Frog Eggs

What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.


— Stanley Kunitz, "Touch Me", in The Wild Braid, p. 95


April 2009

Yesterday while riding our bikes we came across a pond with frogs in it. Amidst the reeds were large clutches of frog eggs. We headed home, collected buckets and net, and headed back to the pond to collect some eggs.

For several years I've been wanting to hatch frog eggs or nurture tadpoles for a few weeks and then release into the wild. As a suburban child in the 1970s mid-Atlantic we would search religiously in the clear pools of water that formed in the orange clay after a rainstorm. We were looking for the tiny black tadpoles of toads to keep for a few weeks until they sprouted legs. So much of the wild was regarded as dangerous; the massive river a few miles away was polluted. Having the opportunity to really observe something pure, young, wild, and alive was a cherished experience.

After returning to the pond by car we collected the eggs and ample pondwater to fill the aquarium purchased a few weeks ago at Goodwill. When we got home, we placed the aquarium in a temperature-appropriate spot, poured in the pondwater, and very carefully transferred the eggs. We're raising our kids to respect all living things—no bug-killing, no keeping crabs in a thimbleful of water in the sun at the beach— a fact which prompted the lecture today about not poking the frog eggs with a stick. They are alive.

Last night we had dinner with another homeschooling family. We proudly shared our excitement at finally scoring some frog eggs. Well, it was quickly pointed out that what we did is now illegal in Maine, a point that would have been well-driven-home were I on the internet this year. Apparently, someone else like me posted a basic question to one of the homeschooling email lists about handling frog eggs, unleashing an email firestorm.

No more bragging about the frog eggs.

That Empty Inbox Feeling

"The poem has to be saturated with impulse and that means getting down to the very tissue of experience."
— Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid, p. 103.





April 2009

Jeff is gone to Florida for an airshow. Left early this AM. He never used to correspond much when away and that always bothered me. But now I don't have that empty inbox feeling. We keep in touch by five word text messages (probably only one a day) and that will be enough.

I remember when I first rented an office on Ballard Avenue in Seattle for my publishing company. The upper floor of a pioneer cabin that had been moved from the Central District. Two identical cabins that had been moved together, relocated to Ballard's historic district, and conjoined. It was an attic, really, with a window on each end; one looked out on the adjacent sloping shingled roof, where rain fell often; the other, down the side street at old buildings and toward the ship canal.

During the first few days I worked there I had no phone & no internet. I had been working out of the house before that, where I had all these things, and a husband, a cat, a garden, and neighbors with whom I was acquainted. Now it was going to be me in a solitary room with its steep narrow stairs. A hermitage, almost.

Part way through the first morning it became overwhelmingly evident there was no loneliness. No one could contact me, I couldn't read my email, so there was never a sense of disappointment, of being forgotten. An email would only take off part of the edge, but the edge would return: that edge of wanting contact with people, of wanting to be known and remembered. Natural human needs partly and often poorly satisfied by technology and therefore never really satisfied.

That experience is part of what drives me this year. Lonely? Go outside. Call someone or go to a café. The depth of satisfaction in seeing a friend in person—or anyone, really—assuages the loneliness so much more completely.

A Night Out with the Local Italian Supermodels

"Too many gardens I've seen seem to express only one mood or one state of being. There is a dependence, a reliance on the effectiveness, let's say, of a single color, as though it were the only state of being that corresponds with one's concept of the beautiful."

--Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, p. 75


Last night my neighbor and her singer-songwriter sister took me out to hear Kris Delmhorst at One Longfellow Square. My neighbor bought me a ticket as a way of saying "thanks" for therapeutic massage received in the days before the birth of her son. The work helped her sleep and forget for an hour that she was pregnant and she felt grateful, so she offered me a ticket to hear live music. How cool!

Now, let me point out that my neighbor and her sister both look like supermodels. I'm not kidding. Long, classically gorgeous, Italian-American. And smart. And sweet. And ten years younger than I am. So going out on the town with them makes it really easy to pretend that I, too, look like an Italian supermodel. That the dozens of guys staring at us along the way are actually staring at me, too.

But the best part of going out with these two is that it's incredibly fun. One of them is always doing something or saying something that makes the other one break down in hysterical laughter.

I'd always wanted to set foot in One Longfellow--they get all the good folkies touring the northeast--and the show turned out to be great. Kris Delmhorst is gutsy, bluesy, original, an excellent poet with words and strings. She played by herself, and had forgotten her performance clothes, and so was wearing her "mommy shirt" that had food on it. I felt right at home. She blew our doors right off with that voice coupled with all that presence. Like really there. Totally in the moment.

And we did get stared at, and it was fun.

First Night with the Drop Spindle

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.








What began as clover
Steam of
breath in barn
during winter gale
Hay between teeth
Quiet lambing
tonight became

barge rope.
Fought its way out of
fiberness into
inconceivable
clumps.
Clods.
Punctuated by
strands so thin
they looked
like hair.

Sheep 410, of
Wiscasset, Maine,
Please forgive me.
I'll try to do better
tomorrow.



[Copyright © 2009]

Putting Off Yoga: A Bizarre Form of Self-Torture?

Rest quietly in what you know is true. Then act.







April 2009

For the last fifteen years I have been wanting to do yoga every day, and with the exception of a few brief periods have been unable to make this happen. This has been a desire because I know--in my bones and muscles, and from observing older people who have done yoga regularly--that this is a superior way to keep the body and mind flexible and strong as long as possible.

I started learning yoga when I was 15 from a chemistry teacher at my school. She ran a small class in the winter for those of us not involved in other sports. It was a fringe sport, an "alternative" sport, one that merited a room but only a classroom that wasn't in use. Still, we learned a lot that winter. Iyengar yoga. I learned to relax from the immense stress of the long winter in a pressure-cooker private school. I mean, really relax. Like, relax until things really didn't bother me. Relax until the mind was quieter and didn't worry unnecessarily. Relax enough to sleep better so I was more alert when I woke up in the morning. Great life lessons to get early.

Fast-forward fifteen years and there's Carol. Part of of her retirement plan is to take the 6 a.m. hour-and-a-half yoga intensive every morning at the local Iyengar studio. Back then, when I took that class for a month, she had the body, energy and youthful outlook of a healthy 35 year old. She's in her seventies now and can stand on her head.

Despite all this—and despite wanting to—I've been unable to effect a daily practice. Absolutely unable. Every single day I think, "This is what I should be doing. This is what I want to do." Nothing. Not even five minutes. I utterly lack the discipline.

Have you ever wanted something that good for you for that long and put it off indefinitely? I'm beginning to think that living this way is a bizarre form of self-torture.

Hooked on Spinning

In a boat down a fast-running creek,
it feels like trees on the bank
are rushing by. What seems

to be changing around us
is rather the speed of our craft
leaving this world.

— Rumi, Essential, p. 194


April 2009

I am completely hooked on making yarn from scratch.

Susan, fiber friend and neighbor across the street, said recently she was taking a week off from work to spin out some of the wool she had accumulated. We agreed that would be a good time to have an hour’s visit and some knitting & chat, which she’d been wanting to have me over for since I brought her a meal when she had cancer last winter.

So Tuesday was our day. I packed up my knitting and also brought along some of the wool I’d dyed a week or two ago with turquoise Jacquard dye. At her place she asked if she could card a bit and spin it out on a drop spindle to see what it would look like.

I’ve intentionally postponed learning to spin on a wheel until I’m done with school because I know it will quickly become an obsession. Never thought the drop spindle would be anything I had the patience for.

She took a little brush (a cat brush—she couldn’t find her carders) and carded the wool against her leg, then selected a drop spindle from her collection—a lovely filigree one. She keeps them in an upright basket. She spun it out roughly, then we folded it back on itself—which is what it wants because of the twist—“plying”—and it was lovely: tweedy, turquoise and gray.

She showed me how to do it. The rest is history.

Right after leaving Susan’s I called the Portland Fiber Gallery and yes, they had drop spindles—for $18 (!!). (My carding brushes were $55.) After picking up the boys we stopped by the fiber gallery and bought one—nice simple maple drop spindle. For the next 24 hours (with a few hours for sleep) I played and practiced; the boys helped turn it when the came through the room.

I had previously carded a lot of the medium gray wool from the Coopworth fleece (I’d separated the fleece by color—black/charcoal; medium gray; pale gray with flecks of charcoal) with the hope that another friend would be able to spin it on a trade. But that trade has never happened. So the box of carded wool has remained with me. Within a day and a half of figuring out the drop spindle I spun out 2/3 to ¾ of that carded wool.

Standing in my living room — the green nub of spring pushing up through the dark earth — drop-spindling while C&B play in their PJs and listen to music and stories — I recognized a moment that was utterly impossible while I was still wed to Facebook. There’s no way that I would have had the time, the desire, and the focus to learn this. I never expected to like drop-spindling — expected it to be frustrating — and so thought that a $500 spinning wheel would be the only way I could learn to spin, and that was out of reach.

According to Susan’s colleague, drop spindling is “slower by the hour but faster by the week” since you can take it anywhere. I'm completely, utterly, happily sold.

Planning a Trip to NYC...Sans Google

"For us, as people sitting here meditating, as people wanting to live a good, full, unrestricted, adventurous, real kind of life, there is concrete instruction that we can follow, which is the one that we have been following all along in meditation: see what is."
—Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape, p. 36.



April 2009

How on earth does a non-NYer plan a trip to NYC without the internet??

We're headed there in a few weeks. Normally I'd be all over google trying to figure out the *perfect* two days in Manhattan, hashing through a million details, looking stuff up every five minutes, scouring photos of the places we think we might want to go, coming up with 25 billion possibilities for those two short days, then having to let most of them go. Painfully.

Then, hanging over my head for the entire trip would be the Lost Opportunities. The Things We Might Have Done. This is just how my brain works.

Basically, the internet is a perfectionist's nightmare when it comes to trip planning.

So, relying entirely on the memory of past enjoyment of Manhattan, paying close attention to what might really matter to me, J., and the boys — and remembering the need to pack enough nothing into each day so we can enjoy the moment — we plan our trip.

Empire State Building. Museum of Natural History. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Taking the subway everywhere. A visit possibly with a Buddhist teacher I haven't seen in 17 years. But leaving enough free, open space in each of those days to actually enjoy what where we are.

Even relying entirely on memory there will be two dozen wished-we-could-haves: Maybe we'll miss out on a good Jewish deli pickle. MOMA. Broadway. The Strand. And on and on.

But...in those slightly panicky moments...what about last minute museum-hour look ups riding the train in from LI? Directions? Hm??

Letters

"We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century, and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village does for its own culture....It is time that villages were universities...."
— Thoreau, Walden (Everyman's Library version, p. 96-97)

Letter from grade school friend yesterday. She called me Pajamas, her old nickname for me. Her handwriting looks astonishingly similar to grades 6/7.

I wrote her back, pulling all the stops: fountain pen, Eaton paper, about 5 stamps of varying values on the envelope: pomegranate, silver coffeepot, teapot, Navajo necklace with turquoise. Feels more like art than using the computer does, for sure.

Back in the old days — which I'm desperately trying to revive in small ways here and there, like letters – this was the way distant friends & I kept touch. Back when I had time. I would put on some music, lay down on the floor or sit at the mechanical typewriter purchased for 3 bucks at a yard sale, and write. Go out to class, or work, or a meal, and come back and write some more. Excerpt a book I liked or was reading at the time. I haven't managed this kind of one-to-one mastery with email yet.

Farewell to a Fine Bookstore...and Place

"As an artist, you are a representative human being—you have to believe that in order to give your life over to that effort to create something of value. You're not doing it only to satisfy your own impulses or needs; there is social imperative. If you solve your problems and speak of them truly, you are of help to others, that's all. And it becomes a moral obligation."
— Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid, p. 103


4/24/09

Went to Books, Etc today on Exchange Street. Closing their shop today after 37 years in that spot. The children’s section was nearly empty, few books but still many good ones.

Picked up a book about growing houseplants from vegetable scraps and seeds in the kitchen, Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, and Last Child in the Woods. Picked up some free demo Putomayo CDs. They had food out on the counters.

There was a bit of a party atmosphere, but the guy behind the counter seemed to be tired of the “we’re going to miss you” comments, which is what I said. Downtown, Longfellow Books is the only retail bookstore still standing that sells new books.

Seeing the bookstore routed does something to my insides that cannot quite be described in normal words. The storehouse emptied. The long-term neglect by the purchasing populace in favor of buying at a discount online 24/7. We can’t replace these places.

Places. We’re always talking about web site addresses. If we were to drive there what would we find?

Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen.

"The extraordinary qualities of great beings who hide their nature escapes ordinary people like us, despite our best efforts in examining them. On the other hand, even ordinary charlatans are expert at deceiving others by behaving like saints."
— Patrul Rinpoche (q. in Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, p. 133)


still 4/17/09

just had a nice, spectacular fall off the wagon.

Part of my year is only texting with Jeff. Even though it’s not technically the internet, it takes on the feel of instant messaging and is highly addictive and takes me away from wherever I am.

So, I forgot my keys to the office today. S (our office mate) was out to lunch and I didn’t want to leave the office unsecured. I phoned S; didn’t pick up. So I texted him that I was ducking out and would he be back. I didn’t want to lock myself out again.

Error #1: text messaged S.

error #2: misspelled ducking and wrote “dicking”, as in “dicking out to get some lunch”.

later S said he thought it must be a prep-school term, since an old classmate had just stopped by the office earlier that day. At his school they used to get a slip called a dicky if they missed class, so there was a slang term there of dicking class.

Sneaking on the Internet?

"Don't you notice that there are particular moments when you are naturally moved to introspection? Work with them gently, for these are the moment when you can go through a powerful experience and your whole worldview can change quickly."
— Sogyal Rinpoche, Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, pp. 32-33

[photo: Quartz, Block Island, 2009]


April 15, 2009

C says, in the morning: "Mom, why is there a chair here??? [in front of family computer] Have you been sneaking on the internet when no one’s looking?”

Later, when he wants to find the building instructions that came with his knex, and they’ve disappeared, I suggest we might be able to download them from their web site. He got all excited when he realized that I could tell him how to get there and it wouldn’t be "cheating".

C also said the other night it’s “nicer” without me on the internet. I tried to get him to give me details, and all he would share is that I’m not sitting down at the computer every single day of my life.
*
Stuff that needs to get written about:
— NYT article: “facebook saves lives” about coordinating sandbagging during flooding in N Dakota

Finding Tara & Louise...or Not

"Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever is floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind."
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, p. 186


Last time I bumped into Tara was at Javanet on Exchange Street, found out she was going to be teaching at Preble Street Resource Center here in Portland. I had since misplaced the card with her phone number in Yarmouth, which she gave to me the day we bumped into her on the stairs down to Videoport, the first time we’d seen her since we all lived in Oxford.

I want to talk with Tara about applied kinesiology, getting copies of her photo-cards w/ photos from India to use for correspondence/birthday cards for my business, and to tell her about the Arla Patch show at the Vox Gallery. But all I have is the e-mail address on the back of the card she gave me.

SOOO....I 411’d her in Yarmouth (no dice), even phoned her old Virginia number in case it was a cell that she’d brought with her...even though I could still remember the sound of her answering machine down there in the cottage by the water where she used to live. It’s now some business number in Oxford — a polite male voice fielded that call.

So....left her a message at the Preble Street Resource Center and haven’t heard from her that way.

The other day I wrote on the white board: “Jeff: e-mail Tara, Louise.” (The J got erased so this morning it said “eff".)

“Who’s Louise?” he asks. Louise is the cook from last summer at camp. C wants to write to her and ask her to please come cook for family camp this summer because he liked her so much (we all did). I told him I’d call Nathan to get that number / address. But I brought down the card with Tara’s email on it and asked if Jeff could please get her phone number or ask her to call me.

Of course, I don’t have Nathan’s number. I could call 411, or call someone else to ask for it. Of course, I would feel a bit embarrassed as absolutely everyone I can think of calling knows the web site address for that camp. Brad would probably give me a hard time if I called him. I could ask Jeff for it.

There could be a whole chapter in this book on finding people.

Analog Book Shopping

"Confined in the dark, narrow cage of our own making which we take for the whole universe, very few of us can even begin to imagine another dimension of reality."
— Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, p. 42



April 2009

Stopped at Longfellow Books on the way to the office. Had my birthday card from them worth 25% off a single title. Headed straight for the Buddhism shelf where all the Pema Chodron books are face out, thinking I might pick up another one.

Someone I've never met, in wheel chair facing the other direction, volunteers, “Let me know if you need me to move. I can’t drive and read at the same time.” I said no problem. He immediately offered: “I love to read. I feel sorry for people who can’t read.” He asked me what I like to read. We chatted for a bit. He was cheery and friendly.

What I bought: a Portland architecture book for my mother. The Year of Living Bibically. A children’s book that won the Caldicott. Wild Braid:A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden , by Stanley Kunitz.

Falling off the Wagon

[Native American Cemetery, Block Island, 2009]

"I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray."

— Stanley Kunitz, from "The Layers", in The Wild Braid (2005)


April 17, 2009

I’m falling off the wagon.

Our kids’ teacher — who is founding a school at her house in the woods — and I have been talking graphic design for her school and her neighbor has created the logo—a beautiful watercolor image with the name of the school around it. There was discussion about how to get the image from her neighbor to me. I suggested she email this to Jeff.

The other day I found myself idly saying, “just have her email it to Jeff.” This just didn’t feel quite kosher for this experiment — the thought of it becoming habitual.

Then, this morning J. had his laptop on the kitchen table. When I sat down with my cocoa, he handed me the little white ipod earphones and said I "should watch this." It was a little video on Avweb that P. and the editor of Kitplanes magazine had made on their trip — part 4 of a vlog. It was funny and he said if I wanted to see more there were several more listed on the page. I said that I couldn't do that but wanted to see them so he navigated about and clicked the links for me.

In terms of the context of this experiment, this was about the equivalent of having someone else hold the cocaine under my nose and taking a nice deep breath — that didn’t mean I snorted it on purpose, did it?

Nice relaxing massage — to the sound of lawnmowers

[fossilizing porpoise, below clay cliffs, Block Island, photo © 2009 J. Van West]

"That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence."
— Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You, p. 18


April 17, 2009

Jeff ran software updates on my laptop the other day. I can’t do this because it involves using the internet.

The next morning I went to use my computer and it was making this relentless clicking sound and was almost totally unresponsive. I went to restart it but it wouldn’t even do this even though I got to the dialog box. so I did a forced reboot and it was exactly the same situation.

When I went to play music — I had a client coming in and I use my cds copied to itunes for the music system — it took a while for the music to start, then it was having to buffer the song.

So I had no music for that client. Jeff took a crack at fixing it and said if I did a safe reboot that I should be able to use the computer. I did this before my client came in the next day and when I went to use Itunes there was no sound. I could play the songs but the volume wouldn’t work with the safe reboot.

Jeff took another look and said the computer is probably going to require a system reinstallation. Everything was working fine before. Then Software Update brings me up to the bleeding edge of softwareville, thanks to the all-nighters of programmers all over the world, and the computer doesn’t work anymore.

Book Fest

"Everybody knows the pain of getting what we don't want: saints, sinners, winners, losers. I feel gratitude that someone saw the truth and pointed out that we don't suffer this kind of pain because of our personal inability to get things right."
— Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You, p. 18

April 2009

Went to a local book festival Sunday. A strong reconnection. Saw a friend who'd been laid off from a local bookstore, the one that inhabited the building where we have our office, and from whom we'd subletted office space for a time. Good people. A good book store. But in order to survive they had to let people go. It was great to be around people whose love of books goes beyond the work of it. He was simply volunteering here.
*
Thought about the Northwest Bookfest when it was still down in the giant drafty Seattle pier building in October. Everyone wearing coats even though we were inside. The thick boards and high windows of the walls and roof. Table after table of books from small presses, letter press printers, the booths of booksellers like Elliott Bay, Open Books, Wessel & Lieberman. Sausage, onion, pepper sandwiches off the grill. Heard Studs Terkel interview a 100+ yo woman who still volunteered for the Audubon Society. A vitality of the spoken & written word, of the art of the book, palpable in the conversations, the readers on stage, the mere passing of others touching & reading books.

Poetry and literature in general were huge in Seattle then (no idea what it's like now!). All that tech money and that dramatic landscape feeding a healthy tapestry of writers, poets, artists, craftspeople.
*
The festival here was much smaller but still had that pulse. There was no small press room. Mentioning this to the ED of the sponsoring organization, I heard her polite words, "Are you volunteering?" Of course, that is the issue--not only human will, but the immense effort and money to make something like that happen.

I thought about Bumbershoot Book Festival, also in Seattle, and what that took to run. For several years in the early nineties I tended the table for Copper Canyon Press, selling hurts (slightly damaged books) for $5. The first year I was there for four days straight volunteering, absolutely saturated in the people, books, letterpressed broadsides. That was where I first met Chris & Jules whose exquisite letterpress work captured my imagination; at the CCP table, I sold beautiful books on the cheap to interesting and grateful people, drank lattes to stay awake through those long four days.
*
Pretty much if I volunteer to help foster a small press component of this local book fest, I can say hello to all sorts of marvelous literary and artistic people, and say goodbye to writing poetry. There is only so much time in a day, a week, a life.

Still, I told her I'd call her in a few weeks.