"don't mind the sparks"

Yesterday's walk in the park seemed to be all about summer color. There was something about the clarity of the light. Cool air, hot sun, the craft fair that I avoided. I woke too early with low energy so decided to allow myself a lazy day with as much solitude as I could find. No grocery shopping, no Fourth of July fetes to attend at various friends' homes. The drive to the park revealed how crowded our small town is during this holiday weekend and I wasn't up for that. As for fireworks, I planned to ignore them or watch from my second floor deck just as I have in many years past. I remembered about halfway through the display and decided to try for some pictures with my zoom lens. I grabbed the camera and barefoot, in PJs, basically unprepared, began shooting.

The photos are mostly a washout but the challenge was fun and it was wonderfully chilly in the night air. Accompanying the far away sparkling blasts (I couldn't hear the booms over the thunder), lightning regularly lit up the whole sky, instant brief daylight, mighty competitors. I tried to capture nature's sudden lights but they were just too rapid for my equipment to handle. Earlier, on the phone, my daughter and I reminisced about the many times when she visited or granddaughter Kira stayed with us and we sat on the deck wrapped in blankets and sweaters and sipped lavender tea with honey (wine for me) and watched the display from our very own private perch. My thoughts were all about those long ago days as I watched alone last night, remembering that last year's holiday was spent with them in Connecticut.

I had no idea last year on the Fourth of July how my life would soon change in many ways over the next year. There were major losses and gains, inevitable change, inflation, deflation, joy, despair. I published a few things, did a couple of readings, stopped writing for awhile, refused workshops and invitations, knitted more, knitted less (still working on this one sock), started filling notebooks again and had many deep talks with best friends and family.

Those talks with more objective beings helped get me through this time without stabbing myself in the eye with a knitting needle. They're still helping and I am more than grateful. I'm not afraid to cry out when I need help and those that care hear and come knocking at my metaphorical door. And speaking of objective beings, the horses are back! Six!

There are two young ones among the adults (I think they're all mares): the two year old who was born on our land and her mother who birthed another foal last year while I was away. The grasses are very high in the fields as you can see from the photo and these lovely creatures (also known as eating machines) are enjoying it immensely. As I am enjoying watching them. They exude tranquility and decorate the landscape. All but one were taken away yesterday for the Arroyo Seco parade, but they will be back. The one left behind spent the day neighing loudly looking in the direction in which she'd last seen them. When I went outside to see what the noise was all about, she immediately came trotting to me. Unfortunately, I was not who she was looking for.

Lightning is not guidance.
Lightning simply tells the clouds to weep.
Cry a little. The streak-lightning of our minds
comes so that we'll weep and long for our real lives.
     Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)

flanerie

"the photographic shot is one of my sketchpads"
Henri Cartier-Bresson compared his camera to an artist's sketch book. I remember these words at the beginning of another summer and how many summer days I've had in my long life, the season of the first time of my existence. How many beaches and bathing suits, sandy walks, sun tans and waves breaking on shore? Inevitably, I wonder how many more I'll have -- and muse about how photographs end up being all that's left of a time and place.

This one is from the early 1920's. My mother (the pretty one on the right) with her brothers, sister, friends. The young man on the far left (wearing that improbable bathing cap) would become my father more than two decades later. In their bathing costumes they spent summers on the Bronx beaches of Throggs Neck and for as long as I can remember my mother reminisced wistfully about those days.

This may have been the only time of her long life when she felt joy and freedom. Beautiful, young, she bobbed her hair, drove a Tin Lizzie, was sought after by handsome young men and hadn't yet stepped into what was for her a paralyzing role. Marriage, children, not enough education, caregiver to her parents, a life mired in quotidian details. She was rarely happy when I knew her and there was often a faraway look in her eyes. Not uncommon among women of her era and milieu.

In my life I've erroneously stumbled onto some of the same paths my mother took. The difference is that I know I don't have to continue walking them -- thanks to the Feminist movement of the1970's when my eyes were opened once and for all. Thanks to something inside of me that has been described by Buddhists as a river of longing and by others as a refusal to accept things as they are.

what I am looking for, above all else, is to be attentive to life
          Henry Cartier-Bresson

ways of running

Sometimes lately I don't know if I'm coming or going. Albuquerque, Taos, east coast, Taos, Albuquerque....

It's been one hell of a ride since the beginning of the year. Not all stressful or bad but stress comes from many directions and circumstances - even good ones. We were in Albuquerque for Ron's treatments for a couple of days last week and this week. My current bout of vertigo I attribute to three flights in one day in crowded airports and planes and then a three hour journey in an old van back to Taos from the airport, sans luggage. Or maybe I'm dramatizing that inconvenient day because I hated it so much. I'd had a good week back east and felt calm and peaceful inside. The weather was perfect, there were walks, writing, reading, good food, in congenial company.

I remembered that when I assisted at weeklong retreats in Taos we told everyone "when you leave here you will feel a peace inside that will be shattered by traveling and landing back in your regular busy life. Don't expect those closest to you to understand so try to ease into it rather than plunge." Good advice. I remembered, I tried -- but was unsuccessful. I reap the consequences now by feeling unbalanced.

One cholla plant was in bloom when I walked in heat of late afternoon in Albuquerque. A delicate flower amidst thorns and with a short life. Somewhat like humans. And yesterday, walking in the park, looking for signs for the future (I do that sometimes) this is what I saw. 

A friend said, "don't curse the darkness, light a candle."
I answered, "I am the candle"
But what if I'm just smoke?

learning new perspectives

Three weeks since I wrote anything on this blog. Hope some of you are still out there reading this.  It's been a challenge to juggle Ron's medical care (he's doing well) and my own creative life that came to a halt. I needed time away so in between his two appointments in Albuquerque I took off and went back east for a week. There was a nurse/helper who came in for a few days to help him until he decided he didn't need help. Family and friends phoned and visited so I felt fairly secure that he'd be alright. I felt a twinge of guilt before leaving, until someone who knows about caregivers said, "think about when you're on a plane and the flight attendant says, if there's an emergency, put your own oxygen mask on first, before trying to help others." That resonated with me and I put on my metaphorical mask and left. It was the best gift I could have given myself.

The weather was perfect and I did lots of walking, writing, eating. Met some new people and stayed in a comfortable place. I came back with a new perspective even though traveling yesterday was a huge and very long, drag. I was rerouted from Newark to Chicago to Dallas to Albuquerque where I had to wait two hours for the Taos shuttle to bring me home in an ancient van with a very casual driver! Very Taos! I got home late and without my one piece of checked luggage that still hasn't turned up today. Next trip I'll pack lighter and carry just an under-seat bag. I hate all that business of people shoving their over-stuffed bags into overhead bins (which I can't reach anyway). It takes so long now to deplane that I once missed a connection because of it.

it's here, it's here!
Just before I left, the book my essay is in, as well as photos (one on the cover, lower left) arrived. It was published in England by Solis Press and I missed the first book launch in Ireland at end of May. I'd really been planning to go, but life is what happens when you're making other plans.

My lengthy essay is called Spirit Socks and is about the related history of sock knitting in Taos as a valuable trade item with Mexico in the mid-1800's -- and my own experience kitting socks in the very place where the "factory" existed. There will be a USA launch at Wellesley College sometime this summer or fall and I hope to make it to that one. Meanwhile, you can learn more about the book on Amazon or directly from the publisher. I feel quite proud to be included in this collection that also includes human rights activists and scholars. Check it out.

Everything desireable is here already in abundance.
And the sea. The dark thing is hardly visible
in the leaves, under the sheen. We sleep easily
So I bring no sad stories to warn the heart.
            Linda Gregg
            (excerpt from A Dark Thing Inside the Day)

the lusty month of May?

I hadn't realized how long I've been away from this blog. Every day in Albuquerque, starting in March, I marked an X on the calender, April came and went, I flipped to May and gradually those empty squares began to fill up. Ron's treatments were moving along and he was approaching the last hit of radiation. Full spring came to Albuquerque and I began to wear sandals and lighter clothes on my walks. Roses are blooming and trees are thick with leaves down there. Treatment over for now, I packed the car and we arrived home in Taos after seven and half weeks in Albuquerque. The driveway was flooded with icy irrigation water and I didn't realize how deep until I stepped into four inches of very cold water in my sandaled bare feet! That was the first test.

spring thwarted

It's mid-May now, we've been home for six days. The driveway situation was corrected: "the water jumped the ditch," and I spent the next two blustery cold days hauling stuff from the car to the house, up the stairs, put things away, while Ron rested. After one lovely 66 degree sunny day and a day of all-weather, hail, sun, rain, light snow, we awakened to this morning's blizzard:

Taos weather, especially up here at 7500 feet elevation, is schizophrenic, but this is blowing my mind - as well as blowing snow horizontally from northeast to west. Yesterday I noticed the lilac bushes filled with flower buds and imagined those brief days of fragrance, purple beauty, bouquets in the house. Their future is uncertain now.

"bella patina" (#2139)
I'm happy that I finished a new pair of wool socks just before arriving home. After searching for a few days, I found them in the corner of a box of books last night. As I worked on the hand-dyed yarn (Schoppel Wunderklecks, Germany), the colors reminded me of lakes, mountains, oceans I've seen. I'm going to wear them today.

The experience of something that has been thwarted is surely matched on the other side by something that has been unexpectedly fulfilled.
         (Rainer Maria Rilke)

displaced person seeking solitude

One hundred and one years ago, Rilke wrote these words in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salome:

"...there is never any hospitable room around me and I find no window through which I can gaze on something calm...I have no undisturbed place of my own."

I might have written those words this week, or last week, or anytime in the last five weeks! I am grateful for this comfortable, clean, inexpensive residency on the north UNM campus, in the midst of a huge sprawling medical and university complex, but....there is no place for solitude or contemplation. Even the miles of walking paths that meander all around and beyond a golf course overlooking the city of Albuquerque, are alive with panting, sweating runners. I tend to walk the paths in early evening around the same time as the runners and dog walkers.

The dining room of this Casa is the only place to pick up a strong wi fi signal and it's usually buzzing with cooks at one or more of the four kitchenettes, the TV is on or (as at this moment), classic country music on the radio, turned way up. There are kids and loud families. As I write, a couple of tables are filled with loud-talking groups and no one is listening to the music blasting in the background. However, if I turn it off (as I did one day to the TV) someone will say (with a look), "did you turn that off?" So I come in here on early mornings and late nights to find a half hour or so of peace and quiet, maybe have a quiet phone conversation with a friend and try to sustain the peace long enough to write a blog post (not very successful, as you may note from the long stretches between). And I do understand that everyone here is connected to someone with cancer. Maybe the music and TV are about life and energy. In the kitchen, I met a painfully thin older woman around my age who wears the same loose grey cotton house dress every day, with sandals on her bare calloused feet that sparkle with hundreds of rhinestones. She told me, through the four teeth left in her mouth after radiation, that she weighted 328 pounds when she was diagnosed two years ago. But she is, as of this time, free of cancer and on "maintenance" treatment now.

The two small rooms we live in are fairly quiet, but this place has thin walls. Ron doesn't feel well enough to leave except for his treatments at the nearby Cancer Center and an occasional trip to the organic market when I drive there. We are in close proximity all of the time and I often feel that all I can do is jot words in notebooks and watch movies with him (which he mostly dozes through) and knit. But we are two-thirds through treatment. He's had some dark and rough times, and today a hint of improvement. We thought we'd be leaving next weekend, but it seems we have two weeks to go. We haven't been home in weeks and it begins to weigh us down. I look forward to taking a few solitary retreat days sometime next month. Not sure yet where I'll go, but it will be quiet and peaceful!

For now, I'll channel Rilke again:

As my words grow more numerous "the disturbances that reached [me] become less frequent; for all noises broke off when they came in contact with the realities that surrounded [me]."

quests & journeys

It's just the imprint of a shoe's heel in the sandy soil near the path I've been walking almost every day until my back started hurting. The last time I walked it felt like there should be an ocean nearby, the wind was warm and it sounded similar to surf (why does everything remind me of something else?). The swirls in this imprint resemble archetypal designs that show up in so many cultures and with so many meanings. I really don't know what meaning this shoe sole has for me.

It's spring down here in Albuquerque. Very dry though, just like the rest of the state, perhaps worse than in Taos. Water levels are critical in the southern part of the state. The wind blows soil and grit around and it feels very desert-like. I don't know if snow melt has begun in Taos. I'll miss the sound of the rushing rivers when it does begin. I heard it snowed the other day.

And, of course, Albuquerque is a high desert.

the journey
We spend our weekdays going from one radiation treatment to another, chemo, blood work. It's the same each day, but is hardly routine. I am simply the driver and companion, Ron has to endure it all and it gets worse each week as side effects have begun to kick in. But I remind him, once you make the decision to live, you have to go through hell to get there. It's like the obstacles in stories and fairy tales: the three-headed monster, Scylla and Charybdis, Harry Potter's horcruxes, even Dorothy trying to get to Oz and home again (mythical and fictional quests help keep things in perspective). One step at a time, one day at a time. Sometimes, one hour at a time. It is a worthy quest and the difficulties only make the outcome more compelling.

This desert is beautiful once one gets past the six lanes of traffic and the congestion. At least the place we are staying is sheltered from city noises. And, hey, as I've said before, this ain't New York City! It's generally quieter and slower and easier to drive (in spite of several lefts when I should have made rights. We are each on our journeys and sometimes mine gets derailed temporarily. 

Note: I've tried to write and send posts at least three times recently but the wi-fi connection where I'm staying is unreliable and cuts out just when I'm ready to hit send. So, for all of you who regularly read this blog, thanks for hanging in there with me.