I went to Franklin Canyon today—a local park off of Coldwater Canyon Drive, a few miles from my home. You forget you’re in L.A. when you’re walking there among the sycamore and redwood trees, the sky a brilliant blue and the winding trails that lead steeply upward or circle the small pond with mallards and wood ducks vying for position in case you have bread to give them. My friend and I walked and talked—about our work, our families, travels we’ve had, or were going to take, what was to come and what had been. It was a simple walk, not profound in any way, not life-changing, but calm and sweet, gentle in a way that was like drinking a glass of cold water on a warm day or taking a nap in the afternoon, a kind of reverie that nourishes body, mind and soul.

Toward the end of our walk we met a couple who said they had been coming to the park every day for twenty years. They were probably in their seventies. He was tall and bearded and held the leash of their Airedale dog. She walked with a cane and wore a fur trimmed, knit cap that she popped off just long enough to reveal the brilliant white color of her hair, just growing back after undergoing chemo. She laughed about how it had a slight curl to it now, which was not there before. The husband knew much about the trees in the park, showing us the tiny pine cones at the tips of the towering redwoods, the drooping branches of the deodar cedar and told us how the water that flowed into the small reservoir there was not pumped, but siphoned from the source. The wife was Finnish and spoke with a soft voice about when she was a child in school and had learned all the trees and plants in her home region, had made a notebook of samples of each one and had labeled each with their common and Latin names. We strolled with them for awhile until it was time for my friend and I to turn off and return to our car and drive back into the city.

When I was visiting my mother a couple of weeks ago she and I were sitting in her living room one evening and she started talking about the neighborhood where she grew up in Portland, near the railroad tracks on 20th Street—how there was every nationality represented: Italian, Asian, African, Russian, Irish and Mexican. She talked about living as a young child during the Depression, her first job as a secretary and working six days a week for $5 and splitting that with her mother 50/50 to help cover expenses. She talked about the scandals in the neighborhood: divorces, beatings and even murder. There were the decent people and the rotten ones, and it didn’t matter the color of their skin or how long ago they’d stepped off the boat—it was how they treated their neighbors, how they watched out for each other that mattered. I vowed, after hearing her talk, to get these stories down on paper—for our family, for the generations.

Perhaps I’m getting sentimental, seeing the earth spinning so fast that it wrenches my stomach these days and I want to hold onto something that is solid, like the center post in the merry-go-round, where life is not a blur. but more like a leaf-strewn path, meandering through time and space, where precious, precious souls leave their footprints, their stories. Maybe, it’s because I’m a writer of poems, one who fingers the scales of what was, what is and what could be. It seems that poetry is about honoring and preserving what is absolutely unique in each of us—of all that has ever existed and will exist—burrowing into what is so different and finding, there, in the center that still place where we are gloriously at one. The thousand-year old redwood, the wood duck and its mate, the Finnish couple walking in the park, my mother and her long-ago neighbors and the stories they have to tell—all we have to do is listen, just listen.

May your 2008 spin a little less and meander a little more.

A couple of days ago my husband and I took a trip up to the Getty Museum. It was a blustery, rather chilly day, for L.A. but there were still pretty sizable crowds lining up to get on the tram that climbs to the top of the hill, where the many buildings of the museum reside. We arrived around 12:15 and had a reservation at the very popular restaurant there for a post-Christmas lunch at 1:30, so we didn’t have time to see too much. Our first stop was at the permanent collection of the European masters with always my favorites of the late 19th century paintings of Monet, Van Gogh, Pizarro, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne and others. There is always a crowd in this particular room of the exhibition, but it was manageable and we made our way around the room, stopping in front of our favorites to linger and drink them in. My husband favors Claude Monet’s, Wheatstacks, Snow Effect Morning and I am entranced by the watercolor of Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Blue Pot.

It reminded me that I had written a short essay about the still life watercolors of Cezanne and in particular, Still Life with Blue Pot when I was in my third semester of school at Vermont College. It was my art study semester and I fell in love over and over again with the paintings of the impressionists and expressionists of the late 19th century and early 20th century. To me this art is the most alive, most present and most emotionally compelling of anything I’ve seen. Following a few photos from our day at the Getty is a reprint of my mini-essay and a poem, of course.

Still Life with Blue Pot by Paul Cezanne is deeply explored in this oversized book written in conjunction with an exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Cezanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors. There are numerous partial and full-page photos of Cezanne’s paintings, with particular attention given to details of the painting Still Life with Blue Pot. These close-up photos of the painting are particularly entrancing as they reveal the movement of the brushstroke on the canvas, the layering of the colors of the paint and the penciled lines of the original drawing.

The French poet Charles Baudelaire is quoted as saying that “the modern artist acts as a kaleidoscope; color is relational and plural in its effects, while working on the eye and imagination of the viewer like a prism or faceted jewel.” This is the experience of peering deeply into these Cezanne’s watercolors. They are beautiful to behold as a completed composition or a simple study, as in Decanter and Bowl on page 80, which is charming in its depiction of these two simple objects, yet one can also feel the energy of a man and a woman; partners who are not only utilitarian, but have a wistful and demurely sensual aspect to them. Cezanne accomplishes this effect with his ability to create a carefully crafted still life scene that, at the same time, appears unassuming and spiritually beguiling.

Cezanne sought to “realize his sensations” and was not given to follow any particular school of painting, rather chose to incorporate them in relationship to his own artistic sensibility. He follows no set procedure to constructing his art and often blurs the “distinction between sketch and finished picture, and even privileging the former over the latter.” This shows up in the enlarged details of Still Life with Blue Pot where graphite lines are seen swirling amidst the brilliant colors and white expanses, adding a wonderful sense of imagining the hand of the artist on the canvas, not in perfect determination, but wandering, playing, letting the hand go where it will.

There is something about the irregularity of these watercolors, how they pool, drip, are not controllable within any boundaries, that is so liberating to observe. The way the colors run together and the objects themselves have murky boundaries, often flowing over into one another. It speaks of life and how individuals slip into and out of our lives, daubing their particular hue onto our psyche. Cezanne had the ability, through his mastery of color and brushstroke and his intention to “realize his sensations,” to depict a simple grouping of fruit and pottery that transcended the commonplace, transforming them into a glorious and ephemeral experience for the viewer.

Cezanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors
Carol Armstrong
Getty Publications
 

Van Gogh’s Bed

is orange,
like Cinderella’s coach, like
the sun when he looked it
straight in the eye.

is narrow, he sleeps alone, tossing
between two pillows, while it carried him
bumpily to the ball.
is clumsy,
but friendly. A peasant
built the frame; and old wife beat
the mattress till it rose like meringue.

is empty,
morning light pours in
like wine, melody, fragrance,
the memory of happiness.

Jane Flanders (1985)
from Ekphrastic Poetry website
 

This is the longest hiatus from P.E. I’ve ever taken. I haven’t felt inspired, been feeling more inward and, honestly, kind of tired of hearing what I have to say. That happens. I have been writing poetry. They occasionally float quietly in through the window. Other times they stomp up on the porch and bang on the door. Most of the time they just sit down with me for a little chat, to let me know there’s something they want to say, something I need to get busy writing about or I’ll wither away. The desire to write poetry is something I treasure, something that means that no matter how bad the world out there gets, that poetry still wants to live, wants to give voice to the depth of human sorrow and the beauty of the human soul.

I’m back in L.A. for the time being. The summer was spent bouncing up to Oregon several times, over to New Mexico, up to Napa and back to L.A. in between all of those trips. There were times when I found it difficult to ground myself, to connect with where home was for me. Instead of seeing the divine order of my life, I felt split in two, caught between, not only my two places of residence, but between who I was and who I am becoming. I wasn’t sure where I belonged.

It was on the drive down from Oregon after my last trip that a peace settled over me. I drove the 900 miles with only my two dogs as companions. It takes fifteen hours and I split it up into a day and a half-day. It’s always tough on the body, these road trips, but there’s something so liberating, something that gets freed up inside when you move through the countryside, stop at little towns and wayside stations along the way. By the time I pulled up in front of our house in L.A. I was joyfully exhausted. There was a certain amount of triumph in having gone the distance, but more than that was that somewhere along Hwy 97 or I-5, a peace had arrived, an understanding about where my true home is, where I will always belong—a place that will never have a mailing address or a weather forecast. I can’t really explain it. Like a good poem, peace is a mysterious force, some of which can be told, but most of which reaches down inside you and opens you to an inner truth, to grace.

Here are some photos taken in Oregon and on my way driving south.

 The "old bridge" over Crooked River Gorge between Redmond & Madras, Oregon

The train bridge over the gorge. When I was in high school my friends and I would come out and play chicken. Scared me then. Scares me now.

Closer look at the train bridge. It’s an amazing piece of engineering and beautiful to behold. Same goes for that husband of mine!

 
Here’s me being artistic with the photography.

Gotta interject a "bridge" poem that I fell in love with by a Polish Poet, Leopold Staff.

THE BRIDGE

I didn’t believe,
Standing on the bank of a river
Which was wide and swift,
That I would cross that bridge
Plaited from thin, fragile reeds
Fastened with bast.
I walked delicately as a butterfly
And heavily as an elephant,
I walked surely as a dancer
And wavered like a blind man.
I didn’t believe that I would cross that bridge,
And now that I am standing on the other side,
I don’t believe I crossed it.

Leopold Staff
Post-War Polish Poetry

Grass Lake just south of Mount Shasta. One of the most stunning and peaceful places. 

The story of Grass Lake. Maybe if you get a magnifying glass out you can read what it says.

Some days I’d like to believe that the most important thing in all the world (well, in my world anyway) is the poem I’m working on—my current one, the one that’s fresh and full of potential, still moldable and tweakable. I’ve got a couple right now that I wrote over the last few days. I may be talking on the phone with the online bank manager or taking a shower, walking in the meadow or watching Crossing Jordan on TV, but I can feel them circling around back there in my head, arranging and rearranging themselves. I go to the computer several times a day to pull them up, read through them, read them aloud, pull a word out here or there, switch another one out, shift the line breaks. When I’ve got a new version I like I print them out on a fresh sheet of paper and set them on the desk.

 There’s been a large red-tailed hawk circling around the house and immediate area the last few days. Sometimes I only catch the enormous shadow of his wings out of the corner of my eye. Just now I watched as he (or she) took a few turns right outside the window, seemed to have something in his sights, but then let the wind carry him away with no reward for his efforts. It feels that way with poems sometimes. I’ll have an inspiration that, in the moment, lyrically sings its way into my head. I write it down and it appears beautifully on the page, so fresh and authentic. In the moments, hours and days following I never take my eyes off of it, hover over it, nursing and encouraging it along, even though at times it may lose all of its luster, seem dull and unwilling to accurately portray the illumination of my original thoughts. More often than not, I must move on to another poem, let this one go, admit that it’s either not ever going to make the grade or that it needs time to mature, come of age, before I can embrace it fully and take it all the way home.

As for the two new poems presently on the table next to my left elbow—I am encouraged. They are coming along nicely, without any major hang-ups to wrestle with at this time. They’ve still got to go through the gauntlet of the workshop and being honed to the point of submission (that’s submission for publishing, of course). Time will tell. Tomorrow the forecast is for thunderstorms. Perhaps there’ll be a new poem there; in the lightening, the rain, the movement of the clouds in the sky. It’s not mine to ordain. The poem, just like the red-tailed hawk, glides into sight on its own clock, shows itself fleetingly. If you don’t look up in that moment, if you don’t grasp it in your heart with passionate adoration, it simply moves on over the trees, out of sight.
 

Rock and Hawk

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realists eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

 
Robinson Jeffers
Selected Poems
Vintage Books, Publishers 

We have a wonderful woodstove here in our Oregon house that heats the whole upstairs, so I decided to get it going to take the chill off this morning. I opened the lid and began wadding sheets of newspaper and stuffing them inside. I was all business and just about had a heart attack when a small bird flew straight up out of the stove, whizzed past my head and landed across the room. I was immediately startled, completely awed and a little bit frightened by the sudden presence of this wild creature. I figured it must be a fledgling as it only flew in short spurts and not very high. It was covered with a dusting of ashes and although it wasn’t trembling or chirping I sensed the bird’s fragility as it sought to orient itself in this foreign environment of “inside.” Also present in this diminutive creature was the indomitable will to survive and to escape, as it headed straight for the clear glass of the windows, to the tall trees and patches of sky it saw there. Because the day before had been quite warm the stove had remained unlit, making me aware that it was very likely the bird had been in that soot-blackened stove for 24 hours or more with no means of escape.

To get some counsel on what to do with the bird I called my husband in L.A. He was a boy scout in his youth and an experienced woodsman. I rely on him heavily for his clear head and practical advice when it comes to navigating such situations. After giving him all the details together we concluded that to release the bird, instead of capture it and take it to a sanctuary, was the best course of action. It appeared healthy and, as it was capable of flying on its own, we felt it would be better served by being returned to its natural habitat. After taking a picture of the confused little guy as it crouched halfway under the sofa, I caught it and cupping it close to my chest, carried it to the window and let it go. It rocketed out of my hands and flew in a ragged pattern diagonally across the driveway, landing in the tall grass under a pine tree.

The sensation of that small, vibrating body nestled in my palms stayed with me throughout the day and into the night. The whole experience felt holy somehow, like the bird and I had acted as catalysts, each for the other, revealing both the tenuous nature of our existence and the unbridled wonder of it, in such a tender and forgiving way. I will never know if the bird survived, if its mother found it, as my husband suggested she might. I do know that the spirit of the bird and the memory of our brief encounter will live on as message and metaphor in the lore of my own mythology, to be savored and re-savored–a little bit of winged magic fallen from the sky one spring day.

Later that same day…

I finally got out for a walk in the woods across from our house, here at the foot of the mountains. It’s been ten days and for some reason or another I’ve been avoiding it. I practically had to push myself out the door, away from the couch and the TV and my desire for comfort. I followed the deer trails. I would start out on one and then wander off, only to find another going a completely different direction. I veered away from the roads and houses, the sound of people talking. There were the tiniest of wildflowers blooming in the dry soil. I fell in love with each violet, yellow, and rusty red blossom. There were twisted, old stumps laying on their sides, slowly sinking back into the earth. I skirted several red anthills, a hawk circled, a solitary deer bounded through the bitterbrush and sage. There was a heart shaped lava-rock that fit perfectly in my closed hand and two rusted cans that had been used for target practice. (These last three items I picked up and brought home for some reason I can’t explain.) As I stepped out from the woods and crossed the paved road, drawn to the meadow and the golden grasses shimmering in the fading light, I was so grateful for the wisdom of nature, how absolutely embracing she is, how she draws no line between the living and the dead, the budding and the decaying, how they mingle amongst each other as an enduring reminder to the short-sighted of what has always been true, of how we are simultaneously of this earth and not of it. I turned back to the asphalt road and back to my sweet house on the meadow, taking what I found, leaving a few footsteps in the dust.

A BIRD CAME DOWN THE WALK

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, –
The looked like frightened beads, I thought
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, plashless, as they swim.

Emily Dickinson
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Barnes & Noble, Publisher

FULL MOON THAT STRIKES
THE EARTH COLD

or to be young geese again
on the night of their first
migration: two angled lines
joined only at the vertex.
A week ago the full moon

that strikes the earth cold
began a thin blue air
in the distance that parted
for the V of your leaving.

Karen McCosker
A Poem A Day
Steer Forth Press, Publisher 

Here’s my thoughts from this week’s PE letter with accompanying poems. Sweet Dreams! 

I’ve been going through a period of enjoying good sleep. If you’ve ever been an insomniac (which I was earlier in life) or a restless/up-and-down type sleeper you know what torture it can be and how it starts to skew the daylight hours, making you grumpy and inattentive, with health issues starting to crop up in body, mind and spirit. You get the idea. Well, what a relief to have made it through the last couple of years where the hormones were jumping around like kangaroos on espresso, allowing for little or no chance for a peaceful and deep reverie at night. I would either be freezing cold and piling every blanket in the house on top of my shivering body or feeling like someone had dropped me in a vat of boiling water, like the proverbial lobster, flinging the just-moments-ago precious blankets off onto the floor, leaving not even a thin sheet to cover my steaming body.

It’s hard to say what changed the “climate” but these last couple of months I have rediscovered what it is to sleep through the night, with only an occasional trip to the bathroom or groggy awakening to check the clock and roll back over into dreamland. And, speaking of dreams, those too have been more fun and interesting, leaving less residue of angst and fear that I was going over the mental edge when I awoke, my eyes bolting open and calculating my best escape route from the creatures under the bed or rustling around out in the backyard. I’m not sure what affected the change—whether it was just the body running its course with the whole change-of-life thing or if all those vitamins, herbs, homeopathic remedies, acupuncture, massage, chiropractic and various healing modalities had finally reached their cumulative potency and kicked me through to a new zone – like restarting the computer when a program stalls and you’re not clear exactly why, but when you Ctr-Alt-Delete all is well again on your monitor screen, one of the many mysteries of this life that you just accept, unless you want to spend your lifetime researching and analyzing the why and the wherefore of such things.

I’m grateful, that’s all I can say, and honestly, take one day (or should I say night) at a time, not sure that the next time I lay my head down on the pillow I won’t wake an hour later in a cold sweat, desperately flailing about for those blankets that I so confidently stashed away in the closet down the hall.

SLEEPING ALONE

It should be easy, no one
   Else breathing beside you
And no restless turning
   Away and, look,
No hands or uneven feet
   In the wrong nightmare
And no murmuring heart
   Open or shut now, sighing
For you or yours but yours
   Alone this night, oblivion
Not yours for the asking
   Or begging, but the surprising
Glimmer of dawn, even there
   In that place somewhere
The other has gone to sleep
   Without you, not now
And then, but forever.

David Wagoner
Good Morning and Good Night
University of Illinois Press, Publishers

A BED FOR A WOMAN

I sat right up in bed and said, “Help.”
I didn’t scream it as if I were dreaming
a nightmare. I don’t know what I was dreaming.
The “Help” came from a dream core like the pulp
in the core of a tooth. I wasn’t frightened,
and that’s important since it took all my
energy and self-concern to understand why
I spoke in the darkness but wasn’t frightened.
I rose up out of bed like a person
whose fever had broken as this person
had known it would. Desperation,
hysterical shapelessness, was not in the word
as it would have been had I called, but I spoke.
“Help” was more like an answer. When I woke,
but not immediately, for I was too startled, I smiled
in this bed for a woman, far from the crib of a child.

Molly Peacock
Cornucopia
W.W. Norton & Co., Publishers

I was thinking about peace today and feeling weary. I used to shout about it, used to march about it, wanted to tear down buildings and burn flags about it. I was thinking about Ghandi, about Martin Luther King Jr., about how I’ve been at war with my own thoughts for 55 years now and how it’s time to lay down the sword, the shield, the desire to win and do what Christ and Nanak and Muhammad and John and Oko said to do: to love, to see what that can do. Yeah, it’s corny and naïve and let’s the other guy “win.” But it seems that winning is the object of war, so peace must be some kind of surrender, if only to the struggle. Don’t get me wrong, doesn’t mean I won’t put on my marchin’ boots again one day, won’t put my vote where my heart is and won’t keep praying every day for peace. It’s the conflict, the back-and-forth that I’m tired of having around. So, here’s my tribute to peace in the written word, photos and a bit of John Lennon to inspire. I wish for you true peace within that spreads like morning sunlight across the surface of this planet into every heart that beats.

All poems are from Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times, edited by Joan Murray, Beacon Press, Publishers. 

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry
 

ON PRAYER

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word is
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
and knows that if there is no other shore
They will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

Czeslaw Milosz
Tr. by Robert Hass 

I know the truth –
give up all other truths!

I know the truth—give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look—it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

Marina Tsvetayeva
Tr. by Elaine Feinstein

Give Peace a Chance by John Lennon from The Best of John Lennon

Here’s my two cents from the PE e-letter this week along with some added photos of a beautiful skyline in Central Oregon. It was one of those spring days up here when the weather went from sunny to snow to rain to hail and back to rain all in the space of an hour.

Whenever I arrive anywhere after traveling I am lost, not quite sure what to do. I have no rhythm established. Do I eat? Watch TV? Do laundry? Run outside and talk to the trees or people on the street? Unpacking helps to some extent—putting familiar things in unfamiliar surroundings—clothes arranged neatly in dresser drawers, shoes set by the door, coats and sweaters hung in the closet, computer plugged in, internet on, email checked, vitamins set out on a desk or countertop, toiletries lined up on the bathroom counter, my own down pillow thrown onto the bed with a wool shawl and my traveling stuffed bunny pal. These things all help “me” be in the room where my eyes and fingers can be in contact with them. I like to burn incense or spray a special “clearing” potion called Serenity Spray that has sage and lavender and other herbal essences in it, all of which uplift the energy and removes any bad vibes. I also bring a traveling altar with me, consisting of a couple of silk cloths, a seashell, a candle, a framed picture of my teacher or a guru and my book of prayers. When this is set up on a dresser top or nightstand then I truly feel at home wherever I am.

It does usually take a good 24-36 hours for me to “land” and I most often find myself regretting making the trip, immediately wanting to turn around and go home, even if I’m at my home in Sisters. Even though I’ve grown to know that this is what I’m going to go through each time, it still surprises me, catches me off guard and I’m spun out of my comfort zone into a sort of “outer limits” zone. It’s now been 48 hours since I arrived in Sisters and today I feel terrific. I’m perfectly content to be here, looking out the window, taking long walks, talking to friends on the phone back in L.A. I’ll go back on Saturday, as planned, but I wouldn’t go back earlier even if you paid me. I guess it’s a process of assimilation and like a dog who turns around three or four times before he plops down to sleep at night, we are creatures who must feel secure in our environments, allowing our senses to relax, our guard to be let down. We need to make a connection with the place and the creatures in that place.

I am one of the very blessed and fortunate ones in this world to have so many loving and supportive places to lay my head. Sometimes it just takes a bit of time to settle down and settle in to find myself never wanting to leave, until the moment that too turns and I am ready to go home or go forth, whichever way the compass is pointing, whatever the destination on my ticket reads.

I can hear the wind blustering, see the leaves on the camellia bush outside my window waving furiously and when I went for a walk with the dogs there were tree branches and palm fronds scattered across lawns, sidewalk and into the street. Nothing like a windy day to evoke the wildness – in nature and in people. What is it about the wind that gets us going? Here in L.A. we have Santa Ana winds that blow off the desert, warm and dry they are known to make men (and women) mad. Only temporarily, of course, but I am sure crime rates go up, as well as traffic accidents and luniness, in general. Of course there is no hard evidence of the latter, but those who live in it know what goes on, how we all get antsy, itchy, and no manner of scratching can relieve the need to move or just do something inanely destructive. Who says we aren’t affected by the forces of nature?

Navigating around town on this bright, smogless day was invigorating. I hit some of the spiritual spaces/places that I have come to cherish over the years. It’s one of things I love about L.A. – these places where people are making an effort to provide food for the soul, where you can go to read books on great spiritual traditions, listen to uplifting music and inhale sandalwood incense. This is the Bodhi Tree, a metaphysical bookstore on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, where the floorboards squeak and the stacks are a warren of respite from the Borders and Barnes & Noble of the world. It has a devoted clientele and in spite of the lack of parking and encroachment of high-end shops and office buildings, persists in its determination to provide spiritual sustenance to the community.

Before getting to the Bodhi Tree I stopped at our “family” yoga center, Yoga West, on Robertson Blvd to pick up some meditation music. The vibe there is so welcoming and gentle. For many, many years our teacher, Yogi Bhajan would teach classes there, always drawing a full house, booming out his messages of “Keep up and you’ll be kept up,” and “It’s not the life that matters, but the courage you bring to it.” A lot of yoga has been done in that space, a lot of meditation. Tears of joy and pain have been shed on those floors as students stretch not only their legs and arms and spine, but their understanding of what it is to be human, to be a spiritual being. It is another one of those places where it’s not about the money made but the difference made every day with every inhale and exhale.

After Yoga West and a quick stop at the bank (even I have to take care of business sometimes) I headed over to Elixir, a tea and tonic shop just a block west of Bodhi Tree to meet with my good friend, Heidi. We met a few years ago at a David Whyte seminar at Santa Monica University, where we sat in the same row and ended up doing some “exercises” together. She’s a great astrologer, writer, stage director, mom and all round caring and loving person. She ordered a “Virtual Buddha” and I got the “Depth Recharger” purported to replenish “jing,” revitalize liver & kidneys and clear “heat.” Sounded good to me, so I ordered mine hot and we took our beautifully sculpted mugs of tea out to the garden in the back to catch up on what has been going on in our lives. The water fountain gurgled, the sun sifted through the bamboo and the sounds of a woman’s voice singing (either next door or maybe from the CD playing) floated over us like an angel of the highest order. It was just good – good to be somewhere so nurturing, with a friend sharing warm tea and sweet muffins, an environment where giving and receiving kindness flowed so naturally.

In the Bodhi Tree I picked up a couple of books of poetry, The Forbidden Rumi and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Below is a poem from each book. I hope you’ll also enjoy a track from a CD I bought at Yoga West from Healing in Africa by Siri Dharma Kaur and The Alexandra Community Choir.

May the winds of change ever inspire you to be more and more yourself and may you get a little crazy every once in awhile, feel the wind-spirit blow you to new territory, new frontiers of consciousness. Up, up and away!!

The Eggshell of the Body

If you want to feel rapture,
then give up thinking, and quit worrying.

You’re like a bizarre bird
in the shell of the body’s egg.
You can’t fly because you’re inside the egg.

But when this egg is crushed,
you’ll fly free and save your soul.

Rumi
The Forbidden Rumi
Tr by Nevit O. Ergin and Will Johnson
Inner Traditions, Publisher

The Forge

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

Seamus Heaney
The Penguin Book of the Sonnet
Edited by Phillis Levin
Penguin Books, Publisher

Heidi Rose

A rainbow of Buddhas inside Elixir 

Teapots

The fountain and back garden at Elixir

Bodhi Tree front window with stained glass mandala. 

Inside the Bodhi Tree 

Bodhi Tree Checkout 

Teachers Bench at Yoga West 

The liquid that descends from the clouds as rain, forms streams, lakes, and seas, and is a major constituent of all living matter and that when pure is an odorless, tasteless, very slightly compressible liquid oxide of hydrogen H2O which appears bluish in thick layers, freezes at 0° C and boils at 100° C, has a maximum density at 4° C and a high specific heat, is feebly ionized to hydrogen and hydroxyl ions, and is a poor conductor of electricity and a good solvent (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).

On Sunday I spent a lot of time immersed. We have a beautiful oval-shaped pool in the back yard of the house we’ve been leasing for a couple of years, as well as a two-person hot tub. One of the best therapies for body, mind and spirit is to alternate between the frigid cold of the pool (we rarely heat it due to the cost and we’re not much into swimming) and the 103 degrees of the hot tub. By the end of 30-45 minutes of that you can melt right down onto the bed and sleep peacefully through the night. I felt like I needed an extra dose of hydrotherapy to ease some of the physical effects of travel and the still very present emotional effects of the passing of my father, so I took advantage of it being a quiet Sunday morning and dipped in and out of the warm and cold water, then wrapped myself in a cotton quilt a friend had brought me from India, sunk down onto the bed in our darkened guestroom and for the next two hours watched the film WATER, written and directed by Deepa Mehta.

 The film held me mesmerized. Set in India in 1938, but filmed in Sri Lanka after a public protest drove it from India, it is the story of an eight year-old girl who is widowed and then must live in seclusion and poverty with other widows, as society sees them as only “half-living” now that their husbands have died. There is great sorrow and great spirit in this film and such incredible beauty in the filming of it. The “ashram” where the women live is in a city on the banks of the Ganges, the Ganga—the Mother River, where Hindus bring the ashes of their dead and the devout make pilgrimage to bathe and cleanse their souls. I was absorbed into this film as a stream is merged with the river. It was a world so far away from my present-day reality and yet, the practices portrayed in the movie exist even today. I saw these women, as all women are — as water; fluid, ever-changing form, mercurial, emotional, powerful when provoked and as generous as the clouds that pour forth their bounty upon the earth. As everything is a teacher, so water is an endless source of wisdom, its lessons of compassion and of destruction always there to open us to the perfect rhythms of this world, as well as the vastness of its mysteries. Take a hot bath. Swim in the ocean. Drink long and slow from a pure mountain stream. Rent the movie WATER. Invite your loved one under the quilt with you. Let the tears roll. It’s so, so good for the soul.

Below are a few "water" poems written by women.

It was like a stream
   running into the dry bed
   of a lake,

               like rain
   pouring on plants
   parched to sticks.

It was like this world’s pleasure
   and the way to the other,
                                          both
   walking toward me.

Seeing the feet of the master,
O lord white as jasmine,
   I was made
   worthwhile.

Mahadeviyakka
tr. by A.K. Ramanujan
Women in Praise of the Sacred
HarperCollins, Publishers

FOREST LAKE

I was alone on a sunny shore
by the forest’s pale blue lake,
in the sky floated a single cloud
and on the water a single isle.
The ripe sweetness of summer dripped
in beads from every tree
and straight into my opened heart
a tiny drop ran down.

Edith Sodergran
tr. by Stina Katchadourian
Women in Praise of the Sacred
HarperCollins, Publishers

 
TO DRINK

I want to gather your darkness
in my hands, to cup it like water
and drink.
I want this in the same way
as I want to touch your cheek –
it is the same –
the way a moth will come
to the bedroom window in late September,
beating and beating its wings against cold glass;
the way a horse will lower
his long head to water, and drink,
and pause to lift his head and look,
and drink again,
taking everything in with the water,
everything.

Jane Hirshfield
Of Gravity & Angels
Wesleyan University Press

 
WATER PICTURE

In the pond in the park
all things are doubled:
Long buildings hang and
wriggle gently. Chimneys
are bent legs bouncing
on clouds below. A flag
wags like a fishhook
down there in the sky.

The arched stone bridge
is an eye, with underlid
in the water. In its lens
dip crinkled heads with hats
that don’t fall off. Dogs go by,
barking on their backs.
A baby, taken to feed the
ducks, dangles upside-down,
a pink balloon for a buoy.

Treetops deploy a haze of
cherry bloom for roots,
where birds coast belly-up
in the glass bowl of a hill;
from its bottom a bunch
of peanut-munching children
is suspended by their
sneakers, waveringly.

A swan, with twin necks
forming the figure 3,
steers between two dimpled
towers doubled. Fondly
hissing, she kisses herself,
and all the scene is troubled:
water-windows splinter,
tree-limbs tangle, the bridge
folds like a fan.

May Swenson,
Nature: Poems Old and New
Houghton Mifflin, Publisher