restingmotion

A Few Snippets From San Francisco.

All I can say is that I didn't intend to drag this out so long...

 

Here I am my first morning in San Francisco ready to go out.  It is cool and I intend to walk around a while and perhaps snag myself a treat before meeting Lisa for lunch.  Although you can't tell, and I forgot to take pictures during the day, the jacket is navy, and I am wearing a winey-purple tunic under it. By the time I met Lisa, the scarf was either tied to my handbag, or stuffed inside. 

After admiring each other's watches I mentioned that I needed a second watch, one without a leather strap, one that I could wear working outside in the humid summer heat.  I had been considering an Apple watch for some time, especially the lavender-strapped variety she had linked to in her blog.  However, each time I went shopping for one in Knoxville the lavender was out of stock, and I was reluctant to order it sight unseen. And so, after a conversation-filled lunch, being only a couple of blocks away, we proceeded to the Apple Store.

The store is architecturally brilliant, and I wish I had taken more pictures, had spent more time looking at the way the store uses light and space, creating something that is both protected and open, modern yet with a respect for the past.  Alas I was entranced with the process of spending money and being kitted out in my new watch.

The next day I went to the Fort Mason Center with friends to see the American Craft Council Show.  We had a lovely time.  I was surprised in that the show seemed smaller and quieter than I had remembered the early shows at Rhinebeck being, or the Baltimore and Atlanta shows, which I remember as being mammoth and crowded.  But it has been years, and perhaps my memory is faulty.  There was much to see, and I collected some cards from artists whose work I admired.  The  tiles pictured above reminded me of paint colors I had been looking at recently, and they also appeal to that part of me that loves old Craftsman tiles (and over-the top art nouveau tiles as well), that same part of me that still dreams of a 1920's or 1930s house.

But this necklace was the only thing I purchased.  It seems there was a gray and lavender and rose gold theme going on. Two simple beads on a cord.  It was the specific shapes and colors that attracted me, and its casual simplicity.  The necklace is exactly the kind of simple shape I love, especially in the summer, when it feels too hot for any excess.

 

 

 

Short But Not Necessarily Sweet Summer Reading

Since my last book report, I have indulged my love of stories. 

 

First I read The Man in the Glass Booth by Robert Shaw.  Although a play is a story, or tells a story, reading a play is not like reading a novel or a short story.   I personally like reading plays, but they do require a slightly different mind set, as they are really meant to be visualized rather than read.  This particular play was difficult to read, it was probably a difficult play to watch as well, as there is much that is intentionally ambiguous.   In some ways it reminds me of a play I wrote about last fall,  Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets, not really because the story is similar, or the writing, but because both force the audience to address basic assumptions and perceived truths about themselves and society.  But I think it would be even more difficult for a modern audience.  There are significant references to art and music, references that I believe would have been familiar to the audience of the 1960s, but which are not so familiar today.  This is partly because many years have passed, but it also because of a cultural shift that has occurred in the intervening decades.  I think this play, like another book I read earlier in the year, The Dissapearance, assumes a higher level of cultural literacy.  It is a product of a type of high-toned popular culture, often called middlebrow, as it was basically a middle-class culture, but one that still believed that culture built character, and a respectable person should strive to understand the best writing and art as part of becoming a better person.   That culture still existed in the 1960s in large enough quantities that magazines and plays would be marketed to it, but doesn't really exist in any significant way today. 

 

 Still,  if you are up for it and can find a copy, I recommend reading the play as I am not sure it is performed much anymore.  It will challenge your beliefs and understanding of human nature, and intentionally so.  The play is about Arthur Goldman, a wealthy Jewish industrialist, a holocaust survivor, who is arrested and tried for being a Nazi war criminal. Goldman is outrageously irreverent in both his personas with the effect that one questions who he really is.  It is in this, Goldman's shocking tendency to play against type, to throw his accusers beliefs and assumptions back in their faces, that we find the true and unsettling strength of this play.  Goldman is aggravating, confounding, and both appalling and all too familiarly human. The play turns the reader's understanding of victimhood, responsibility, retribution, survivor guilt, and the complexities of good an evil in the human experience completely upside down, and leaves us with no easy answers, in the end causing us to question not only his guilt or innocence but our own.  I read the play nearly two months ago, and it still slinks through my mind.  It may continue to do so for some time. The play was made into a movie.  I think I will look it up sometime.

 

Next, I thought some rather light reading along the lines of a murder mystery would be entertaining for a flight, so I picked up Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry.  It is taughtly written and rather compelling although I couldn't say that it was actually very light as I found much about the story that was disturbing and the main character to be completely aggravating.  Yet I couldn't put the book down.  The story is told from the perspective of Nora, the sister of the victim, who finds the body, and it perfectly captures her jittery, haphazard, at times maddeningly obtuse and otherwise emotionally flat affect. Although I am not particularly knowledgeable of the mystery genre, I found it be a good psychological suspense story that told the story in a new and somewhat unexpected way.  The conclusion seemed a bit of an afterthought in some ways, as indeed I believe it was meant to be.  Although the story begins as a search to find a killer, and the killer is indeed found, that is not, in the end the real focus of the suspense in this story.

 

I also read Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment, a book that probably deserves its own post.  But it is also a book that I can't really write about.  Nothing I put in words is as powerful as the book itself and it is not a book I would recommend to the casual reader.  It is the first book of Ferrante's I have read, and I understand that it is different from her Neapolitan novels, which I am now looking forward to reading.  I love this novel, but it is raw, and gut-wrenchingly intimate and painful.  Basically it is the story of a woman's descent into despair and loss of identity following the dissolution of her marriage.  I have no experience of divorce; it is something I hope to never experience.  And, like the grief from a death, I am sure there are similarities and differences in everyone's experience.  But I am familiar with grief, at least from the perspective of losing a spouse to death, and although death also feels like a betrayal, I can believe that divorce is a betrayal of a completely different nature.  Ferrante's prose is so beautifully rendered, so personal, that I felt drawn into Olga's misery, as if her despair was my despair, as if all the ugliness of dissolution was palpably present.  Since I read the novel, I've read some reviews that find the story overwrought and implausible.  I do not.  Ferrante touches on something, some aspect of grief and loss, of losing oneself and finding oneself again, only changed, that we all must experience at some point, something I can definitely understand, and makes it real.

 

I'll end with two books that I feel are best read slowly, perhaps as part of a daily practice of meditation.

Plain Living: A quaker Path to Simplicity was picked up for a Sunday School class, a class that I missed most of due to other obligations, but I am happy to have found the book.  The book actually does not have a narrative structure, instead consisting of a series of quotes from various writers that have been grouped according to themes by the author.   Read consecutively, I believe the author is a bit heavy-handed, but that observation does the book a disservice.  I don't believe it is meant to be read from cover to cover, and if one is so inclined, there is much wisdom to ponder here.  I would say the book is more theist than specifically Christian. Although many, if not most, Quakers do consider themselves part of the Christian tradition, this book is not limited to that mind-set but rather on the relationship of the individual to the divine, and the search for simplicity as a pathway  to finding clarity of purpose and meaning in life.

 

Listening is an Act of Love by David Isay was given to me as a birthday present.  It is a compilation of stories edited from interviews that have occurred as part of the Story Corps project.  Like the previous book, the editor has grouped the stories by theme.  Also like the previous book, I find they are best read one or two at a time.   By reading a story a day, I fond the stories powerful reminders of the importance of everyone's life and story, each revealing in their own way something of the human condition that I could relate to and be inspired by.  They do not stand up to further scrutiny however.  Read straight through one gets the sense of something missing and yearns to hear more of the interviews.

 

 

 

Meandering Musings on a Thursday Morning

Right now, I have a low-grade headache and my eyes are just beginning to water.  I am home, but I spent last night in a hotel, the same hotel to which Tikka and I will retreat this evening as well.  And so, once again, my plans are more or less on track, but the path has shifted and even perhaps meandered a bit.  I have a friend who always says the plans are "firm as jello".  It is a phrase I have pretty much taken to heart, as it mirrors so closely my own approach to life.  You can plan and plan, and then you just have to let it go.

 

So this post will be interrupted, and I've decided to go ahead and write it as such. 

 

The flooring installation team will arrive in a few minutes to resume gluing down the new flooring in the master bedroom, the same engineered hardwood floor that matches the rest of the house.  I had requested vinyl in that room when the house was built, knowing full well I would eventually need to replace it.  But the process of aging can be rife with indignities and I was tired of scrubbing grout and carpet, and far too aware of the tendency of liquids to run between the floorboards.  Perhaps wisdom comes with learning to accept the things you never wanted to know anyway, and then moving forward.

 

What I didn't anticipate was the fumes from the glue.  It began when the vinyl was removed, but continued through the gluing of the floorboards.  Burning, watery eyes, draining sinuses and a growing headache told me that I would not be sleeping in the house, and so other plans were made.  I had thought that I would use my retreat to write a blog post, perhaps read, or knit.  Instead I found myself overwhelmed with exhaustion, ready to do nothing further than watch tv, let my mind decompress, and go to sleep. And so I slept, slept better than I had for a while, not because the hotel was more comfortable, but just because I was in a space outside of my own routines and obligations.

 

And here I am again, home, enduring the headache because, well, I have stuff to do here, stuff that I will do best here, at my own desk in my own space, with occasional breaks in the fresh air. I am here because I want to be here.  Granted the heat and humidity don't make the fresh air all that inviting either, but then, no one ever promised me that the world would revolve around my wishes and preferences. 

 

And I am excited about the floor.  I am excited about the process of moving things back into the bedroom, even though most of that will wait until tomorrow.  I am very aware that my ability to replace the floor, my ability to chose to escape to a hotel in the evening, even my ability to chose where and when I work are all privileges.  They are privileges I have worked for, but they are privileges none the less.  

 

"Firm as jello". Even privilege is a tenuous thing.  You can work hard to achieve a certain place in the world, perhaps even come to it by accident.  But despite all one's effort, the result is still a tenuous thing.  Circumstances can, and often do, conspire against your will.  You may never achieve your goals; even if you do, you can still lose it all.  I am comfortably secure.  And I can make good choices with the goal of maintaining my status, my privilege, if you will.  But if I am wise, I also have to admit it is never all about me, or my work, or my choices.  The world intrudes.  The unexpected and unanticipated intrude, and sometimes they intrude in terrible ways for which we are not prepared, and we all have to adapt.  Hopefully, learning to adapt, and learning to let go, come with age.  Increasingly I think this is a significant part of what we call wisdom.

 

I am not really a particularly patient person.  I know people who think otherwise about me, but this is simply because they only see one side of my personality.  Like everyone I know, I want safety and security and simply to be happily ensconced in my own little safety zone.  But I also realize that there is no such thing.  I see it as an illusion; an illusion I may yearn for, but an illusion none-the-less.  We have to change to survive.  The world changes around us daily, and eventually we have to change or be overwhelmed.

 

And it is this part of me, this part of me that sees change as constant, this part of me which is a corollary to the "firm as jello" part of me, that gets frustrated and sometimes impatient.  I do get impatient with people who dig in and refuse to change, especially when they see the need intellectually but can't bring themselves to venture out of their comfort zone, especially when they say they want change and yet can't, or won't, take the necessary steps.  I get impatient but not angry.  This is one of the reasons I am not a person who has a natural gift of healing or soothing others.  I can be good at seeking compromise, at moderating, but I am not a healer.  I am far too impatient. 

 

What people don't see is that I am just as impatient with myself.  I get frustrated with others, but I get equally, if not more, frustrated with myself.  I find self-forgiveness far harder than forgiving others.  I don't hate other people, but there was a time in my life when I hated myself, and I do know how difficult it is to let go of that self-hatred.  I do know that I often fall victim to the same pigheaded determination to be right and to be safe as any other person I know.  It seems I am constantly learning about new blind spots.  Each blind spot I overcome seems to reveal two more.  I hope this is the path to something or someplace better, because it sure is a rocky road.  I get frustrated, not because I think I am better, but because I am well aware of how treacherous the road can be, of the boulders lurking around the corner, and because I don't want anyone to fall by the wayside.

 

 

Restoration

I have been sewing, although my recent sewing has been restorative rather than creative.  I love handwork, the process of hand-sewing, of hand embroidery and needlework.  It is restorative in that it soothes my soul but also opens a door that allows it to soar freely, as if the act of slowing down, of small repetitive, attentive motions, allow something greater to take flight. I regret that I stopped doing handwork for so long.  I rejoice that I have found it again.  With time, patience, and practice, my skills will improve.

An older silk banner needed repair.  The silk backing, which was shredding, came off.  One of the hanging tabs was also in poor condition.  It needed to be turned and lined, then reattached to the banner.

But the entire top support of the banner was in sad condition. The new tab is in position but not yet anchored.  You can see the shredding of the fabric, the many decades of wear and dirt.  It was questionable whether the top of the banner would continue to hold. 

A support band was added, anchored in several rows across the top of the banner, stitched through the tabs and canvas underlining.  Three rows of stitching were added, although this photo was taken early in the process and you do not see them here.

Then a new silk backing was attached.  Many hours were spent making small stitches under magnification.   Although many would find this work tedious and boring, I know of few activities that are more peaceful and centering.

 

I returned the banner, but I really should have spent more time, let it hang for a week or two in my studio before returning it.  People missed it, and I was going away.  I felt guilty about keeping it while I was gone.  But that was my own, self-imposed guilt, my own failing.  The weight of the embroidery and the heavy appliques pulls the fragile silk, which is shredding in places, downward.  The previous backing, equally old and equally shredded collapsed at the same rate.  

 

Like everything in life, perhaps like life itself, restoration is a series of compromises.  I see what needs to be done.  The work goes on. 

 

(All photos, except the second were taken under magnification.  This is both a godsend, that my older eyes can see, and a curse, in that I see how far from perfect my stitches are.  Mastery can only be achieved through years of tiny steps)

Five Things Friday

1.  The dressers I dismantled and reassembled so that they were all the same height were moved into the master bedroom closet.

Now all my clothes are in one place, in a room where there is light and they can actually be seen.  It is both wonderful and overwhelming.  Even though my closet is by no means full, my first reaction on seeing everything together is "I have too many clothes".  But I have already edited my closet down considerably, eliminating things that fit a previous life, that didn't fit, or were the wrong colors.  The problem is that I have a wall of fabric I want to make into clothes while at the simultaneously feeling that there are things I need (there are indeed) and I have too much.  The challenge is finding the perfect meeting of these all too human impulses, realizing as I do so that contradiction is an essential part of human nature.  Our passage through life is a process of growth and also of editing or refinement.  I think somewhere along the line my journey the balance between making and editing will take on a more curatorial process. Or I could just be saying that to make myself feel better.

 

2.  Last November I brought a silver chest home from Texas.  It was made by my grandfather and contained assorted sets and remnants of my grandmother's silver.  The silver simply needed polishing, but the chest needed refinishing and relining with silver cloth.  It went off to be refinished and restored, along with a small chest of drawers I had salvaged many years previously when someone left it out on one of the designated curbside pickup days.  Both chests came back home in mid July.

My grandmother's silver has been returned to the upper chest, where it is used every day.  The lower chest, which I suspect was originally meant to store papers, now holds placemats, napkins and assorted small pieces.  The drawer bottoms are very thin, hand planed at about 1/8 or 3/16 inch thickness and were bowed  and split to the point that I couldn't use most of the drawers.  They have been flattened and restored and are now usable.  This little chest is one of my most treasured objects, and using both of these pieces, my hands opening drawers made by previous hands, knowing that they were saved from the ignomy of a landfill somewhere to find new life and use, brings its own kind of joy.

 

3. A couple of times this summer, I've cracked an egg in the morning to find double yolks: 

I always get a little thrill somehow,  but it is a thrill tinged with sadness and knowledge of the fragility of life.  You know of course that twin chicks do not survive.  If embryos even develop, they rarely survive to hatching, and then cannot get themselves out of the shell, not having either enough room or enough strength to survive.  A chick that cannot get itself out of its own shell does not have the strength to live, despite all the best, and most-well-intentioned efforts of kind-hearted humans.  Food for thought.

 

4. A process that started with reassembling dressers (above) has taken on a life of its own and I find myself in the middle of an extended nesting phase.  Even in terms of decorating or home improvement, it seems I am all in or all out. Wallpaper was put up  in my office, turning it into a little jewel box that I hardly want to leave, which may be a good thing as I am involved in several outside projects as well, with a few more on the horizon.

There are two paint swatches on the gray wall in the hall.  One is actually the same shade of gray that is currently on the wall, but it appears slightly darker.  it could simply be the difference of using a higher quality paint and a different base than the one used by the builder, although the actual color formula is supposed to be the same.  I am not knowledgeable enough about paint to say.  The lower swatch is slightly lighter with a slightly more obvious lavender cast.  A decision has not yet been made, but I have learned that I am very comfortable with gray.

 5. It has been a long time since I've posted any kind of garden photos.  Truthfully it was hot and dry in July and the unrelenting heat was not encouraging.  But the small creeping sedum I planted in the bare area of the front bed, at the base of the magnolia has done very well, and is blooming.  Sometimes great beauty comes in very small packages.

 

 

 

 

 

Two Photos

During my recent blog break I was in San Francisco.  I was also in airports during the Delta computer shut-down and flight-cancellation mess.  But I was one of the lucky ones, one of the people who got to my destination within reasonable proximity of being on the same day, and with minimal fuss.  A lot of other things went on during my blog break, and they will undoubtedly come out in their own time.  But this is a (relatively) short post, and not the time for such things.

 

Once upon a time, I travelled to San Francisco once or twice a year.  But nine years had passed since my last visit, nine of the hardest years of my life.  Nine years ago, my own personal fracture lines were starting to show.  It was time to return, but I hadn't been ready before now.  I went to San Francisco to see friends, old friends mostly, friends who knew me before, but my trip also ended up being about reconnection with that person whom I was once was and still  am to some extent.  It was a visit of rediscovery.

 

I have many friends in San Francisco, many friends whom I did not see, many friends who may have been perfectly happy to get together, and yet I didn't make the effort.  And yet there were old friends,  friends I had not seen in seven years, nine years, friends I needed to see again.  There was a meeting with a new friend who is also an old friend.  And there was time to simply walk in this city.  Some part of my old self was waiting for reconnection, for rediscovery. I have never lived in San Francisco, but perhaps I have simply been there enough that I am completely comfortable being who I am without worrying about social signaling or connecting with my "tribe" when I am there.  I am sure if I were there longer than a few days, than a week or two here and there, my feelings would be different. But San Francisco reminds me that it is the closest I have come to be being a place person, although I am not a person of that place.  I have always  been a relationship person.  Home is where the heart is, where the relationship(s) that sustain the soul are, at least for me.  And yet I can, for a brief moment, when I am in San Francisco, understand the place-driven, for whom home is as much about place as about relationship. 

A lot happened on my blog beak.  I read.  I walked.  I spent time with friends and family.  And I rediscovered something about myself that had, before this, remained at least partially hidden.  That is the way of life sometimes, one step forward and two steps back.  Or is it the other way around?  It depends on our understanding.

 

Old and new.  Change, fear, and holding on to the dear and known aspects of life.  This is the human condition, this balance, this struggle.  The two photos in this post were taken within three paces and one counter-clockwise turn of each other.   They were the only pictures I took of this city.  The old, the new, the uncharted path. We never know where we are going, but wherever we end up is at least partially shaped by where we have been.

 

 

 

 

Blog Break

I'm off until mid-August.

My original intention had been to leave you with some interesting tidbit or another, but sometimes life doesn't work out that way. And so, until later ...,.

Take a Walk With Me.

Take a walk with me. 

 

It is an early morning in June, slightly before sunrise when we set out.  We are walking around the lake at the resort where I am staying with my family in Orlando.  The resort is perfectly nice; it would be a good place to stay with children for a family gathering, especially if one was planning on visiting the parks and cooking in at least part of the time.  I am not so certain it is a place that I will frequent at this stage in my life.

We've already walked around the small lake a couple of times,  The loop is slightly over 1/2 mile and this is our third loop.  We've watched a turtle glide lazily around the boardwalk on one end of the lake. But it is still early and there are only a few walkers and runners out.  We are on vacation time after all.  The playgrounds are empty, although just yesterday I watched a family playing checkers, the youngest child doggedly struggling with the large pieces, stubbornly refusing too much assistance from mom in his quest to be one of the "big" kids.

But even in these manicured gardens, there are things to see, treasures both grand, like the large bed of agapanthus,

and small delicacies, like the color of new leaves, still soft and velvety to the touch.

Two birds are having an extended conversation.  What are they saying?

There are hot sunny yellows, calling out for attention,

and pinks that seem cool and soothing in the gray early morning light.

Then there are the shy whites, tiny blossoms hidden in masses of greenery, dainty treasures that are simultaneously seen and not seen.  A small flash of white as one passes by, easily missed in the daily bustle, but showing great beauty if one takes the time to look.

Ahh, we are rounding the final bend. Soon the sun will be high and the sounds of laughter and splashing water will fill the air.  It is time to stop and savor a post walk cup of coffee before beginning the day.