Remembering fearless Oboe / Overcoming stage fright from the beginning / Last night's dream

*

Last night's dream:

Once again I was surprised and overjoyed to find myself at the ocean, walking across a broad sandy beach to have a closer view of the waves.  Suddenly, without any warning, the ocean was far below me.  The sand and ocean in front of me had dropped hundreds of feet.  Turning in mid-air, I found a tenuous handhold and was able to hang on to the sheer cliff of hard packed sand.  Looking down, I saw that the tide had nearly reached the bottom of the cliff of sand, although there was still some beach left.  Briefly I considered letting go, confident that I would be able to sustain the fall.  Thinking again, it was clear that even though I would survive the fall, the tide was coming in and I would be in danger of drowning or at least spending a long time in the cold ocean water because there was no way to climb up the sheer cliff and no exit either way, north or south, from the beach.  I turned my attention back to the sandy beach I had just walked across with such joy.  I didn't have the strength to pull myself up onto the beach again, but I had the strength to keep holding on.   A young woman appeared out of nowhere.  I told her I needed help getting back on the beach.  She anchored herself as best she could and reached out her hands for mine.  She wasn't convinced that I could be helped and was concerned for me, but I told her not to worry.  With her help, I was able to scramble back up to the beach.  

That's when I woke up.

It's occurring to me that the ocean in my dream was to the east.  Most of my experiences of the ocean have been that it is to the west.  

Tears have been welling up with unexpected frequency in the past month.  Sacred tears.  Just in time.

More of one thing leading to another / Tibet: Through the Red Box / Remembering Oboe

 

Long long ago, in the early days of the pandemic, an artist friend of mine said that she had a book that she thought I might like to read.  For one reason or another, she wasn't able to bring the book to me during the past year.  A week or so ago, I went to her house for the first time in more than a year to visit and borrow the book.

First some backstory.  Some years ago I went to see an exhibit of diverse art work created in the context of climate change.  Of the many art works, there was one that stood out.  It was a felted wool jacket with inlaid drawings made using strands of handspun wool.  There had been an arrangement for the artist to live in a village in Nunavut in order to learn from the women who lived there.  The felted wool jacket was inspired by her time spent with the women in the Nunavut village.  As I read the information to the side of the beautiful jacket, I was surprised to see that the artist had grown up in the same small oil town in the desert in the San Joaquin Valley where my family had lived from 1954 to 1957 because of my father's job with Standard Oil which later became Chevron.  The artist's father had worked for the same oil company as an engineer.  Both the artist and I and the majority of children who lived there were exposed to, if not sprayed with DDT when the trucks came through the streets of the neighborhoods where we played.

I wrote down the email address of the artist and emailed her to let her know that, in my opinion, her jacket was the best art work in the exhibit and that I had also lived in Taft, California.  We emailed, then talked on the phone and became friends.

She was absolutely right in thinking I would enjoy the book, both the story and the detailed art work, including mandalas.  I liked it so much that I wanted to read other books for children by Peter Sis and found that our public library has a good collection of them.  My friend also has a collection that she offered to loan to me.

Peter Sis' book was inspired by the experiences his father had as a documentary filmmaker in the 1950s in Tibet where he had been hired by the Chinese government in their process of building a highway into Tibet.  There was a stressful period of time where Peter's father's whereabouts were unknown.  Peter and his family awaited his return to Czechoslovakia.  With some Googling, I found Vladimir Sis and Josef Vanis' documentary in Czech which is available here and bought a copy of the 1970 translation of their book originally published in Czech in 1955 or 1956 or 1957 (depending on the source).

The book begins with a series of short essay/stories which are followed by 224 photographs, including the Dalai Lama photographed as a young man by Vladimir Sis, along with photos of life in Tibet before the Chinese occupation.

Here is something about the documentary:

The first and only western visitors (although coming from the Eastern Soviet Bloc) to Lhasa after a three-year gap following the visit of Americans, father and son Lowell Thomas (summer 1949) and Austrians Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter (December 1950) were Czechoslovak army filmmakers Vladimir Sis (7 July 1925 – 7 September 2001) and Josef Vanis (6 January 1927 – 12 February 2009), who stayed in Tibet for ten months in years 1954-1955. They shot an hours documentary film in cooperation with the Peoples Liberation Army Film Studio (established on 1 August, 1952, in 1956, it was renamed August First Film Studio), which premiered in 1956 as On the Road through Tibet (original title: Cesta vede do Tibetu) and obtained an award at the Venice festival. The film captured the construction of a strategic military road from Ya-an to Lhasa, which was mainly built by Chinese soldiers and workers but also Tibetans. Vanis and Sis also published books with a number of photographs and they made TV coverages. Due to the dispute between Beijing and Moscow in 1959, this topic became a taboo in Czechoslovakia until the fall of communism in 1989. Besides these official published outcomes of their documentary work in Tibet and China their family archives contain unpublished private travelogues, correspondence and many photographic negatives and positives. Using both these information sources, but primarily thanks to the not yet known literary and photographic records, the large and deep background of their expedition may be examined for the very first time.
* All of the above has given me the inspiration to work on Mandala #62 using every single one of my FaberCastell Polychromos pencils, all thirty-eight of them, some of which colors I don't like very well but which seem likable when used in the context of the ones I favor and use frequently.  This year I'm alternating drawing my mandalas with my right hand and non-dominant left hand.  This is a left-handed one. There is a distinctly different process going on in me when I use my left hand.  Are any of you left-handed?  Or ambidextrous? * My beautiful talkative cat, Oboe, died a year ago today.  I'm grateful for her quirky and healing presence from 2006 to 2020.  Our animal friends are dear to us.

Remembering December 8, 2006 / Mandala #55: Bird and Moon Meditation

 

This blog's first post was on December 8, 2006, when I was 56 years old, unemployed and, to be honest, unemployable, living simply on what should have been my retirement resources, with all the free time in the world and able to do little or no art work.  I was not without friends or moments of peace, but each day was long and bleak due to what was then diagnosed as PTSD but has been diagnosed in recent years as a trauma-related disorder and complicated grief.  For years I had been receiving various types of counseling and, in between appointments, I made intermittent calls to a crisis line.  Although I was not suicidal, I was often in emotional distress.  It was on one of those calls to the crisis line in December 2006 that it was suggested to me that I do something entirely new and positive on December 8 (the day R returned from Vietnam in 1970) instead of re-living the trauma of that day yet another time.  

Inspired by a first cousin once-removed who at that time had a political blog, I had begun reading blogs and commenting on blogs for about a year using my first laptop, an iBook G4, purchased in 2005.  The first blogs I read and commented at had their roots in her extensive blog list.  

Taking the suggestion of the crisis line volunteer to heart, I made a decision to go to the Blogger website and set up a blog for the purpose of doing a retrospective of my art work up to 2006.  My intent was to revisit my lifetime of art work, one piece at a time, which meant revisiting my life while trying to keep my focus on living in the present in a healthier way.   

After a few days of posts,  I was delighted to receive my first comment. The blogs I read at that time all focused on a combination of nature photography, poetry, literature, and music.   

After more than 20 years of living alone because that was the only way I felt safe, I had a few months earlier brought home from a local shelter a cat that I named Oboe.  She was a year old and found it fascinating to watch me at my laptop from the kitchen counter.  Her fleece bed was on the desk off to the side of my laptop.

It has occurred to me while writing today that the series of events that led to my healing were buying that iBook G4, learning to use the iPhoto tools, reading and commenting on blogs,  adopting Oboe, and starting my own blog.   

By the time I finished my retrospective posts, I had begun doing a little bit of art work, had begun to share music from YouTube, and had began to share photos of the view from my porch and views from my long walks in Whatcom Falls Park, Lake Padden, and along Bellingham Bay.

From the day I started my blog, my life changed for the better, not without ups and downs but without that which had haunted me for so many years -- unattended sorrow.  Stephen Levine's book, published in 2005, may well have led the way to the day that I decided to begin blogging.

Up until December 7, Mandala #55 had been going extremely well and then suddenly it wasn't.  I had hoped to finish it on December 7 and stayed up late working on it but went to bed tired and discouraged because something about it just wasn't right.  I didn't sleep well and dreaded waking up to see it still unresolved.  It is a terribly unsettling feeling when I something I am working on is not going well.  Fortunately, in the morning it didn't look as bad as it had looked the night before and I was able to finish it and feel peace.  Although I'm not completely satisfied with the way it photographed, it looked beautiful on my wall where I photographed it in the December morning light.

And it looks good next to the last two mandalas.  I've drawn the circle for the 11th mandala.

December sunrise:

Thank you, blog friends, near and far.

Talkative Oboe Listens / One thing leading to another (otra vez)

About a month ago while listening to Bob Dylan's "Time Out Of Mind" from 1997, as I make my way through my collection of cassette tapes and CDs of Bob Dylan's music from 1962 to 2020, I looked up and saw Oboe lift her head in a way that I have not often seen her do.  I picked up my camera and filmed her.  When I tried to upload the short video to YouTube, I received a notice that my video would be blocked because of a music copyright issue, and so I figured out how to mute the copyrighted music.  I am grateful that I have this short video of Oboe in May 2020.

The Fish

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Although you hide in the ebb and flow

Of the pale tide when the moon has set,

The people of coming days will know

About the casting out of my net,

And how you have leaped times out of mind

Over the little silver cords,

And think that you were hard and unkind,

And blame you with many bitter words.

My mother purchased a print titled "Shadow-play Cat, by Dorr Bothwell, many years ago.  She found

it at an art gallery not far north of where my parents lived in Gualala, California, for the 25 years

prior to my mother's death in 1994.  For the past 14 years, the print has been hanging on the wall 

above where I put Oboe's food.  In the print my mother purchased, the lower part of the print is 

orange rather than blue but otherwise the same.  I've moved the print to my living room where I can 

enjoy seeing it more easily now.

The summer cloud view from my porch has been lovely.

Something is being mischievous with my layout today  (-:

Come walk with me / Walkin' down the line

After having no energy for walking for most of this social distancing time, the beautiful weather in the last few days encouraged me to begin my spring and early summer pattern of walking up to the top of the hill where I live and home again.  On the first day I went without face covering but realized that without face covering, I couldn't risk foot trails or the narrow under-the-road tunnel.  Bellingham is a walking and biking town with access to a network of trails in every neighborhood.  Throughout my walk I saw people of all ages, about half of them wearing face coverings, everyone maintaining social distance, many on bikes, many with dogs.  There was an abundance of smiling and waving and hellos.

Walking up the street through my neighborhood I saw this.

Here's a view of downtown Bellingham from part way up the hill.  What look like mountains to the west are islands in the Salish Sea.

At the highest point on the hill I can see the Canadian Cascades.

Walking out of Northridge Park into the hillside neighborhood for a block or so, there is an unobstructed view of the Canadian Cascades.

Walking back down the hill.

Crossing the street because I am not wearing face covering and the under-the-road tunnel is narrow.

The under-the-road tunnel.

Down the hill.

I stop, assuming that Big Rock Garden is closed, but it isn't.

The photo above shows a solitary redwood tree that is dear to me.

From this vantage point on our hill, we can see the next hill to the south which is where Western Washington University is located.  When I walked home down this street on Sunday, the air was so clear that the mountain range on the Olympic Peninsula could be seen in exquisite detail, but I didn't take my camera for that walk.

Almost home.

My door is to the left.

Later.  Oboe sleeping in the sunshine on my porch.

Mandala #47 finished.  

Ready to begin Mandala #48.

Today just before 6 p.m. in 2008 was the last time I saw R before he died.  In those last few days before R died, I felt that June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash were close by in spirit, understanding fully what I was experiencing and giving me courage. 

Sending love near and far.

Oboe

Early Morning, Trees, Oboe

I love the two evergreen trees that someone planted years ago on the other side of Scudder Pond.  My guess is that the two trees spent a December in someone's house before being planted outside.  One is slightly smaller than the other.  It was years before they were tall enough for me to be conscious of them.

Yesterday evening, my sister who lives in Gulfport, Mississippi, sent an email to me and my youngest sister.  The email contained a photo of a little evergreen tree that she planted on her property.  I was struck by the coincidence that I had a vision a few days ago, upon awakening, of a tree like that growing in my heart.  It turns out that my sister's tree is a Deodar cedar.  Hmmmm ...  The linked article mentions weeping Atlas cedars, which brings to mind George Harrison's song "Beware of Darkness," from the album "All Things Must Pass," which R gave to me for Christmas in 1970 soon after his return from serving as a helicopter mechanic during the Vietnam War.  George Harrison was an avid gardener and planted an amazing number of trees on his property.



Weeping Atlas Cedars
They just want to grow, grow and grow

The next three trees are Sequoiadendron giganteum,  They were pointed out to me by a Bellingham friend who lives within walking distance of them.  Bellingham and Whatcom County have a surprising number of Redwood trees that were brought up from California, beginning at least a century ago.

Speaking of trees.  This was brought to my attention via my email inbox.

And that is Oboe, my talkative 13-year-old cat.