to time being pilfered from, robbed or swindled. In short being palpably vulnerable to the world. And that vulnerability, although it induces some fear, also opens something up that lets the beauty in with the volume up. I won't even start on my reminiscences of those unexpectedly beautiful travel moments coined in my memory that are like riches from the universe. Well, ok, just a few; an evening spent in a small hut perched on a volcanic hillside being served beans and rice and playing with a small girl as the fireflies and an electrical storm flashed above the lake outside, waking up on a bus pulling into majestic Istanbul at sunrise and having my hair ruffled and being handed a homemade pickle by a Bulgarian grandpa sitting near me, finding a little town where they make chestnut ice cream and then driving a winding narrow road down through the mountains of Provence to the sea. Now I can add perching in the cold between a railing and the rooftop of a little wooden Serbian house to get a picture of the crowd below drinking and smoking and dancing and waiting for the opening ceremony as fireworks shot up over the wooden roofs and cinders fell down in our hair. My memories of beautiful travel adventures are as dear to me as anything I own. It's all worth it for that wonderful 'soul in wonder' feeling of learning about people living a different kind of life, and being a stranger in a strange and wonderful place. The world opens up, or more likely I open up, and I feel so alive and lucky to be alive and so in love with whatever patch of the globe I am standing on.

American Music

2010-01-09T17:52:00.000-08:00

I went to a great old time music party/show last night. Once in a while there is the kind of party so full of creative energy and welcoming fun that it fills your mind like a wonderful painting or a touching song or an amazing meal. An inspired thing was created in the party itself. It was in a loft just south of downtown in a barren neighborhood amongst a bunch of warehouses dotted with gentlemen's clubs. Some enterprising and adventurous fellow lives there and keeps his living room empty except for a piano, a few mics, a lot of extra chairs and his kitchen full of beer. Amazing, wonderful music was made, and there was dancing and joy.

It wasn't like being in L.A. It was like being in Portland, in Vermont, northern Arizona....in just about every place that I have ever lived since my early 20's. In all of these places and apparently here in L.A. too there are groups of mostly young people getting together, dressing up, well, down I should say, imitating old time musicians from the early decades of the past century, drinking, smoking, partying and playing music into the wee hours with abandon. The opening band was headed up by a skinny young blond fellow with pomaded hair and 1950's style dress pants over his destroyed loafers and a thrift store white button down rolled to the elbows. From his narrow 20ish year old body he somehow managed to powerfully pull the ruined voice of a 60 year old chain smoking black man from the south. It was great! He played mandolin and was accompanied by a skinny guitarist with a nice old resonator and new white wing tips, a long-haired, clear voiced young lady fiddler, and a cheerful, chubby jack of all trades who alternated between the piano, the washboard and the jug. Doc Bocs, the Carter Family, Smithsonian Folkways recordings, Roscoe Holcomb, Jimmy Rogers, Lefty Frizzell, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams and Kitty Wells are just a few of the closely studied and imitated icons of American musical roots talent that are drawn upon by crowds like these to create entertainment and joy.

I grew up watching Madonna on MTV. Yet I spent my twenties learning to play Carter family tunes on the guitar. I know how to play a lot of them. And everyplace that I go I find other people who do as well. This music sounds right to me. It feels right to me. It makes the world feel right to me. I'm certainly not the only flatpicking refugee from the digital age, or the most serious by far. A friend of mine in Portland used to spend much of his time online digitally compiling various versions of traditional songs. Pretty geeky, huh. But it didn't sound geeky when he played them. He sounded alive and wild and totally consumed by the music. I don't know exactly what is going on here. It's kind of a weird, and certainly unglamorous sort of movement. I guess that's part of the point. The anti-MTV cribs kind of musicians. Music parties in random lofts or apartments or cabins out in the woods, potluck and even with homemade hooch sometimes, advertised only by word of mouth. And at these parties you find artists, budding filmmakers, writers, farmers and revolutionaries and probably a few closet computer programmers and bank tellers. Maybe this is my generations counterculture rebellion. Undoubtedly worshipping at the roots of American music in impromptu location for free feeds some cultural need. We need traditions. We need something spontaneous. This party and others that have come before are about as human and un-digital and un-commercial as it gets. It's a real experience in real time. Also, American music is a truly beautiful and great fusing of American traditions. We may have a sorry country in many ways at this point, with over six million people currently living with no income whatsoever and no help from social programs while wall street grows fatter and corporations monopolize the very air we breathe until we can't but exhale and participate in lining someone's unsavory pockets. We do have some wonderful unspoiled riches though, like a surviving democracy, our natural resources, our unparalleled diversity, our thirst for creative enterprise, and our unique and wonderful music. Playing it and loving it and keeping it alive is one way to love America. To love something that's really good about America.

On With The New

2010-01-02T10:19:00.000-08:00

I kind of have that deflated feeling that you get when the holidays are over. The decorations are coming down, the fridge and bank accounts are emptied out, the bad eating habits are catching up, the visitors and all the excuses for not working are going home again. I'm tired and kind of getting a cold but it's still time to get serious here. The good thing though is that beyond the debris of the holiday stretches out a new year, clean and clear and fresh and waiting for something wonderful to be made of it.

Having visitors here made me do lots of fun L.A. things that I don't usually do. I went to the La Brea tar pits in the heart of Hollywood to see the amazing Columbian mammoths and dire wolves and sabertooth cat bones from the L.A. basin's pre-human days, preserved in the molten asphalt, now surrounded by seas of asphalt in another form. We went out for ramen and saw a movie and many famous handprints in cement at Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. On New Year's Eve day I took my parents up to the Getty museum in the hills above L.A. It's an amazing place. There is an incredible art collection there and entrance to the exhibits is free but I never get to them because I'm so enraptured by the experience of riding the monorail up the hill from the parking lot and walking through the massive, monumental, fountain filled courtyards and gardens with views of the L.A. basin from the towering, snow covered Sierra Nevada in the east across the sea of humanity to the glittering coast with mountainous islands off shore. It really makes me forgive the traffic and the porn and the overzealous plastic surgeons and appreciate this city. The fact that Maine is now covered with a couple of feet of snow and bitterly cold helps with that too.

I had a nice conversation with the checkout guy at Trader Joe's today. It went something like this:
Him: How was your New Year?
Me: Great!
Him: That's so great, glad to hear it! This was a good one, huh? What did you do?
Me: Oh, not much. Made pizza, watched a movie, went to a fun brunch party the next morning.
Him: That's great! I love pizza and movies and brunch parties. Homemade pizza's the best! (They must train them to be extra nice and cheerful at Trader Joe's, and this guy was admittedly above and beyond the call of duty. Kind of like a human golden retriever.)
Me: Yeah, it was fun. I've just got a good feeling about this year.
Him: ME TOO! man, me too. More this year than any other I can remember.
Me: Yeah, me too. I don't know why.
Him: Yeah, huh.(laughs) The facts don't look that great, but I'm just feeling good about it!
Me: Allright! That's the first step, huh?
Him: Happy 2010!
Me: Yeah, Happy 2010!

Happy 2010 to you! Happy 2010 to me. I hope for this year to bring me more strength and acceptance and accomplishment and joy and compassion and wholeness. I hope for it to bring us all more compassion, more justice, more common sense and resourcefulness, and more hopeful visions for the future.

Christmas Toast

2009-12-24T18:34:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-26T10:23:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-10T21:43:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-04T12:31:00.000-08:00

[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

2009-10-25T16:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-21T20:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-10T12:48:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-10-03T19:58:00.001-07:00

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

2009-10-02T23:09:00.001-07:00

(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

2009-10-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-09-20T12:51:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-09-13T12:30:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-09-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-08-20T20:49:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-08-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-19T15:27:00.000-07:00

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.