Mujer de corazon y mente

A few days ago, a friend texted me a photo of Joni Mitchell while I was taking a long walk with another friend.  My startled first thought was that Joni Mitchell had died.  I looked up and took this photo:

Thank goodness my first thought was wrong.  It turns out that my friend had been watching a documentary about Joni Mitchell, thought of me, and took a photograph from a paused DVD image.  Last night I went to sleep at around 6:30 and woke up at around 1:30, instead of my usual 3 a.m. waking time. Although I used to need up to 10 hours of sleep every night, my sleep pattern has shifted to 7 hours at night, more or less, with a 1- to 2-hour nap during the day.  I wake rested both times.  I fall asleep easily both times.  I dream both at night and during naps.  My bedtime varies.  It all works out.

Wide awake so early this morning, I decided to work on my daily Spanish lessons on Duolingo.  When I finished them, I went to YouTube to see what had come up for viewing and was rewarded with this cover version of "Come In From The Cold."

Then what caught my attention was that the documentary my friend had watched was in the sidebar, with Spanish subtitles!  Double synchronicity!

" ... Oh y todo que siempre quisimos solo era entrar desde el frio ..."

Just as I love when women perform their interpretations of songs written by Bob Dylan, I love when men interpret Joni Mitchell's songs from their perspective.

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Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.  How grateful I am to have had their music enriching my life since I was a teenager, reminding me over and over again that there are no easy answers and to live fully in that context. 

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... I am a lonely painter.  I live in a box of paints ...  (Joni Mitchell lyrics from "A Case of You")

Sending love to blog friends near and far.

Journeys / Being of use

Journeys bring power and love
back into you.  If you
can't go somewhere,
move in the passageways of the self.
They are like shafts of light,
always changing, and you change
when you explore them.

(Djalal Ad-Din Rumi)


Last Sunday, I drove nearly the entire length of the state of Washington to meet with a friend from childhood and her husband of at least 40 years (whom I had not met before) and their shy sweet Bernese Mountain Dog.  In order to adopt a puppy, they had driven up from their home in a small community which is located high in the mountains of southeastern California.  We met in Carson, Washington, a tiny town located on the Columbia River gorge.

My old friend and I met when we were 12 or 13 years old.  We used to walk to junior high school together.  In high school, we took long walks from our homes in suburban Redwood City, California, into the beautiful grassy hills to the east of Redwood City.  We walked there in the days before Highway 280 cut through those rolling hills, before the hills were filled to the brim with houses, while the Vietnam War was still raging.  We were not part of the "in crowd."  We were both odd and eccentric and enjoyed each other's company.  My family went to church.  Her family didn't.  I remember the time she brought me to a Buddhist festival in Palo Alto.  We belonged to a small loosely connected group of young women who lived within walking distance of each other and went to the same high school.  Below is a photo of three of us.  If my memory serves me well, the photo was probably taken at the 16th birthday gathering for my old friend.  That would have been in 1965.  We are all wearing "Beatle" hats.  Her father was a psychiatrist. Their home was filled with books.

Here are the senior yearbook photos of my friend and me.  Neither of us enjoy being in front of a camera:

My parents chose that photo of me because they paid for the photos. I'd love to see the rest of photos and see what was not chosen by them.

After we graduated from high school in 1967, one of the things my friend did was become a surfer, and she spent weekends surfing in Santa Cruz.  Another thing she did was go to Stanford University, following the tradition of both of her parents.  After graduating from Stanford with a degree in English Literature, she went to law school and had a long career as a lawyer.  Her husband was a conscientious objector and, as a result of his alternative service in a library which had early computers, he had a long career in the field of computers.

In 1967, I left Redwood City to attend the University of California at Irvine, studying Art and English Literature.  My friend and I kept in touch.  She visited Irvine.  I visited her at Stanford.  It was the time of protests against the Vietnam War.  The man she loved achieved conscientious objector status.  The man I loved was drafted in April of 1969.  He was a high school dropout and a surfer.  We considered going to Canada.  He met with draft counselors in Oakland on the day before he went to Vietnam but felt sure that he would not be granted conscientious objector status.  He did not want to go to prison (although he ended up in prison years later for drug and alcohol-related offenses).  He did not want to go to Canada.  He made the fateful decision to go to Vietnam, serving as a helicopter mechanic, returning as a drug-addicted war-haunted man in December of 1970. We lived together for nearly 5 months.  We separated in the first weeks of May 1971 after a terrifying episode where the violence of the war that haunted him was directed at me.

In 1973, in an attempt to go on with my life, I left California.  My friend and I gradually lost touch with each other, although I did visit her at her law office in the early 1980s, and she contacted me
in the early 1990s.

A year ago, during the December holidays, she wrote a note letting me know that she and her husband had moved from the San Francisco Peninsula to a remote place in the Sierras.

That note led to our respective journeys to Carson, WA.

What got me started on this post was reading this article about Daniel Berrigan who died yesterday at age 94.

You have to struggle to stay alive and be of use as long as you can. 
(Daniel Berrigan)

I've also been listening to George Harrison's final album and wanted to share these thoughts from
George Harrison:



Lyrics from "Brainwashed":

The soul does not love.  It is love itself.
It does not exist.  It is existence itself.
It does not know.  It is knowledge itself.
How to Know God, page 130

And then I've also been meaning to share Joni Mitchell singing "God Must Be A Boogie Man."



May Love bless and keep us always.