Read.Eat.Listen: Mom

Today would have been my mom 80th birthday, which is as hard to believe as it is to think that she passed away more than a decade ago. I don't know there is a bigger 'life learning event' than a parent's death. Any notion of permanence goes out the window; an awareness of the hows and why's of one's attachments becomes abundantly clear and no matter how old you might feel, you realize more than ever that you're responsible for your own reactions. And as the years go by, you realize anew how much you owe to your parents.
Read: Sometimes, all I have time or inclination for is poetry. More from Jane Hirshfield:

For What Binds Us

By Jane Hirshfield
 

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they've been set down—

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

 

Eat: Mom, dear Phyllis Jane, wasn't much of a cook or baker, but she occasionally whipped out a killer angel food cake. I loved watching the whole process of her separating eggs and whipping the whites into a great soft mound of goodness to lift and leaven the batter. Plus licking the bowl of its sweet sugary residue after the cake was in the oven was as much a treat as the finished result. As an adult, I don't keep white sugar or white flour in the house, so I searched around for a healthier equivalent and found this raw vegan version from Real Raw Kitchen  (It sounds deliciously coconutty albeit is nothing like what my mom made); and this Gluten Free (but sugar-ful) version from Gluten Free Mommy. Bon appetit!
Listen: While my song"Adding Water to the Ashes" is about faith and lost love more than anything, it owes a ton to my love for my mom.  I've been playing this song for years but finally have some live footage from the show last week at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco.
"Adding Water to the Ashes" from the 2008 Cd of the same name.

Hawaii Postcard: Walking Up Hills

                    Old ghost ranges, sunken rivers, come again

                             stand by the wall and tell their tale,

                     walk the path, sit the rains,

                     grind the ink, wet the brushes, unroll the

                              broad white space:

                     lead out and tip

                     the moist black line.

                     Walking on walking,

                                              under foot          earth turns.

                     Streams and mountains never stay the same.    

                                                                      -- Gary Snyder, Endless Streams & Mountains

In a new landscape, the mind reaches for known landscapes. My body reads 'tropics' on the skin and in the air, and automatically conjures up paths it's stepped, breathed, been before. In the years since I took that first flight to Hawaii, I've been to many other lands, other islands. Driving through Honolulu this week, I'm recalling Mysore, India; Austin, TX; St. Croix, VI; and, seemingly pedestrianly, Sacramento, CA. All of thes places I've been, share heat, a certain stickiness, and similar foliage (and some birds, native and/or introduced).*

Walking up Diamond Head yesterday, hearing multiple languages as we switched back up the side of the crater, my mind scrambled with memories of walking the stairs of Chamundi Hill, in India; and  ascending the cable route of Half Dome; as wells as a low-slung mountain that the painter Cezanne was said to favor outside of Aix. 

I've read body turns over all of its cells every 7 years, but somewhere there's a file of miles walked within me, beyond it seems, even the cellular. The mystery of being glimpsed yet again.

The view from Diamond Head

Autumnal Sky

Christopher Capell photo

The word equinox comes from the Latin words for "equal night." The fall and spring equinoxes are the only days of the year in which the Sun crosses the celestial equator.
From here on out, the temperatures begin to drop and the days start to get shorter than the nights. — Farmer's Almanac

Practice, life,  everything, about living, it seems, comes down to balance between opposites: light and dark, hard and soft, life and death, sweet and sour, male and female, heaven and earth.  The Autumnal equinox was Monday, providing a fine opportunity to stop a moment to marvel at the earth hanging in balance between all these poles.

I celebrated the equinox by planting my feet on the earth and looking up at the sky. After an early-morning practice in San Francisco with Peter Sanson, a visiting Certified Ashtanga teacher from New Zealand, I headed up Hawk Hill in Marin for my fortnightly stint as a Hawk Watch volunteer. By the time I left the studio, the sun was fully up, the sky was clear and bright blue, making a perfect backdrop for hundreds of migrating raptors. A half hour late to my shift, I barely had time to say hello to my hawk-watch team-mates as there were so many hawks in the sky: Cooper's Hawks, Sharp-shinned hawks, Broad-Winged hawks and more, there were hawks everywhere. The day would go by quickly as there was rarely a moment when the sky wasn't busy with migrating birds (and the hill full of both tourists enjoying a stellar view of San Francisco and other avid bird watchers). It was tremendous. It was was wonderful. 

Autumn Sky

By Charles Simic
 

In my great grandmother's time,   

All one needed was a broom   

To get to see places   

And give the geese a chase in the sky.   

               •

The stars know everything,   

So we try to read their minds.   

As distant as they are,   

We choose to whisper in their presence.   

               •

Oh Cynthia,   

Take a clock that has lost its hands   

For a ride.   

Get me a room at Hotel Eternity   

Where Time likes to stop now and then.   

               •

Come, lovers of dark corners,   

The sky says,   

And sit in one of my dark corners.   

There are tasty little zeroes   

In the peanut dish tonight.

 

Speed limits, time, the moon & memory

The latest super moon kept me up half the night after a full weekend of shows and teaching and socializing, which found me driving a hell of a lot. Part of this was great — notably, getting out  to the coast on Saturday for a brunch-time gig (if I looked over my left shoulder I could see the Pacific. Coastal beauty = happy making). But driving in the city has been nutzo. Regular crazy cell phone-using drivers coupled with Outside Lands rabid concert-goers has necessitated extra vigilance. I know I react to aggressive driving more now that I live on an island where the speed limit is 25mph.  Not everyone is holding to that limit here, but even if you're speeding, you're likely not going much faster than 35mph. (And if you are going faster than that on these roads, you do deserve that big ticket).

Likewise, I think there's some genetic influence at play.
My dad drove exceedingly slow in his later years. Trips to town entailing put-putting down the road in his Datsun pickup truck, one elbow out the side window taking in the view: the rows of apple trees filling the orchards along Corralitos Road, who was convening at the local market, oblivious to any cars riding his bumper.  His slowness exasperated me then. I was a teenager,  embarrassed by my dad's driving especially as more than one friend let me know how they'd been 'stuck' behind my dad as he cruised along.' 

Dad circa 1944

Clearly the years have mellowed me. (I choose to live  in a place where the speed limit is 25mph!)   I'm not near the age he was of this memory (I'm closer to the age of my dad when he had me), and I had to answer so many questions myself,  but like so much of my dad's useful knowledge, I've appreciated it more with time, see the wisdom in his slowness and taking time while he could. Dad would have been 89 this past Friday. He's not alive for me to tell him I get it now, but I'm glad I can credit him where some credit is due.

In a Landscape: I By John Gallaher

“Are you happy?” That’s a good place to start, or maybe,

“Do you think you’re happy?” with its more negative

tone. Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes falling. That’s part

of the problem too, but not all of the problem. Flowers out the window

or on the windowsill, and so someone brought flowers.

We spend a long time interested in which way the car would

best go in the driveway. Is that the beginning of an answer?

Some way to say who we are?

Well, it brings us up to now, at any rate, as the limitations

of structure, which is the way we need for it to be. Invent some muses

and invoke them, or save them for the yard, some animus

to get us going. And what was it Michael said yesterday? That

the committee to do all these good things has an agenda to do all these

other things as well, that we decide are less good in our estimation,

so then we have this difficulty. It just gets to you sometimes. We have

a table of red apples and a table of green apples, and someone asks you

about apples, but that’s too general, you think, as you’ve made

several distinctions to get to this place of two tables, two colors.

How can that be an answer to anything? Or we can play the forgetting game,

how, for twenty years, my mother would answer for her forgetfulness

by saying it was Old-Timer’s Disease, until she forgot that too.

On the television, a truck passes left to right, in stereo. Outside,

a garbage truck passes right to left. They intersect. And so the world continues

around two corners. The table gets turned over, with several people

standing around seemingly not sure of what comes next. Look at them

politely as you can, they’re beginners too. And they say the right question

is far more difficult to get to than the right answer. It sounds good,

anyway, in the way other people’s lives are a form of distance, something

you can look at, like landscape, until your own starts to look that way

as well. Looking back at the alternatives, we never had children

or we had more children. And what were their names? As the living room parts

into halls and ridges, where we spend the afternoon imagining a plant,

a filing cabinet or two  ...    because some of these questions

you have with others, and some you have only with yourself.

New Moon in June

“And the sun and the moon sometimes argue over who will tuck me in at night. If you think I am having more fun than anyone on this planet, you are absolutely correct.”
― Hafiz
There is no excuse for not writing (or blogging as the case may be), there is just not writing. Just like everything, you are either doing it or you're not. Not writing, though, doesn't necessarily mean you aren't creating value in other ways.  I haven't been at the keyboard much this week, which has been concerned with music and yoga in other spheres of this great big world. Speaking of spheres, it's the New Moon today. Time to start something new, plant some seeds, celebrate you're alive.*
You might also take a listen to the latest from. Kris Delmhorst. She  has a great new album out Blood Test.

*“There is a wonderful sparkle to the New Moon in Cancer at 5 degrees on June 27th, 2014. Something feels refreshing and even inspiring even if you can’t quiet verbalize what it is. Soak in the fabulous energy now as new moon phase tends to symbolize a fresh new start…” —Dipali Desai at Celestial Space Astrology.

Studio Ink: On handwriting and open studios

photo by by Martin_Heigan

"Under the trees light
has dropped from the top of the sky,
light
like a green
latticework of branches,
shining
on every leaf,
drifting down like clean
white sand.

A cicada sends
its sawing song
high into the empty air.

The world is
a glass overflowing
with water." 
 — Pablo Neruda

There was a widely circulated article in the New York Times last week "What's Lost as Handwriting Fades" concerning educational development  and handwriting. In this digital age, handwriting is barely taught past first grade and researchers are finding there are consequences to creativity and memory retention. This doesn't surprise me: when I need to memorize something, I often write it out first...and then work on writing it out from memory. I also note that when I initiate writing something by hand it has a different quality, is more immediate and authentic somehow.
Neruda, as sensitive a human being and poet as they come, held a similar mind on the power of handwriting, choosing longhand over the typewriter:

"Ever since I had an accident in which I broke a finger and couldn’t use the typewriter for a few months, I have followed the custom of my youth and gone back to writing by hand. I discovered when my finger was better and I could type again that my poetry when written by hand was more sensitive; its plastic forms could change more easily. In an interview, Robert Graves says that in order to think one should have as little as possible around that is not handmade. He could have added that poetry ought to be written by hand. The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again." —Pablo Neruda, The Art of Poetry No. 14, in The Paris Review
 

No surprise that Neruda thought about handwriting down to the color of his ink. Amid his epic, prolific and influential life, he often chose to write in green ink, "his personal symbol for desire and hope" and call for abundance.
The glass overflowing world makes for busy weekends around here. Amid it all, I noticed a slew of artist Open Studios signs all over the East Bay. Open Studios always remind me how much art is being made all the time. This year 400 East Bay art studios are throwing their doors open for two weekends of art share. Check out this map of possibility HERE.
Studios are some of my favorite places to be, be they visual art, music or yoga related, and I'm in at least one each day. This weekend we were in the music studio again, finishing mixes on the KCDC project. More to share on that in a bit. In the meantime, here's a Neruda-inspired tune by Brazilian Girls:

Full Flower Moon

May's Full Flower Moon, also called Mother's Moon, Milk Moon, and Corn Planting Moon, marks a time of increasing fertility with temperatures warm enough for safely bearing young, a near end to late frosts, and plants in bloom. — Farmer's Almanac

 Who could be so lucky?

Who comes to a lake for water and sees 

the reflection of the moon.

~Rumi~

It's hot hot hot in these parts. I got home last night and we sat on the stoop and watched the moon rise. It's officially full today, the Full Flower Moon (in Scorpio).  People were walking around in shorts close to 10pm and it would be a no blanket kind of night, and a moon day today for Ashtangi's. No  practice, coffee in bed, rangoli on the sidewalk and checking out Bob Dylan's latest offering, Full Moon & Empty Arms (reportedly a hit for Frank Sinatra in 1945). Enjoy!

Stream the tune at his site: http://www.bobdylan.com/us/home

Read.Eat.Listen: Instruction

There is another kind of tablet, one

already completed and preserved inside you.

A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness

in the center of the chest. This other intelligence

does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,

and it doesn't move from outside to inside

through conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead

from within you, moving out.

—From Essential Rumi By Coleman Barks

READ: In addition to Rumi, I've been reading Six Word Memoirs. I love reading SMITH magazine's project/feature 'six word memoirs' when I'm at a loss on where to begin with writing something, and/or don't want to get too lost in a rabbit hole of reading too much Internet fodder. There's also an ongoing Twitter Feed of @SixWords.

As part of teaching appreciation week, SMITH is asking reader/writers to submit #sixwords on the topic of#TeachingIs. I submitted "#TeachingIs holding space for awareness and discovery #sixwords" as I've come to believe the best teachers are like sun and water on a plant, letting me be my best self without much other interference. Other favorites include: 

 ‏@TchrAnnie  #TeachingIs trusting your students, igniting their curiosity

and 

@mollysroy  Every day is a second chance @sixwords #sixwords #TeachingIs

Kind of fun, huh?

EAT:  I grew up across the street from an apple orchard and my dad has 5-6 different varieties of his own apple trees growing on our property. I've always liked them in pie but have always gone in and out with them myself, perhaps due to their ubiquity in California. Also when you eat a lot of apples you know how some apples can be not so good. And maybe because even after all those years having apples given to me, buying them still feels odd.  Nonetheless, in part because the CSA box delivers boxes curated by someone else and has included more apples than I'd buy, I've rediscovered the joyful crunch and simple goodness of an apple. Lately Fuji apples have been on order, sliced and served up with cinnamon and almond butter, yeah!

LISTEN: "The Hard Way" by Tom Kimmel/The Waymores. I saw a trio of great songwriters — Tom Kimmel, Sally Barris and Don Henry — performing as the Waymores, in Niles on Sunday.  All seasoned Nashville writers whose songs have been covered by a famous lot of singers including the likes Miranda Lambert, Linda Rondstadt and Johnny Cash (!), the trio leaves no topic out of the mix of subject matter explored. Fom singing about dead people in love to their work ethic, they put on a great show of skill, heart and humble dedication. Kimmel's song "The Hard Way" especially slayed me:

 

Read.Eat.Listen: In process

Read: I'm really glad it's May. April was a challenging month personally, underscored by a nasty cold that stayed too long. One of the bright lights was poetry. I took National Poetry Month to heart and doubled up my reading of verse, a habit I want to keep. Here's one I appreciated from Linda Gregg today, culled, again, from the A Year of Being Here poetry blog:

Being
The woman walks up the mountain
and then down. She wades into the sea
and out. Walks to the well,
pulls up a bucket of water
and goes back into the house.
She hangs wet clothes.
Takes clothes back to fold them.
Every evening she crochets
from six until dark.
Birds, flowers, stars. Her rabbit lives
in an empty donkey pen. The sea is out
there are far as the stars.
Always quiet.
No one there. She may not believe
in anything. Not know
what she is doing. Every morning
she waters the geranium plant.
And the leaves smell like lemons.

— Linda Gregg

Eat: How to live local and feel connected is equal parts art and practice. How to eat healthy amid variable schedules falls into the same camp. I don't have much garden space and haven't made the time for the local community garden so I'm appreciating the CSA deliveries from Dan's Fresh Produce, as well as the new cookbook book, Clean Eats, from Dr. Alejandro Junger, author of Clean. 200 new, can't-fail healthy recipes. Ole!

Listen:  I've been spending a week plus learning some covers for a private event so I'm doubly enjoying the new Norah Jones/Sasha Dobson/Catherine Popper project Puss n Boots. Here's their version of Johnny Cash's Bull Rider.

Read.Eat.Listen: Surrender

Seemingly out of nowhere this week, I came down with a 24-hour-ish bug and ended up canceling two-days worth of my oh-so-carefully made plans. Poof! I didn't go out of the house for a day and (mostly) unplugged. Kind of a drag and kind of a blessing at the same time. Today, everything was so vivid, the sun coming out after rain rendered the sky that much more blue, sprouting seedlings in the garden that much more green, that I felt grateful for the enforced break from it all. It's really easy for me to get busy, to try too hard, to try to figure it all out now, when the truth of the matter is I only have a certain amount of control over events.  The benefit of getting sick is how easy it makes it to stop — thinking too much, doing too much, whatever — and listening.  I'm reminded that surrender is not about giving up or giving in, it's simply about stopping the fight.

Read: Yay, it's national poetry month. There's a nice blog "A Year of Being Here" that features a mindfulness poem each day. One recent entry from poet Chris Forhan:

"Joy"  
It seized me—never mind the circumstance: sudden
scent in the breeze like cinnamon, sun silvering
a roof as the unicycle parade began—it seized me

as sickness does, wholly, with no mercy,
all of my body obeisant to its law as though none of it
were mine, finally: not the joy or the body. —Chris Forhan

Eat: Caldo aka hot soup. There's a Mexican restaurant in town, Acapulco, that does a kick-ass version, either veggie or with chicken, and its all I wanted to eat while under-the-weather. Here's a veggie version from Food 52. Simple, good, healing.

Listen: My pal and life-long music eductor Sally, gave me David Sylvian's 'Dead Bees on a Cake' on cassette many years ago (it was first released in 1999). Today I got in the car after yoga and heard one of the songs from that record, ' Krishna Blue,' and recalled how great that CD was. I also remembered another song on Dead Bees that fit the day: "I Surrender."

Read.Eat.Listen: Orderliness

There's nothing exactly sexy about doing ones taxes, but once I got over the 'ughs' of it all, I got really into doing them this week. In any event, getting all my accounting up to date spawned a rash of (relative) orderliness. The words and music filtering into the reclaimed structure:

Read: Between the Malaysian flight disappearance acting as my whodunit mystery and Russia's political/war drama, I admit I've been a newshound. But as I'm about to do a writing workshop with the fantabulous Santa Cruz-based Ellen Bass, some poetry has crept in to save me. "Like a Beggar" is her latest.

excerpt of "Waiting for Rain" from Like a Beggar:
"Maybe it's wrong/to think of better and worse./There's no one who can carry my fear/for a child who walks out the door/not knowing what will stop her breathe./The rain they say is coming/sails now over the Pacific in purplish nimbus clouds./But it isn't enough. Last year I watched/elephants encircle their young, shuffling/their massive legs without hurry, flaring/their great dusty ears. Once they drank from the snowmelt of Kilimanjaro. ..." — Ellen Bass

Eat: Though I grew up near fields full of them, I was first turned onto Brussels Sprouts as something I'd want to eat in a French train station during a cold winter trip abroad. Served as a side to something I can't remember, and helped along by a generous amount of butter, I came awake to their flavors. The cruciferous vegetable has since morphed into one of my favorite things to eat, and has nearly surpassed brocoli  as the in-house go-to vegetable. Check out this simple Kale and Brussels Sprout Salad from Epicurious. 
Listen: Eliza Gilkyson is a more-than-fine songstress out of Texas whose steadily amassed a stellar body of work. She released a new album this week, her 20th or so (!), "Nocturne Sessions." Here's a tune from the CD :

Happy Valentine's Day: World Sound Healing Day Feb 14, 2014 + Some Poetry

It's no secret singing makes you feel better. Sound vibration — whether you're chanting or singing in the shower or part of a choir — is going to alter your felt sense somehow (usually for the better).
Coinciding with Valentine's Day, a tribe of sound scholars, healers and singers have organized an international event around healing sound: World Sound Healing Day! The 12th annual event — where people from around the globe are invited to 'sound' a healing note in unison at 12 noon (local time)— is today, February 14.
"Join thousands throughout the planet for the 12th Annual WORLD SOUND HEALING DAY on Friday, February 14, 2014. At 12 noon (local time in your time zone), sound forth for 5 minutes with the “AH”, created and projected with the energy of compassion and love."
 
Heal your heart, heal the world! Healing Sounds pioneer Jonathan Goldman offers a free sounding mp3 for those who want to join in.  Find a list of in-person events here.

I once heard a writer instruct her students to carry a book of poetry everywhere. I've followed her guidance at times, always happy when I do. Poetry just gives. To whit:

The Quiet World 

by Jeffrey McDaniel

In an effort to get people to look

into each other’s eyes more,

and also to appease the mutes,

the government has decided

to allot each person exactly one hundred   

and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear   

without saying hello. In the restaurant   

I point at chicken noodle soup.

I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,   

proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.   

I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,

I know she’s used up all her words,   

so I slowly whisper I love you

thirty-two and a third times.

After that, we just sit on the line   

and listen to each other breathe.

                           —Jeffrey McDaniel, “The Quiet World” from The Forgiveness Parade. Copyright © 1998 by Jeffrey McDaniel. Reprinted with the permission of Manic D Press.

Read.Eat.Listen: Pick Me Up

You know the holidays are over when the cat pulls down the Christmas lights and the (living, Norfolk Pine) tree and the house has succumbed to the winter bug of the season. Well then!
Read:  Poetry Foundation. A campaign to 'flood Facebook with poetry' circluating this weekend just as I was being laid low pulled me out of a big wallow. I spent a few happy hours revisiting poets and discovering some new ones.  Here's one from a new-to-me poet Heather Christle.

Pursuits

It is not that you want

to be the one to make prints

in the untrampled snow

It is that you want

to be in the snow

without having touched it

to be of  the snow

not beginning

Everywhere commerce

dictates the shapes

that move you along

that seat you at the table

far from the snow

far from the act

of not touching

It only gets worse

A girl’s gotta eat

And your hunger’s

not even your own
          —By Heather Christle 

Eat: (Drink). Wellness Shots via Tashenna Lawson MindbodyGreen. Simple, strong and bracing.
Here’s how to make a basic wellness shot:

• Juice ½-1 whole lemon
• Juice 1-inch piece of ginger
• Add a dash or two of cayenne pepper

Knock it back at the onset of a cold, or just when you feel like a little pick-me-up is in order. You’ll feel the effects fairly quickly. "

Listen: The always excellent Rosanne Cash's new CD "The River & The Thread" is scheduled for release January 14, 2014. Impeccable and literate, she never fails to inspire. NPR is previewing the CD on First Listen for the next few days and you can hear full tracks via SoundCloud and other sites. She'll be touring extensively, including a 4-day residency at SFJazz in April! Here's 'A Feather's Not a Bird'

Read.Eat.Listen: For the Dogs

There's a scene in the Levon Helm documentary Ain't in it for My Health,"* which we watched the other night, where Helm's fellow Arkansan Billy Bob Thornton is visiting and talking about how much Helm's place reminds him of home. "All the dogs come out!" Thornton comments and shakes his head, and they both nod and grin.
I didn't grow up anywhere near Arkansas, but I grew up in the country, and my dad, too, loved dogs nearly as much as people. The first thing you'd see coming up our driveway was two or three dogs running out and down the hill to greet you. Most of the time they'd bark whether they liked you or not. One mean dog bit nearly everyone who looked at him wrong...and got away with it! (until he was hit by a truck driven by one of the illegal pot-growers that tended a plot up the road).  Officially, we only had one dog, but neighbor dogs gravitated to my dad (dogs found their way to our house out of seeming thin-air), who treated them like honored guests. My dad usually went through every name of every dog and one's respective siblings before he landed on yours.  I accepted, and loved at least some of our dogs growing up, but —  having tired of and resented sharing parental attention with the dogs — it took most of my adult life to really warm up to them again.
In any case, I've been far quicker to warm to Dogpatch, a once-working class and somewhat sleepy, now up-and-coming district of San Francisco, with several restaurants, chocolatiers and a few gallery/home-made wares sort of shops that make you have to blink for thinking you might be in Portland. We strolled about there last week, after work, pre-busy evening, and enjoyed the eats.

Read: I've been revisiting some favorite poets of late and found, lo!, Jane Hirshfield released a new collection "Come Thief" earlier this year:

“Everything has two endings-
a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.

Before a life, air.
And after.

As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Come, Thief: Poems

Eat:  Our Dogpatch ramble found us stepping into Recchiuti Chocolates Chocolate Lab, because in our hunger, we missed the new Piccino Restaurant, which we'd fondly remembered in the same space. Too bad we weren't in the mood for sweet, opting for savories with a farm-to-table emphasis, an ale and a Drinkwell Softer to get us to our next station. Blood sugar restored, we walked out and right past the bright yellow building that houses Piccino. Duh, next time.

Listen: Back to Levon Helm. We enjoyed the Helm documentary in his last years —pissed off, loving, driven and brilliant —a great sad and touching illustration of a musician putting music first, or better or worse, til the end. This song, from Electric Dirt, was my favorite. "When I Go Away"

Read.Eat.Listen: Retroactive

There's comfort in familiar even if you're reaching for change. I got back from travel in July motivated to finish, curate and compile a lot of my own content: 'downtime' has been filled with finishing mixing, going through a bunch of writing and blog posts and figuring out what's next.
Last weekend, we took some time out to visit a favorite region of the Bay Area and drove up to Pt. Reyes, stopping in Inverness for lunch before hitting the Tomales Point Trail, gazing at the ocean, the bay and catching occasional site of the Tule Elk that live there. It was lovely and scenic and not-so-crowded.
Read: Getting back up to Pt. Reyes jogged my memory banks about The West Marin Review, a lovely art, poetry and literature journal put together by a committed group of West Marin folks along with Pt. Reyes Books. Check out the latest issue's TOC.

Eat: Inverness, a small town along the west shore of Tomales Bay 'only' has a couple restaurants and one cafe but that doesn't mean it's slim pickings. We had a long, lazy lunch at Saltwater Oyster Depot, which yes, has plenty of oysters, but also a nice selections of salads (fish and farro anyone?), sandwiches and pizza —all artfully assembled from locally sources ingredients —as well as wines and beer on tap. We sat in the sun at the communal table and basked a bit before hitting the trail. Post-hike, we stopped in at Blackbird, an art-house cafe next door, for a slice of their daily pie (peach-berry in this case) and made it back to the East Bay to catch two different shows. Yeah!
Listen: I've really noticed how my tastes are so influenced by what music I heard — consciously and unconscious — when I was growing up. My antenna seems especially tuned to beats and melodies ingested at an early age. I hear something from decades back and automatically start boppinging a little, even if I don't really 'like' the song. Back in the 'likable' category: the wonderful songstress Sam Phillips recently released an album inspired by 60s pop music. It's familiar, it's smart and it's new (and she's one of those just-cool sorts).

Check it out:
Sam Phillips "Push Any Button"

Notes on the Solstice

Doomsday prophesies aside, I'm down with ending cycles and the opportunity for new beginnings. Here's saying thanks to the latest chapter of living and hello to a future that is that much more brighter, peaceful and healthy. 
Further reading:

How Stuff Works: The Mayan Calendar

The Farmer's Almanac: Winter Solstice

and a poem:

Winter Twilight
by Anne Porter
On a clear winter's evening The crescent moon And the round squirrels' nest In the bare oak Are equal planets.   From Living Things by Anne Porter, published by Zoland Books, an imprint  of Steerforth Press of Hanover, New Hampshire. Copyright © 2006 by Anne Porter.

Seal mind

 

"When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Red and bright pink. " — Louise Gluck, 'The Untrustworthy Speaker'

I haven't been sleeping well. We're looking at buying a place, I'm in the middle of a new project and the 'whee!' of starting something new, and the 'woo-hoo' of finishing something are distant shores. I've had a near constant feeling of being lost couple with a chattering monkey mind of worry...and I'm not sure where the shores are anymore.
So Sunday morning I got on K's boat. Unlike the rest life, I kind of prefer 'dull' sailing. Conditions were perfect for me: flat, chop-free and light wind. The bay was like a big bathtub (though not a warm one). We headed south where there weren't any boats and drifted a bit. Calm. Ahh. A certain point we came across several harbor seals in an easy repose. Heads up, looking south, spaced at a distance from one another, they sort of bobbed open-eyed in the water, as if meditating. It was a slightly surreal scene, at once magical and ordinary. They looked at us with only mild surprise and swam a little further away, unhurriedly, to resume their float. Ah-ha. A clue.