"To be is to do" / Meditation with beloved rain falling once again / True love

Doo-bee-doo-bee-doo Doo-doo-dee-dah Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah, ya-ya-ya

I find out with a little googling that Frank Sinatra hated this song from 1966 that is loved by so many.  In 1966, I was listening to Bob Dylan and had no inclination to listen to anything that Frank Sinatra sang.  Paradoxically, Bob Dylan was listening to Frank Sinatra and in recent years has recorded three Frank Sinatra cover albums, without ever covering "Strangers in the Night."  The only Frank Sinatra song that Bob Dylan covered that truly spoke to me was this one from 1949, the year I was born.  Could I have heard it on the radio as a baby?

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I remember my early days living in Washington State in the mid-1970s when there was little I yearned for more than to return to Northern California.  There was nothing I liked about Washington State, except the rain.  Since then I have grown to love Washington State, both the cool damp western part of the state and the eastern part of the state, to the east of the Cascade Mountain Range.  Eastern Washington is much much colder in the winter and hotter in the summer.  It's a different landscape, a different world, in all ways.  Although I don't love Washington State in the same way that I love Northern California, Washington State is one of my true loves nonetheless.

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"And it has to do with a tree, a singular one, not like these careening and cascading trees all around me here, but one tree that prised open the shell of me, led me out of the enclosing maze, the impasse of the heart, and showed me, yes, I could breathe again, and find love within me, and find that -- which can touch our hearts -- isn't only a person, it can be -- anything really, a sunlit mountain slope, a tree -- it isn't out there that we find love, though it can be some 'out there' being that slides back the shutters and we find the whole landscape of love is within us ..."

(p. 103, Bouyancy of the Craft, by Morelle Smith, who blogs from Scotland and to whom I am deeply grateful for her novel celebrating the life of Annemarie Schwarzenbach)

THE BOUYANCY OF THE CRAFT: The Writings and Travels of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a novel by Morelle Smith / The day after the summer solstice 2019 and 2021

Excerpts:

p. 3  

In 1942 the young American writer Carson McCullers penned a story A Tree.  A Rock.  A Cloud.  The idea of the story was that for a relationship to be sincere and genuine it need not be confined to one with another person but could be with any external object or being.  She had taken this idea from something her friend Annemarie Schwarzenbach had written to her, in a letter.  The separateness, wrote Annemarie, that we perceive between all beings is false; there is a greater perception, that of the heart which, if accessed, can override the illusion of separation.  Love is stronger, she wrote, no matter who or what one loves, even if it is 'a stone, a tree'.

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p. 25

There are detailed descriptions of the conflicting sense of knowing and not knowing a once familiar place that we've returned to.  It has changed in the interim, as have we.  There is the conflict between what we remember -- more than just images in the mind, they seem to form part of our body and psyche, a blueprint for our being, a meshwork around which memories, feelings and thoughts spin and spiral, creating the fabric of our life.  So there's what we remember and what we see now, in the present time.  And there can seem little traffic between the two, few bridges to connect them.  It feels vital to effect a reconciliation between the two, yet there's no perceptible way of doing this.  It feels as if we have to choose between one of the other and we rebel against such a choice for whichever we choose, half of our being has to be abandoned.

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p. 40

Though it sounds scarcely credible today, with our knowledge of what happened later, Breslauer says that up to that point they really were not aware of what was happening politically.  And Hitler seemed such a ridiculous figure that they did not believe that he and his party could stay in power for long.  How could one take such a person seriously?

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p. 43

But 1933 was not just a year of personal success.  It began in the poisonous and dangerous atmosphere of Berlin, where she knew she could no longer stay, but would have to leave.  After living there and witnessing what was happening, she saw there was a new force to contend with, negative and destructive.  This new dynamic changed her outlook and her sense of purpose.  She could no longer live only for herself, for the pursuit of her own desires and her own personal freedom, however vital that still was.  From now on in her life, she would be seeking to serve a greater purpose, to find a way of doing something that would serve others, serve a cause, for a way to be committed to freedom in general, to be useful.

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The enigmatic Annemarie Schwarzenbach was both dear and a puzzle to so many who met her during her short full life which ended in 1942.  I'm absorbing the experience of reading Morelle's book.  Last night I was compelled to stay up way past my bedtime to read the last .  It is one of those rare books that I am going to start reading a second time within 24 hours of reading it for the first time.

Morelle writes (p. 110) that on the day after the summer solstice in 2019, she was visiting Horgen on the shores of Lake Zurich, spending three days visiting the grave of Annemarie Schwarzenbach.

I'm grateful to Morelle for her blog, her photographs, her travel books and her books of poetry, and now her timely novel.

Photos of Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Morelle Smith from the lower left hand corner of the back cover: