Having world enough, and time

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling ... of that something which you were born desiring and which, between the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?
~ C.S. Lewis

And so, I have flown from the Pacific around my ankles with the sandpipers' daily newsfeed to the banks of the Thames. Backwards in time to spend time with an old college friend, ex- ex-pat, entire soulmate. I haven't been in the UK since my Westmont semester abroad, when we larked about Canterbury, Cambridge, Edinburgh, the Lake District. 30+ years ago. The cultural divide still surprises, all the curious street names flooding by on the taxi ride from the airport (soon to be dredged up from the river bottom of my jet-lagged mind.) Leg stretching on the queen's walk along the facelifted river banks (why do I think of Sally Potter's film Orlando here?) I almost stumble on a streetwoman listing under a bridge, like a gray bird caught by a cat and released with a wing dislodged from it's breast, spare some change? spare some change? her three note song a whippoorwil's call. Day reflects off tower bridge, then dies in the lone apple tree's white blooms

Now it's 3 a.m. and I watch the waxing moon set over the inky Thames. A pre-dawn breeze riffles the surface of this liquid mixing chamber; molecules eddy through centuries-- barges, bards, bell tolls swirl through bridges as our attentions anchor the drifting past.

How what we love defines us

Laguna

The flag snagged on a jacaranda tree
just where the children’s tower
cuts a place for itself in blue
ocean swirls at the ankle
contained for a moment by the crumbling sea wall
festooned with purple seastars
and waving urchins. We have placed ourselves
in this bright bracelet they may call home.

Can we learn the language spoken in this garden?
Translate the sighs of mussels clinging to stones for all they’re worth,
or green anemones whose languid tentacles reach through water-bent light?
The eyes they don’t need bequeathed to other creatures,
they are all foam and salt, the steady
wave washing over with everything they need.
They are patient.
Waiting for bright fish who find themselves captive
to the sudden mouth singing.

The sea mirrors the sky, violet dyes sailors who knot and unknot
stranded in sand to the tune of the sinking sun, wait for
the blaze to ignite some dormant urge, just before drowning in a far horizon. Salt tingles the lips and tongues of those who dove beneath
breaking surf this afternoon--who tightened their lids against the sting
to thrill in the tumble of the wave moving them,
moving towards them all this time from Rangoon and Auckland-they coast on phonemes like blue glass from Bali.

It’s the spaces between the waves that draw me.
Before each singular note breaks and shimmers, the rest.
I abandon interpretation to the casual pelicans glide ,
the trio of spouts where slick dolphins rise like a descant,
breaking the mirror into a thousand shards of light.


(Forgot to post this poem when written on
4-13-08)

Not all traveling is done on legs

"Bodies act upon Light at a distance, and by their actions bend its rays."-  Newton

Sara Lippincot in her review of the new biography, Newton, by Peter Ackroyd, says

'He ate standing up

he slept in his clothes

and rode in his coach through London

with one arm out the right side,

one out the left.'

And who wouldn't want to sprout wings coaching through London., the Great Plague hovering. turning to the occult he found gravity. And changing clothes when writing the Calculus? Preposterous. He almost burned his house down leaving the alchemical fire burning...

how our eccentricities fan our genius.

A raid on the inarticulate

'You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.'

-TS Eliot, Four Quartets

Blocks of wood and shifting light, Maya Lin's 2 x 4 Landscape is a plea, a paen, an 

elegy.  My father, an engineer, my mother, a director

my cousin, an artist, another cousin, a linguist and her husband, a teacher, circle this hill tent, this elephant in a boa constrictor, this gathering wave of upended two by fours--pitched in Union Station--moving in the moment.

The nominal moment, plastic or potential: The product of a quantity and its distance from a reference point.. for the moment, we lose ourselves and word as reference point.

We are a turning force, rotating around this axis-  50,ooo boards swirling a solar system--words reach escape velocity.

It is all we have, what we can touch, and imagine, and what we've made of it.

Mother leaves to get answers from a local authority. Dad studies the shadows. I think of the liminal again. Where space and substance, inside and outside, text and meaning, walking and falling, meet-- holding each other in perfect equilibrium.

Hides over cliffs, hopes into harbors

Dateline: April 5, Dana Point, California.

"And the end of all our journeys will be to arrive where we first began, and to know the place for the first time."- TS Eliot

We drove. And drove. And drove. Through the side roads toward santa barbara and over la cumbre pass and stared into the Los Padres wilderness, intact since the spanish land grant in the 16th century. And tried to imagine how this land was saved from the changes that altered most of the character of california almost beyond recognition. Here, as always rise the chalky white hills and deep green oaks, the horizon gentling mountains, silver sage, and wildflowers of the fierce little wills.  

We descend to Santa Barbara, where I went to undergrad school, to the home of a college friend I hadn't seen for 14 years. Who recently lost her husband to cancer.  Peeling out of the car in a neighborhood festooned with bougainvillea, we opened the door connecting our parallel lives again. We held each other for a long time.

Then trundled down to Henry's Beach, where we had gotten ourselves thrillingly into mild trouble all those years ago. The amber hour just before dusk and the seabird shadows lengthening. Barbara hops on the rocks like a sandpiper. then it's back to the house for sushi and cat fights (Rumi gets his mojo back and tries to bogart her two cats' food-- gets taught some manners.)

We look at yearbooks with impossibly smooth faces, picnics on a perpetual lawn, and bunches of long-haired boys. Would we have had the heart for all that life has brought if a window had cracked open back then?  She says the ten years with her late husband were the best of her life.  I ached to hear her say that with such finality. As though only bleakness stretched before her. But how could one imagine oneself into a life alone after that kind of closeness?  She tells stories of his repartee, his preferences in wine, as though he were just in the other room, about to emerge after a nap or a smoke...

Barbara and Rumi and I left the next morning, to continue to Dana Point, the beachtown I grew up in, named for the B-list classics writer of "Two Years Before the Mast," Richard Henry Dana. (in place of the European grand tour his Harvard cohort took, he signed onto "the Pilgrim" to sail around the horn and wound up chronicling the mistreatment of sailors.  Melville said his account of sailing around Cape Horn was so vivid it must have been 'written with an icicle.' Although with Dana's eyesight compromised by measles, it's a wonder he was able to write at all...he wrote about the natives, hustled into missions tanning works and how they carried hides to these cliffs to pitch them into his waiting trade ship)

------

We arrive to the parental unit intact, smiling and relieved.  A quick trip to Laguna Beach tidepools and emerald waters and then Barbara is off to Salt Lake City via  John Wayne (International) Airport. It's hard not to smile at a town that takes so seriously a dead star astride his horse.  Maybe he's an icon for the edge of the west we have arrived at, or a patron saint herding aircraft in the sky keeping them from stampeding... In a way it makes more sense than naming an airport for a politician.

Driving home alone, the ocean on the starboard, the greening hills on my port, I think my patron might be Saint Lucy, who carried her eyes before her.  I see all the other times I've driven the coast highway, for 35plus years now stacking up on the shoulder.  I cannot say why I was drawn back here now, except to see it all more rightly. the parents, the place, the threads through my history, and where they will weave next--san luis obispo, paso robles, petaluma--or maybe another state or country that has the same warmth and liminal coast and feeling of coming home. 

They say when you circle back you are always one rung higher in a continuous spiral. I hold the moonsnail shell I scooped from the waves in Santa Barbara, and wonder if the shell is the house we've left behind, the spiral involute, ever tightening to a core that is me and you until all the sand settles and we leave the shell we don't need for the connecting sea.

A body in motion

March 28, 2008

"Rumi (the cat) has a self-possession I greatly appreciate." --Barb Richardson

The gray cat curls up in his carrier in the wheel hump (do we still call it that?) in the mid-back seat and falls asleep. A life dismantled holds him in place, a carrier, a catbox, suitcases, photographs, cowboy boots, laptops, papers and papers, jars of plum jam. Cat Stevens' The Wind plays on the car stereo.

Do the smells of these and all the other things that populated his Ballard life dissolve into a dream scrolling before him on a rain-drenched highway? He has never been farther than 5 miles from home, never spent the night away from the bed he has always slept in, the window open year round just a crack. He has no way to guess what lies ahead, and wouldn't sign up for it if he did.

The encouraging friends and cheerful movers have come, packed the paintings and the bed, the dishes , the books,--carried away the accumulation of 9 years here, and carried forward from other moves, other lives.  They all came, the book club friends, the old college friends, the tango friends. They came to help send us off on this journey to a new home.  We are siting for California.  

"Geography is destiny," Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote.  And those rolling golden hills dotted with live oaks have populated my dreams for, well forever.  And the rhythm of the waves I fell asleep beside while burrowing toes into warm sand still echo as an arrhythmia, ( shkaa, shkaa, shkaa), the cardiologists can't explain...

It appears to be a short time ago I decided to sell my little Craftsman bungalow house and beloved garden (can you sell a garden? )  and move back to warmer climes after 27 years in the Northwest. The wish I had harbored for years was publicly launched just 10 weeks ago.  Now that my daughter has graduated from college and is making her life in New York City, there was nothing to hold me back from launch from this swell little house. Nothing but the huge kindnesses of friends and what we've woven together here.  But that is what will both remain here and go forward with me. Moving two directions at once.

I've been busily taking cuttings from the roses and plum tree, wrapping them in damp paper towels and sending them around the world to friends and family to see which new place they take root and thrive in. For now, I'm setting my sites on the Central California Coast-- still not overrun with the frantic and their cars-- after an interim stay with my parents, now 73 and 85.  How many people at this age have the opportunity to revisit a home from decades past, the same but changed, and spend weeks or months with their parents? It will be getting to know them on wholly different terms. Terms? No--stations.

Barbara, my tango dancing, ex-mormon, novelist friend flew from Salt Lake City to make the trip with Rumi and me.  Her unflagging spirit and energy are a vital addition to our little entourage.  So, we packed, we cleaned, we hauled to Goodwill, we said goodbye and we set out.  The itinerary-- to get warm, see old friends, discover new places, and find ourselves home.