Happy Birthday, John!

When I visited Yosemite Valley in early October of 2008, I turned around after reading a large sign that said that John Muir once stood on that spot, and I took the above photo.  Yosemite Valley is dear to my heart.  It has to be seen to be believed.  No photo can capture what it feels like to be in Yosemite Valley.

From the John Muir link above:

And just FYI, John Muir loved wilderness, but he was no misanthrope. He had many friends with whom he corresponded to regularly. And he was married with a wife and two children! Both girls accompanied their father on walks in the nearby hills of the family's Martinez, California ranch, and Muir named two of the area's peaks after them -- Mt. Wanda and Mt. Helen

Winter Solstice 2013 / Picasso painting with light / Woman Turning Toward the Light

I stood out on my porch as the sun rose at 8:01 this
Winter Solstice morning.  There was melting snow
on the ground below.

Later I checked some of my favorite webcams for
Winter Solstice Day images.

Yosemite Valley:

Big Sur:

Laguna Beach:

Mendocino:

Ocean Beach (San Francisco):

Then I found this photo of Picasso painting with light:

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite else. It is remarkable how little the 'willing' of the artist intervenes. 
(Pablo Picasso)

Woman Turning Toward the Light (1985, chalk pastel drawing by am):

A Play Of Light During Caffeine Withdrawal

(enlarge webcam photos for full effect)

Last night as I was about to go to bed after my third day of a steady headache from caffeine withdrawal, I looked at the webcam of Yosemite Valley and Half Dome and ended up staying awake for another 45 minutes to watch the play of light that held my attention despite the headache and my weariness.

This is the 4th time I've gone through caffeine withdrawal.  Until I was 30 years old and was in the process of returning to college to finish up my Bachelor's degree in English Literature and Art, I didn't drink coffee at all.  I had lived with low-level depression and lack of energy all my life, and the discovery of the positive effects of coffee seemed to be like magic.  Suddenly I felt better than I had ever felt.  I could stay awake all day long and was full of creative energy.  Then I began to develop withdrawal headaches if I missed my caffeine dosage and developed gastritis with accompanying nausea and lack of appetite.  I continued using caffeine for at least a year beyond the onset of those symptoms until I felt ill on a daily basis -- worse than I had ever felt.  After the first 5-day withdrawal from caffeine, I vowed never to drink coffee again despite how much I missed the lifting of my spirits that coffee gave me.

In the late summer of 2007, in hopes of becoming a massage therapist, I was studying for an anatomy and physiology challenge exam and experimented briefly with caffeine.  I decided against taking the challenge exam, and instead made plans to undergo an intensive yoga teacher training.   In late September of 2007, while taking that rigorous yoga teacher training, I began using caffeine again so that I would have enough energy to wake up before 5 a.m. and go to sleep after 9 p.m. Again, I was delighted by the feeling of creative energy.  I did experience headaches, but I continued using caffeine until 2009, when recurring headaches were undermining my sense of well-being.  I knew what to expect from withdrawal and vowed again that I was through with caffeine.

In 2010, while starting a new job after being unemployed for several years, I chose to use caffeine to keep me awake for the entire workday and to give me that added sense of well-being.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the job didn't turn out well, and I ended up quitting the job in despair.  During this time of caffeine use, my pulse and blood pressure began to rise alarmingly, and I suffered from recurrent headaches.  Once again, I withdrew from caffeine.  My pulse and blood pressure returned to normal, and the frequency of headaches lessened.

At the beginning of this May, during a stressful period where I was called for jury duty, I decided to try using caffeine again. In addition to needing the energy for the days of jury duty, I was and am acutely aware of my need to find a job, and I question whether I have the energy for even a part-time workday. At first, I had that wonderful lifting of my spirits and high energy. Then I began to wake up in the mornings with a dull headache that would leave only after I had some caffeine in my system.

Given that I had been waking up feeling unusually good for the past few months, the artificial lifting of my spirits from the caffeine didn't compensate for the dull headache I was having upon awakening, and so I decided to go through caffeine withdrawal again.

I know that in the next few days I will be feeling much better than I do now.  Will have to find another way to a sense of well-being and energy that lasts the whole day long.

I am grateful for that play of light during caffeine withdrawal.

"When one finally arrives at the point where schedules are forgotten, and becomes immersed in ancient rhythms, one begins to live."
(Sigurd F. Olson)

Refuge / The capacity to love arising from savasana (the corpse pose)

(Source for the above quote)

This morning I woke up at 2 a.m. feeling some grief and PTSD-related emotional distress and then chose to enter into what turned out to be a three-hour meditation, mostly positioned in variations of the yoga pose named savasana, with some drifting back into sleep as well as trying to stay with body sensations and mental imagery, not the thoughts that had disturbed my sleep and stirred up my emotions. There were shifts in and out of distress, some tears, some moments of joy. Whenever I would become aware that I was thinking, I would focus my attention on body sensations and the imagery that arises from them. I found refuge in the capacity to love that arose from the savasana practice.

At 5 a.m. as I got up from the savasana meditation I noticed my copy of Gentle Wilderness: Sierra Nevada where it leans with its book cover facing my bed, on the bookshelf next to my bed.

I remembered sitting side-by-side on a couch with Richard, looking through his brother's copy of the book, page by page, reading John Muir's words and looking at the splendid photos. It was not long after he had returned from Vietnam. Richard had brought me to his brother and sister-in-law's apartment to look at that book. Richard had said, "I know you will love this book, too. You are a poet and an artist."

I remembered driving from Modesto to Yosemite with Richard on my 52nd birthday, after not having seen him since 1986, the year before my recovery from bulimia and anorexia began. It was the day before his 52nd birthday. He was not feeling well but wanted to drive up to Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada. As we approached the gates of Yosemite on Highway 120, Richard quietly said, "Amanda, I have suffered enough today. Let's go back to Modesto."

I remembered driving alone from Manteca to Yosemite on my birthday in 2008, a little more than five months after I had spent four days with Richard in the ICU at the Palo Alto VA Hospital during the week before he died. As I passed through the gates of Yosemite on Highway 120, I knew that this delayed and long-awaited experience would be an ongoing gift from Richard, and it has been just that. As I took in the landscape that John Muir and so many before and after him have loved, I experienced the capacity to love that I had first felt at the ocean, even before I met Richard. It was no coincidence that I met Richard while walking next to the ocean when we were both 17 years old. It was no coincidence that I felt love as I entered Yosemite that clear sunny day in October 2008.

It is always my hope that sharing my experience by telling these stories can benefit others.

I've been in the studio for about three hours today working on this post, grateful for the renewal of creative energy that comes with blogging and the recent desire to do other art work as well.

"You will always, for the rest of your life, feel some grief over this death. It will no longer dominate your life, but it will always be there, in the background, reminding you of the love you had for the person who died."
(Alan D. Wolfelt, from Understanding Your Grief)

Oboe selects a stone from Yosemite Valley

"And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth. "
— Raymond Carver

New Year's Day 1/1/11

You and Art

Your exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.

Year after year fits over your face--
when there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;

And you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.

(from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems by William Stafford)






















A wolf? A coyote? A dog? From one of the Yosemite webcams on December 25, 2010.

Dear Blog Friends,

Looking forward to another fruitful year of reading your blogs and blogging! Here is where I started in 2006. My 4th blog birthday was December 8.

Kind wishes for 2011 and always,
am

P.S. At the top of this post is "Boy with Amaryllis and Orion," one of my trackpad drawings from January 2008.

Talking Karmic Debt Blues / Like The Moon And The Stars And The Sun

Listen.

This morning I was listening to Jakob Dylan's CD "Seeing Things" in my car just before 9 a.m. He was singing "Everybody Pays As They Go":

Look up and see the men returning
In their winter coats
Some of them in one piece
Some of them got rolled
Some less than others
Some right through the nose
But everybody pays as they go
Young old rich and poor
Your mother she too owes
Cuz everybody pays as they go.

I thought of John Lennon's song "Instant Karma":

Instant Karma's gonna get you,
Gonna look you right in the face,
Better get yourself together darlin',
Join the human race,
How in the world you gonna see,
Laughin' at fools like me,
Who on earth d'you think you are,
A super star,
Well, right you are.

When I woke up this morning and turned the calender next to my bed to August 1, I found a wonderful woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Above is a detail from "The Hanging-Cloud Bridge at Mount Gyodo, near Ashikaga," which can be seen at Museo Chiossone in Genoa, Italy.

Well we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Well we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Well we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Yeah we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.

(Recorded by John Lennon on 27 January 1970 and released on 6 February 1970, it ranks as one of the fastest-released songs in pop music history, recorded (at London's Abbey Road Studios) the same day it was written, and coming out only ten days later. Lennon remarked to the press, he "wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch, and we're putting it out for dinner.")
















Thanks to the Turtleback Dome webcam for the sunlight of the spirit image from Yosemite Valley.

IMANI / FAITH

One can make a day of any size and regulate the rising and setting of his own sun and the brightness of its shining.
-- John Muir (1838-1914)






















Imani, which means "faith," is the theme for New Year's Day, the 7th day of Kwanzaa. New Year's Day is the 7th day of Christmas.

Shanora: I hate him.

Queen Esther: O, don't hate him, child. You won't find no strength in hate.

Chimbuko: That's right.

. . .

Chimbuko: It's a new day and a new year.

(from the movie "Harambee," directed by Fracaswell Hyman)






































Scroll down and listen to Mavis Staples sing "Have a Little Faith"

. . . These are trying times that we’re living in
Have a little faith I say
Have a little faith, my friend
We got trouble everywhere around the world . . .

Photos:
Yosemite Valley on October 1, 2008
Big Sur on October 4, 2008
My porch before dawn on a rainy Pacific Northwest New Year's Day 2009