we're all renters here

when i had that realization, it was very liberating.

it came about when a friend who had bought a fixer-upper with the help of her family said about her neighbors, 'oh, they're only renters!' i didn't take umbrage with her, but i felt it. after all, i've been a renter my whole life.

then came the epiphany: we don't really own anything. everything is contingent. we don't own our children. they leave. we don't own our parents. they die. we don't own our houses: my sister's house burned down and the vast family history my mother had gathered ashes. recently, a friend had most of her house flattened by a tree falling in a storm. an acquaintance lost his house to one of our wildland fires a couple weeks ago.

even our bodies we don't possess, not in the way we'd like to believe. two days ago i visited my friend ed in the hospital. an avid bike leader in the community, six months ago he hit a stanchion and tumbled, injuring his spine. he looked very tired, paralyzed from the neck down. he's feisty and hopefully will recover the use of his limbs. however, for the moment, it's been taken away.

most of our suffering comes from a sense of loss. perhaps it helps to think that loss is the name of the game. at the moment california burning up. according to botany, it's supposed to burn. the oils build up in the brush. a fire releases a lot of seed, puts healthy ash in the soil. of course, people build in the woods. it's merely a matter of time, especially since global warming is charging the atmosphere with higher energy that must find an outlet.

if we are only renters, we might consider stressing less about buying a home, a new car, and so on and on. they say, 'you only get to keep what you give away.' it's not a bad philosophy to live by, despite our need for the illusion of owning.

here are some pics from the lookout in the smoke:

http://forum.getdpi.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2426

when the smoke gets in your eyes

during the night, someone discovered a hundred acre four miles north of me, where i would normally have spotted it right away. (visibility at the moment half a mile.) the most fire-ridden june i've seen in 45 years as a lookout. four days of lightning (perhaps dry) now predicted.

maybe that's why this morning before getting up, i began thinking where i'd like to die. this is, of course, the return of a morbid subject, but i have my reasons.

two weeks ago, i paid my next six months on my secret storage space. roger, the manager, has become a friend over the years. i've heard lots about his troubles. for example, this time he pulls me aside from the house and tells me his wife's daughter, husband, and two kids showed up may 1st with no money. one baby sleeps in the stroller outside the door. i ask, 'other than that, is everything okay?' 'no, afraid not,' pointing to a bump on his jaw. 'cancer. lungs. blood in my stool.' he's about to leave for treatment at the veteran's hospital.' i do my best to reassure him and give him a bottle of french wine. his little blond granddaughter asheley comes out, smiling. 'i've got thirteen of them,' he says, still puffing on a cigarette.

last night, i watched 'wit', the story of a youngish woman professor of metaphysical poetry diagnosed with cancer. she's lively and witty and if you want to see chemo in action, this is the movie for you. unfortunately, the treatment fails.

can i be forgiven for considering the subject while i'm in this twilight zone? (i'm trying to be as realistic as i can be.)

thus, this morning i thought, 'okay, i'd like to die right here, on this bed, surrounded by nature and the sky. where else? in the house i'm house-sitting, artwork and books taking me into themselves. and lastly? on a train, going through fields in europe.' this my secret way of finding what means most to me.

here are pictures of my friend berta on our travels. as she grew weaker, her sister sat her down and they put pins in a world map of all the places she'd been, a very lovely if sad way of showing her she had lived and had a full life. i was very happy to have these photos as a momento.

www.pbase.com/wwp/berta

friday the 13th part four

ah, it's almost past. the sky full of smoke from near my hometown (chico), the sun setting red.

twice i've received life-alerting missives on this particular day, which adds to both my excitement and anxiety. alas, i can't remember the second, but the first happened in oxford, england. i'd just gotten permission to stay for a year and had the money, when the coast guard wrote i'd have to come back and go to reserve meetings. this was quite a shock. i'd done a month active duty in london the year before to satisfy the requirement.

a greek island, berlin, and two years later i had to return to the land of the war in vietnam. they never called up the reserves, which definitely saved my sanity and probably my life.

what would my life had been like had i stayed in britain? perhaps quite different. maybe a permanent expat with a bouncy, buxom irish wife. no, it was not meant to be.

reading 'the flaneur' by edmund white. "Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flaneurs...they are always driven by the urge toward self-improvement." the flaneur wanders the street, joins the crowds, idly looking, for no purpose other than the experience.

all this while i thought to educate myself, grow-up, become an expert. yet i suspect i know little more than i did fifty years ago! what an astonishing thought. i do know i revel in my memories. back here at the lookout i'm constantly traveling the world.

the main awareness: you are making your world as you live in it. no wonder buddha said this the first step. you really can turn off your desires for sweets, your worries about love, you simply have to realize you're creating the craving. of course, it's easier some times than others. personally, i like to wallow in certain moods. then i can't get out of them because i'm enjoying myself!

looking back through old picture files, i think, 'how many good ones i've got already. why persist?" guess it's a further motivation for rambling, looking, it changes even a well-known place into something mysterious. here are a few more parade files from last year:

www.pbase.com/wwp/fujiparade

only three more hours and this fateful date will be history. the thing is, have i received an important notice without realizing it? the smoke on the horizon? the troubled dreams i had just before waking? what if i'm not getting the message, tho it's already been sent?

graduation, the moment of truth

somehow i was never there, not for grade school, high school, or college. and i have to admit, part of it was pride. i didn't want to be one of the herd. however, like about everything else in my life i'm now suspicious of my motives. fears played a large part. i used to have a knot in my stomach at parties, felt inadequate at social gatherings, hankered for a good book when i felt i had to make small talk.

"we spend too much time worrying about what other people think." all too true. must be part of our survival instinct, the need of the pack, the fear of banishment, starving in the desert. and only the other day it occured to me i could simply turn it off. nobody's really thinking about me anyway, much as i might like to wish they were.

so, back to graduation. i've more than made up for it in the last few years: grade school, high school, and many times college. true, i still feel ambivalent about education. is it really a training in timidity, rats adapting to the maze? can you really be an artist (certainly you can a dentist, social worker, engineer) as a result of courses in composition, color, timing?

robert henri in 'the art spirit' insists all education is self-taught, the school merely an opportunity and obstacle. hmm, certainly the case in my town. the one thing in life that will get you by is the work ethic, whether you apply it to flight-school or the dice. and that's what i mean (mostly) about the moment of truth. it's when you suddenly have to pay your own bills, can't call your folks for a check or a loan. cold water, o boy, cold water it is.

by not having children or buying a house, driving old cars, i've managed to avoid mortgages and debts. it's still pure luck and good luck is all i've ever asked for. my own moods, inclinations, desires have taken up so much of my energy i wonder how other people take upon themselves the cares of others. reading '511 things only women understand' i'm not surprised at my impatience. do we all start out as wild animals having to be domesticated?

last sunday i took more graduation pictures. bored by the repetition of old themes, i transformed them into something else. have a look: www.pbase.com/wwp/woodcuts

and then take a peek at pics from the county fair, another favorite event, taken two days before. www.pbase.com/wwp/g3fair someday i hope to figure out what i really have to say. then maybe i'll graduate to the next level!

Dancing while i can

the crisis is past, at least some kind of crisis. the echocardiogram showed a normal heart with a blip in one of the valves (wonder to see it beating, the four chambers). on the stress-test runway i lasted nine minutes as it ran faster and steeper. my pulse remained low, as did the pressure of blood. thus, my body's stable, even at this age, my many prior terrors all for naught.

true, i did visit the hospital three times where my friend karma lay with an opened chest and five bypasses created with veins from his leg (his birthday within three weeks of mine). up and down the halls were blatant signs of mortality and for awhile in the world everyone look like a corpse waiting to happen!

gradually that passed. karma's home, stronger every day. in three months they say he will be able to do everything he once could, including trekking in the himalayas. still, i can't forget what la rochfoucauld wrote,"few people know how to be old." and to pull myself up i photographed dancers. amazing how young they've become, even in the three years since i took the class myself.

i tried out a couple of older digital cameras to test their merits. of course, they're slower than the latest product, however they seem to have a better image quality, the pictures full of intimacy and emotion. why have today's models lost the capacity to capture these?

even before driving up the mountain yesterday and fighting the wind to carry boxes of books into the tower, my spirits had risen. the night before i'd attended the final lecture of a favorite teacher, jim mcmanus, an expert in the life and works of marcel duchamp. at the end the students gave him a standing ovation. in the final tally that's what matters, what others have learned from us.

dancers: www.pbase.com/wwp/choreo2

older cameras: www.pbase.com/wwp/revisit

www.pbase.com/wwp/d2

no more memories needed?

i put this as a question. to myself, of course. since i have to move again this fall, the options open up. and that's what i love, and fear. (we moved thirty times by my graduation from high school.)

this, perhaps, is why i never really wanted children of my own. ie. i mean to raise, since we never own them and they ultimately abandon us, as we've taught them to do. a life-partner, even, ruled out of the equation, though i tried. how could i have acted on impulse? lived without much money? (our family in debt the whole time i was growing up. the result of idealism, serving others.) to me a family meant doing lots of things you didn't want to do, life slipping away.

now, i have the memories i desired. bits and shreds from forty countries, and that doesn't include dreams. for example, china a big hole in my travels, along with south america and africa. (tangiers and costa rica, close but no banana. japan twice, yet not quite the continent.) that said, a moment ago i looked at a picture book on the great wall. one village perched high above a river appeared to be the one i visited in a dream forty years ago. hmm, maybe that trip more real than many so achingly experienced.

yes, it's anxiety that makes us remember things. and someone said, 'memory is incomplete experience.' in a book called 'is there life after high school?' the author posited we remember high school so vividly cause it was more painful than anything else in our lives! that's true, except, perhaps for travel, if you go the way i've gone, buses and backpacks and cheap lodgings. is our life most our own when we're lonely? that seems completely possible. the guru osho says we belong to ourselves only when we're between thoughts, and that's meditation, nirvana. certainly, time collapses and telescopes when we're on the road, a week in a dusty asian city equals five years of comfort in a suburb.

of course, this was all part of a plan. to use my time up, to have so many memories i'd be comfortable departing for the final journey. unfortunately, as e.m. cioran says, 'thoughts of dying comfort us on the way to grave, but they don't help us when death is on the doorstep.' we'd like to be free of the burden of tension, however it's that very pull of gravity which makes us feel alive.

mostly i think i will miss my memories, or at least, i think it's a shame they will disappear when i do. if i add to the pile, am i merely creating more loss for myself? and do i need to go anywhere? the appearances around us are more mysterious than we think. gary winograd said, 'i take pictures to see what things look like photographed.' somehow i like to discover the true nature of an event afterwards, rather like a japanese tourist, looking at the parthenon when i get home. no, it's not quite like that, cause i tend to dissolve the present in a bath of memory and agony to arrive at a spectral interpretation. some might call it a vision. look at www.pbase.com/wwp/eco to see what i mean.

"all you need

is a new idea" said the dancer/choreographer twyla tharp.

ah, if only it were that easy. we can be enlightened by a cup of coffee and it won't survive the day. waking from a fantastic dream, we feel we've the world by the tail. by the time we get out of bed, the sky look gray and bare.

a new idea! yes, of course. yet it must grab us, motivate us, obsess our thoughts and drive our feet. unfortunately, our heads are already full of categories, circles, childhood, money, houses, cars, cares, children, work, history, the news. there is simply no room for anything else.

we tend to live in the closed system of ourselves. stumbling and groping, we grasp at whatever works and hold onto it for dear life. how can we escape the safe but inhibiting patterns we've built up to support the edifice we've created?

i've mentioned a cup of coffee. of course, there are other drugs: pot, prozac, or more desperately, heroin and sleeping pills. whatever breaks the circle of our judgements, for in not accepting others we do not accept ourselves.

how often do we come out of a movie, a play, or rise from reading a novel, to feel we've broken free, entered another's way of being, of looking, of acting and reacting? for an hour, even two, we see the world with love's eyes, everything possible, everything new. (the charm of youth.) and gradually the bright sun sets.

as many of the wise have said, we have to get out of our own way. and this may be as simple as saying yes where we've said no, walking down a new street, confronting a bully. the desire to do things differently has to grow huge, or be thrust upon us.

in solitary confinement, the black panther george jackson invented and practiced his own form of yoga. then there was the fellow imprisoned in a box during the american civil war. to pass the time he invented the repeating rifle. war and famine, earthquakes and fire, marriage and divorce, children and death, how do we submit to a boot-camp by choice?

in a recent book on work the therapist thomas moore uses the example of following your own daimon, the little voice inside which gives us a sense of direction. in 'how to get control of your time and your life' by alan lakein the author submits that fifteen minutes of planning early in the day may be worth more than all the good intentions in the world. (he also says, '80% of the results come from the first 20% of effort.' and other good things.)

every answer is personal. usually i avoid going back to places where i've had a pleasant experience. living in the same town for years on end, this isn't always possible. a week ago i returned to table mountain, a local pilgrimage site for spring flowers. i'd last gone five years ago. here is the first record: www.pbase.com/wwp/table_mountain the first view seems easy and fresh. especially in conversation with a friend. the second time i was alone and it was easter. something darker and more brooding entered into the pictures. www.pbase.com/wwp/easter

same place. new idea. for a moment there was room for it.