During our visit with Josie at the cottage, there was a well-loved old Moroccan leather hassock that we usually kept on its side near the television. It was about fourteen inches high and twenty inches in diameter, just the right proportions to support Josie’s frame. We tried encouraging her to sit in a child’s chair but to no avail. Left to her own devices, however, Josie made the leather pouf her own.
I’ve been wondering about regrets recently. You know, what they say about living so that you won’t have any regrets. In order to do that, one has to be wise when one is young and make the right choices all the time in hindsight. Or luck into them by default.
What if when you look back on some of what I call “regret candidates” that you are mature enough now to realize that you can tick them all on your fingers as roads better off not taken? For me, they were conventional ones as I took my own path into the lonely dark of the unknown. If anything, I had a huge amount of help from the Cosmos, Helpers and any other forces able to effect synchronicity and serendipity in my life. It didn’t hurt that I was either too dumb or naive to know how close to the edge of failure I was treading the whole time either. I worked hard for a long time and I was lucky.
Now, I am getting my house in order. Painted with fresh “Navajo White” paint. And it’s not a whitewash job either. It’s a clean start, taking care of what we are already lucky enough to have in our home and for our lifestyle. Maintaining what we treasure while simplifying at the same time.
I’m also getting my head in order. To know what has been good for me and who has taken care of me when I needed it the most. And to let go of what I thought might have been better.
Regrets are just fairy tales of our imagination, aren’t they?
Even though it’s been unseasonably warm this winter moving into spring, I’m catching up on some spring cleaning this week. I’ve been meaning to clean up the plant shelf where G. had brought up some gorgeous dusty rose marble planks to provide a surface for the orchids. They’ve been coming along and their bloom is still approaching its peak.
I had a grocery bag full of clippings and dead leaves from the plants, especially the maidenhair fern which had nasty, dried-up brown fronds.
maidenhair fern after repairs
I also noticed that the overheating going on inside me has abated with the wise treatments given yesterday by C., my gifted Shiatsu practitioner. A levelling and cooling off that feels really calming and steady. By next week, some ceiling repair around the skylights and painting will take place in the kitchen and living area. Benjamin Moore’s “Navajo White” paint is my favorite color and has followed me from place to place wherever I have lived. The storage closets will be cleaned out altogether and organized so that we can find cottage and Christmas things more easily. My plan is to provide a swift exit for anything that we won’t use and that we don’t need. Outdated books and CDs will be donated to the local library. E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G that remains will have its place. It has already begun to look more spare and feels as right as rain.
To top it all off, here is a photo of little Josie, lending a hand to vacuum the floor at the cottage the day that we left. Priceless!
As I drove down Penzance Lane early this morning, returning from buying the morning papers, NYTimes and the Boston Globe, a large, dark red cardinal flew directly across my windshield. Maybe I am one of a handful of people who believes in omens and signs but I felt my heart lift when it happened. I mean, when you think about it, the bird had to launch itself exactly at a certain moment to coincide with the rate at which my car was moving forward in order for that to happen. And my spirits lifted for the day!
As I enjoyed my breakfast, I came upon an article in the NYTimes about David Hoffman, a rebel against building codes and other living requirements in Marin County, California. Mr. Hoffman has built a series of 30 structures, grows Pu-Erh tea and ages them in bamboo containers. He lives with his wife, a native of Thailand and together, they maintain a lifestyle of their own values, apparently ignoring convention and government code requirements.
This got me thinking about some of the dualities that we live amongst:
~ those who believe in omens and those who don’t
~ those who march to societal’s rubrics, and those who do not
~ Confucian principles which honor society’s norms for acceptance
and achievement
~ Taoist philosophy supporting an individual’s quest for,
well, individuality rather than conformity in order to gain someone
else’s approval
I come from a Mandarin family that went to great lengths to pursue individual values and goals, breaking convention and persevering through hardships during the Cultural Revolution. My Aunt Lucy, for example, completed her translation of “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman into Mandarin before she died despite personal tragedy and setbacks during her middle and late years in life.
Anyhow, this tea guy in Marin County reminded me of the kind of intensity to be himself in the middle of building codes and some such while carrying out his purpose–producing ancient tea. There is a documentary made about him called, “All In This Tea” that has won numerous film critic awards.
Our home is unconventional in that it is rebuilt from recycled building materials and is heated by a well dug deep under the house. There is no heating oil dependency here with a geothermal system put in by my husband, well over twenty-five years ago before it became popular as green technology.
We live in a working class town so our property is valued at less than half of what it might be were it closer to Boston where more conventional structures appreciate in value just for being located where they are, even when all the houses on the street look alike.
So, I guess there are people who live their lives according to the rules they grew up with and those who chafe at any rules at all. I’m of the latter persuasion and breathe a sigh of relief that I escaped a humdrum existence that I might otherwise have fallen into.
So, seeing red cardinals (3 in one day last week) another a couple of days later and then the one this morning, continue the drumbeat from the Cosmos to my inner spirit, reminding me that “you’re right where you’re supposed to be.”
I think it might be time to revel in this affirmation and live it up, wouldn’t you say?
Okay, so after all the grousing that I’ve been doing about thick, sticky life dramas, here is a refreshing respite. Josie came to visit and brought us a time in her world of wonder. Baby yogurt, noodle soup, smoothies, big strawberries, bubbles and a mindful presence way beyond her age of 19 months.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here are some that show the wonder of life in its simplest forms.
Enjoy!
As some of you know, I’ve been a little disheartened lately. Today, as I was driving along a country lane, a huge, dark red cardinal flew across the front of my car from right to left, his crimson wingspan fluttering in full view. I gasped and thought to myself, “all is not lost,” because I think of cardinals as good omens. Feeling a little better, I picked up my cell phone to call G. While I was describing the red cardinal flying in front of the car, ANOTHER ONE, this one a lighter, golden color, a female this time, flew alongside the right side of my car for about fifteen feet and then winged off into the woods. Two in one day! I began to feel better in earnest.
As I continued driving up to the North Shore, I reflected on what these twin sightings might signify. I asked the Universe silently, “what does this mean,” as I drove up Route 128. All I heard in reply was “everything will be all right” and then a little more softly, “cheer up.”
At the cottage, I ferried things into the house: foodstuffs, bedding, clothing, flowers. The kids are planning to join us tomorrow for the week, then a luncheon for friends next weekend: a busy time. The sky was clear, the sun out, a small red speedboat bounced along the surf, making loud popping noises as it hit the water in its hasty traverse across the horizon. A lovely day.
Returning to the car, I decided to go and fill up with gas so it would be all set for the week. As I edged the car down the rocky lane, I spied a flicker of red in the high bushes to my left. I stopped the car and peered upwards, spying my third cardinal for the day, a male, dark red and pretty large in size.
Seeing red three times today was convincing evidence that it’s definitely time for a change.
For the better!
Guess what? I’m Chinese. I’ve been Chinese all my life too, ever since I was born in Chungking during a Japanese air raid, as the story goes. For awhile, I lived with my paternal grandparents in their ancient house in Peking. My grandfather was Dean of Religion at the University and was also active with the World Council of Churches. I came to the States when I was five and landed in a country where the three dialects of Chinese that I spoke didn’t apply anymore. I learned English on the fly and also how to take care of myself because everyone around me had lots to do on their own.
Growing up during the McCarthy era was a challenge. So much so, that I grew an invisible set of armor that saw me through most of my life, like Colgate’s “Gardol,” an invisible shield to protect teeth from cavities. Even though I was subject to name calling, that kind of overt racism was easier to take than the covert kind. You know, those people who want to accept other ethnic groups but can’t seem to let go of their own sense of superiority. When I was visiting my first husband’s family in the Midwest, a woman in a grocery store remarked to my future father-in-law that “she has such nice teeth,” as though I were a horse or some kind of livestock at an animal auction.
I wouldn’t even be talking about this in a post except that it happened to me again this week. A former classmate from the Ivy League school I went to came for lunch at the cottage and managed to be so rude as to puzzle me afterwards. During lunch, she mentioned that even though she knew that blacks, gays and lesbians were socially acceptable nowadays, that she couldn’t get past the “training she received as a five-year-old.” She sounded like she didn’t really want to outgrow racist attitudes and even sounded like she was a little proud of it! Later on the drive home, it occurred to me that her behavior might have been an outgrowth of wanting to be superior to me because I happened to be a minority ethnic group. Or maybe it was something else, I have no idea. It did bring back how isolated I had felt so many years ago as a scholarship student among a bevy of well-to-do princesses.
The more I thought about this, the angrier I became with myself. For being so naive and trusting as to ignore the possibility that this kind of covert discrimination had been ever present all my life. Or that who I was as a person and my abilities were insufficient to offset this kind of prejudice from people I thought were my FRIENDS. On the other hand, what good would it have done to acknowledge it then? Maybe I might have seen rejection more clearly. Anyhow, I am writing about what has become a very uncomfortable realization: that life is not fair and that people do care about what your race is.
Who knew?
Some of you know that I’ve practiced the piano for a long time. My teacher, Basil Toutorsky, taught me how to practice: read the notes for the right hand, then the left hand. Look at the phrasing lines, the dynamics and then play both hands together. Study only one bar at a time until you can play it accurately three times in a row before you move on to the next bar. Slow and steady. Rigorous. Then, speed it up a little. Practice with the metronome so that your rhythm is accurate. Once this process has been followed for one page, stop there. Go back over that page until the notes and the playing start to make musical sense. Play the entire page three times in a row without mistakes before moving forward to the next page. If you make a mistake on the third try, start over again. This was the drill.
Fast forward to today where my facility for sight-reading sometimes gets in the way of patient study habits. Lately, I’ve been drawn to pieces either transcribed or composed by Franz Liszt. This is a kind of anomaly for me because my favorite composer is Bach. One Liszt piece is called “Liebeslied” when it was written originally by Robert Schumann as a wedding gift for his wife, the concert pianist, Clara Schumann. The melody and the harmonies are simple and very touching. It is also called “Widmung” for reasons I’m not aware of once Liszt took it, added sections and embellished it with his usual fanfare of rolling arpeggios and movie-like thematic blow-ups. When Van Cliburn won his tumultuous victory at the Tchaikovsky competition during the Cold War, he played this piece as an encore. A young Asian pianist, Aimi Kobayashi who looks to be about eleven years old, also played it recently as an encore in Russia. (Click her name for a link to listen to this piece on YouTube.)
Anyhow, back to practicing, there’s usually a point in time, a tipping point if you will, when a piece morphs from a study exercise to a piece of music. This phenomenon happened to me recently, a couple of days ago while playing this piece. It went from a period of time over several months, reading the various sections of the piece and playing all the notes. . . to suddenly playing it with a more intuitive grasp of the piece so that the music flows on its own.
In a way, I was thinking about this as a “before” and “after” — from notes on pieces of paper that are transformed into sounds capable of arousing a listener’s emotions. Even if you’re not a pianist, don’t play a note, or, if you think you’re tone-deaf and can’t listen to music, you’ll get it when you listen to this music and it connects with you.
Nothing better.
Yesterday, we were having lunch with a friend when the conversation veered to someone we were all concerned about. It soon became apparent that there were two vastly different world views which we felt strongly about. One was, “who am I to judge, criticize or interfere with someone else, even if they are being self-destructive?” The other was, “how can we sit idly by and not try to help in some way?” The former was to strictly mind our own business while living and let live. The other was to take action in some way to make things better, to influence or intervene for a positive change.
Let me just say that during this conversation, we also voiced past examples where no manner of intervention worked to stop someone from doing something self-destructive, whether it be throwing their health away or other worldly goods. So, even trying to do something didn’t necessarily make a difference.
These two vastly different views about our role in life also serve to polarize our society politically, it seems to me: those who want to be left alone to sink or swim on one’s own efforts; and those who feel it is an obligation to help “those in need.” I didn’t realize until now how different these basic attitudes were and how strongly they are held in our present society.
One of the CEO’s I worked with in biotech years ago liked to say: “There are only two kinds of people in the world: simplifiers and complicators.” That adage, I think is true. The one above is more complex and grey rather than black and white.
Nobody likes to be told what to do, and not everyone wants to see things differently, that’s for sure. So where does that leave us?
mulberryshoots 