The Great Awakening

Pottery by Ben Maisel

That was then, this is now. After the shock and awe of the initial assault on our sanity that occurred on election  day, we are now facing the daunting task of defending ourselves and holding our territory for the next four years. I try to avoid military metaphors, but there is a sense that we all feel embattled. We are partisans who will be fighting on multiple fronts, employing a wide range of skills and training. We cannot all be commandos.

Let's begin by laying a foundation of love in our own families and communities. You may have noticed that this is already happening. The energy of isolated iron filings magnetizing towards one another has been palpable from the onset. Love is strong. It empowers people to feel courageous and creative in the face of looming danger. It is the most potent antidote to despair. Love is a perennial weed. It blooms in unexpected places and defies all attempts to be tamed. Reach out to it and it will spread across backyards and fields where you live until you can no longer control it. Transplant it when you can and admire its beauty as you ponder how to contribute to the great awakening that needs to happen.

Fortified with a sense of connection to one another, to the Earth, we can begin to think deeply about how we came to be teetering on the edge of this particular precipice. Part of this process is the exercise of historical memory. I don't mean how the Clintons were tainted or how the press demonstrated its venality. I mean reaching back as far as we can to taste the rapaciousness of the western powers in the Middle East that flourished in the aftermath of World War I; the acquisition of vast resources for the purpose of lining the silk pockets of the already rich; the dominion of French, British and later American white men over millions and millions of brown people. Follow this juggernaut through a series of tyrannical regimes, the sputtering promise of Arab Spring, perpetual bombardment, the starvation of native populations, and the rise of ISIS. Congratulations, you have arrived at the refugee crisis. You are confronting a condition where virtually the whole of the western world is recoiling in horror as the people of color they have been only too happy to exploit arrive en masse at their doorstep seeking sanctuary. Enter Brexit, Le Pen, Putin and Donald Trump.

If you looked closely, you could see it coming and you could feel how this historical matrix would create a perfect storm of racism and xenophobia, set against a background of globalization-induced economic dislocation and environmental degradation. In our country, where the domestic presence of Muslims has up to now been less of a factor than it is in Europe, it's an easy sleight of hand to use the available raw materials to generate anti-Mexican or anti-Black rhetoric and violence, always bubbling just under the surface in the melting pot. The post-colonial tune is a theme with infinite variations.

Sitting with the weight of all this and being hammered day in and day out with the proposed appointments of savage ideologues, the presumed Health and Human Services secretary who doesn't believe in health or human services, the Education secretary who's never set foot in a public school, I feel on some days like I'm being force fed a banquet of barbarism and choking on it. On other days, I imagine a car that has stalled on the tracks. I'm in danger of being hit by an oncoming train. I can't go backward, I can't go forward. The only sane option is to get out of the car before it's too late, walk home and breathe deeply into the knowledge that I will only be able to exercise a narrow influence over events, but that when my influence is added to yours and yours and yours, the train will ultimately be stopped.

Some will march, petition, write to their congresspeople. Some will get involved with local efforts to sustain pluralism, resist growing income inequality, protect our land and water. Some will make art as Woody Guthrie did, as James Baldwin did, as Picasso did when he painted Guernica. And some will be charged with the task of holding the space so that there can be an ongoing conversation in the spirit of both/and. Both economic anxiety and racisim gave rise to Trump. Both understanding how the Democrats failed their natural constituency in the election and how in its aftermath we can and must resist the result. We are the only ones who can make change, inch by inch, row by row as we used to sing lovingly to our children. We are all at risk and we need each other desperately.

http://ncdd.org/22174  Check out the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation's program to "Bridge the Divides"

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Mourning in America

Collage by JoAnne Spies

It is astounding to me two weeks into this science fiction how much it still feels like a death. At first there was shock, disbelief. Then despair and an icy nightmare dread of the future. More recently, there has been anger and blame. The misdiagnosis, the FBI, white women. Someone must be held responsible. Hypervigilance is called for. If I forget for five minutes while I'm watching a Law and Order re-run, I am plagued by guilt. How could I forget? How could I forget? I have betrayed my country. I am a cheap date. The campaign was a long, protracted illness complete with remissions and periods of false hope. The election itself was a massive cardiac event, a failure of the heart. Now, in the aftermath, we are suffering from complicated grief.

Complexity will hunt you down if you give it the slightest opening. It will keep you awake at night and deliver florid dreams of your own complicity if you are fortunate enough to sleep at all. In the wee hours of November 9th, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, camps were already forming on the left. Some turned their rage on the power brokers at the DNC. Others railed against their own children who voted Green or not at all. People of color, Muslims, and immigrants woke up to a new and terrifying world. There is more than enough reason to fear the president-elect and his white supremacist minions. Those of us less likely to be immediate cannon fodder have a commanding moral obligation to join forces with the most vulnerable and stand up to emerging racist rhetoric and policy threats. Desmond Tutu said "if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you've chosen the side of the oppressor." No means no. Never Again means Never Again.

We arrived at this moment after months of unrelieved stress fed by the invidious pollsters. She's up by three. She has an 85% chance of winning. Some algorhithm that claims scientific validity, some mathematical hocus pocus that we are clearly not meant to understand, scanned the horizon and missed half the population. Sixty million people primarily in rural counties and small cities throughout the country voted for the Republican candidate. As Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic during the campaign "the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously but not literally." I remember, nostalgically, conversations I had before the election about how we (liberals, progressives, people who were convinced they had the moral high ground) would accommodate the rage and despair of the Trump voters after they were trounced. We had a faint glimmer of the degradation of life in those remote flyover precincts - the abandoned mills, the opiate addiction and what The Nation has since referred to with maximum snark as the "economic anxiety." Note the quotation marks. But we had no idea of the magnitude of the desperation. Now we know.

I'm reminded of a story I once wrote about a woman who is among the mourners at a shiva. She sits and sits, eats cake and more cake, but can't seem to figure out who has died. It's like that now. We don't yet know who or what has died. Is it the First Amendment, the equal protection clause, a snowball's chance in limbo that we'll be able to reverse the onward march of climate change? We're still in the remains-to-be-seen phase, but every day brings us closer to the dark side of the moon. People in northern Florida and western Pennsylvania who voted for him will not get better health benefits. They will not get jobs that pay a living wage. Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics, LGBT people, the disabled and, yes, Jews, will be victimized, while the people in power compete for the biggest pieces of pie like contentious family members at the reading of the will.

We, the survivors, are called to remember the rising tide of hope that carried us during the last administration, especially in the early years. The attempt to provide affordable healthcare, the efforts to regulate the banks, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the spectacle of someone like Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office. But to remember accurately without sanding down the rough patches, we will also have to call to mind the endless drone war, the growing horror of income inequality, the expansion of mass incarceration of inconvenient populations. The patient has been ailing for a long time. It is the daunting obligation of our citizenship that we maintain a panoramic awareness of the breadth and depth of the conditions that have led to this moment. We must witness with unwavering attention the hostile takeover of our country by a rightwing cabal that campaigned in a language that we do not speak and the anti-democratic forces that have since been unleashed. There will be a resurrection of the better angels in our wounded country, a renaissance of sanity, but we will have to fight hard for it. We will have to be patient and I am not always a patient person.

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They Can't Take That Away From Me

If you're anything like me, right about now you feel like everything you hold dear is imperiled. After tomorrow, we may be entering a new dispensation in which our president (God forbid) is intimate with both the KKK and the KGB. Your inclination is to focus on those things that give you solace, casting a soft glow on your life, inspiring gratitude and making you think of drinking pernod and listening to Edith Piaf. Writing in the second person gives you just the distance you need to escape the black hole of "it can happen here." So you go the second person route which you have not done since the very first blog post on seventysomething when you couldn't quite believe you were taking the plunge. You considered calling this piece "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things," but mindful that sentimentality is the flip side of violence, you determined that the treacly, alpine Julie Andrews lyric didn't fly. Instead, you went with Gershwin, 1937, Jewish New York, defiance in the face of brown shirts on the move. The following is a list, hardly exhaustive and in no particular order, of some everyday encounters, all virtually free of charge, that belong to you irrespective of the outcome of the election  and that fill you with tranquility, joy and amazement. So there.

Drinking coffee in bed. In the indolence of seventysomething, you don't generally rush out of the house in the morning. You can make a pot of coffee and pour a cup for yourself (black) and one for Frank (with milk). Then, you can get back in bed and read, letting the caffeine work its magic, orbiting other worlds. You can fly to Rome with Jhumpa Lahiri in the pages of In Other Words. Watch the remarkable Jhumpa, raised in Bengali and educated in English, as she surrenders to Italian. You can wander with Rabih Alameddine in Yemen, Egypt and Lebanon and tell him how much you admire his intricate novel, The Angel of History. You are hopelessly infatuated with books like a horny teenager. You can't live without them.

Lemons. You love their astringency, the perfume that floats up from the oil in their peel when it's grated over linguini. Lemons make everything taste better, cod, custard, cocktails. So Mediterranean. You love their color in a blue bowl, definitively yellow as if nothing else, no daffodil, no sundress could compete. The way they offer themselves up off the tree in your sister's backyard in Berkeley. You are grateful to lemons for their simplicity and their versatility, their willingness to make themselves useful.

Walking in Stockbridge. You never get tired of ambling in disbelief down Main Street from north of the library, past the Dutch roofed old town hall, past the gracious Riggs buildings with their charcoal shutters and matte blue doors separating the pain inside from the pain outside, all the way to the cemetery where your friend, Al, a wandering Jew, an interloper, ended up surrounded by legions of church people from old Stockbridge families. Nothing much changes in this town. The trees do what trees are called to do, leafing gracefully in the spring, exploding in cherry blossoms as spring becomes summer, turning pumpkin in autumn, letting go as winter approaches. You feel no need for a different walk. It's less than a mile down and back, but you see something new every day.

Words. English words inhabit your cells in densely populated housing projects. There are so many of them and each one plays different music. You love their roots in the classical languages, connecting you like ancient Facebook friends to Socrates and Virgil. Sometimes, they arrive in steerage or by caravan from the Arab world. Alchemy. Algebra. The history of language defies politics. Eighth graders in Indiana don't know they're engaging with the mathematics of the Arab world when they struggle to solve equations. They don't know that the word ojala, Spanish for hopefully, comes from the Islamic devotion, if Allah wills it. Words are sneaky. They don't carry passports. They vault over the big wall and set up shop. There are some that irritate and some that terrify, but truthfully, you love almost all of them promiscuously.

You will not be deprived of these pleasures no matter how far the armies of the night advance. You have read the history books and you know that the struggle to remain who you are in the face of the monster is crucial to survival. In the cacophony of the moment, you wish to make it clear that you
will not be bludgeoned.

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Not Yet

There is another hostage crisis and we are all captive. Waiting for the outcome of the political circus, the resolution of our deepest anxieties, much of the country is holding its breath. We are all trying to make it through these last few weeks of not knowing, craning our necks, watching the trapeze artists, the tightrope walker. Everything is up in the air while we wait for the advent of solid ground we can stand on. Ours is not a culture that rewards hovering in the in between. We abhor ambiguity, the shadows. This is a painfully uncomfortable neither here nor there moment and we are all in it. Yesterday, I saw a drawing at a gallery opening that perfectly reflected this condition. The caption accompanying the drawing said "the abyss yawns but it does not sleep." Looking up at the tightrope is dizzying. Looking down into the abyss is frightening. And there is no straight ahead. Not yet.

At home, I wrap myself in sweaters and blankets. I eat too much comfort food and watch baseball. It's been raining all day today, but not in Chicago where the Dodgers are playing the Cubs. During the unfolding of the postseason, I think about the rain. It's that rain that always comes when fall begins to lean into winter and the burnt sienna trees give up the ghost. It streams through the porous roof of the sukkah, a monument to impermanence. Here in New England, in the attics of our minds where we keep the wool socks, the thermal underwear, we are anticipating ice. We don't know it consciously and we don't know exactly when it will come, but soon enough we'll be standing outside the door sprinkling rock salt like confectioner's sugar down the front steps. But not yet. This is above all a season of not yet.

We have not yet fallen on the ice this year. Later, it will hide on the blacktop or under the snow, threatening us with its slippery lack of empathy. Sometimes, it will fall from a dark sky and cover our windshields with a brittle crust, daring us to get from here to there unharmed. It has its upside, ice does. It offers its slick, glassy surface to swan-like Russian skaters. But overall, ice is misanthropic, unloving. Better to crush it mercilessly and introduce it to Margarita.

When it melts in the spring, crocuses giggle, birds trill their free-spirited sing-song. Then, droplets irrigate the born-again grass, rivers rush headlong to meet the sea. Waves approach the shore, tickling the toes of small children building sandcastles with moats that empty and fill with the August tide. Once long ago when we were taking our two boys to Tobago for the first time, the airline lost our luggage. We arrived in the punishing heat dressed for the arctic, no sandals, no bathing suits. The very first thing we did was tear off our north country clothes and fly naked and unashamed into the Caribbean, after which, covered in sweat and salt, we stood rapturously under cascading outdoor showers that reminded us of the waterfall where the Konkapot meets the Umpachene. It receives us, water does. It cleanses us and slakes our thirst.

In another state, not red or blue, but scalding, hot enough to burn your hand when you drain the angel hair, water becomes steam. It whistles a happy tea tune. It creates an entire percussion section, making that deeply consoling knocking noise that tells you the radiators in a drafty New York apartment love you and won't forget you. It pours out of our mouths in winter breath, affirming for us that we are warm-blooded animals even as the air on the far side of our skin is below freezing. Water has its moods, icy and forbidding, steamy and evanescent, just right for swimming, for drinking.

Watching the rainfall, a lesson from nature arrives at my front door. It's the lesson of neither here nor there, the understanding that definite boundaries in time and space are often human conventions, designed to make our experience intelligible, tolerable. This not that. But what if the various material states of water are not boundaried, despite everything we learned in school about the boiling point, the freezing point, in Fahrenheit and Celsius? Our teachers admired specificity. They had no feel for those liminal intermediate moments when water hovers between solid and liquid, liquid and vapor like a blurry pre-dawn consciousness in between dreaming and waking. This is the existential situation we find ourselves in for another two weeks waiting for the election to be over. It's foreign to our way in the world. Still, here we are, the future of our country hanging in the balance, inhabiting a state of suspended animation, like water on those days when it freezes, then melts, then freezes again. Or those times when it refuses to boil, no matter how intently you stare at it.


For more on impermanence and the lessons of nature check out Aruni's piece below.
http://coacharuni.com/2016/10/the-lesson-of-leaves/

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Time Lapse

Today, I feel the need, I'm sure you understand, to retreat into a safe haven of my childhood. I used to love to sit on the blue carpet in the living room and rifle through the wide, shallow drawer at the bottom of the breakfront where photographs were casually tossed. This was before the iPhone, before digital files, when photos were both more and less important than they are now. Some black and whites were lovingly mounted with adhesive corners into leather-bound albums and labelled in my sister's hand...Susie 1947, mother and daddy behind the counter in the family antique store 1952. But I am captivated by the loose pictures in the drawer, the homeless. My father is wearing his corduroy peaked hat, recently inherited by his great-grandson, a fisherman. My grandmother Anna, laced up stiffly, poses for a formal Victorian studio photograph taken before she emigrated from Romania. My mother is impossibly 40s glamorous in Persian lamb. There are also pictures of me, many pictures of me. I invent narratives to go with the photos, especially stories about all those people cavorting around in pre-war America. Many images are unidentified. Who is that leering, oily charmer with the tennis racket and what about the woman in the skimpy one-piece with the wet hair sitting on a man's lap? I'm stunned by their open sexuality. Apparently, life was flourishing before me, without me. I can't nail down the slippery identities of these shadowy people. I want to be able to name names, connect the faces of the people housed in the drawer to one another, but at the same time, I relish their aura of mystery. Mine was a life that cried out for mystery.

There were also loose negatives trapped under piles of pictures. The negatives, white becoming black, directions reversed, conveyed the shadow side of their photographic subjects, their rejected identities. They defined people by what they were not, a common organizing principle for a worldclass non-joiner like myself. I specialize in rejected identity. I know who I am because I'm not the sort of person who eats lunch at Burger King or drinks martinis at the country club. I know who I am because I do not believe in American exceptionalism, especially not in this season of vulgar buffoonery. I am Jewish, but not that kind of Jewish. Not zionist, not orthodox, not tribal. Not, not, not. What happens when events conspire to force me to print the negative, to stand and be counted?

My husband has written a play. I am generally resistant to the idea that all women are sisters. I regularly consider and reject that sweeping generality along with all the others. But then a man I know socially approaches the two of us at a reading and asks me how it feels to be the muse of a playwright, muse being code for the woman behind the great artist who types his manuscript and provides encouragement and coffee. The first person I think of is Vera Nabokov and while I am thinking of the beleaguered Vera, the moment passes, the opportunity to say, wait a minute, wait just one fucking minute, becomes part of history and doesn't resurface until Donald Trump makes his porcine remark the following week and I say to myself. Mother of God, he's talking about me.

It's remarkable at this late date to be considering fluid identity, a poorly explored aspect of aging. A friend just the near side of seventy laments that she used to be the life of the party. Clever, witty, the whole Dorothy Parker-Nora Ephron thing. Now, she says, she feels more reserved, more introspective. The change in social metabolism comes as a great surprise. Much has been written about wrinkled skin, about sexual invisibility, but very little about the way for some people, aging involves a certain withdrawal, a tendency to want to give it a rest. I remember when I was much more gregarious. I remember when the idea of spending a protracted period of time alone was anathema. I felt a great dullness, a great heaviness that begged for distraction. I wanted to go out, out of myself, to see and be seen, to discover the identity du jour and attach to it. Being young seemed to be one long advertising campaign, one long broken record, designed to reach the largest audience, whether we believed in our product or not. When sales declined, it was a dark season.

Aging has lifted me out of that malaise. It has introduced me to myself, a previously unidentified image, and offered up a time-lapse photograph that has recorded my evolution from an uncertain girl, anxiously scanning the horizon for indications of social weather, to a grown woman, in love with her family, with spirit, and with writing. The images are emerging from the developing negatives.


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A New Year: The Path of Paradox

 Paradox is the beating heart of spirit. There is a tension between accepting what is and yearning for a better world. Contemplative practices bring us back to the moment, to the startling awareness that, really, this is the only moment that we have. The now carries a gratitude-centered spirituality. In Judaism, we say a prayer, Shehecheyanu, to mark beginnings, the first apple of the season, the first snowfall, the new year. The prayer gives thanks for the gift of being alive in the precious, unrepeatable moment of newness. At the same time, prophetic consciousness whispers in our ear, calling us to lean into the future.  It resonates with the suffering of this moment and dreams of deliverance from poverty, racism, environmental degradation, and war. It is animated by an aching desire for change, for a better life for all the world's people. Gratitude and yearning are the figure and ground, the yin yang of awareness. We wake up every morning in the light of this paradox. We eat it for breakfast.

This year at Rosh Hashanah, I am thinking about paradox and about a blue farmhouse with a wrap-around porch that I lived in for twenty years. The house was opposite an enormous barn. The woman next door owned the barn and all the land except the six acres around our place. She rented her acreage to a farmer who raised beef cattle. The air was pungent with manure and the airwaves carried the deep, comforting lowing of the cows. They made the best neighbors, never playing their music too loud with open windows in summer, never operating machinery early in the morning. They just mooed and chewed. They just stared at our strangeness, like the cows in a Far Side cartoon strip.

Every year in September, the farmer would come over to ask if he could bring 'em over to our side of the road for fresh grass. He and his farmhands would put in temporary fencing with a gate along Division Street creating a large pasture on my side. When the fencing was complete, a date for the cattle herding would be set. The gates on the farmer's side and our side would be unlatched and the herd would cross the road like a group of very large, spotted kindergarten children on a field trip.

Often the arrival of the cattle would coincide with Rosh Hashanah. One year, my teenage son and I came home from services, changed out of our synagogue clothes and made ourselves tuna sandwiches on challah. We took our plates out to the back of the property and sat on the strip of grass just on the near side of the fencing. Several large cows came over to watch us eat. They shooed the flies with their tails and stared at us with loving incomprehension. After a while, there was a minyan and we felt deeply prayerful. We received the new year with gratitude and expectation.

There is value in remembering that the whole idea of a calendar with an annual cycle that begins at Rosh Hashanah is an artifact of the exodus, of liberation. As long as the Israelites were enslaved, every day was just like every other day. There was laboring and there was trying to stay alive in the midst of hunger and violence. The grammar of the calendar is grounded in choice, in an orientation towards the future. Today, I will feast.  Tomorrow, I will plant my garden. Today, I will shop for a new coat. Tomorrow, I will visit a sick friend. But, elsewhere in the world, not very far from the biblical backdrop, life has been reduced to its most primitive. It has come down to surviving another day, without the luxury of imagining a future.

Here in New England, where neither Bashar al-Assad nor Vladimir Putin is trying to kill me, where the American air force doesn't rain bombs down on me either intentionally or by accident, I drink green tea and read a novel entitled Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty. I live my day as if everything were alright and then I watch Syria on TV. There are what the BBC calls disturbing images, followed in the next segment by Brad and Angelina in happier times. Carrying the disconnect between the goodness of life and the blood on the streets of Aleppo, not to mention Charlotte, is my greatest challenge as a conscious person. Giving the moment its due, lingering in the memory of bovine communion here, cannot crowd out my witness to the daily struggle there. Understanding that my comfort is an accident of history reminds me that I am here, but I might just as well be there among the hungry, the hunted. Every day offers me another opportunity to acknowledge the miracle of being alive and to hope for an end to injustice, the repair of the broken world.

On Rosh Hashanah in particular, the present is pregnant with the future like a mother and her baby. The gratitude for the present and the hope for the future are entwined in a rapturous caress that embraces the paradox of what it means to be alive.

Glitches in the transmission of my last post, Less Time, More Space have been fixed. Please give it another look.

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Less Time, More Space

 Posted on my 35th wedding anniversary

I remember exactly where I was fifteen years ago when I first heard a spiritual teacher use the word spacious. I was standing beside an enormous desk in a tiny room, more of a hallway really, talking on the phone to a rabbi in Seattle. I knew immediately that the experience of claustrophobia, of imprisonment, was at the root of all my struggles. Ventilation saved me. Not literally opening the window, but oxygenating the narrow capillaries of doubt and fear so that I might be able to see what's out there.

As a child, I experienced a dash of both agoraphobia and claustrophobia. I was visited by nightmares featuring enormous indoor spaces like the Metropolitan Museum of Art where there was nowhere to hide. At the same time, it was hard for me to breathe in small places, the filthy bathroom up the crooked stairs to the attic of my father's antique store. The comfort zone of my personal geometry originated in the five-room New York City apartment where we lived, neither vast nor cramped. It took decades to inhale and exhale into the world outside of that apartment, that family.

Even now, I am preoccupied with space. The outer space of nebulae photographed in the infrared and spiral galaxies in the ultraviolet. The inner space where, on the far side of the somewhat arbitrary boundary of my skin, my memories and intuitions lie in wait, as immaterial as the solar wind. In the middle distance, all the rest of it, the space between you and me, the space between my house and the one next door, the vast space across the Arctic tundra, the Gobi desert and, most remarkably, the subatomic space between particles. All that emptiness we can't even see. The great discovery turns out to be that what's out there is mostly nothing. No walls to close in on you. No fences to separate you from your heart's desire.

Time is a tyrant. It goosesteps through all this nothingness, staring straight ahead, a bit of a bully. Time makes things happen, whether you like it or not, while space just is. Without time, without decay and mortality, space is the Garden of Eden before the picnic. Growth, awareness, suffering, art are all a function of time. In this science fiction movie we call life, we are called to tango with time in empty space. The universe continues to expand. There is more and more space, but the number of chapters remaining in my particular book of life continues to dwindle. There is less and less time.

One way I manage that is to tango backwards, back through history and, better yet, prehistory, so that time is liberated from the hourglass, so that I can experience its elasticity. Human civilization has been around for a nanosecond, a sliver of space-time, only a little more than 5,000- years. Machu Picchu, Chinese porcelain, Venice, fish tacos. We are all infants in the light of geological time. Scientists tell us the Earth was formed some 4.5 billion years ago. I swim in that temporal spaciousness when I go down into the limestone cave in my basement. My house, an 1884 two-horse barn, sits on a limestone shelf. The rock is what remained of the coral after the salt water receded in western Massachusetts. This part of the world, scenic with haystacks and church steeples, was once under the Atlantic Ocean. It was more like Buccoo Reef in Tobago where we snorkled at the turn of the millennium. The fish were chartreuse and aquamarine. The creatures in the basement are grey and brown. The ocean has retreated, leaving only the limestone and my amazement, the caress of the spacious.

Now, with the clock ticking on my sojourn on the planet, the practice of extending my vision in both exterior and interior space-time has become increasingly healing. I understand when a friend facing surgery goes to the beach to visit "the blue doctor." The ocean is ancient and panoramic. Like a Victorian consumptive, I breathe better in salt air. The distant horizon dissolves the artifical boundaries I have created. Going to the ocean is like breaking out of jail. But I don't need to get in the car to travel. I practice contraction and expansion, an accordion pleated way of being. Inhale. Exhale. I breathe in and focus on what is directly in front of me. Purple phlox. I breathe out and hear the prehistoric ocean rushing through my house. Both geometries stretch my awareness, opening me to the long view, backward and forward, and the wide-angle shot, this way and that.

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