small change

baggage fees

“It's a blessing and a curse, to slip so easily from one world to the next, to be so unrooted in any one reality. It keeps me from building in any of them. Just passing through: no need to fix anything or establish anything. According to some versions of reality, I've squandered my talents by wandering.”

So writes Dale of mole about wandering. Like Dale, I, too, have been a wanderer, feeling lately as if I had “squandered my talents” through all the untetheredness that has characterized my forays into the arts, languages, careers, and hobbies. Unlike Dale, though, I am not able to come to terms with my tattered journey. Some stubborn part of my thinking is still hostage to an idea that only by staying in one place and space can talent flourish in the ways in which flourishing happens both at the root and the crown.

How is it possible to delude myself this deeply about the nature of roots, when I have left behind so much and even my native tongue, so long ago now that when I hear it, it is a foreign language? A peculiar variation of the Stockholm syndrome has me bound to ideas of what it takes to live a “real” life, and this, ironically ties me deeply into limbo, from where I have been sending postcards, wishing for my company.

As I get older, the wandering is getting wearying. It’s more than just the squandered talents, now living in memory like disappointing teenagers. It is also a slower brain and a body that is showing wear and tear. It gets a bit disconcerting to be wandering with so much baggage. At times when the load is particularly heavy (as of lately), it is understandable that one should long for a place that has been fixed and well established, or (and this is what that elusive object of desire is) familiar.

palm reader

The series of ads on TV for Palm Pre* are starting to annoy me. Framed like a Renaissance painting, but luminous with that unmistakable digital color touch when it comes to the ethereal depth in the field, these ads feature a young red-headed woman, who is very much in your face. She also happens to embody a concept of beauty first brushed into vision by Botticelli, then carried into the digital age by the old Adobe Illustrator logo, among other artifacts old and new in marketing with a human face.

It's not the beauty as such of this face on the pitch for the gadget that sets off my hackles. What annoys me is the attitude that is breathed into her speech, which steals the focus from an idea of timeless beauty and then pours it into the narrow confines of a praise to the timeless features of the gadget. The gadget as a gateway to endless magic and boundless mysticism wrapped inside a sleek case of the moment.

Juggling effortlessly, accessing past lives -- all this comes to this Venus of divine marketing without the sweat of practice practice or the commitment of initiation into art and craft. And it also comes timelessly, with a mere touch of the button. There is no ivestment of effort here, no constraint of time, and her icy blue eyes and the haughtiness of her tone makes it clear that the juggler of things in space and time is not only so yesterday in an imputed spiritual confinement, but clearly inferior to the endless and incredibly light flow of possibilities presented within the confines of the shiny box that is new new gadget in her hand.

* It is worth reading the comments on AdFreak generated by the perceived creepiness in this ad, featured on the site partially.

not quite sunday morning

It is Saturday and it is a glorious summer morning in this corner of Northern California. You would think that just about everyone around here would head for the beach to soak up the sun on the shores, or the backyard to catch up with gardening chores … but this morning's yoga class was packed to the rafters with the regulars, some new faces and some old ones from classes long past thrown in the mix. As usual, there was also the mix of levels of practice and that of age, from the old geezers and the women past their mid-seventies holding poses with strength and poise to the young people throwing their pliable limbs hither and yon, for some of them their enthusiasm sure to develop into the supple musculature it takes to practice yoga not for the physical beauty of the body or even that of the disembodied soul, but for the “light on life” of which B.K.S. Iyengar speaks.

clunker

This hunk of metal is older than my younger son. For the last two years it sat in sun and rain, wind and calm, gathering rust spots on its once-so-golden hull and in the muffler seasonal spiders that wove intricate webs veiling the flat tires.

Neither the spouse nor I could bring ourselves to junk it for what seems like eons. We joked about hiring someone to steal it in the middle of the night. We considered turning it into a piece of art in the yard, thus confirming the growing suspicion of our neighbors that we are definitely losing our grip on what it takes to show the world that one is a true standardized suburbanite.

In the end, the spouse made the call. A few days later the tow truck, employed by an environmental nonprofit, to which he donated it, came and took our chariot away. With it went so many memories, but in a way, I feel so much lighter. Now, if we could do the same with the detritus of a past steeped in the ritual toys of the suburbs, I would probably grow wings….

flesh & bone

I dreamed I posted to my blog. It wasn’t much of a post, but enough to make a slight ripple in RSS feeds, like a pebble tossed lightly into the steely calm of a lake.

*

In another dream, I found myself in a gathering of women, some friends, others acquaintances, but most of them strangers. One of the women, who had just published a book, rose to give a speech in which she expounded on what she thought of stay-at-home moms, which I was for years. Her speech came to a thundering end with this: “Stay-at-home moms are really nothing more than just human fat.”

In waking life I am not given to public outbursts, let alone speeches, but in the dream, I rose to my feet and asked all the women gathered there to take a good look at me, because, as I explained to them, I happened to be just that nothing more “human fat” to which the speaker had relegated my past, those years of toil and worry, as well as of beauty, in moments lived that obviously can’t be measured in the muscled flexions of the flesh of finance.

*

While in the world of dreams I was growing lots of back bone, in this life of mine, apparently, I am losing bone mass. Though I am doing all the right things for bone health, it’s my past, that hefty pebble tossed so carelessly into the lake of the future, that is now rippling through the marrow of my bones.