Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We drove up to our cabin overnight, to get a water leak fixed and talk to a contractor.  There was no one around, and we walked to the tiny restaurant for dinner and then found our way back by flashlight.  Late in the night I was laying on the sofa and there was not a sound, when an owl hooted three times, then at intervals again for a couple of hours.  I couldn't sleep.  I kept waiting for the next communication.  And I realized the owl was busy and nighttime was his element.  I wondered what tiny creature was being stalked.  It was very Halloweeny, and tonight is the real thing.  I'm going around with my daughter, son-in-law and youngest grandchild.  He is a dragon, and a butterball turkey kind of dragon.  I'll phone my other two grandchildren and wish them well.  I give books instead of candy, but there will plenty of sugar, I'm sure.  Since the entire country is in a ghoulish state, I can't think of a celebration more appropriate.  Let's witness the kids' innocence and our failure to fully protect them.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We went with a friend to the Richard Strauss opera "Arabella" yesterday.  The music was sublime and the voices terrific.  Seeing a comedy-romance rather than a tragedy was a welcome relief.  When we were riding home and turned on our phones we saw that the Tree of Life synagogue had been attacked, and our joy turned to sorrow.  At a bris, no less.  What should have been a celebration for a new life beginning became instead a horror show.  What popped up in my mind was gathering some friends and "guarding" a synagogue during services.  After all, most of the dead are my age or older, so if someone has a yen for gunning down old people, we can make ourselves the target, not innocent worshippers.  It's difficult not to think of our current national situation as a deeply dark period, more frightening than any horror movie or Halloween decoration.  We need to look at ourselves and find our better natures to combat this evil.  And evil it is.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My younger son and I had a rare afternoon alone together.  We saw a show he had installed at an art gallery an hour away, and we had lunch first.  The show was small, but breathtaking.  Agnes Martin paintings were in the middle two rooms and Navajo rugs were in the entry room and back room.  Each rug and each painting was spectacular.  The sense of Agnes Martin's living in the southwest was readily apparent.  With each piece, rug or painting, the closer I got, the more detail and color appeared.  There were many surprises:  flecks of red in what seemed from a distance monochromatic, and variations of yarn and color seen only as you stood a foot away from a rug.  The rugs were vivid strong deep colors, with a lot of earthy brown and deep blue of a night sky.  Martin's paintings were seemingly stripped of color except for pale peach, a luminous yellow, a washed out blue.  Yet they were the same landscape.  And they were not only representational but spiritual.  You were pulled to step into the painting or rug.  upon close viewing, the flaws in Martin's lines and the weaving in the rugs highlighted the humanity of each artist.  We took each other's photo before our favorite painting and rug.  Then we stopped by a university art museum and looked at old faves and a small show of Elizabeth Murray, who couldn't be more different, more cartoonishly playful.  Her pieces were huge and some sluggy brownish, and others neon psycadelic.  Her joy in materials was blatant and contageous.

We went back with visual memories stored in our minds for touchstones to beauty and connection with our earth and the surprising artistry of humans, with whatever materials they fashion their dreams.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Our whole family is so excited that our older daughter is having her novel published!  I know just how much effort and time it takes to get writing out in the world, and we're so proud of her.  Though I have not read it, the blurb sounds exciting and complex and deep.  I can't wait to read it.  Anything worth doing takes time.  Yes, there are the techies who become millionaires overnight, but for most of humanity it takes, as the Brad Pitt character says in "World War Z", us to GUT UP.  My husband's PhD took many years and a previous attempt at grad school.  Writing requires years of lonely struggle, art is often beating your head against a wall, and teaching is all the nights awake worrying over that kid you can't seem to reach.  My family perseveres.  We aren't flashes in the pan, we're a slow cooked meal.  And after all, isn't it the process that teaches us what we need to learn, more than the product?  What we learn is to believe in ourselves, and pursue our passions.  Against all odds.  Gut up, indeed.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Today is our daughter-in-law's birthday.  My husband and I have the tradition of singing Happy Birthday over the phone for our kids and grandkids.  Dreadful harmonies, but we do our best.  And our family is getting so delightfully full that it feels like every other week we pick up the phone.  Our daughter-in-law has only been that for a year, but she is pregnant, so we were singing for two!  How amazing that when your kid marries, you get this new kid and all their family as well!  I enjoy her brothers, their wives, and their children.  I get excited when her older brother is having their second child.  The first has played with my grandson several times, and is quite a character.  We spent the Fourth of July together, and I loved the fullness of it.  The stretching with open arms of the boundary of family.  We're all the richer for it.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

One grandson is going to be a butterfly and the other a dragon, so I think they run the gamut as far as fantasy goes.  Come to think of it, both can fly, so maybe there is something about being 2 and 3 that involves the desire to dip and dive and float in the air.  I really lucked out yesterday, because I found a perfect outfit at the first place I looked for the dragon boy.  His size, with a sweet dragon face and scales, and sewn in warm fleece.  Used, of course.  I was helping out because our daughter has no time after teaching to shop on weekdays.  I used to order a costume for our granddaughter.  I think one of the first was a cupcake.  Now, at 10, she creates her own, and she has an adult sewing machine and workspace in the basement for designing.  Halloween was my favorite holiday, because there were no gifts to buy and I and then my kids got a chance to express themselves.  Yes, there was the downside - eating way too much candy, but my husband and I liked to costume ourselves as well.  One year I was a pork entree, with a cardboard table and my head coming out of the center of the plate and a pig nose on top of my own nose.  I must say, it was difficult to dance in.  But it was harder on a friend who was a bookcase with a lamp on top that worked.  He had to stay plugged into the wall all night.  Anyway, I love seeing the grandkids and some of my kids dress up, and if not overdone, the children are awash in joy.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Yesterday my friend and I saw "The Oath".  It has been compared to "Get Out" and it has some of that same nightmare in suburbia feel to it.  Like "Get Out" the ending is comforting more than likely.  But the film has many funny moments and captures the zeitgeist of now.  I really liked the reversal of expectations inherent in Tiffany Haddish's portrayal of a suburban mom.  Everyone is great in it, and as a portrait of rage among ordinary people it is dead on.  There is some violence, and it is realistic enough to put the viewer right in the middle.  You actually want to shout at the characters and put your two cents into the mix.  I'd say that is the definition of engaged.  And it is, of course, a gigantic metaphor for divisions in our country right now.  Maybe crude, but I don't think so.  And it skewers all of us, like an equal opportunity mirror.