late night

shared with friends visiting and family meeting - all for the first time. all in my apartment. not much space left. from new york and florida and italy to paris - all of this happening which would not have been imaginable even a short time ago. i feel so grateful and so tired. full of goodness and the gratitude of. still wishing that i can find myself amdist this all.

here's hoping...

xoc

via MH

The Journey, by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

in barcelona, watching

the france-uruguay match at an irish pub, molly's fair city, with GL and a german seismologist working in napoli.
among my small tribe, many sides to be chosen: do i wistfully wrap myself in a french flag or proudly proclaim my love with an obama tshirt or go with the tried-and-true, italian style?
what constitutes loyalty when it comes to questions of nationality or identity? is it the life we have been given through parents and their geography or is it the love we have chosen that decides which side of the stadium we sit? is it their blood or is it our heart? if national borders can be redrawn, created or destroyed through wars and backroom treaties, i believe we should drag our passports and our pens across those man-made scars delineating our countries, recognizing that there is something deeper than those borders, something that they don't want us to find out, something stronger to connect to in each other if only we stopped being distracted by all the pretty colors on all the little banners.

barcelona bound

continental border crossings.
cocktails of architectural alchemy.
the possibilities of a new city.
i have never been here before.
i want to dance flamenco down its streets, learning the steps from the sensual curves of the modernista buildings.
i want to be transformed.

directions

My hotel is in front of the airport in Nice, and directly behind it, the sea. I arrived here on Sunday, after a Buddhist conference in Marseille. The days since the conference have been spent finishing the semester's grading and responding to the desperate student emails with the hotel's dependably aleatoric wifi connection: a plane takes off and the connection ceases. I don't know if those of my students who are tardy in submitting their final papers would see that as a good metaphor for their attempts at communication. The thing is, I am so close in age to them, I understand their situations too well, so it is very hard for me not to be compassionate of their initiatory dramas and nascent tragedies. And so, together, we perform the dance that has been unfolding between professor and student with the seasons of every semester gone past, adding our own steps, leading each other towards a more delicate calibration of mind to heart.

itinerant buddhism part four: mont sainte-victoire, marseille

Paris to Marseille: 670 kilometers. Ryan Bingham: repeat. Sun roof: open. I am on my way down south for a Buddhist conference, a pilgrimage that I have been doing since I arrived in France almost three years ago; this will be my fourth visit. This time, I am going as support staff, in charge of cleaning and general management. I felt a need to be of service, to provide a tactile proof of my gratitude for all that this mystic place has given me over the years.

The retreat center is near Aix-en-Provence, at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain that Cézanne painted over 60 times. The mountain, with its rugged, geometric shapes, inspired his use of bold blocks of color to create the new spatial effect of "flat-depth." Cézanne's rhythm of light gradations and differentiation within this ruggedness creates a paradox of subtlety and beauty that, in painting and in reality, provides that spark - that squeezing of the heart that is a reminder of shared humanity.

My own memento mori came late in the conference, Saturday, past midnight. Dinner cleanup was finally over and we were sitting on the wooden steps, feet relaxing in the dewy grass, when across the top of the mountain came a comet, slow-moving and stardust-leaving, so seemingly close that both us and the mountain felt illuminated by its fire.

changing and unchanging things

This evening, between the aleatoric raindrops, we scootered to the Musée Marmottan for a nocturne musicale - a musical evening - to celebrate women painters at the time of Proust. Amid the many Monets downstairs, we listened to the trinity of vocalists singing Fauré against the rain outside.

The museum is near La Muette, a neighborhood so named because of the hunting lodge where King Henry IV would bring his falcons every year to molt, muer, to shed their feathers. Listening to the unintentional duet of music and weather, I wondered what the opposite of molting would be. Doctors tell us that our bodies change every seven years and physicists say that atomic particles are moving at the speed of three billion something per second. But the heart, on the contrary, retains and accumulates everything, layer upon layer growing around everything it remembers - as in the creation of a pearl, when a mollusk grows successive and overlapping layers of nacre around a foreign object which has transformed its soft tissue.

My heart grew an annual ring, another layer of love last night. Post concert and post rain, we picniced at the Pont des Arts, in the same spot where my past successive Parisian years celebrated enormous changes.

Happy Anniversary, GL