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.

DECISION

Do your work, then step back -- the only path to serenity.

Today's quote from my Zen Calendar is from the Tao Te Ching.

This pencil drawing was made during the year when I was 17 years old, having met RTN on the beach at Half Moon Bay, California, on December 14, 1966. RTN was a surfer and a high school drop-out. He was the third-born son in a family of 10 children. His older brother, the second-born son, was serving in the Army in Thailand. His youngest siblings were fraternal twin boys. RTN's arm was in a cast when I met him. He had broken it in a fall off a bridge near where we met. I was a shy young woman with extremely low esteem who had never had a boyfriend and who was sending out college applications with a desire to study art and literature. I was in the early stages of a serious eating disorder, the oldest of three daughters in a family that appeared from the outside to be stable.

We both liked to draw. We both liked Bob Dylan. We both loved the ocean. We became friends. We discovered that we had been born within 24 hours of each other. I was the "older" one. We walked along the beach together, talked and laughed. I would borrow my parents' car and drive from Redwood City to Miramar Beach in hopes of finding him walking on the beach, which was not far from where his family lived. We didn't "date," but I drove to the ocean on as many weekends as I could during the winter and spring of my senior year in high school.

As part of a commitment made in 1966 to drawing something every day, I made the above drawing from a photo of Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. It doesn't look like Dennis Wilson, nor does it look like RTN did then, but there was a resemblance which spoke of someone who had experienced something that haunted him.

The drawing has been with me since 1967. Sometime in December of 1983 during a heavy rainstorm, water from the roof of my studio space began to seep onto the drawing, which was thumb-tacked to the wall of my studio. I was horrified to see that the water had stained my drawing. Not a good sign. The drawing was part of what little was left of my connection to RTN. Then, on December 28, 1983, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys drowned. I hoped that RTN was still alive. We were 34 years old and had been apart for twelve years because he had hit me in one of the rages that he experienced after returning from Vietnam. I couldn't live with the fear of his violence or with his increasingly destructive drug and alcohol abuse, but I didn't stop loving him.

In those early years, I once asked him why he had been attracted to me. He said, "Because you are an artist."