Being Thankful

This week I paused on a city sidewalk to admire bone colored ginkgo leaves, each one tipped in amber, fluttering in the wind against a royal blue sky.

In the mornings I sometimes wake up to the whirring of a hummingbird drinking nectar from the red sage blossoms outside my bedroom window. Beyond the tiny bird's silhouette is the Pacific Ocean, blanketed with fog and tinted pink at the horizon.

Some of my gratitude rituals include: sitting in my garden (or bathtub) and seeing shy little birds as they land on the feeder, making it sway like a swing. Watching trees through a window as they blow about in a storm. Feeding the fish, their mouths wide open in happy anticipation as they feel my footsteps on the path to the pond.

To this list I'd add doing the dishes, warm bubbly water flowing over my hands. (I've heard if you look at your palms, you will see your ancestors.) Making coffee. Smiling into my husband's eyes. Smelling the surprising late winter blooms of the tiny Cecil Bruner roses at Deetjens Inn. Sunrises. Raindrops on windows. Dewdrops on anything. Brushing my hair. The feel of silk, well worn cotton and the mysterious promise of lace.

One thing that living in Nature makes perfectly crystal clear is that gratitude is the key to happiness. I repeat: gratitude is the key to happiness. It's our little secret in Big Sur, that by simply observing the natural world we can tap into this magical source of presence and contentment.

If we could put it in vials, like voodoo medicine, we'd call it the Mother Lode. After almost 20 years in Big Sur, I find that Nature shows me her beauty everywhere I stop to look, including at my Mother's, where I am on this lovely Thanksgiving morning.

This process, known among spiritual seekers as "Wanting what you have", is a way to let go of Life's constant imperfections and disappointments. Stop, look and listen: it unlocks the jail of the mind and for a while sets us free from worries, obsessions and regrets. It gives blessed relief when the inevitable snafus hit.

When Nature fan-dances across our consciousness at year end, with all the wake-up calls of the season, I feel encouraged to lay down all my personal battle flags, to stop wanting something else, something more. It's time instead to see beauty everywhere, even in those perfect "imperfections", and for today at least, to feel grateful for it ALL.

Going to Town

It's what we do when we run out of food, gas, or entertainment. A one way trip can take anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours. Fog, rain and wind are a factor in the journey, as well as traffic volume. The experience changes seasonally, and can be dramatically different if you are driving your pickup filled with treasures for the dump v. say, the hotel's van on a laundry run or an SUV load of kids going to a soccer game.

"Going to town" is an expression that works both metaphorically and literally: We go all out when we go to town, most of us making that drive at least once a week. According to Rootsweb, for our American Wild West ancestors the phrase meant going where the action was, while the Urban Dictionary reminds us that in Ye Olde England, the phrase referred to something a little naughtier.

The Big Sur Town Trip phenomenon proves that yes, it is possible to run errands for 6, 8, 10 hours at a stretch. Detailed town to-do lists are generally left behind on the refrigerator, and often an odd juxtaposition of tasks takes place. This can be comic, as when we get our teeth cleaned on the same day we get the kittens spayed, or a real pain, say when I had our taxes done in the morning, and suffered through a mammogram in the afternoon. Squeezed mercilessly twice in one day!

Strange things can happen on the road: not just the frightened drivers who navigate Highway One at a snail's pace, the occasional motorcyclist with an obvious death wish, or the sad-faced hitch-hikers with signs that say "South". Once I found a delicate gold wedding band abandoned on the blue tile sink of a gas station restroom. Another time, when I was traveling at 50 mph, a vision-impaired owl smacked the top of my windshield and flew on, leaving a few soft feathers glued to the glass.

If "the Road" is a metaphor for Life, then the citizens of Big Sur live that poetic reality every day on Highway One. At one end of the spectrum, some make a dedicated effort to rarely leave their nests. At the other end, one can (as an old boyfriend of mine once claimed) suffer the "Jack Kerouac Syndrome" and constantly be on the road, again.

And this process of reflection has led me to recall the lovely Sikh lullaby:

May the longtime sun
shine upon you.
All love surround you.
And the pure light within you
guide your way on.

Now, that's a song to come home to.


Photo "Bathtub view" by Linda Sonrisa

Ages pass, and still you pour

Ages pass

and still you pour
and still there's more
to fill.
Your infinite gifts
come to me
only on these very small
hands of mine.
Ages pass
and still you pour
and still there's more
to fill.

For Julia Ingersoll, who spends her time painting, teaching and exhibiting in Tuscany and Big Sur, this mystical prayer by Bengali poet Tagore comes as close as words can to describing her experience as a landscape painter.

Julia and I chatted a few Saturdays ago at what she calls our local "piazza": Loma Vista. Back in the 80's, when I was escaping the City, I remember it as a sleepy gas station next door to falling down greenhouses filled with peaceful pastel begonias.

In those ante-diluvian times, the sign with the marquee style plastic lettering on the highway said simply, Gas, Cactus, Beer. People were always asking for the "Cactus beer" when they stopped in to fill up their tanks. Now it's the site of a delightful cultural center and famous restaurant, but you can still pitch coins into the moss covered fountain for the volunteer fire brigade, and enjoy the view of Mt. Manuel to the north, especially beautiful at dusk.

Julia had one of those challenging but blessed childhoods that seem to create fearless artists: Growing up the child of academics with a dose of wanderlust, Julia was schooled in Paris, and lived in a village in Morocco. She spent summers in Greece, Portugal and Austria. Coming back to the US, she rode horseback in the shadow of Mt. Shasta and bicycled in the Colorado Rockies. It was, she says, similar to what Big Sur kids experience. "No one told us there were things we couldn't do, so we did everything we could think of, without fear."

It's no accident that she now teaches painting in Tuscany for Women's Quest, an organization that offers retreats all over the world, and whose slogan is a quote from poet Mary Oliver, "What will you do with your one wild and precious life?" As I write this post, she is teaching landscape painting in medieval Tuscan villages, having just launched an exhibit of her work as part of an art and poetry festival in Bolgheri, Italy.

In college in Boulder, Colorado (where she graduated in Philosophy), Julia developed a passion for mountain biking, competing internationally for almost a decade. Her career included racing for the National Team in the World Cup. These years gave her the opportunity to travel, make money and pursue her love of drawing and painting, something she has done all her life. During her last race, she vowed she would "never pin a number on again," and chanted "all I want to do is paint" to herself as she crossed her final finish line. Later that same day, she signed up for a live drawing class in Boulder.

After apprenticing 5-6 hours a day with painters she admired, her hard work earned her a spot in the Florence Academy of Art, where she thrived. During her travels she became a self-proclaimed "Italophile" adding Italian to her fluency in French, and looked at lots of religious art. "Madonna con bambino, Madonna con bambino, over and over" she says with a flourish, adding that "and in the backgrounds of all these paintings one sees landscapes."

"The presence of the sacred was a huge part of everyday life in the Renaissance world," Julia says. "And today," she adds, giving credit to the great 19th century American painter George Inness, "instead of characters from sacred mythology imposed on a landscape painting, you have it emanating from every leaf, the sacred shining through Nature itself."

Which brings us to Big Sur. Julia's been living here for 4 years, mostly on a coastal property with panoramic views of the Ventana Wilderness "back country". Like many Big Sur pilgrims, she had no idea she would be starting a new chapter in her destiny when she stayed briefly at Esalen Institute, which she calls a kind of "butterfly sanctuary". But one thing led to another, and now she's one of us.

Today, when she rides her bike on the Coast Ridge road and looks east towards the Ventana Double Cone, and west toward the Pacific Ocean, she muses on how the ocean is infinity in terms of space, while the mountains are infinity in terms of time. Big Sur and Tuscany compel her to paint like no other places on Earth.

"The veil between the worlds is very thin here," Julia says. "Spirit is in all the land, not just in a few sacred spaces. But in places where the land has been abused, spirit retreats. Here in Big Sur, the land pulsates with spirit. Everybody feels it. You can feel your heartbeat in the waves, the soaring of birds, you can't not notice that all life is one."

"All of this is so vivifying," she adds, flashing me her million-dollar smile. "Sometimes I think that being a painter is just an excuse to be out there in IT," she laughs. "You can't paint what's really there, anyway...It can be hard sometimes to be face to face with this ecstatic quality of Nature. It can push at your limits of what you can receive."

After our chat, Julia rides home on her bike. "Hey, where's your helmet?" I call out, and she just smiles that smile back at me. As I drive away, I repeat softly to myself "Ages pass, and still you pour, and still there's room to fill."

The Gathering Hour, Oil landscape by Julia Ingersoll
At Loma Vista
November Cypress, Oil, 24 X 30, Julia Ingersoll
The artist in her element

Late Summer Walkabout

Sometimes, when we're looking for that land over the rainbow, unlike Dorothy, we have to go farther than our own backyard. Although I live in the soul-opening majesty of Big Sur, I still feel a touch of wanderlust. Due to the "recession" we are mostly in stay-cation mode, but work, long overdue social and family visits, plus a compelling art exhibit called us out of Oz into the larger world.

San Francisco's De Young Museum exhibit "Birth of Impressionism" was mind-blowing, and dovetailed nicely with my husband's gig as a wine sommelier at the SF Chefs Food and Wine Festival. We dreamed and sighed over the Impressionist paintings on loan from the Musée d' Orsay in Paris, sharing the audio tour as we wove through the crowd.

Seeing the canvases in person (v. looking at reproductions) is like listening to live music instead of recordings. You are there beside the artist making the brush-strokes. These paintings hold immense energy. How radical these painters were, to paint exactly what they wanted, and to show so perfectly what they saw. In the early works (think: Bouguereau) I decided that no, that was not paint, but luminous flesh on the canvases holding those figures lifting lamps or sprouting wings.

I have so many favorites from this exhibit, and am eagerly awaiting the Post- Impressionist show at the De Young beginning later this month, but what stands out to me now are Renoir's The Boy with the Cat, and Stevens' The Bath. Sisely's painting of The Barge During the Flood, Port-Marly occasioned this comment from my husband, "I was there!" I had to laugh, but then was surprised to hear him mentioned on the tour as a former patron of the pub on the edge of the Seine (kidding).

Later we dined on the best pub food I've ever enjoyed at the Phoenix Irish Bar on Valencia St., followed by a drive across town to the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square (despite the encouragement of a girlfriend, we did NOT have an amorous encounter in the fast-moving glass elevator).

Toby had pulled some very interesting strings and scored The Windsor Room on the 31st floor, a large and corporate style suite (with yummy red wines and chocolates strewn about). Queen Elizabeth II stayed there in 1983. We felt rather regal, at that. Apparently the Queen and Prince Phillip had bumped then-President Ronald Reagan downstairs into another room, and in the photo of the hotel lobby you can see them toasting, Reagan wearing his signature strained smile.

Next came a quick trip to Discovery Bay, to see one of my oldest, dearest friends, and her fiancée. After watching the bride-to-be do flips on a sky board behind their speedboat, we christened her Our Dolphin Lady of the Delta! But before we made it out of the murky city fog into the blazing heat of the central valley, we had to pass through the clogged arteries of the megalopolis that the Bay Area has become. Mysterious road crews performed arcane deeds, their minions directing traffic below overpasses and onto the Bay Bridge. I tried hard not to think of that 7.1 shimmy California's tectonic plates did in 1989.

Instead, I thought of one of my favorite books of all time, where caterpillars climb enormous pillars composed of their fellow squirming worms. Obsessed with reaching the top, they discover that transformation comes only by jumping off the damn pillar. Which is what I felt I'd done when the roads finally cleared around Concord, as I headed east on Highway 4 to the Delta.

Yes, in search of that elusive summer sunshine, we went far afield, including even a quick trip to Lake Tahoe, a visit of surprising gifts. There is just no substitute for actual contact with the branches, leaves, and acorns (not to mention the odd squirrels and wing-nuts) of one's family tree.

We need to breathe the same air, to laugh and break bread together in order to make it real. So we did that too, on this last summer trip. Our reward included not a rainbow, but the heavens shined on us after all, and showed us love.

Photo by Toby Rowland-Jones

Dansayoga Surprise

This past weekend I took my slightly hungover self to Dansayoga, a wonderful two hour yoga and improv dance class held Saturday mornings at Big Sur's Grange Hall.

There were only two students, myself and my businesswoman friend, and two teachers, a lovely dark-haired yoga instructor and Dansayoga's founder Carlotta, the wild and creative Swedish expat who guides us weekly in our improv dance adventures. The four of us checked in briefly, complaining a bit about life's ordinary stresses, and (a common theme) the general malaise of mid-life marriage.

Halfway through the yoga class, two beautiful (and I mean beautiful) shirtless young men joined us, forming "planks" and then standing with us as "trees". I said a silent prayer of gratitude. I tried to catch my friend's eye, but she stayed focused on her poses. Later, I raised an eyebrow and she winked back at me from across the hardwood dance floor.

Yes, these two would be EXACTLY the kind of angels we would dream up: handsome friendly faces, perfectly sculpted (and lightly tattooed) torsos, a willingness to play. The kind of young men who make you smile inside and sigh a little, too.

The energy in the room shifted perceptibly when we began to dance together. First we moved on our mats, un-kinking our bodies from the hour of yoga. Next we stood up and began to work through those first self-conscious moments. The music inspired me, and I lost that dance-floor awkwardness pretty fast.

My friend was a professional dancer in her former life so the two of us began to play with more confidence. The young men jumped into the pool as well, moving in their own unique ways. Carlotta encouraged us to "steal each others' moves" pairing up to follow each other, taking turns with different partners. Everyone moves differently, and I love mimicking moves, it gives me a subtle sense of being someone else for just a moment.

As the music warmed up, so did we, and soon the Grange Hall became the hottest dance club on the coast, all of us stone-cold sober on a Saturday morning. We kicked into overdrive: spinning and leaping around the room, grinning at each other as we tried out all our own different moves. The music possessed us, we glowed with perspiration, it was divine. There's a reason why Carlotta calls this "Dance Church".

At one point, encouraged to so some contact improv, I thought of the tradition of couple's dancing: socially acceptable ways to touch and be together on the dance floor, the old-fashioned way. I suddenly saw my shirtless young gentleman in a cowboy shirt, hat, jeans and boots, as we did some modified swing dace moves. Men and women dancing together feels deep in the race, civilized and kind.

The light is soft in the Grange for Dansayoga, with candles and sparkling white string lights along the edges of the floor. And so, Dear Readers, the moment of truth arrived (as it always does) as we sat in a circle and passed around a small book of Rumi poems.

In the stillness after all that dancing, we read aloud the first poem we open to for inspiration. Yes, I had to extend my arm as far away from my body as possible, and squint, in order to read the damn words. My friend didn't even try -- when the book came to her she walked to the window, and she read her poem in the brighter light.

Our two visitors were on their hero's journey through Big Sur on a holiday weekend. They confessed they'd never done anything like this before, had only seen the sign on the highway the night before and decided on the spot to join in next morning. They both sincerely thanked Carlotta for creating the space, and quizzed us on the best options for another night's stay. Oh, how I wanted to offer them the hammock in my backyard!

But, as we learn with age, discretion is the better part of valor. As my friend and I left the Hall, off to our busy Saturday schedules, our dreamboats stayed behind. "Who dialed up Hunks R Us?" she asked, and we doubled over in laughter in the parking lot. So, will we see you at Dansayoga this next Saturday morning, at 10am?
Photo by Carlotta Persson

Big Sur Bee-tox, Or, A difficult week in the beauty department

Well, I know how it happened, and there's no one to blame. That little girl bee (who must have been furious and scared) got under the bill of my baseball cap, and as we mutually freaked out (I batting her away, she, quickly stinging me and presumably dying) the poison entered the soft flesh on the point of my cheekbone, a finger's breadth away from my eye.

I turned and walked rapidly back down the mountain, cutting short my before dinner walk with my dog. While my face hurt, and I had a sense of dread about what would happen, but I didn't see any sense in getting emotional at that point. It was a beautiful evening, and I'd just had another Big Sur experience. It couldn't be as bad as a rattlesnake bite, or a scorpion's kiss, right?

When I reached home I realized the stinger was hanging off my cheekbone and so had my husband Toby pull it out with a pair of tweezers. Then we carried on with entertaining our guest, eating pasta, drinking lovely red wine, reading Tarot cards. As the evening wore on, both my husband and our friend commented on the transformation of my face. "I think it's not going to get any worse," said Peter, "I think it's as swollen as it will get." Dream on!

All night long I put baking soda compresses under my right eye (and watched the poison spread across my face). My left eye was swelling up as well, my cheeks were inflating. In the morning I put on a hijab and went to work (thinking I could take my mind off the pain) but an hour later two sweet guardian angels took me to our local clinic, where the country doctor gave me a steroid shot and told me I'd be fine in no time. Small town hazard: he teased me about blogging about my sting. Later he emailed me a link to an article he'd written about apitherapy, which the ancient Greeks practiced. Ouch!

Back at home I sank into the grass (ignoring the bees dancing around me) letting the blessed sun warm my body while I held an ice pack across my face. One of my guardian angels had given me a bottle of homeopathic anti-anxiety drops to offset the steroid's effects. That and some leftover codeine tablets calmed me down somewhat. The product, Dr. Garber's ANX, is Buddhism in a bottle: it promises to reduce anxiety, stop nervous irritability and obsessive thinking. Toby wants to buy me a barrel of it.

But massive swelling had yet to occur. Here I am at my worst, and now, perhaps, I can banish vanity from my life, at least a little. This is where I turned into a 100 year old Tibetan lady. My face became a mask of swollen skin. It hurt and it was scary. Worst was when I felt the venom flowing down my throat, enlarging the whole right side of my face and neck. A friend stopped by and was properly horrified. "I hope you get your face back soon," she said. So did I.

While I knew in my head it was temporary, and tried to feel compassion for those in the world who suffer more painful permanent conditions, it still, well, sucked. But here's the silver lining: I'd been standing on the edge of the pool, staring into that whole world of "women of a certain age" processes of expensive recurring treatments, wildly priced magical creams, a life of wearing hats and sunblock. Suddenly, the normal discolorations that happen on a late-40's face seemed just not very important to me anymore.

So, I guess I have to thank that tiny distressed bee, who gave her life so I could renew my dedication to growing old gracefully. Now, when I touch the spot on the tip of my cheekbone where the stinger deposited its poison, (it is still there, the littlest bump) I almost hope it stays. To remind myself that bee-tox is better than botox, and to be grateful for the face I have, which (Praise be!) came back.

Jack in the Beanstalk Land

All right then, the fog is back. At this point, we'd welcome the bugs that come with hot, sunny days in the country. The ridge is wrapped in cloud, all is quiet, even the birds' dawn chorus is silent.

All edges soften, as if we've burrowed into drifts of cotton gauze, and shapes on the horizon blur. Up close, the colors of the garden pop with intensity. Condensation falls like raindrops from the trees, damp cobwebs shimmer in the grass. Today we can watch a movie, drink hot chocolate, play scrabble. Yet, we are longing for the sun.

Yesterday morning, we had a few delicious moments above the fog, one of my most favorite experiences here. It's as if we've become residents of a mystical archipelago, with ridge-top islands stretching up and down the coast. All we have to do is summon a golden boat and sail over a sea of clouds. So felt the lucky few who made it to the top of Mount Olympus, home of the gods.

Grandiose metaphors aside, the one we prefer in our rustic, hobbit-home, is the story of Jack in the Beanstalk. We must give credit for this romantic, fairy-tale vision of Big Sur to the gentleman who owns the property we live on. Witnessing the fog-blanket phenomenon some years back, he exclaimed, "It's Jack in the Beanstalk land!"

Yes, we can imagine happy Jack emerging from the clouds at the top of a giant beanstalk. The great green stalk sways in the muted light of a foggy day as Jack steps across the fog-carpet to the hillside below our house. Like us, he had no idea what his impulse buy of those mysterious beans would bring. He's curious and determined to explore this magical land.

Sometimes doing the eccentric thing, like trading a cow for beans or jumping off the merry-go-round of mainstream modern life, can bring unexpected riches. The goose that laid the golden egg, the talking harp, and the giants (minus the fee-fi-fo-fum bit) are all here, on the top of Partington Ridge.

Photo by Linda Sonrisa

Jack in the Beanstalk illustration by Jackie Willcox Smith