With the anniversary of lockdown, I imagine many of us are looking back at the past year. I remember that first foggy morning, gazing into the city and listening to a kind of stillness I had never heard here before. It seems both like yesterday and forever ago.
For many people, the opportunity of this year was in having time to look closely at our patterns. The distraction of our social lives went away, and the way we truly live came into clear focus.
I am gratefully a good sleeper, but now and then comes a night when things are out of whack. This time, I blame it on choosing Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 Faye Dunaway version, for the Sunday night movie.
For me, for many, this was the best era of movies, between 1967 and 1976. I hadn’t seen this one in a long time, and just gazing at Dunaway alone is worth the price of admission. I forgot how gruesome the end of the movie was though, and the energy of the mayhem woke me up from dreams. I am pretty diligent about what goes into my brain, violence-wise, for just this reason. Continue reading “All is Well”
I worked in a restaurant in Chelsea long ago, a wine bar on 7th Avenue in New York City. It was a small place with three levels. There were some tables upstairs, overlooking the main bar area. Downstairs was the kitchen, and there was a room with a fireplace and sofas and tables close together.
It was cushy and comfortable in that room. With the wine flowing and the warmth from the fireplace, things got quite rowdy down there, especially on late weekend nights. I wore steel-toed motorcycle boots, running up and down those stairs all night long with those heavy shoes. At the time, this was my idea of fitness. If I ever need a hip replacement, I will blame it on those years and those shoes. Continue reading “Choosing Magic”
I fell into a hole for a few days. The San Francisco air quality had been such that when the pug and I went outside for our daily peramble, he sneezed for the whole walk, and I came home headachy. My own struggle was a constant reminder of the devastation happening close by. Friends were evacuating their homes. The gut-wrenching destruction of fires haunted me, the lives lost, the trees and plants, the animals. I hooked into the heavy feeling and dug in.
The wildfires affected many places from my history. I have driven from San Francisco to Washington so many times I can see nearly each mile in my mind, my aching delight in the vast beauty of forest always very present as I wind through. Okanagan County Washington, where I picked apples for 6 weeks, long ago. Santa Cruz, where I went to college. Vacaville, Oroville, spots on the “places I’ve played” list. Continue reading “Pocketful of Stars”
The drum begins. I begin my journey on a bluff, overlooking the Pacific. Rolling grassy hills, the coastline rippling side to side, and the big birds delighting in the marine updraft. There is an opening to a cave there, to my left. The first time I entered this cave, a wave of fear washed over me because it was so dark. Then I remembered: this is my shamanic journey! Turn on the light! And light flooded in from above, highlighting the massive space. A soft dirt floor, ferns and the distant sound of water. A lower world where everyone I meet has my best interest at heart.
For a couple of years, culminating in the past few months of the quarantine, I have been studying Shamanic Counseling with the teacher Isa Gucciardi. This path is a surprise in my life, and yet I also feel as though I’ve been making my way here the whole time.
As a person matures, he develops a sense of self. The more aware of himself he becomes, paradoxical as this may seem, the more concerned with others he must become. Just think of this great spiritual truth, my friends: lack of selfhood means self-centeredness. Full selfhood means concern for others, fairness in evaluating advantages and disadvantages of others and self. It does not mean annihilation of self for the sake of others in a distorted sense of martyrdom. But it does imply a sense of fairness in which one is capable of forgoing an advantage if it creates undue pain or unfair disadvantage for another. Pathwork Guide Lecture 120, Eva Pierrakos
For the most part, the past week of quarantine has looked much the same as it has for the past couple of months. The preponderance of birds, riotous flower bloomings, quiet streets. Then, a warm spell in San Francisco sending folks out to the parks.
Overnight, it seems that facemasks have become obsolete, and big drunken parties of young people fill the grass. I don’t enter the park most days now, and walk Henry elsewhere. After months of lockdown, I can’t help but seeing that block-square grass patch as a big petri dish.
It was funny, really, and later it brought to mind the article we had both read about the spike in divorce rates after the quarantine was lifted in China.
We had to venture out to the laundry. Harsh words were spoken after perceived carelessness. Then, escalation after a reconnaissance to the grocery.
And just like that, everything stops.
I come out here to the window seat with my tea and the pug, and crack the window to let out a fly that’s buzzing around. Birdsong enters the little room from the mockingbird I was aware of during my meditation this morning, as well as from seagulls and crows, and small fits of what I guess are warblers and sparrows. The city is quiet now with the shutdown, and it feels so strange to be able to pinpoint the sound of the ferry motor in the distance, heading to Sausalito over the glassy Bay.
In a way, I feel as though I’ve been planning for this my whole life. I flash back to all those hours during all the various day jobs, wishing for time to just be, fantasizing about time spent doing those things I most love to do, with no where to go and no demands. All those fleeting ideas of creative projects put off, all those things I wanted to investigate and learn and create. Here I am now, and the weight of possibility is so heavy it takes me a few days to get used to it. Continue reading “Sheltering in Place”
Finally, the fog has come back in. As I sit in my morning meditation the call and response of the near and distant foghorns are like cosmic singing bowls. For a while I indulge in a little movie that pops into my meditative state, of enormous foggy elephants in tutus dancing in the middle of the Bay, Alcatraz as their footstone and the Golden Gate a sweet hurdle. My imagination was honed by Disney, apparently, and I guess this will always be with me.
My first blog post in a month. Why haven’t I been writing? I mean to, and every day I think of it, every night I make a plan that the next day I will carve out some time, but I guess what happens is everything else. I’m so admiring of the folks who can be steady in their work, even and consistent. Even and consistent has never been my strength. I seem to work in bursts. I go to where the fire is, and I guess I’ve had a lot of other fires taking priority. I’m happy to come back to this blog, that I love to tend.
While the train
flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and
bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the
observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep
over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many
things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in
little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of
climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a
brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell
of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the
whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one
who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It
was a kind of freemasonry, we said.
― Willa Cather, My Antonia
Where there is great
love, there are always miracles.
― Willa Cather
Tonight, The Drover, Omaha.
There are some things special to this town: the cobblestone streets of the Old Market, the inspired music scene, the range of funny old bars. The old steakhouses are another. Which is saying a lot, since I have been a vegetarian for most of my life.
Continue reading “Meeting Barbara Stanwyck, The Drover, Omaha”
