Thursday, August 18, 2022

Arnie the Armadillo

                            Arnie the Armadillo came home with us from Orcas Island Pottery.




                                                        He moved into Terry's lush backyard...


...where he met Sherman, his kindred spirit.

                                    He also met Ava, who set to work giving him a make-over.


Arnie falls in love.


Arnie, the psychedillic armadillo!


When Ava had to go home, Arnie was inconsolable.


        But when he learned she'd be back, he decided to have a look around the garden and settle in.



                                                   

                                                                He met some new friends.

                                                   

                                                   

                                                            He grew to love his new home.




                                                        And he lived happily ever after.

















 

Saturday, August 13, 2022

Breezy Days

Today's my 73rd birthday.  Ava will turn five in two months.  Just before I was turning five, I was returning home with my family from a year in India.  We celebrated my birthday in Rome where my cake was laced with rum, and I didn't like it.  I was a shy little girl then.  Ava and her generation are miles beyond...

On a Wednesday afternoon this August, Ava held Auntie Lisa's hand as they stood at the edge of the ocean.  She held tight as each little surge shoved her a bit.  Within an hour, she let go and began to feel the delight of meeting those surges with her own strength.

On Saturday, she got her first taste of the boogie board -- Whitney showed her how to center her body, hold on, and she shoved her into the little white water rolling in from the bigger waves.  Soon came:  "Again! Again!...Farther!  Bigger!"  I was out there with them, enjoying the glorious day -- the air was 73' and the water 70'.  Like riding a bicycle, catching little waves and diving under white water came naturally.  Simply swimming around in that gently rocking sea brought deep pleasure suffused with memory.






By Sunday, Ava was out much deeper with Whitney or Lisa, riding one after another.  Once she and Lisa caught the same wave and rode in side by side, laughing together.  And in the afternoon, it was she and a 6-year-old in the shallows together, riding tandem.

When it was time to leave, she was in a big inner tube, catching whitewater by herself.  As she refused the call in, she simply headed straight out to sea, all confidence and spirited defiance.

My delight in watching Ava become a little mermaid was enhanced by the memories it brought of my dad taking us kids to the beaches at Avila and Pismo.  He plopped us onto those big old canvas inflatable rafts, (red on one side, blue on the other) and shoved us into wave after wave.  I can still remember my thrill with the speed and the rush of water all around...and the feel of my hands clinging to the rough canvas.  Eventually he taught us to body surf too, so we could know the fun that he had had on those very beaches, when he was a kid.  I was several years older than Ava...I hope she remembers this weekend!



Monday, August 8, 2022

Orcas Island Pottery


Old wooden signs lead through the woods on a curving dirt road. Beyond the wooden fence you enter a magical property perched above the Puget Sound, tucked in the forest, brightly flowered. You’re greeted by three herds of friendly critters.  






A treehouse overlooks it all: weather-worn wooden buildings that house showrooms and workrooms, and picnic tables displaying ceramic dinnerware.




A few pieces dazzled me...the gold-rimmed vases with horsehair designs burned into them, and the raku spheres that the artist called Prayer Malas.



As I purchased an armadillo for my sister and her husband's garden, I chatted with one of the elder craftswomen.  I mentioned I'd long ago studied with Paul Soldner.  She, with a big grin, led me to the back room and this poster which, she said, they'd been repairing for 40 years:



After a good laugh, I told her how a man at my art reception had responded when I mentioned I'd studied with Paul...he asked, with a wry smile, if I'd been "one of Paul's girls."  Of course now I understand much better what he meant.     (Be sure to read the box -- Paul was advertising for his company which sold hand-built wheels and clay bodies.)  Paul told me he'd get me into his grad program at Scripps if I wanted.  I think I'm glad I chose to spend a year in Europe instead, but not sure.  How different would my life have been?






Thursday, August 4, 2022

Random Thoughts

Some time ago I assembled a book pairing photos of beautiful places I’d visited with quotes collected over the decades.  Needing a new book to grab me, I peeked in for some inspiration and found these by Kathleen Norris, from Dakota: A Spiritual Geography:




        “A door that opens onto the still point where my heart is…Of course it is silence that makes 

listening possible.  The willingly embraced desert fosters realism, not despair.”





        “A person is forced inward by the spareness of what’s outward and visible in all this land and sky.  

        The beauty of the plains is like that of an icon…what seems stern and almost empty is merely 

open, a door into some simple and holy state.”


So I borrowed her most recent:  Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life.  Amidst the thicket of difficult stories and her religious thinking, I found some good pointers and nuggets.  In discussing the widespread use of antidepressants, she sites Kathryn Schulz, author of the New York Times Magazine article “Did Antidepressants Depress Japan?” who quotes a Japanese psychiatrist:  


“Melancholia, sensitivity, fragility — these are not negative things in a Japanese context…It never occurred to us that we should try to remove them.” (p 271). Huh!


Soon after this, Norris was writing about the desert monk Evagrius, and this popped out:  “…both tears and the psalter itself are the monk’s essential tools for living a grounded spiritual life.” (p 277). That sounded promising, but I was soon disappointed.  Those tears were about self-recrimination — facing one’s guilt, sin, and need for reform.  


I prefer Melanie Klein’s take on sadness in the depressive position, where the ups and downs of life aren’t polarized into good and bad — sadness, loss, grief simply come along with love, joy and the rest.  Duh…Inevitable.  It brings to mind Judy Collins’ rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”:


I’ve looked at life from both sides now

from win and lose and still somehow

it’s life’s illusions I recall

I really don’t know life at all


At nearly 73, like the Velvet Rabbit, I've gotten pretty real with tears shed and fur rubbed off.  The lyrics that felt so true a half century ago no longer apply.


And here’s Judy looking more gorgeous than ever with her snow-white hair...of course we'd all look better professionally done up for publicity photos!   




Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Baez and Blue Eyes

In 1964, Joan Baez published an album containing Johnny Cash’s song, “I Still Miss Someone,” with these lines:  ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w_cA52F2lQ )

         Though I never got over those blue eyes....I see them everywhere…


Though Cash and two family members wrote this about his wife’s parents, it seems safe to surmise that Joan picked it up because of Bob Dylan.  Their relationship was breaking up about that time.





Eleven years later, in 1975, she put out “Diamonds and Rust,” including an old favorite of mine: “Winds of the Old Days.”  Again she refers to Dylan’s blue eyes in this poignant remembrance of their love.                           ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeXLnxkNXFk )





Eleven years!  She married in 1968, had a beloved son, a wonderful career, and yet when she gets a glimpse of Dylan in the news, her heart is ready to take flight.


The heart is a strong muscle!  It won’t, after all, let go…



   





Mary Oliver on Whitman

Thus Whitman's poems stood before me like a model 

of delivery when I began to write poems myself: 

I mean the oceanic power and rumble that travels through 

a Whitman poem-the incantatory syntax, the boundless

affirmation. In those years, truth was elusive--as was my

own faith that I could recognize and contain it. Whitman

kept me from the swamps of a worse uncertainty, and I

lived many hours within the lit circle of his certainty, and

his bravado. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew

the doors themselves from their jambs! And there was the

passion which he invested in the poems. The metaphysical

curiosity! The oracular tenderness with which he viewed

the world--its roughness, its differences, the stars, the

spider- nothing was outside the range of his interest. I

reveled in the specificity of his words. And his faith-that

kept my spirit buoyant surely, though his faith was with-

out a name that I ever heard of. Do you guess I have some

intricate purpose? Well I have ... for the April rain has,

and the mica on the side of a rock has.


But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that

the poem is a temple--or a green field--a place to enter,

and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an

intellectual thing—an artifact, a moment of seemly and

robust wordiness--wonderful as that part of it is. I

learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but

to speak--to be company. It was everything that was

needed, when everything was needed. I remember the

delicate, rumpled way into the woods, and the weight of

the books in my pack. I remember the rambling, and the

loafing--the wonderful days when, with Whitman, 

I tucked my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had

a good time.









Sunday, July 31, 2022

Upstream and Hot Sand

In her epigraph to Upstream: Selected Essays, Mary Oliver shares this quote from Shelley’s “On Love”:

…in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass and the waters and the sky.  In the motion of the very leaves of spring in the blue air there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.


In her first essay, Oliver describes how, as a youngster, she wandered in solitude upstream in the woods, away from family, immersing herself in the sights and sounds and smells…and silence of the blossoms.  She writes, “In the beginning, I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed.  I had to go out into the world to see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was…”


This got me wondering which of my young experiences contributed to setting patterns in me.  Immediately the colorful little shells on the beach came to mind, along with remembering my skin feeling gritty with sand.


On sunny summer days at the beach, I nuzzled my body into that hot sand, nose to the ground, searching for tiny shells striped with pastel colors, every one different.  When I’d collected all within reach and absorbed the sand’s heat, I inched forward on my stomach.  Each new position brought a deeply satisfying sting of fresh heat and renewed the hunt.


Later I picked through my precious collection, loving the colors and designs.  My mom gave me a square straw purse with a flat top where I could glue the shells.  I carefully chose and arranged my favorites, and carried that purse proudly.  I didn’t know till today that they were coquina shells, tiny clams.  



                                                           (from the web)



Oliver says, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”  My attention to color and design wove through the years.  In summer camp, we made lanyards — I recall combining the unlikely pair of orange and maroon, being thrilled by the result.  And every spring my grammar school yard was carpeted with purple jacaranda petals:  Stunning visions of bright purple on the black asphalt background will never leave me.  I also used to sit intently at my desk pressing crayons hard to strengthen their vibrance as I created plaid patterns.










In Annals of the Former World, John McPhee says something like: varied topography, surface appearances, are temporary expressions of the same underlying processes.  Foundational themes appear and reappear as they weave through the eons.  Color and pattern are themes in my expressions through the years…and have left outcrops like these along the way. They have all corresponded with my heart.




                                                    Up Alamo Canyon
                                                                       (macro photo)


                                                                               Wildflower Riot
                                                (acrylic on canvas)
                                        

                                                                                               Rainforest Riot

                                                                                           (acrylic on canvas)



Friday, July 29, 2022

Squamish Murals

     

The murals from the recent Squamish Mural Walk were fresh and bright, adding to the festive atmosphere.