Magical Catalysis

Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

—Roald Dahl 

Magic is much different than I once thought it.  Not an all-but-impossible thing, rare and hardly ever seen, but things themselves—a realization and appreciation of things in the world we inhabit, the world that inhabits us, magical as any childhood wizardry.

Just one example, from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire:

“The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.”

image: NoteFromTheUniverse

The Guest House

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

Some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

Who violently sweep your house

Empty of its furniture,

Still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

Meet them at the door laughing,

And invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

Because each has been sent

As a guide from beyond.

—Rumi

Fun to imagine that the basis for a story or a novel.

Running an inn in Virginia hunt country, with the autumn and early darkness advancing, the woman I am (a verger of the Episcopal church, with airdale terrier named Walter Mitty) welcomes

• the man who’s hard of hearing, or would rather not hear, a retired astrophysicist who wants to find stories in stars instead of always numbers, calculations [depression]
• his carping wife, mouth with its downturned corners opening and closing like a carp, nails painted with Cajun Shrimp polish [malice]
• a curly-headed child, who loves baby smoked clams and Harry Belafonte songs [joy], her mother an actress at the Stratford Festival, Ontario (last summer Alais in The Lion in Winter) [shame]
• a loan officer with a secret tattoo (anchor, the soul of a drowned sailor; or Minoan swallows fighting) [meanness]
• a family of thieving Corfiotes with a party rental business, dance floors, tents, glittery Cinderella coach with pony and plumes; linens, glasses, fairy lights [crowd of sorrows]
• male cook, Athabascan, flashing his knives and reading Schopenhauer [dark thought]

image:  Screened Porch, Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park

Leg-Warmers and Boeuf Bourguignon

I have my new leg-warmers on, and just had some of Julia Child’s boeuf Bourguignon delivered to our doorstep (as well as soup and salad for tomorrow’s lunch).  So all is well, despite the 40-degree temperatures in our spare room, and despite another Monday.  And here’s my E.E. Cummings for the day—

“may I be I is the only prayer—not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong.”

Those other things would  naturally be welcome too, but I think in the end they come out of the first, if one just goes on in one’s nice leg-warmers and dances to one’s own drum-beat, taiko or calypso or otherwise.

image:  baby leg warmers, cutiepiegoodies

The Grass Is Greener, The Lights Are Redder

We'll go look for a Christmas tree today (not in the fog on a hillside in Santa Cruz, this year), but these are the trees I want!

image:  PorchSitting Union of America

Distillation

I’m trying to distill the year into a single page, for my annual Christmas letter.  Trying to extract the essential.  Going through old posts, reliving the myriad living details, weighing again the losses (childhood house, accustomed place of work, old family friend, time for writing and cooking and being me).

Listening to the Emerson that I have taped outside my cube (despite the edict to keep everything inside)—

“Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today”—

and learning that I am enduringly myself, despite it all, inside it all.  Like the pink grass that we found on the big island of Hawai’i always growing back first on the lava, or like the waves of busy thought and unrestful emotion that our mindfulness teacher says let break overhead, while we imagine ourselves sitting calmly in the deep, still, underneath waters of the ocean (being the deep waters, the clear, sunstruck waters I picture with that splash of yellow fish), I find the cracks in misery and poke my nose out, curious and stubbornly determined, hopeful beyond hope, and irrepressible.

“a wind has blown the rain away & the sky away & all the leaves away, & the trees stand.”

e.e. cummings

Yes, the trees stand—stand still.

Distilling:  making stiller than still.  Poised at the brink, still.

image: ©Ching Ching — with Galina Deneva, Maria Rosa Juárez and Yehuda Edri - 

Yehuda Edri

To Market, To Market

Sunday’s farmers’ market included more riches for all the senses and stimulus for the imagination:

• woolen slippers in muted (mulled) colors
• kittens for adoption finding their children
• porchetta sandwiches charred on a grill
• an orange zest scone wrapped in paper
• tender lettuces bundled into a wooden crate
• the year’s last tomatoes and seedy peppers
• little tart apples, some gnarled in interesting ways
• olallieberry jam to stir into oatmeal
• wild sole to pan fry for tomorrow night’s supper
• mole negro tamales from the Oaxacan Kitchen
• the smell of curry, and of spit-roasting chickens
• chocolates, olive oils, cheeses
• the art supply store, brushes and easels

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Peppers, Alcudia Sunday Market

Sonoma

Such treats I have had!  (Such places I’ve been!)

A wonderful Thanksgiving with friends:  candles, sheets of paper taped against the blinding sun in the direction of the sea, reggae and upbeat world beat, photos of their walk up Machu Picchu in the early fall, the New Mexican feast (red-chile-rubbed turkey with cornbread-chorizo stuffing; red chile gravy with sage; cranberry, fig, and pistachio relish with spices and a soupçon of red chile; green chile spinach casserole with cheddar; and New Mexican Gruet champagne, from the winery below Sandia Peak, the watermelon-shaped or -colored mountain with the tram—which I have ridden only once, that with my Spanish class in highschool when we went on to the zoo and I took black and white photos of zebras in the also stripy shade and then we had an Indonesian meal with unfamiliar condiments, exotic in memory too).

Then up to Sonoma, a favorite sleepy town among the vineyards, now discovered.  A perfect lunch, sitting at a sunny little table on the square outside the wine shop—a bowl of spicy black bean soup (black bean with seven spices and whipped goat cheese) and simple salad, tender lettuces and big curls of carrot with lemon vinaigrette; local cheeses (one a heavenly smoked mozzarella) and a glass of wine, some pomegranate-marinated eggplant to scoop up with toasted bread.  And after, deciding to save our visit to the mission for the next day, prowling through a used bookstore with good mystery and history sections and a good selection of cards, and a fun shop with inspired desktop Christmas trees and French linens I’d fill my villa with if only I had one.

And then!  Arriving at the Mission Inn (and Spa), just up the country road at Boyes Hot Springs, we felt immediately well and happy, as if entering a place outside the world.  As soon as we drove in we said “I never want to leave!”  Somehow the grounds just radiated their nature as a sacred healing ground—making you think of mountain sanatoriums (in The Magic Mountain, or Heaven Has No Favorites), and reminding me too of favorite campuses, sanctuaries of learning.

Gorgeous dappled sunlight poured in through the windows of our spacious room, lighting a blaze of Japanese maples and silvery olives.  A stretch of time, hours of well-being.  A headboard painted with a Tuscan country scene.  A wholesome, delicious room-service menu:  foods healthy for every possible diet or preference.  We finally decided on grilled salmon on greens, braised chicken with spinach and wild mushrooms, and an artichoke with hummus.

The next morning I splurged on lemon & cottage cheese pancakes, and then—oh luxury!—still further, on an herbal wrap with deep heat (chamomile, calendula, lavender, and saffron) and heavenly foot massage—talk about never wanting to leave.  I carried away the fragrance of the herbs in my skin, deeper than skin-deep.

The drive back through the vineyards, past the stand where I once used to buy cherry cider, led to a further gracious night in San Francisco, grilled fish and potatoes, brussels sprouts sauteed with ginger and black mustard seed, and then an orchestral treat for the ears (after all of that pampering of all my other senses) with double basses, double choirs, and excellent English baritone.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Outside the Sonoma Mission

Ajar

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

And still more gratitude!  I leave my heart ajar, to let in all good and advancing things.  And I give thanks continuously—even when I seem to grumble.

image:  Miele Tèe Dolce Lavanda

As Long as We Have Voices

“In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.”

—Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

More gratitude for this Thanksgiving week!

image:  Yehuda Edri

A Rather Large Amount of Gratitude

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.”

—A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Happy Thanksgiving, happy life with such friends in it!

I'm having a hard time finding the words to say just how thankful I am, but will borrow the words below, my favorite poem on the subject, that says it all—whatever can be said.

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse

I pick an orange from a wicker basket

and place it on the table

to represent the sun.

Then down at the other end

a blue and white marble

becomes the earth

and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,

open a bottle of wine,

then I sit back in a ladder-backed chair,

a benevolent god presiding

over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing

a homemade canticle of thanks

for this perfect little arrangement,

for not making the earth too hot or cold

not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees

and the owl become possible,

not to mention the rolling wave,

the play of clouds, geese in flight,

and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again

and give thanks for the trout,

the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows,

as sun and earth and moon

circle one another in their impeccable orbits

and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

—Billy Collins

image:  Miele Tèe Dolce Lavanda