End of Summer Muse

This was to be a summer of drastic changes. I was ready to be new again. I signed up for a mystery-writing class, for chi conditioning (neither my old favorite Tai Chi nor Qigong). I began practicing Pilates, outside the Red Barn on campus where Stanford students board and school their horses, watching hawks and swallows overhead, wistful for my old love of riding, the dusty days at Santa Fe horse-shows seeing others, more daring, jump. I meant to rent a bicycle, to carry books and herbs in my basket, move slowly, drink only sage tea, become a better person, lose weight. I did finish a novel, start a long-contemplated blog.

But nothing has added up to more, or different. I am as I was before, only a short summer along. The world didn't transform for me, the way it did when I learned to tell it through photographs instead of words, or when the words returned. My spirit hasn't become gossamer butterfly. I am still bound by gravity. Now more than ever, in fact, despite finding a certain balance in the hour of Pilates up by the Red Barn, while others ride around the dusty ring.

Maybe change isn't what I was after? I've just been told that tea is said to taste much better brewed in pots that have accumulated a dark layer of sediment over the years. And in Tristes Tropiques, that marvelous journey to self, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss writes:

In Martinique, I had visited rustic and neglected rum-distilleries where the equipment and the methods used had not changed since the eighteenth century. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, in the factories of the company which enjoys a virtual monopoly over the whole of the sugar production, I was faced by a display of white enamel tanks and chromium piping. Yet the various kinds of Martinique rum, as I tasted them in front of ancient wooden vats thickly encrusted with waste matter, were mellow and scented, whereas those of Puerto Rico are coarse and harsh. We may suppose, then, that the subtlety of the Martinique rums is dependent on impurities the continuance of which is encouraged by the archaic method of production. (chapter 38: A Little Glass of Rum)

So I'd like to think that if I'm rustic and neglected, despite my attempts to make myself over, that's all for the best. What I love accrues, adding day by day and year by year to the flavor of my after all blessedly unchanged life.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, McCloud, CA