Questions

 I’ve thought for a long time that a good question is a really big deal.  There’s an art to asking a good question, to even seeing what question needs to be asked.   I remember when we bought our little house  in E. Lansing, the realtor touted as a big advantage that there was a relatively new concrete driveway at the house.  It was an unusual upgrade because the owner was very very cheap.  We didn’t ask the question, “Why did the owner put in a new driveway?”  Over the years, we’ve realized there is an underground river running under the driveway, eroding the supporting soil even creating a huge sinkhole in the street in front of our driveway.  The answer to that question would have been illuminating.  I remember loving good questions in the classroom.  When a student asked something I’d never thought about, I was delighted.  The answer often illuminated something important,   This week up in Sonoma when our friend’s 90 year old husband told us he is writing a book about questions, we were interested.  First of all, that at 90, he’s thinking about questions shows his lively and interesting mind.  Then, he told us the really big question is “What question is your life the answer to?”  I’ve been reflecting about what have been the most important themes of my life.  Looking back over my long life, can I summarize and ask a question about my life?  It makes me look at the priorities and values I’ve held.  It makes me look at the issues in my family of origin.  What question is my life the answer to.  As Bob said, “It’s Jeopardy about my life.”  

Friendship

 Friendship is a balm that soothes pains and brings joy to my heart.  Today, a dear friend and I drove up to Sonoma to visit mutual friend.  We have gathered once or maybe twice a year together and always our time together is very special.  Today we drove through the green hills and by beautiful vineyards of Sonoma to her place, a farm behind the city of Sonoma.  We sat under a lathe cover on her porch with a  gentle breeze wafting by erasing any possible fear of Covid even though we’re all fully vaccinated.  Our host served a beautiful salad, a new circle of soft cheese from nearby Nicasio and sparkly drinks.  We passed the food around and our wonderful conversation began.  There is something special, even sacred, about the give and take of honest conversation with true friends.  I remember most our laughter.  It felt like healing.  It is truly something wonderful to be heard and understood.  We ended our meal with a fabulous fragrant tea served in beautiful mugs from Taize in France and really big homemade chocolate chip cookies.  Our hostess had to leave at 2 to take a call and my friend and I walked up the road to admire an amazing display of local wildflowers.  I can’t remember seeing such a vibrant display of dark blue lupine.  It was truly a sea of blue.  There were vernal pools with flowers in rings over the dip in the ground.  There were white popcorn flowers, fiddle necks, blue dicks and many many.  I could hardly take in the glory of abundant beauty.  

After the day, home again, I felt restored and relaxed after a very special day.

A Fabulous Break-through Weekend

 Last weekend we were invited to stay with our good friends up in their Gold Country house in Sheep Ranch.  Because of the pandemic, we hadn’t been there for more than a year.  But now that we are all fully vaccinated, we were invited for a totally maskless weekend.  Everything about the weekend I had not experienced for more than a year.  I’d not been out of Berkeley except a very few times and then we hadn’t gone very far.  Sheep Ranch was a 3 hour drive east.  It was very beautiful going through the Central Valley with the green green fields and the many orchards of flowering fruit trees.  We had not been with people unmasked for more than a year.  When we got there, it felt both normal and very strange to be without a mask.  They prepared a celebratory dinner of Pescatarian Paella which Larry cooked, a Spanish salad and a special Almond cake.  There was great joy in being together and being safe and unmasked.  Nancy and I stood in front of the open fire place to warm up as we caught up with what has been happening.  The next day we decided to go out to lunch in Murphys at a restaurant of a friend of Larry’s.  We ate indoors.  It felt somehow naughty to do it, even though it felt very safe.  The restaurant was cavernous, with lots of open space and everyone wore masks except at their tables which were well spaced apart.  It was definitely a breakthrough!  Then we took a drive through the backroads enjoying the green of late March spring and the many roadside fields of daffodils.  It was good to be out and about.  Mostly we just enjoyed each other’s company as we hung out together.  Bob did some birding with his spotting scope Sunday morning and enjoyed close up views of Mountain Bluebirds, Purple Finches and House Finches, a white breasted Nuthatch among the many unidentifiable sparrows.  All in all, it was a fabulous break-through weekend for which I am very grateful.  It was great to get back to normal, but next day, I was really tired and feeling overwhelmed.  I’m never the first to do new things and this weekend felt like a very new thing after a year of mostly living in lockdown.  It was great to experience life after the pandemic, if only for a weekend.

Poem by Rilke

 Poems have been speaking to me this morning.  I heard one read on National Public Radio  by one of my former students, Danusha Lameris.  It was called “Small Kindnesses” and brought tears to my eyes as it recalled all the particular small ways in which we used to interact and give each other little things like telling someone to go ahead of you in a line or saying Bless You when someone sneezes.   I’m happy for her success.  I remember her as a beautiful gentle sensitive person.  Then this poem by Rilke came to me from Sagrada, one of my favorite stores in Oakland.  Both poems spoke to me about our injured relationships and our grief from the pandemic’s ravages.  I felt both had the hope of recovery implicit in them.  .   

All will come again into its strength

The fields undivided, the waters undammed,

The trees towering and the walls built low.

And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.

And no churches

Where God is imprisoned and lamented

Like a trapped wounded animal.

The houses welcoming all who knock

And a sense of boundless offering in all relations,

And in you and me.

No yearning for an afterlife,

No looking beyond,

No belittling of death,

But only longing for what belongs to us

And serving earth,

Lest we remain unused.

Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

                                                

Handling Change

 As the CDC (Center for Disease Control) gives guidelines for those of us who are fully vaccinated, it is becoming clear to me that it is a big deal to leave the pandemic restrictions behind.  I’ve become adapted to wearing a mask.  For me, it provides safety and a way to not accidentally infect another person.  Each day this week, I’ve shed my mask in one on one encounters.  I walk the hills each Tuesday with a friend and this past Tuesday, we didn’t wear our masks unless we someone else passed us.  It felt so freeing to go up a hill without having to breathe through several layers of cloth.  This past Thursday Arne came to have dinner and visit on his way home from working in Oakland.  In this visit (and hopefully all others with his family) we didn’t need to wear our masks.  It feels really strange to me to let go of the mask.  I’m not exactly afraid, but uneasy with the change.  I am used to staying home now, adapted to having my world be as small as just the Berkeley hills.  It feels like a foray when I go 9 miles south to Oakland to the doctor.  I have grown used to and like the intimacy of just Bob and me here day after day.  And I am still nervous about being out in a crowd, but then I always was fearful of crowds.  Now that fear is just worse.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to go back to attending the San Francisco Symphony concerts for my fear of the crowding.  I’ve written about my fear of freeways.  This is really strange for me, the ultimate “queen of the freeway” who grew up driving on the freeways of Los Angeles.  We’ve all adapted to the pandemic restrictions because we had to (well maybe the trumpers haven’t).  We carried on as best we could.  Now, as the pressure eases, I think it is normal to start feeling emotions about how this past lost year has really affected us.  At the Garden today, I had a conversation with one of the other volunteer propagators and we agreed, we were both feeling tired, a bit confused, a bit anxious about starting the work of re-adapting back to “normal” times, whatever they will look like.  It’s exciting, but scary too.

Living in the the Light

 We had a rainstorm yesterday.  It rained all night and off and on during the day with periods of sunshine breaking through.  I love listening to the rain on our roof and seeing the ground wet with plants looking so happy.   I took some lovely photos of flowers around the house bathed in the warm glow of shafts of angled light coming through the rain clouds.  As I reflect on the photos, I think they reflect something important in life.  There are times when we are bathed in the warm glow of love and we feel so happy.  Our faces shine with happiness and we feel so alive.  Once we’ve experienced this, we seek it over and over again.  We yearn to feel so alive.  We long for such happiness to be in our lives.  Like the light, love enlivens us.  I believe love is all around us, if we look very carefully and open ourselves to it.  Looking through an old Nature journal of mine this morning, I found some quotes from 6 year old Erika that warmed my heart:

“Three days without daddy is like three days without sunshine.”

“When you leave, I feel like little pieces of me break off.”

“You make my heart sparkle like a diamond.”

The light shines through these wonderful expressions of love.  I want to live in that light.

Break-Out Trip to SFMOMA

 Saturday morning early I wiped a year’s worth of dust off my best black leather shoes.  I dressed up in my newest fancy blouse and black pants.  We were going into San Francisco to the Member’s Only Opening Day at the San Francisco MOMA.  It was exactly a year minus two days since we were last at SFMOMA, just before the lockdown began.  I was excited, jittery even, to break out of our isolation.  We’re both fully vaccinated and San Francisco has lowered it’s Covid danger to the red level so museums and movies can open at 25%  capacity so I felt it was safe to go, masked and socially distant, of course.   Our tickets were for 11 AM.  I decided it would be safer to drive in rather than take BART and sit in the enclosed train cars for extended time.  So off we headed off in our trusty Prius a bit after 10 AM, Bob was driving.  As we got on the freeway, I realized I’d only been on a freeway a handful of times in the last year (5 or 6 times) and that I was very anxious.  I struggled to maintain a calm demeanor, but failed as my stomach tied up in knots, my hands sweated and I felt lightheaded with the cars whizzing by us.  It is quick and easy to get to MOMA by car.  Without any trouble, we parked in the MOMA parking lot and entered the Museum.  It felt good to be there again.  I was pleased by the large open mostly empty galleries, by the wide stairs, all the beautiful light wood, all the art and the big sign that said “We Miss You.”   I appreciated the friendly greetings the staff gave us.  First, we visited a new exhibition of art made during the pandemic:  “Creativity in Crisis” featuring six local artists.  Some I liked better than others.  I was impressed by their need to be creative and how hard that it was to be creative when they were so isolated.  One artist stuck in a small town in Wisconsin where he didn’t know anybody painted as a means to express his emotions he wrote in the Introduction to his art.  I found his painting of a man covering his face with his hands expressed the despair and isolation we have all felt one time or another during the pandemic.  Another artist painted small scenes on postcard sized paper of what was happening in the pandemic.  Another had 140 squares of drippy watercolor with tie-died fancy handkerchiefs attached to each square of color.  While the colors were bright on the wall, I didn’t get the message at first.  A day later, I asked myself, “why handkerchiefs?” And thought that they are used to blot away tears.  Also the water drops on the watercolors could represent tears.  We’ve had a lot to cry about this past year.  We wandered on, I was interested to find the brightly colored wall murals.  I located three and found them reminiscent of graffiti art out on city walls.  My favorite was on the 5th floor in the hallway by the restaurant.  It had bright flowers and children dancing on the ruins of symbols of the old white dominated society.  Definitely like Oakland street art.   Lastly, we enjoyed paintings by Ellsworth Kelly (noted to be the last happy modernist painter).  His large bright forms somehow made me feel good, maybe because he painted them to be happy?  There were several galleries with his large paintings and they were empty of any people.  My favorite was a yellow painting titled “Gaza” because it called to mind all the yellow things in my life—-the yellow room in our first house just the color of the leaves of the hickory tree outside the window in the fall, my favorite yellow dress bought in Bullocks Department Store on Lake St in Pasadena, yellow lemons off our little lemon tree and my joy in yellow daffodils.  All in all, it was a lovely serene time.  I am happy to be back in one of our favorite museums again..  Our trip made me hopeful things are getting better.  

A Few Things I Learned in the Pandemic

 A couple of days ago, the Chronicle had a small article in the Bay Area section asking people to send in writings about some of the things they had learned in the pandemic.  It’s been about a year since the first lockdown request was made “to the elderly and vulnerable.”  So I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned and now I ask others what they have learned during this last year of isolation.  

One thing I learned is that human beings are surprisingly adaptable.  I now feel naked when I go out into the world without a mask.  I will have to unlearn wearing one.  I will have to re-adapt to feeling safe in crowded BART trains or in the packed Symphony Hall or even at an indoor dinner party with friends.

I learned it is better to live in the present moment like the Buddhists preach.   Most days are the same anyway, so it is a good approach.  I have stopped looking ahead and mostly I’ve stopped planning.  I rarely think about the past.  That just makes me think about losses. 

I learned to slow down and be patient.  I don’t want to return to rushing around from activity to activity or trip to trip.  I used to say “I want no more than three things to do in a day” now it is more like one activity a day is enough.

I refined my ability to notice small things, like a beautiful flower or my relaxation after a nice walk or my delight in getting my hair cut.  I am learning to notice what pleases me and seek to bring those things into my life. 

I am learning to stand up for myself.  I recently advocated strongly at Kaiser (our health care provider) to get an appointment I felt I needed.  It’s taken such a long time to learn to do that.

I remembered to be grateful for blessings in my life some of which come in strange ways.  

It’s a hopeful thing to think about what I’ve learned from this terrible past year.  It makes me think this pandemic and it’s required isolation will be over.  We are the fortunate ones, I don’t even know anyone who has Covid, let alone died from Covid.  We will be able to reconstruct our lives again.  Though it won’t ever be the same as it was, we will go back to being together in community once again.  We will be able to travel, though not as much as we did before the pandemic.  A simpler life will be our good life.