Writing

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Serendipity

I went to San Francisco yesterday for a job interview.

San Fancisco is my city. I moved there in 1967 to go to San Francisco State and stayed for 15 years. I love San Francisco.

I finished the interview at noon and had four hours to kill before meeting my friend. I had just read the day before that SFMOMA had an exhibit that features Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe.

It was first Tuesday – and first Tuesdays of the month are fee entry days into the museum. I did not know this when I decided to go there. The cost for the exhibit was five dollars. For another six I got the audio guide.

Earphones in place, I wandered (and wondered) through the exhibit of photos by Steiglitz, Weston, and Adams, and paintings by O’Keefe. All what I would call landscapes.

In one photo, Adams captures a lone dead tree in Owens Valley, a valley that had become desloate because water had been diverted from it to water the lawns of Los Angeles. In another, he captures sunrise over the Sierra Nevadas with the snow-capped peaks in brilliant sun, the foothills in dark, and a lone horse grazing in the meadow, a ray of sun illuminating that one spot. Apparently he waited patiently for the horse to turn so he could capture his profile instead of his rear end.

Patience pays off.

Stieglitz apparently saw Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings, exhibited them in New York without her permission, and when she came to protest, their chemistry transcended the 32-year difference in their ages. Thirty years ago I got a book of Stieglitz’s photos of O’Keefe. Theirs was definitely a union of artistic souls.

Displayed side-by-side are Adam’s photograph of a New Mexico church and O’Keefe’s painting of the same church – a church that looks as if it rose from the earth as a rock formation.

Color, O’Keefe says on the audio tour, is how she expressed feeling. You can understand why New Mexico, rather than New York, became her landscape, much to Stieglitz’s dismay. California is clearly Adams’s landscape.

A part of what distinguishes the artists displayed in this exhibit is that they didn’t go to Europe to study art. They stayed home and let the landscape educate them. In the very best sense of the word, this exhibit is an American landscape.

The audio tour also talked about how O’Keefe and her New Mexico home became a place where artists of all expression would come to – well, come to just be with each other. Poets, photographers, painters.

After I left the exhibit, I spent some time in the café, where a woman in perhaps her 70s or 80s wore a Seargent Pepper like costume with a crown-like hat. Shortly, her companion appeared – a man of a similar age in a red-silk shirt, a colorful vest and leather hat. His long grey hair was in a single, neat braid.

I took the N-Judah to Cole Street, met my friend, and reminisced about the stores, restaurants and cafes that had been a part of the Cole Street landscape over the forty years she has lived in the neighborhood. I had lived there thirty years ago. It is one of my landscapes – my neighborhood.

At the corner of Cole and Parnassus, the bakery where you could buy a birthday cake changed to the Tassajara bakery shortly after I moved there in 1976. I would on my way to work at UCSF for coffee and a croissant every morning. Sometime later it became a Just Desserts café. I don’t know when it became the French bakery and café it is now.

Cole Hardware is still there – a neighborhood hardware store that survives in this Home Depot and Loew’s Hardware era.

My friend and I used to eat dinner at Bambino’s before our Hospice Volunteer support group meetings. Wonderful garlic-rich pasta meals before an evening of intimate discussions about our experiences witnessing life coming to its end.

Last night we talked about the third friend who used to join us for the meals and intimate discussions, and how strange it is that we are now witnessing his life as it is coming to its end.

After way too much food, I got on the N-Judah, where a tiny young man, sitting next to a more robust young man who wore an Oliver Hardy-like bowler hat, played the ukele and sang songs. They were, the ukele-playing young man told us as we traveled along, members of a circus performing group.

Across from them was a woman who resembled someone I know from Livermore, the town I now live in. Finally I asked, “Are you from Livermore?”

She was indeed the woman I had seen in Livermore. We rode the rest of the way home together, while she told me her story of having a stroke six years ago and that she couldn’t be sorry. The stoke had almost taken her life, but he first day she walked out of the hospital she looked about and felt the beauty of the day.

She feels that way every day since. What the stroke took from her, it also gave her.

I drove her to her home in the countryside outside Livermore. We both said we used to think that the sueded brown hills looked desolate in summer, but had come to see their beauty. The sun was beginning to set and rain spattered the windshield. Few clouds were scattered across the sky so it seemed to come from out of the blue. Sunset-red and -orange haloed around the clouds as we drove, and she, an artist who will need to learn anew how to practice her craft, marveled over and over about the beauty of the landscape.

Her landscape. And mine.

Serendipity. Free entry into the museum where landscapes by artists of profound vision were exhibited and a ride on the N-Judah and Bart that helped me discover my landscape.

I don’t think I will ever again say that I have time to kill. I will know, instead, that I have time for life.

And now some of my landscape from Mendocino (Livermore landscapes will follow in the near future).

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’Splain Yourself Lucy

I haven’t finished a first draft of my novel. I finally understand who my characters are, what they want, and what’s in their way of getting it.

But, I was supposed to have finished a first draft of my novel for the class I’m scheduled to take in Iowa, which starts in two weeks. I only need to submit 35 pages to the class, so I can wing it.

But the class description says, “After working on your novel for six months or a year or—say it proudly—ten years, you’re finally ready to show it to other people.”

I think that means I should have a first draft.

I signed up for the class in January, thinking that it would provide me the incentive I needed to get the draft finished. But then, as I discovered one of the characters and as the plot took a new twist – well, I just don’t have a complete draft.

So, last night, at the first Literary Café, I asked should I come clean, or should I just wing it.

My friend, Jim said, “Every episode of I Love Lucy starts with her telling a lie.”

Oh.

When I was a kid, living in Saudi Arabia, I never went trick or treating for candy. I went trick or treating for UNICEF – in my Girl Scout uniform.

When I was 30, living in San Francisco, totally broke, and active in the Gray Panthers, a group I knew from the Gray Panthers decided to go out on Halloween as a group. We would dress up as crayons.

The tag line of Gray Panthers was “Youth and Age in Action.” It was a multigenerational approach to fighting ageism. Perhaps that’s why we were going out on Halloween. Experiencing our multgenerationalness.

We each got two pieces of poster board in the color of the crayon we had chosen to be. Mine was black. We spray painted party hats so we could have points for the crayons, used a stencil to spray paint “Crayola” in the middle and the squiggly lines at the top and bottom of the poster board, stapled the two pieces together, and punched holes so we could attach straps. We wore leotards and tights the color we chose to be.

I carted us from place to place in my 1971 Volkswagen bus. I thought about putting a sign on the front that said, “Sharpener in the back,” but ran out of time.

So here are the three things I learned from that night:

You could still do good work and dress in a costume for Halloween.

When you don a costume, you become the character of the costume.

Crayons really do go out on adventures at night while we sleep, and that’s how they know what to draw and color.

That last thing is the truth.

It’s also true that I haven’t finished a first draft of my novel.

I think that Girl Scouts, like Boy Scouts, aren’t supposed to tell lies.

So, I need to come clean. I think that I can still get something from the class, even though I don’t have the novel finished.

But I really don’t want to have to face Ricky asking me to ’splain myself.

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Call it What it is: Proposition Hate

To love another person is to see the face of God.

I remember the first time I saw Les Mis. I wasn’t expecting to like it, thought it was just another Broadway musical. But I became totally enthralled with it. I was already completely swept up in it when, as Jean Valjean is dying, the spirit of Fantine offers him her hand, assures him that his choosing love over fear made a difference. At the transcendent moment, Fantine, Eponine, and Valjean sing:

Take my hand
And lead me to salvation.
Take my love,
For love is everlating.
And remember,
The truth that was once spoken
To love another person
Is to see the face of God.

I didn’t know I had that many tears. I started to say that I totally lost it, but really, I totally gained it.

Yesterday, the California Supreme Court declared that fear transcends love. Declared that if your fear keeps you from loving another person, that you have the right to make that person illegal.

I couldn’t disagree more.

Sometime around 1982 or 1983, I wrote an article about the AIDs ward at San Francisco General Hospital for the hospice newsletter. By that time, I had been a hospice volunteer for two or three years. I was used to how a hospital worked.

What struck me about the AIDs ward (I think it was 5B) was that there was no room designated for staff. The room normally set aside so doctors and nurses could distance themselves from pain and death, was, instead, a place where staff and patients interacted in a casual manner.

They created a community.

The way they dealt with staff burnout was by recognizing that true patient care required an emotional commitment – to themselves as well as to the patient. Staff took care of themselves and each other by submitting to their emotions, and allowing themselves the time and space to tend to them. They supported each other, and when they needed a break, they took it

They allowed themselves to be healers.

The “authority” who designed the ward came from a nurse (now that is revolutionary in and of itself), a gay man. I don’t remember his name.

Towards the end of the interview, I asked him “What is homophobia?”

“It’s the irrational fear of homosexuality,” he responded.

“No, no,” I asked, “what is the fear of?”

He looked relieved that I asked it. “It’s fear of one’s own sexuality.”

That’s when I understood that to “come out” as being homosexual is not simple. It means that one has had to acknowledge that we are here for more than biological reasons. Sex is not only for reproduction, it is for connection. It is a vital part of our being.

And, the acknowledgment that we need connection – that we need to connect with someone who sees who we are and loves us for what is seen. And that makes us vulnerable.That, to me, is one of those moments when we realize that we live in a mortal body that requires attention because it is transitory. Its mortal nature makes for sacred moments.

It is the sacred in the profane.

To love another person is to see the face of god.

What disturbs me about the California Supreme Court’s decision is that it enables fear. It says that if enough people need the world to be defined by their fears, that their fear becomes the law of the land.

And that institutionalizes hate. It legitimizes fear of the other – gives someone the right to say “Just your being who you are threatens me, so I have the right to make you illegal.”

Women were burned at the stake out of fear of the other. Black men were lynched out of fear of the other. Millions were annihilated in the Holocaust out of fear of the other. Genocide against the indigenous people of America was legitimized out of fear of the other. The attackers on 9/11 legitimized their actions out of fear of the other.

We have to stop using fear of the other as the connector.

Instead, we need to allow our fear to give us courage. The courage to change. The courage to love, especially to love ourselves– our mortal ineptitude. The courage of compassion.

I have been basking in the realization lately that I feel loved. In large part, this is because I have a lovely, wonderful husband who is loving. His father called him Sweetman when he was a child, and I can’t help but think that this nickname allowed the sweetness of his nature to inform the fierceness of his nature. He is no pushover, my husband. But there is a sweetness to his soul that is like nectar.

But, I don’t think I could be feeling this way if I had not recently thrown aside the image I had of myself as a monster. That monster, I have come to learn, is really nothing more than my willingness to change. Seeing that as a gift, instead of a curse, has brought me great peace. I have learned to love myself. And now that I know how it feels, it’s easier for me to recognize it when others give it to me.

So, today, look in the mirror. You’ll see the face of god.

And, then, let’s take compassion to the streets, the courts, the ballot box, your church if needs be, wherever we need to take it so that love of and compassion for being human, instead of fear of the other, becomes the foundation for the law of the land.

And in case you need proof that you’re loved, take a moment to enjoy this sunset from Mendocino:

sunset_mendocino

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When You Become too Big for Your Britches

So in my last blog, I said that caterpillars change their DNA to become butterflies.

I was wrong.

Their butterfly-ness is part of their DNA from the start. Apparently some messengers are time released – they get woken up and sent out after an alarm clock goes off, a clock that is embedded in the DNA. At least, I think that’s how it works.

Wow. That’s cool.

So, first of all, bad on me as a writer for not having done my research. Fortunately, I have my friend Jim to point it out when I haven’t done my research, because his points always make me delve deeper.

After delving deeper, however, I think that the metaphor still works. In fact, I think it almost works better (which is why research pays off for writers – makes us better writers).

Our DNA is what makes us unique, while also connecting us to each other. This isn’t about fate or destiny, but about our true nature.

I’ve always thought that the admonition, “You’re too big for your britches!” is pretty lame. So what – we’re supposed to wear the same size britches at 14 as we did when we were four?

I have no idea what part DNA plays in our psyches. Maybe something, maybe nothing at all. But I do know that there comes a point in some lives when who you thought you were supposed to be, isn’t who you find that you are. Your story might be different than the one you were told was yours.

I think this can happen on a cultural as well as an individual level. I wonder if that is what is happening now. Joseph Campbell said that we need to create new myths; stories that are metaphors for a world that is both smaller and bigger than one that is limited by geography and topography.

We’ve seen photographs of earth. That has to have an effect on us, whether conscious or unconscious. It can evoke awe and it can provoke fear, for it requires a change in our worldview. We are part of something bigger than what we can see from where we stand.

I think that science, at its best, informs us of that. Art,I think, gives us metaphors that inform us how to stand where we are and participate in that something that is bigger.

We need both.

I think that when you become too big for your britches, the time has come to shop for a new pair. Or, when the story no longer works for you, it’s time to find the story that does.

Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize speech, says that the writer should banish fear from the workshop. He’s not saying don’t ever feel fear, just banish it from the workshop. I agree.

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On Purpose

Three weeks from today I will be in Iowa City. I’ve been going there for the past five years for the Writing Festival. My friend Selene came with me one year; a friend asked her, “Are you going to Iowa on purpose?”

My friend Selene being purposeful.

My friend Selene being purposeful.

So she wrote a poem titled “Iowa on Purpose.”

I’m a California girl through and through. Born here, lived here most of my life. Northern California, of course. Though I hear that Southern California has its charms.

What I like about California is its diversity of topography. Within four hours I can be in the mountains or Mendocino. Within five I can be at a dormant volcano or Hollywood.

It’s an interesting place California.

But I go to Iowa on purpose. It has something that California doesn’t: summer thunderstorms, lightning bugs, and cicadas that sing as day changes into dusk. They have waited ten years to emerge and sing their songs.

Talk about patience.

I might be learning patience; trusting that life unfolds as it should, if I pay attention to nuance. Nuance must be what a ciccada pays attention to – waits for the moment when it’s called to emerge and join the chorus. Talk about a miraculous moment.

Maybe I’ll try and record their music this year.

Last night, after dinner with friends, we talked about transformation. One friend, who takes the role of devil’s advocate, questioned whether we could ever really transform; took the position that we can never escape our birth language.

It was a difficult and interesting conversation for me, because I had to articulate what I meant about transformation, without having to be right and win the argument – an argument I didn’t know I was having.

I tried using the term paradigm shift, but he got irritated with the word, “shift.”

I asked him why it irritated him, because that was not my intent. He never answered that question. I think it was an important question, but he did not.

In the end he was satisfied that I wasn’t talking woo-woo nonsense, though I’m not sure he’s convinced, in the way I am, that we can transform.

So here’s what I’m thinking might be the metaphor for what I mean by transform.

Catepillars.

I sometimes think that catepillars are the most courageous creatures on the planet. They crawl along and at some point heed the call that tells them to cocoon. While they are in the cocoon, their matter turns gelatinous, they no longer look anything like they did when they crawled along the ground. In fact, they have no discernable form.

But then their gelatinous stuff forms itself into a butterfly. Their DNA changes.

They struggle to emerge, then have to wait for their wings to dry so they can fly, for what a day or so?

I mean what an experience: go to sleep, knowing a world that you only perceive crawling on the ground, then wake up with the ability to fly – to look down on the world you used to inhabit.

Maybe that’s what astronauts experience when they look back down on earth from space.

So maybe we can be caterpillars or cicadas. Trust that when a crisis gives us the opportunity to make a fundamental change in our belief systems – there isn’t enough for everyone, for example – that it is life calling us take our next step – which could be to take wing and fly or sing our unique song.

Dick Cheney challenges my ability to be compassionate. Why, oh, why does he and his family want us to be afraid – be very afraid. Perhaps his mechanical heart has too many shorts in it.