not a time of endings

The frenetic activity of the holidays has no place in the natural order here in the wintered west. The weak light is deeply slanted from the south. Most deciduous trees have shed their leaves and are resting. A range of migratory birds still find the occasional spider or a conifer bursting with seeds awaiting harvest or dispersal. And, the long nights and crisp days encourage a gentle sense of hibernation. The world around me is at rest, gathering silent strength for rejuvenation. Winter is not necessarily a time of endings. Like the conifer, it gives us seeds awaiting spring.

silly season's greetings

I want to send warm and mirthful greetings to everyone for a Merry Christmas. So, I am using last year’s photo of the skinny Santa walking the streets of San Francisco in one of our many outrageous traditions….SantaCon….hundreds, literally hundreds of folks put on some version of a Santa suit and go from store to store, bar to bar, Union Square to the Mission, all the while bringing a light-hearted Christmas spirit to the City.

Nearly the end of the year. Christmas just a couple of days away. Weather unseasonable, desperately dry and not much change expected soon. A few Christmas cookies baked. A few cards sent. A few gifts selected. Not much in the way of traditional decorations. It seems like an un-traditional season for me. Not bad, just not quite the pace of many years, not quite the standard that was generally unmet anyway. And, it seems really fine. Merry Christmas and/or warmest wishes to everyone for whichever holiday you are celebrating at the Solstice!

dancer on the street

The sun was shining brightly. The street was wrapped in a beautiful winter-morning’s cloak. A young woman, actually a girl, ahead of me was dancing from side to side on the urban sidewalk as she moved toward the stoplight. She had a broad smile and seemed to be hearing a tune that I could only imagine. We stood together as the light changed from red to green, she started across Mission Street. Only then did I realize that her dance steps were actually her normal walking pattern. Her spine had formed in such a painful way that she could only walk as a dancer. She crossed the street dancing, with her continuing and lovely smile.

The photo is of beautiful wild flowers that I photographed at Jepson Prairie one Spring. I hope that it is an appropriate remembrance and tribute to the dancer.

live the questions

American Thanksgiving. Most countries do not have a secular tradition of giving thanks for the bounteous gifts of the earth and community. As the day and weekend progressed, I began to question my own sense of gratitude. So much is taken for granted in my life. I never have a concern for clean water. The air in my city is almost always pristine. My food choices are phenomenal, safe and nearly always available ─ for a price. Frankly, most often my friends and I have the wherewithal to buy nourishing food. I live in a safe neighborhood, have dear friends and family, have never been displaced by war. And yet, I am not grateful every day for all of that. I don’t even notice much of the time. It seems simply normal, perhaps a birthright. One Facebook friend/colleague speculated that life is less worth living when we cease to have a sense of wonder about it all. That seems like a very good step to move toward gratitude. I so often turn to Rilke for an opening into the nether world. I remembered his advice the young poet to live the questions.

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

(Note: the photo is of a sculpture in the gardens of the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts. The sun was shining through the leaves of an old Coastal Oak and reflected in the polished center of the stone work by Dick O’Hanlon)

from the alpine heath

I had thought I would write about the grieving process and how we know little about the consequences and changes caused by loss, except as we look back. I have not been able to do so, perhaps later in a poem. At the end of this blog entry, I do have a poem by Vladimir Nabokov about the loss of youth.

 My youth was spent in the dream of government service in the State Department. In the summer of 1963, I was so privileged to have a summer internship at the new Peace Corps in Washington, D.C. I could see the White House across Lafayette Square from my borrowed office. Washington seemed filled with excitement and hope. It was Camelot. My boss was the President’s brother-in-law. Twice, I was awe-struck to be in the presence of the President. I shook hands with two of his brothers. Truly, it was an awesome experience for a young man from the Rockies. I was filled with hope that fall as I passed the Foreign Service exam and saw my life on the trajectory that I had dreamed, so supported by my family. It was not to be.

The 50^th anniversary commemorations of President Kennedy’s assassination brought days of reflection on my part. November 22,1963 was chilly in Boulder, but the sun was shining. I remember walking across campus to lunch at home with my friends. The phone was ringing when I opened the door. A political friend was on the phone with the unbelievable news. Everyone was in shock. No emotion. No talking. We had Campbell’s Tomato Soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. We ate in silence. At such moments, every detail remains etched.

I knew at that moment my life had changed for ever. The day remained mostly in silence, just a constant droning of the radio, as college students we did not have t.v. I have little remembrance of what was being said, just the unending drone. Late in the day, I finally found a church, Roman Catholic, with the doors open. This bereft, not very religious young man sat alone in the back pew near statues of saints I knew little about, near quietly weeping elderly women and realized I could not cry. And, truly my life had changed forever.

We So Firmly Believed

We so firmly believed in the linkage of life,

but now I’ve looked back ─ and it is astonishing

to what a degree you, my youth,

seem in tints not mine, in traits not real.

If one probes it, it’s rather like a wave’s haze

between me and you, between shallow and sinking,

or else I see telegraph poles and you from the back

as right into the sunset you ride your half-racer.

You’ve long ceased to be I. You’re an outline – the hero

of any first chapter; yet how long we believed

that there was no break in the way from the damp dell

to the alpine heath.

                                    Vladimir Nabokov

long shadows of November

Our seasons here, a Mediterranean climate mid-way between the Tropic of Cancer and the Arctic Circle, are more defined by light than by drastic weather changes. Many trees are coming into bud, fewer have lost their leaves. The grasses turn from golden to green with the first rains. But, it is really the light that marks time.

The long shadows of November, the sun barely edging over the southern hills in the City ─ a time to contemplate the coming darkness of full winter. I treasure each season, although the slanted light of late autumn or early spring seem especially wonderful to me. November light signals the slowness of winter, March light tells the coming wonder of spring.

Days are becoming short, the light even more precious when it is so limited. A time for interior repose and assessment.

without irritable reaching

So often our friends are openings into wisdom. Recently, I had afternoon tea (really old fashioned) with a dear and insightful friend. We treasure these times for the conversation, or sometimes we read  to one another poetry that we have found meaningful. This day was just meandering around our lives and how we perceive the end of life, and what is after this life. We talked about the thin veil to seeing that seems to be getting thinner with such incredible new knowledge of the universe. What are our personal connections between scientific learning and religious or philosophical thoughts and mores? How do we connect this past with now? Do we?

Does it matter? All questions, little resolve.

I thought of this as I was standing on the upper level of the San Francisco Art Institute recently. This sixties-modern building in early morning could have been Thebes or even Petra, with philosophers and seers debating meaning. And, yet, hundreds of generations later we are still left with mysteries that don’t yet respond to reason.

“Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason — “

                                                    John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends