An imperturbable demeanor comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune and misfortune at their own private pace like a clock during a thunderstorm.—Robert Louis Stevenson
It is always color that I return to—here I have yarn dropped over batik fabric. I could not figure out the quilt so I moved on to the weaving instead. The last quilt I pieced just came home, but I won’t get to open the package and put on the binding for a couple of days. Then we’ll see “Winterberry.”
The sky is vivid blue and the sun burns hot and yellow. The horse is flying. The flying horse soars beyond rust-brown dirt roads and gardens of red and orange flowers and sunflowers, over green hills and streams edged with trees in full leaf. The horse flies effortlessly. Cold air brushes past my cheeks and the flanks of the horse. I feel power in my legs. Sometimes there are feathered wings on the horse. Sometimes I am the horse. My own muscled wings carry me through the air.
It is my favorite dream.
When my husband and I are having a good time, I am smiling. My eyes are half-closed. He asks me what I am thinking, and I grin and close my lids and tell him I am thinking of colors. Red and orange, shocking pink with juicy slices of chartreuse and violet, deep indigo and amber flicker in my mind’s eye. The riot of hues shift and splinter and recreate new tessellations in the darkness. Joy is these brilliant colors.
I come back to certain combinations in my work again and again. Purples with olive and sage green; maroon with shocking pink and acid yellows and greens; pinks with orange and a slice of turquoise; soft gray with plum and black. I cut the colors in fabric. I weave the colors, and my pleasure in the patterns on my loom comes through sight and touch and juxtaposition. These are my personal choices. The world has others. Each year, a panel of experts get together to select colors that will show up on fashion runways and upholstery and even toys and paint chips. Color changes—gray replaces brown replaces navy as neutrals in suits and shoes. But this is marketing, not my real life. [For 2018, the color of the year was ultra violet.]
We are continually surprised by people we thought we “knew.” Just the other day a local woman I’ve known for forty years asked for my email address, which has the word “pride” in it.
“Does that ‘pride” word stand for something?” she wanted to know.
“Yes,” I said, “it was my grandmother’s maiden name.”
Then she launched into a whole thing about the word “pride” is “triggering” and a “trigger-word” that “we need to take back that word.”
And I thought, really? Gay pride is triggering? …Who are you?
My older son complained that he had emailed a journal three times last year asking when a paper he’d authored that was due to be published. They finally responded to his email the day before yesterday.
I’m not sure why, but I said: karma is a bitch.
He countered that I had corrected that use of the word karma decades ago.
Oh, right. I know better.
Westerners are inclined to use the term “karma” as shorthand for “What goes around comes around” or “As you sew, so shall you reap” and “He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.” Which is not at all the meaning of the term, but we pretend it has to do with just deserts. (Yes, that is correctly spelled even though it’s pronounced in this usage as “desserts.”)
I do not believe we are being punished, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Life does not work that way. We do not always or with any consistency receive punishment in life for misdeeds and rewards for virtue. It seems like it might be nice, but no.
We should feel better about ourselves when we are kind and generous and open-minded, but too often the kind, generous, and open-minded among us are the very ones who question our own motives and experience remorse over minor failings.
Never mind.
And anyway, that is not what karma means, in its original use. Karma is more like destiny. More like the path we are supposed to follow at various stages of our life as child, student, parent, and on to a quiet retirement.
The other day we found 23 pieces of sea glass. This was not a reward but the result of three hours of searching. On our way home, the couple who were standing in the middle of our path thought I hesitated to pass them because I was afraid of their completely pleasant dogs. It was the people themselves I was afraid of. They seemed completely amazed when I told them this. Who knows where those people have been?
There’s this pandemic? Hello? I go masked if I might come within twenty feet of someone outdoors. I am always masked before shopping for groceries. On the beach I walk well up into the rocks when people come by on the sand. I wait for them to pass. I try to keep my distance. Rarely do the people we meet seem to understand that. Maybe they trust the same magic that sends them jaywalking in Cannon Beach, speeding or crawling along. They’re on vacation and can’t be touched?
I have often joked that tourists behave as if they think: I’m on vacation, the rules do not apply to me. Maybe I’m not far off?
A new member of Congress was complaining that we needed no laws about civil rights or freedoms since we are all free according to the founders, and it’s already guaranteed. I wondered what she was thinking? Does that mean that because the Declaration of Independence says we are all granted life, therefore murder need not be declared a crime? Her reasoning was ridiculous. Flat-earthers are ridiculous. QAnon are ridiculous. How do people believe this nonsense?
We live together in a society that agrees to certain truths. Murder is wrong. Every society that has ever existed agrees that murder is wrong. Human beings have always agreed that killing for personal benefit is murder and therefore wrong. Theft, cheating, lying, breaking our promises? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. We all agree. We have always agreed.
Kindness, charity, compassion, love, honesty, devotion? Right, right, right, right, right, and right. We all know this.
We do the best we can to do right. Sometimes we fail and when that happens in any society, we apologize and make amends. We do this not merely from fear of punishment, but because we want to be good. We want to be productive, useful, just members of society. We abide by laws that are not intended only for some but for all. We agree to do this as civilized people.
We do not always get what we deserve, but we should always try to give the best we can.
This is what I think of as an appaloosa sky. Today the sky is pale gray, smooth as colorless butter, showing a horizon where it meets the green ocean.
This must be a more hopeful week, a milder and gentler week, a less eventful week, while still a week to get things done. We need a better year, and we’ll have it too… eventually. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of our lives. Whether we deserve it or not, we’ve got it coming. Ya’ think?
I completed a draft of our taxes yesterday. That wasn’t too bad, even though I didn’t have all the stuff I need. But since I can’t submit till the middle of next month (the IRS is running behind), I will complete the forms all over again in a couple of weeks to check for errors. Just in case. (Because, seriously, the forms have been changing each year which means I actually have to read all the instructions every year.)
I’ve only woven twenty-some inches on the new warp. It’s getting done as I figure out the colors a half inch at a time.
We got out for a walk this morning between pouring rain and snow on the coast range. We managed more than a half mile onshore without getting run over by a wave. Sometimes it was close.
Our friend’s medical appointment went well this morning—no major intervention and everything is functioning again.
Some politicians are already blaming others for not working across the aisle even though that first group has never made any effort to even talk to the others in the past years.
And we shouldn’t prosecute criminals, according to that party that has been whining about law-and-order for . . . ever. Because why exactly?
The new Cabinet is being confirmed, we’re insisting people from infectious areas prove they are not sick, the feds are going into war-mode to ensure supplies necessary to inoculate an entire country are available, and Harriet Tubman is going on the $20 bill.
The little dog that came to the ER every day, all day, for days was finally rewarded when her elderly person was released from the hospital. That happy story was in Turkey.
Right here in the front yard, a flock of birds landed and pecked at the ground. They are finding something to eat. Seeds or crumbs or new tiny seedlings. The jay came by and was underwhelmed.
I am reading a good book with an abomination for a cover design—the designer drew in a cartoon fishtail with a completely fake wave pattern on a painting by a famous, deceased painter. This should result in serious demerits.
And I am watching Season 2 of The Magicians in order to calm down.
It is raining this morning, not hard but hard enough to provide an excuse for staying in. We walked long yesterday morning and the world was cold. There is snow at the summit of the coast range, but we aren’t driving anywhere today. We’ve had a fire in the wood stove every day for weeks. Rain means cloud cover and cloud cover means the temperature is up but there will be no gorgeous dawn or appaloosa sky.
The sky, the sky, the sky!
Everyone I talk to seems to be apologizing for forgetfulness and mistakes. The entire country might be on high blood pressure meds from the tension, or something to address depression, moodiness, forgetfulness, errors, confusion, and general stress. Zoom, FaceTime, phone calls, and email are temporary fixes. Our drugs of choice are only coffee and alcohol. Last night Gary and I shared sparkling wine that sent us off to bed in good spirits. Literal and figurative, emotional and physical good spirits. It was a celebration of nothing in particular, only that we are still here, still muddling along.
Our first dog was Oranje Anisette, Ann Ann, who was a year and a half old when she came to us in 1973. She had been owned by a Saluki breeder who found her character too gentle to be a fit for him. I had flown to Arizona to look at a bloodline I first met through magazine photos. I wanted to show Afghan Hounds. I was flexible aboust age and color, though I had been to enough dog shows by then to know that black dogs disappear in the ring. Ann Ann was black.
Ann Ann had hunted jack rabbits in the desert. She chased a squirrel twenty feet straight up a tree on the University of Washington campus. “Squirrels can climb trees?” Another time she actually caught one but spit it right out unharmed when I shrieked. Rain completely mystified her. “What is that stuff?” I walked her all over a wealthy Seattle district during breaks from my long studio hours, and she napped on my workbench in the Fire Arts Building on campus. The first time she saw a lure she was thrilled. It took her a couple of minutes to figure out she was chasing a shredded white plastic garbage bag. She stopped mid-course and trotted back to me. “That was kind of silly.” She finished her Canadian Championship. A sweet girl.
Our second Afghan Hound was Onika and I had driven with Canadian friends from Seattle to Colorado to see her as a puppy. There were five puppies in the pen when we arrived outside Fort Collins and the breeder was not yet home from work. The one girl who caught my eye over and over turned out to be Onika. Her mother was BOB at the first Colorado Grand National Field Trial—seeing that trial was the reason my Canadian friends made the trip. Onika later won both her majors owner-handled, but she died when she was chased onto the highway by a well-meaning neighbor in 1980. I sat in the garden and cried and cried.
A remodeling website showed a house with an entire wall of pinkish-sandy fieldstone, probably installed in the 1940s or early 50s, painted over.
We hung no stocking over Christmas, but our beach coats and shoes live near the stove.
We have identical stonework halfway up the wall of the living room, installed by my grandfather in the late forties along with other MCM details. He was a retired engineer and had built two houses by then. He tore down most of the family summer place to rebuild it as his retirement home. The living room and fireplace stayed but the kitchen and a former dining room moved forward. Over the objections of his new wife, he remade the house one story and lowered ceilings to less than eight feet, intending to make heating easier. That was the house I inherited in 1978.
Gary is downstairs listening to a CD from The Searchers, his favorite group from the 60s (they were still playing a year ago). I have spent several days working on a poem for a local event. (With my luck they will not like it, but honest, I couldn’t write a cheerful “pandemic” poem. Others will.) As I sent it off as an email attachment I had word that the gallery is taking down the show the end of the month. They did not sell anything of mine (or from two other people). Yes, disappointing. But the poem . . . here’s the first stanza:
Birds fell from the sky this past
summer, a warning as defiling as riots
and bloody marble, the risk of living
in dangerous times when all times
prove dangerous.
Waves washed up into our hedge this morning, but it settled back for our afternoon walk.Continue reading →
Don’t most Americans feel that violent thugs do not represent the best of what our country has to offer? Don’t we believe that reason and fairness should rule over tyranny and violence?
Again, may 2021 lead us all to rediscover the virtues of hope, charity, faith, compassion, justice, temperance, and courage.
Simple courtesy and ordinary civility would be welcome. Truth, justice, and the American way? Surely. we remember all of that?
&PRIDE Press 