shepherdsvoice

[shepherdsvoice]

Peace

When I stepped out into the pale lavender light of the New York City evening from the darkness of the movie theater, I had only one thing on my mind: peace.

The air was warm and it had just the right amount of humidity so that you felt it but didn’t feel like you were swimming through it. And the city was so quiet. No loud phone calls, no pounding music, no sirens, no barking dogs. Just the city-silence of the low rumble of cars driving by and people walking home alone, their footsteps silent on the pavement. I walked a few blocks just noticing it. Feeling the quietness press against my ears. Looking up at the buildings that subdivided the sky: the unapologetically American exuberance of the Dorilton, the disapproving French poise of the Ansonia, the squat and somber rustication of the Central Savings Bank.

And it was summer.

Summer. There are some words that are bigger than themselves. That hold memories and magic within their syllables. That you try to use sparingly so as not to exhaust their mysterious, unidentifiable power. Summer is one of those words. A sentence with the word summer in it is just better. It aches in that sweet, painful way of nostalgia and past happiness.

That evening, summer beamed from the vibrancy of the green-leafed trees. It panted in the dogs circling the fire hydrants. It haloed the old-timey streetlights that lined the park. Summer gasped in the pearlescent wink of lightening bugs in the dark gardens.

When I crossed 70th Street, I saw the last washes of color from the fading sunset over the Hudson and decided to take Riverside Ave home. The silhouettes of the New Jersey apartments were stark, dark rectangles against the little afterglow at the horizon and their lights reflected in the slow water of the river. I was reminded of the lights reflected in Arno on those beautiful, joyous evenings in Florence. Walking home across Ponte alle Grazie at 10pm or midnight or 2am with my belly full of al dente pasta and melting gelato, my ears still ringing with laughter, a smile lingering around the corners my lips, my eyes stinging at the beauty of the city I – and so many others – have loved so much.

As I walked along the cobbled path of Riverside Park, I thought of all the cities I’ve walked at night, all the lights reflected in all the rivers and bays. The red lights flashing in puddles on a rainy Paris night as I headed back to Montmartre. The silence of Tokyo. The heat and buzz of insect and swaying of palms along a highway in Nairobi. The lapping of waves and echoes of clinking glasses on the beach in Tel Aviv. The neon glow of Hong Kong across the bay, the old fashioned boat anchored and rocking in the water.

What is it about walking through a city at night alone? It feels so different from walking during the day. Maybe it’s the hush, the low hum of thousands of in-window AC units. Maybe it’s the rush, the cinematic herd of yellow taxis approaching the intersection where the sign counts down to a crosswalk where no one is x-ing. What is it that makes you want to take the long long way home and delay the moment when you open your apartment door and return to your normal life?

I think it’s peace.

I had just watched a documentary about Anthony Bourdain. Roadrunner. It covered his addictive personality, his bad boy persona, and his travels around the world. From al fresco lunches in Provence with goat cheese, fig jam, and a 2010 sauvignon blanc to freshly brewed coffee at a floating market in Vietnam to bombs falling on Beirut. And his friends in the documentary talked about how he was always searching for something. Always trying to fill a hole. And he himself said that he had never really felt still and at peace. Or if he had, only for a few fleeting seconds.

I feel a lot of peace. I feel it on lazy afternoons, reading in the fading light in my living room. I feel it sitting in Central Park, watching dogs wrestle and shooing ants off my bag. I feel it during my whispered, nightly prayer. I feel it when cutting fresh flowers for the vase on the kitchen counter. I feel it standing before a Whistler or Sargent in a New York City museum. I feel it driving down an empty street at night in winter with the heat turned all the way up. I feel it sitting on the steps at Mom’s house with the sun darkening my back. I feel it inevitably when looking at the ocean. I feel it especially on a long train or bus ride, the Dutch countryside or Taiwanese mountains or African plains streaming past the window. A Peterson podcast, or Crosby Stills and Nash, or most often a Bible lecture playing through my headphones. My eyes full of the beauty of this world, my body rich with youth. The simple pleasure of time. Time to look and appreciate, to see fully.

All my most peaceful memories are alone. Maybe that’s a prerequisite for peace? I’m not sure. Sometimes I worry that I’m too at peace. Too at peace with my life, too at peace with myself. Too at peace on my own. Not striving, not trying to work harder or be better. Not actively seeking and filling my life with others. I know that peace can be too safe. Can be cowardice. Though peace is not necessarily the same thing as comfort. I find peace often when I’m in a new place. It is one of the things I love about traveling; it forces you to see and feel and consider the little moments. You are broken out of your habits, your expectations, your norms. You’re more connected and tuned in. Autopilot is turned off and you’re forced to pay attention and grip the controls and bank hard to keep yourself in the air.

I think peace is taking a moment to see and feel and be and most of all be grateful. To switch off your mind and let your heart swell up with that happiness that’s so big it almost feels like sadness. As I get older, I see more and more people who live without peace. Who live instead with hunger and yearning and frenzy. And it’s no way to live. It’s a way to push through life, to not feel time. To not feel anything good because you are running so hard from the bad. The bad needs to be felt too. And to be felt with gratitude and thanks. There’s a peace in acknowledging and feeling the ache of grief or loneliness. There’s a peace that’s hard-won after the submission and release of anger. There’s a sweet peace in faith. In letting go of what you cannot change. In finding the things you can. In the push and pull of doubt and wonder.

I’ve found that there’s peace in life if you seek it humbly.  

[shepherdsvoice]

Nomi

My grandma died. Yesterday in her sleep on a rainy California day in her room. And now I have no more grandparents. And it’s hitting me harder that I thought it would.

Grandma was a whole person. An impregnable but artistic and lively and passionate person. And it’s so sad that she is gone from the world, all the things that made her uniquely her, never to exist again. But I am so grateful that I got to be a part of her life and her such a part of mine and for all the love we shared though neither of us could express it. For that familial love that’s not earned but just given. And though I’m glad that she passed peacefully and gracefully as I’ve been praying for every night for the last week, now I give myself over to grieving for her and mourning what we have lost.

We’ve lost a bohemian intellectual. This mysterious, eclectic, eccentric, creative, caustic, womanly woman. This tiny spark of wit and style and flair. This woman who left her family and started her own in a foreign land. To think that I’ll never again hear her play piano – shuffling behind the bench, slapping the light switch on the wall, sitting beneath the watchful, serene gaze of Madame Maxime as she holds her painted beads between her hands like a fallen cat’s cradle. Then nosily turning a few pages of whatever’s on the stand, other folios and loose sheets strewn to one side and stacked precariously on the bookshelf. And then her total engrossment as she played, mostly looking at the music with an occasional quick glance down at her fingers which scuttled assuredly across the keys and snapped up surprisingly to roughly turn the page. Her not serene or peacefully entranced like some people when they play but frenetic and self-possessed and confident. And as she played, the music filled the house, echoing up in the empty space above the stairs and spilling out onto the patio crowded with climbing roses and warming my heart with pride and wonder and love.

And it’s so sad to never again hear her musical “Hệllỡ↗”when she answered the phone. To never walk in to see her sitting right in front of the huge TV watching tennis. Or sunk into one of the two swiveley chairs smiling and following the conversation or laughing with her head tilted back and her mouth wide or looking out the patio door to the constant Palo Alto sun. So sad to never go for a walk to the pool or up the hill or around the neighborhood. Her small, soft hand tight in mine or else her hands clasped behind her back as she strolled shufflingly, a picture of contemplation.

And I’ll miss her long dark hair when I was young, half pulled back by the velvet rose clip I admired so much. And her sassy silver bob at the end. And her long dresses and rose pants and New England fleece dotted with boats.

I’ll miss going into the kitchen to get more water or orange juice and pausing at the fridge to look for any new additions and then turning to find her coming to join me, pointing at the pictures and telling me the same stories I had heard a million times but never tired of. I loved looking at old pictures with her. She didn’t always know who was pictured or where it was taken but it was such a lovely alchemy to sit beside my wizened grandma and look back on the stylish bombshell she once was. In stark black and white with a high pony and big sunglasses and a cinched, crisp blouse with a pouty, full-lipped sassy smile as she sat on kaleidoscopic red rocks in New Mexico. Or posed in a high-waisted bikini on a beach, her head cocked and her smile sweet. Or color photos of their wood-paneled cottage in Maine, she in a long black 70s gown that is still in her closet upstairs.

And I remember now the quiet, girlish bonding moments that we had – talking about the photo of her standing in profile and smiling serenely in the picture in the extra bedroom upstairs. Or going through her jewelry box on the counter in the bathroom. Or exploring the rich furs and vibrant dresses in her closet. Or stroking the long dark hair of the geisha doll on her dresser that had been given to her by a student.

It makes me sad that she was so locked in herself and impermeable by the time I knew her and probably even before I was born. Sad that Dad can’t find the feelings to mourn and that Claudia feels conflicted and surprised to do so. But I’m grateful that I got to know and love her as she was and that she felt that we had a close bond at least when I was younger.

It’s sad to think that that whole chapter – 25 years – of visiting them is over. Long drives past rolling golden hills, the sound of the piano or viola heard outside the front door, nights spent tucked up under the colorful floral bedspread in the spare bedroom, studying the painting that I loved so much above the desk of the dark interior of a New England fisherman bar. I’ll just miss their house filled to the brim with them. The wonderful, fantastical, dreamy, strange art and trinkets and keepsakes crowding the walls and the music and books pouring forth from every shelf and the fresh cut flowers in little vases on every table and pictures everywhere. Memories and time and just them plastered so thick and poignant on every surface.

I will miss them both so much. And though I mourn now for the grandmother I’ve lost, I’ll always be thankful for the years I spent loving and learning from both her and grandpa.

[shepherdsvoice]

2020

Part of me wants to say that 2020 was just a terrible year. And in some ways it was. But I can’t ignore that in so many ways it wasn’t. In the macro, it was, for the most part, a pretty terrible year. It was a year of frustration and anger and disillusionment and violence and disappointment. I fear that it is a year that will have long-lasting and far-reaching repercussions. But in the micro, I am blessed to say that I was not too affected by the situation. I know that I could have and should have conducted myself with more grace and patience this year. I let my anger and frustration and worry take a hold of me and I took it out on those around me. But when I put aside those emotions, I can appreciate all the blessings I received.

I am grateful for all the unexpected time I got to spend with family this year. I am so grateful for the seven months I spent with Mom. Probably the last time we’ll ever live together again and maybe the closest we’ll ever be. I am grateful for that strange spring and that loooong summer that in some ways doesn’t feel like it happened at all. I am grateful for watching the sun rise most mornings from the sunny little office that I painted yellow. Watching the first wisps of pink crest the hill and illuminate the dew on the lawn and the grey cat on the fence and the roses blossoming on the bush in the back corner of the garden and the downy white blooms on the crepe myrtles. I am grateful for the chill of the hardwood floors in the morning and the baking heat as the sun shone full through the windows in the afternoon. I am grateful for calling to Rosie through the thin, warped glass windows as she lay on the deck or sniffed under the gate. I am grateful for Friday Facetime sessions with Ngawang. Sitting in the sweltering office and talking about nothing and everything. Making plans for future trips and lamenting what the world had come to. I am grateful for sitting on the top step in the afternoon when I was finished with work. Listening to Genesis or Leviticus, drinking strawberry milk or eating berries or an acai bowl, the sun browning my back and Rosie coming to sit beside me, nudging her head under my arm. I am grateful for throwing the Frisbee with her and playing keep away and running around the back yard under blindingly blue afternoon skies or beneath pale pink and purple sunsets as the crows squawked and returned to their roosts in the tall trees on the ridge.

I am grateful for my morning chats with Mom. Walking into her room once I finished my morning meetings, and commiserating about the news and laughing about our lack of plans and lamenting her empty retirement and complaining about my boss and talking about the neighbors who passed by on their morning walks and boxing with Rosie as she lay at the end of the bed. I am grateful for afternoons on the front porch, watching the little world go by on C Street, joking with Steve and Bill, playing American Trivia, reading languorous novels while Mom read the paper, looking at houses on Zillow and whiling away the long afternoon hours. I am grateful for weekend mornings at the dog park. For walking up the hill in invariably inconvenient shoes then sitting high on the bench at Gerstle Park as Rosie trudged through the ivy and did her looping patrol of the hillside. Or sunny, windy days at Mill Valley Park, watching dogs reluctantly run the agility course or race across the broad lawn after a ball or Frisbee or dive unhesitatingly into the muddy shore of the bay. And I am so grateful for mornings at Piper Park. Sitting on our favorite bench beneath the thin maple, looking out across the verdant lawn at Mt Tam standing sentinel over us with Hall nestled in the middle ground where I spent so many hours playing soccer or sitting in a circle with my friends in the back corner of the field or laughing over our lunches at the picnic tables. I am grateful for the familiar faces at the park, the people whose dogs’ names we knew but not their own. I am grateful for iced chai’s sipped on the park bench as mom and I talked about our school days while Rosie lay panting in the tall grass behind us in the shade of the great willow tree looking out at the high creek.

I am grateful for our afternoon drives when there was nothing else to do. For the chance to explore Marin. Driving down Center Street through sleepy Fairfax and over the hill to San Geronimo. Cows and granite boulders and scraggly trees dotting the fields that crept up the hillsides as hawks circled overhead. I am grateful for that long, straight road through that wild, wonderful country. I am grateful for the shaded windy road through the redwoods towards Nicasio and the little white school house on the corner. I am grateful for the backroads towards Petaluma past the Nicasio Reservoir with hills so vibrantly green and rolling and tranquil that I was reminded of Ireland. I am grateful for the turn onto Petaluma Road and the lazy bends up the hill with sudden vistas of the valley below. And I am grateful for the 37 towards Sonoma and Napa, for the horses on the hill and the bridges over the bay and the beached boat on the side of the road and the long low lane through the marshes. And I am grateful for all the laughs and talks we had during those drives while bluegrass and rap and oldies and classic rock played on the stereo. I am grateful for afternoons at Stinson and Rodeo when we could forget the wider world and enjoy the simple beauty that California still has to offer as we watched dogs and children frolic in the surf and dig in the sand.

I am grateful for my trip with Michelle and Dash. For honky tonk country music and long lazy drives through the central valley and the sunshine in LA and the quiet of Utah and the vastness of the sky and the rainbows of Bryce Canyon and the awe-inspiring beauty of Zion and the blinding white of the Booneville Salt Flats and the gaudiness of the Las Vegas Strip and my grueling hike with Dash and our long talks on the road or in the evening. I am grateful for the time I got to spend with Michelle. For our tours through the City and the East Bay, spending the whole day exploring and talking and complaining and laughing, agreeing on so much. For our dinner on New Year’s Eve, driving to a hilltop in South SF and eating dumplings out of to-go containers and exchanging Christmas gifts and trying to make sense of the craziness of this year. I am grateful for the time I got to spend with her family. At her niece’s birthday party while the children splashed in the pool and her dad told me about Nauru. And at Samuel P Taylor as we sat around the campfire and sang Russian and Slovakian folk as Steve strummed along on the guitar. And at Labor Day weekend with Mom, eating hotdogs with Michelle’s parents under the sprawling oak in their backyard and seeing Lenka and Janka and Kimmie and Alex. Mom and I talking on the way home about the unique sadness of being an only child and the joy that a big family brings.

And I am grateful for my three trips to Hawaii this year. And especially for this last one. I am so grateful for cool mornings on the lanai, watching the shadows recede across the lawn and the sea lighten from grey to blue in the morning sun, the myna birds stirring and shrieking, me slowly drinking my guava juice while reading or embroidering and then sitting with Dad and talking about movies and psychology and ideas for articles and albums. I am grateful for morning walks on the beach, for the dogs and the surfers and the damp sand and flip-flops left in the shade and the waves creeping up the shore. I am grateful for lunches on the lanai or at Hula or Mama’s. For the tropical rainstorm at Hula Grill as I drank my strawberry daiquiri and for the light rain at Mama’s as the colossal waves crashed against the coast. I am grateful for drives along the seaside while music played, with the multi-hued ocean to one side and the steep, sculptured mountains shrouded in fog on the other. I am grateful for lazy afternoons napping and reading and playing trivial and scrabble and cards. For time to be together and relax. I am grateful for home cooked meals, the three of us joining hands around the table for grace and piling the plates to one side to talk after we’ve finished eating. I am grateful for our dinner at Spago’s, watching the sun set behind the palms and the lights illuminate the beach, sharing sushi and keeping an eye out for celebrities. And I am grateful for nights after dinner watching good movies and bad. Talking through plot points, arguing about Gal Gadot’s attractiveness, predicting the storyline of Soul, and marveling at the athleticism of Gene Kelly. I am grateful for the warmth and beauty and slowness of Maui.

I am grateful for the breath-taking sunset that I saw from the plane last night, the sun dipping down into the Pacific and bathing the hills of Pacifica in gold while the city sparkled farther north. I am grateful for the sunrise I saw today from the back of an Uber on the New Jersey Turnpike, the sky confetti pink and yellow, silhouetting the Manhattan skyline across the Hudson.

This has been a hard year. A trying year. But a year for growth and reflection and pause. A year that threw most of my goals and hopes out the window but that gave me so many other blessings in return. This was the first year since 2013 that I did not leave the country. I got to spend 365 days in the country that I love so much and I got to explore new parts of it and fall in love with it more even as I worry over its future. I spent every holiday this year with people I love, Fourth of July with Dad and Susan, my birthday with Mom and Ray, Thanksgiving with Ngawang and Aja and Deanna and Abina and Ritcha and Christmas and New Year’s with Dad and Susan and Mom and Michelle. I must admit that I am glad that 2020 is over but I am thankful that I lived it.

[shepherdsvoice]

Journal entry from October 24th, 2019, Ngawang’s, NJ, 8pm:

             “This will be quick – just to say that I’m here. I made it. I got to NYC early and Ngawang and I spent the day in Midtown doing a lot of walking. It was really wonderful. We got Gong Cha, went to Strand, ate Shake Shack in the 23rd Street Park, and viewed an apartment on 45th Street. I already feel like I’m getting to know the city better and NYC is certainly throwing a warm welcome for me. Today it was sunny and clear and in the high 60s and people were happy and I saw two springers and some of the trees are changing and the city is clean and beautiful and filled with Red Tails and Japanese White Eyes and unidentified woodpeckers. And I saw Aja right before I got in bed and Ngawang’s mom has been so nice and gracious and Ngawang is jobless so we can hang all the time.

             It was a really wonderful first day. But Ngawang and I keep saying that it doesn’t feel like I’m actually staying here yet. It keeps hitting me in flashes but hasn’t really set in. It feels like it’s happened so fast but I’ve been sitting around for three weeks waiting to come out. It just doesn’t feel real yet.

             I did kind of feel it on the airporter last night. It was one of the most beautiful rides of my life. I nearly cried saying goodbye to Mom and Rosie, Caroline hugged me tight after we got lunch at Comforts and ice cream at Scoop on an 85 degree October day. But then that drive. California did not let me go quietly. The sun dipped behind Mt. Tam so it stood in stark silhouette against the yellow sky, reflected in the bay at Larkspur Landing. And on the bridge, the city was swathed in a pink to blue ombre sky, the blue on the edge of the horizon reminding me of the cotton candy I got every year at the fair at the end of a hot, dusty, dizzying, perfect July day punctuated by fireworks. And on the right side of the bridge, the sliver of a fiery orange sun sank into the Pacific. It was one of the most beautiful and vibrant and poignant sunsets I’ve ever seen. And I wept silently the whole ride. For the sun was setting on my life in California and it wasn’t until the final drive that I realized how every corner of Marin is draped in memories – almost all of them happy. Like a patchwork quilt of laughs and love and friends and moments spread over the whole county. And I am so grateful for them all – growing up in the shadow of Mt. Tam, ferry rides to Giants games, hikes on Ring Mountain and afternoons spent at Marnie’s, lunches at Robato’s with Dad, sunny sandy exhausting days with Mom at Stinson, dinner dates with Tanisha, golf matches with Lindsay. So much of my life is held in Marin and while I cried on the airporter I told myself to knock it off and stop freaking out. But I realized that I wasn’t freaking out. I was ready to go but I was also right to grieve and be sad about leaving this most beautiful of places.

             Briefly, throughout today, I’ve had flashes of longing for the comfort and routine of Mom’s house. But honestly, I never truly felt or made that my home. Nor any place I’ve lived in the last seven years since leaving Glen Way. And today, walking around with Ngawang and trying to remember streets and avenues and stumbling upon little parks and negotiating busy intersections, I didn’t feel out of place. I’m ready to make this city my home and surround myself with people I love. I’m sad to say goodbye but excited to say hello.”

[shepherdsvoice]

Nara

“It’s like something out of a fairy tale,” she said with wonder, sitting on the soft worn couch with her legs tucked up beneath her in her long red skirt, plants hanging down above her, the summer night pushing up against the windows behind the monstrous monstera.

And I realize with wonder that she’s right, while sitting on the old park bench worn soft by the elements with my legs tucked up beneath me in my long white dress, Japanese maples spreading delicately above me, the summer afternoon hanging heavy over the little pond. Japan’s fable is a fantasy. One interspersed with magic and I feel that magic especially here in Nara.

Nara’s story, like all stories, is not a line but a vast tapestry of interwoven threads. Not an island alone in a sea but the sea itself – its waters lapping up onto the shores of distant, varied lands. Nara’s story is not just the dates and figures that pertain to man; capital of Japan from 710-784 AD, population 359,666, 276 square kilometres, 16.3 million tourists a year. It’s also the dates and figures that pertain to life itself; the two days a year when day and night sit across the table from each other as equals, the width of the stripes on a pond turtle’s nose, the number of spots on a deer’s back, the density of baby barn swallows crowded into a clinging nest, the rhythm of the water skimmers dancing dartingly across the surface of the pond.

The magic in Nara is more readily felt because nothing here is normal. Different language, different alphabet, different side of the street, different ways of dressing, different stores, different foods, different etiquette, different holidays, different rituals, different myths, different histories, different routines. Everything foreign and fantastic and confounding. Nothing is automatic for me here, nothing taken for granted or inherently understood. It is a place that forces you to be present and conscious of every little moment and the littler moments between those.

Here, I notice the minutiae. I pay attention to the setting of this story. I feel the heavy history of the place that covers and colors the city like a thick wash of varnish over the surface of a painting; changing the tone of the hues beneath, sealing in the painter’s intent, keeping out the effects of time and changing tastes. I hear that history in the teeming throngs around the time-worn, thousand year old timber temples that recline at the base of the hills, shrouded in the old-growth forests. The beams and transepts worn to dark black petrified wood. Transmuted through time and transfigured into something that straddles the line between natural and man-made.

I catalogue the cast of characters in this tale. The red-capped mushrooms nestling in the damp earth between tree roots. The complex origami of a delicate maple growing through a thick-barked ginkgo. The valiant burst of bamboo from a hollowed out zelkova. The yellow striped frogs that huddle in the muddy grass. The elegant egret with her winsome white feathers whispering in the wind. The busy, bustling ants hard at work doing their daily duties. The crusty-eyed cats crowding around the base of the bell tower. The acrobatic swallows carousing in the eaves of the buildings. The woodpeckers whose familiar flight catches my eye. Their flight like falling, hovering on the knife-point of catastrophe – just a single flap before a plummet. The Chinese tourists with their cacophonous conversation. The Starbucks baristas with their perfect ponytails and plastered smiles. The silent, white-masked crossing guards holding their orange batons. The staff at the guesthouse always stationed behind the welcome desk and ready with a smile.

And of course, the ubiquitous deer. Delicate, but here dauntingly daring, accepting and at times demanding crackers from the tourists. I am struck by the frightening and incomprehensible fragility of their spindly legs. They move like a ballerina transmuted into something solely designed for grace. I love to watch them hunkering down beneath shady trees in the high heat of the day. Some panting, their spotted hides rapidly rising and falling. Their long-lashed, rich brown eyes and soft ears - delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist – unmistakably those of a prey animal; never at rest. Their tails forever swatting and their sides shivering at the incessant insouciance of insects. The startling beauty of their buoyant springbok bounds when chased by small boys. The cautious way they approach your outstretched hand. Their insistent bobbing bows. The rippling light of a stream reflecting on their long, lean, delicate necks as they dip their head to drink. Their strange and plaintive high-pitched, yearning cries that echo through the woods like trees creaking in a storm.

Here, I am better able to catch the subtle soundtrack of the city. Nara’s music is heard in the low, earth-shaking grumble of idling tourist buses. In the nasal voices of saleswomen endlessly repeating the daily deals. In the sudden splash of a neon koi breaking the surface of the lake. In the laughs and shrieks of the tourists around Todaiji. Nara’s magic is nestled in the words that sound like they should be part of a magic act. Abracadabra replaced by kasuga taisha. Open sesame transformed into takoyaki. Sodesune said with a flourish as a curtain is whisked away, revealing a dove where, moments before, a rabbit sat.

I have been a stranger in this place just as my forefathers have been strangers since the dawn of time. But in moments I find that I do belong here. For Nara is a place that asks tranquillity. That begs reflection. That requires stasis. And on park benches or on sun-suffused decks or in lively cafes or on soft leather sofas or in trundling trains while learning about the trials of Joseph, or the worries of Moses, or the vagaries of Jacob or while reading about idealistic, idiosyncratic intellectuals or mythical, missing medieval kings, or lonely, lost men in Tokyo, I am no longer an American in a country bombed recently by America, or a head taller than those around me, or curly haired in a sea of straight, or tan skinned in a snowstorm. Instead I am just another creature caught in Nara’s thrall. I am just another thread in Nara’s tapestry. Another shore soaked by Nara’s incoming tide.

Now I am just another part of Nara’s story. And it is a part of mine.

[shepherdsvoice]

Goldengrove

And now the purple dusk of twilight time steals across the meadows of Regent’s Park. I stroll through the park, listening to Nat King Cole sing over luscious string ensembles, past trees in exuberant bloom of downy white and pinched pink, and children playing soccer, and coots diving and resurfacing.

I just finished reading Goldengrove for the first time in probably ten years. And it was revelatory. For I realized how much this novel influenced me. Thoughts I thought were my own are actually from this book; I’ve always thought of Humphrey Bogart’s face as beagle-like, always thought of old time starlets as having a “lit from within quality,” always thought of the spirit of the staircase. But it turns out that I got all those from this book. And they became so imbedded in me that I lost the source memory.

Back in 2008, I happened upon Goldengrove at Barnes and Noble and thought it was the most beautiful book I had ever seen, with its glossy dust jacket picturing a rickety red boat moored on the shores of a lake and the pages stylistically frayed and torn. I read it and reread it though I was too young to have done so. I remember bringing the book to school one day and showing my girlfriends how pretty it was while we stood in middle school clusters outside the eighth grade hallway during recess.

I really loved this book. It made a big impression on me and my fresh thoughts. I dreamed of owning a small bookstore in a sleepy town in New England – though I didn’t really know what or where New England was. I wanted to know the names of jazz singers and the plots of old movies. I wanted to be like Margaret whom I saw as someone to aspire too; someone old fashioned and iconoclastic and nostalgic for a bygone age. Though at the time, I was just like Nico; thirteen years old, scientifically-minded, naïve, sheltered, uncultured.

It shocks me now to realize that in some ways I did grow up to be like Margaret. I can hear the difference between Ella and Etta, between Nat and Frank, between Chet and Bing. I’ve seen Casablanca and Vertigo and The Dollars Trilogy. I wear vintage clothes and can talk about Russian literature. But what’s even more shocking is to realize that I’ve outgrown Margaret. I can read this book now and see her as someone young and inexperienced. Eighteen years old and never having left her little town. About to go off to college. She would emerge from college changed. Not so committed to the past. Not so wrapped up in it. But dragged bodily into the present. I know that now. I know that you don’t remain as you were at eighteen. That it is Margaret you mourn for. You’ll see sights colder and not spare a sigh. The worlds of leaf meal won’t move you anymore. You’ll have new worries and interests and motivations.

When I first read this book a decade ago, I was just becoming a “smart” girl. I would get all A’s for the first time that year. I was interested in science. I wanted to study neuroscience. I knew nothing of art or oldies or the world. But now, when the book mentions Carracci, my mind leaps to the Farnese Gallery and that little church next to Piazza del Popolo where Carracci’s altarpiece is overshadowed by Caravaggio’s depictions of Saint Saul and Saint Peter. And I’ve stood in that church twice and marvelled at those paintings. And when the book mentions a song I don’t know, I now have an iPhone on which I can immediately look it up and listen to it. And I read the book on my kindle. Here in my dorm room in London where I am completing a Master’s Degree.

It’s so wonderful and jarring and exciting to be confronted with something from your past. Especially now when I stand poised, with a past and path behind me and a future unfurling ahead. Like stepping back and looking at the collage of your life and then approaching the canvas and carefully peeling up the onion-skin pieces of decoupage to see the layers that make up the whole picture. Like x-raying a painting and seeing the differences between the under drawing and the final version – a dog transformed into a unicorn, a hand gesture altered.

Just today, I watched a documentary about the Met Gala and I thought about how in a different life, that yearly event would have been relevant to me. Maybe I would have been working at the Met or some other hallowed institution. Maybe I would have known Andrew Bolton and his work. It’s so strange to be confronted with a book that helped set me up for the life I did live – am living – at a moment when I picture another life I could’ve lived. But at the same time, when I walked through Regent’s Park, I imagined the life I’ll soon start living, though it is dim and distant and uncertain. I imagined what is written – the deer outside Todai-ji Temple, the striped umbrellas in Positano, the goodbyes I’ll say to my friends come June, the vibrancy of the colors in Maui. And I imagined the things that are unwritten, that I hope for – walking through Central Park, a membership to the Frick, a cluttered, cosy apartment waaay uptown, dinners in K-Town. Things thirteen year old me could never have dreamed of.

In a way, the eponymous poem is right. We do grow up and our perspectives change. What once mattered to us, ceases to, replaced by new fears and worries. And while we have the words to explain our grief, we still feel it the same way. And we do mourn for who we once were. It’s a blight we were born for. Because nature’s first green is gold and it is her hardest hue to hold.

But even though I may mourn for who I was ten years ago, I don’t want to be her. Because even though her worries were small and trivial and my worries today are bigger, I now have the tools to deal with them. I have confidence and wisdom and experience on my side. My world is wider and brighter and better than she ever could have imagined. I don’t want to be her because she read that poem over and over and didn’t get it. But twenty three year old me reads that poem and understands.  

 Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

[shepherdsvoice]

Kafka on the Shore

This one took me a while. I was chugging along fine and swell till I suddenly hit a wall, put the book down for a month, and then finally returned to finish it in two days’ time. That’s never happened to me with a Murakami novel. I devoured the other three. Driven to the end no matter how many pages lay ahead. The themes and characters whispering softly in the back of my mind while doing other tasks, reminding me to return. But not so with Kafka.

At the beginning, I did feel that way. It started off strange and engaging with odd characters and multiple storylines and fate as a winged chariot driving all the plots and characters together relentlessly. I kept thinking man, this dude knows how to write a book. But then – it just got too weird. I lost track of the characters’ motivations and their puppet strings became visible to me – a death knell for most books. I didn’t believe that Kafka would fall in love with Miss Saeki or that she would sleep with him so easily. It just seemed too hurried, too out of left field, with too little (ahem) foreplay to set it up.

But after putting it down for a while and letting my disbelief be forgotten, I was able to return to it and breeze through the remainder. And it was great. It was nostalgic and sad and tender and warm. I don’t really understand what happened or what everything meant but there was a resolution like a hero’s story. Like a bildungsroman. Kafka grew up. He went into the forest at the place where it was darkest to him and confronted the center of his soul and came back cleansed and better and grown.

That’s what I got out of it. It was about growing up. Accepting fate and responsibility but in a strong, dignified, heroic way. Not as someone to be buffeted and blown about but as someone who sees (like Horus) what’s coming and what needs to done and aligns and positions himself to face the gale. And some of the passages at the end were just beautiful. Simple and sad and dripping with nostalgia. There’s something about summers in your youth. They have such an affecting, lingering, poignant sensation.

Waking up to birdsong in the early morning. Blasting Dvorak and the Wood Brothers in the high-ceilinged living room where the windows stretched almost the whole height of the wall and the only thing visible outside of them was forest. And the tan leather seats of my V-dub and windows down and Jack White and that blue t-shirt that Tanisha got me and Cesar salads from Paradise. And the redwoods framing the stars at Lindsay’s house. And an afternoon in the city. And the reprieve from schoolwork. And staying in bed reading till noon while my stomach growled for Chevy’s.

It’s so specific and perfect. And lately I’ve been listening to music that’s reminded me of that time. And of high school in general. Classical and Ricky and Led Zep. I was such a pure focus back then. Wholly committed to that image and unsullied. I was so much cooler. But it was a me who had to transform and eventually be washed away. Left only in memories of the blocks of sun on the green carpet of the living room.

…

“The shore is visible outside the window. And you can hear the sound of waves, and someone’s voice. There’s a hint of the sea in the breeze. And it’s summer. Always it’s summer. Small white clouds are etched against the azure sky.”

Back to Kafka. Murakami is dealing with some deep themes in this book, man. And while I don’t understand all of them and certainly don’t have the literary knowledge to identify and wrestle with them, I see them and appreciate them and aspire to them. Murakami is one of the few writers who successfully integrates deep themes and literary references into his novels. And all of his novels have this appreciative, otherworldly air about them. It’s a fun world to inhabit. A koan. Light and simple but impenetrable and lingering. I really enjoy his works. And in the end, I enjoyed this novel, too, though not as much as his others. But it had some important connections to what I’ve been listening to Peterson talk about and it called to mind biblical and Donnian references. And it left me sated and satisfied and contemplative and wistful.

[shepherdsvoice]

Fathers and Sons

I’ve just finished this novel, on a plane somewhere over western Ukraine. I must admit that I don’t know if I fully comprehended this book but I did get some amusement and insight out of it.

Towards the end I kept thinking about Nabokov’s quote that “when one reads Turgenev, on knows one is reading Turgenev.” I understand that. It is a somewhat strange style. He is grappling with the issues of his day but in a somewhat shallow, formulaic way. He is much more devoted to plot and emotionality than Dostoyevsky. He refers to the reader and author occasionally, breaking up the flow of the novel. Unlike Dostoyevsky, though, he sometimes lapses into clear, lucid commentary which makes this book a good intro into mid-19th century Russian nihilism.

Bazarov is a hate-filled but interesting character. He is the only interesting character though he’s also loathsome – somewhat like Satan in Paradise Lost. Bazarov is the face of nihilism in the novel. One who “undertakes nothing but confines himself to abuse.” He exemplifies nihilism as a way to bypass thought. His form of nihilism grapples not with the things it disdains (which includes almost everything except the material and scientific). Instead, he believes that everything must be wholly destroyed. It’s lazy in a way. He wants to do away with the thing instead of grappling with it. Instead of wrestling with God, call Him make believe. No attempts made to better, to aim, to work. Just a swift judgement of disapproval and a death sentence.

He suffers from the delusion of Raskolnikov’s great man complex. One who is above the law, above the rest of mankind. Destined for greatness and therefore not bound by the rules and restrictions that limit other people. In the end of course, he dies miserably and lowly. Killed by his beloved science and his indefatigable ego. He does nothing great. He will spend eternity in a grand tomb in a rotting cemetery in nowhere Russia, mourned only by his parents. Where the lone and level sands of Siberia stretch far away. Meanwhile, Arkady and Pavel and Nikolaevitch marry and will live happily ever after with their small lives.

It’s a bit formulaic and heavy-handed but still it explores important issues. The title sets up the main foil in the story. Vassily, Bazarov’s father, worships his son, rejoices in his vitriol, bows to his whims, even removes the clucking rooster for fear it will disturb his son. He wants nothing more than to hear others praise Bazarov and remark on his destined future greatness. To be fair to Vassily, people are often willing to offer such sentiments. Vassily is an educated man and good man but maybe somewhat naïve or without conviction.  

Nikolaevitch, on the other hand, is a self-educated man, concerned with aristocracy, and living a slavophilic lifestyle. He lives in sin but tries to do what’s right and if I remember correctly, though he too adores his son, he does try in some feeble ways to discourage him from falling too deeply under Bazarov’s influence. It is Pavel, however, who takes the lead and indeed the bullet in trying to bring down Bazarov. He argues with him and discouraged Arkady. He openly disdains Bazarov.

I think the point of these foils is to demonstrate that we must respect the past and wisdom. The older generation cannot be simply written off for they have experience and knowledge that the young do not. It is the younger generation’s responsibility to recognize and honor this. At the same time, it is the responsibility of the older generation to think their knowledge and experience worthwhile and make an effort to impart it to their children. If they become too enamoured of the newness and vitality of the young, and see their world as something to be forgotten, they do themselves and the youngsters a disservice for they force them to repeat past mistakes instead of taking an expedient route. Furthermore, they rob the younger generation of self-reflection and especially critical reflection. They heap too much hope and praise on the young people, and so the younger generation thinks themselves new gods. It is telling that Pavel, who upholds the archaic and out-of-fashion trends of the aristocracy, is the only one who stands up to Bazarov and sees through him completely.

Basically, the novel tries to pull Bazarov down and humble him. And it does do that. But in an enfeebled and unbelievable way. Bazarov loses his influence over those around him, except simpletons whom he disdains like Sitnikov. He falls in love with Madame Odinstov, though he believes this to be the height of foolishness. He loses Arkady who gives himself to happiness and love and a simple life. He retains his parents but does not value them highly. He dies having accomplished nothing.

It’s an interesting and short book though it took me a while to read. It’s good, I guess, but lacks depth. I think it’s best as an intro into nihilism and Russian literature. Reading it after Crime and Punishment, though, does it a disservice, for as much as Turgenev may have disdained him, Dostoyevsky is a hard act to follow. Dostoyevsky’s books are unhinged and unscripted. It feels like his characters became sentient and broke free and Dostoyevsky is chasing after them with a notepad through the winding and filthy streets of Petersburg trying to document the whole account like some harried journalist in a war zone. Meanwhile, you can feel Turgenev pulling puppet strings throughout his novel. The reader senses Turgenev crafting the plot and forcing characters to follow it to his desired conclusion, instead of letting the characters loose to forge their own paths.

Perhaps the most important and lasting idea of the book is Bazarov’s assertion that “a good chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet.” I started writing an essay to argue against that, but got stuck in a corner. For it is a hard statement to contend with. Science is more useful than art. But I guess now, in light of finishing Fathers and Sons, my answer would be “so what?” Science may be more useful but that does not make it better. Does not make it more worthwhile. Science doesn’t make man better. It doesn’t raise us up or put us on the path of righteousness. Art – good art – is a striving, an aiming upwards. Towards an unseen but felt pinnacle that lies just beyond reach. Great art captures elemental themes life and makes them into something tangible. Something that we can admire and study and learn from. There’s a quote I’ve always loved that says “art breaks up the white light of truth into the prismatic colors.” Art deals with the things that are immaterial and intangible. The stuff between atoms. But the things that make life worth living and appreciating. Science will do the opposite of art, it will kill you in the end like it did Bazarov. Because it is unfeeling and indifferent and goes on with or without man. A person can live his whole life knowing nothing of science and live a perfectly full and good and happy and well-aimed life. I’m not convinced that a man can live his whole life knowing nothing of art and live a perfectly full and good and happy and well-aimed life. Art and poetry may be high-minded and flowery and made possible only though ease and comfort, but they are trying and working. They are not ineffectual and idle like the chemists in the epilogue of the novel.

Indeed, bad art is nihilistic. For it does not aim upward. It does not grapple or “undertake” but instead confines itself to abuse. To reductionistically labelling and falling back on materialism. That’s the great and supple and poignant and fragile balancing act that good art achieves; making the immaterial material. For “this is not a pipe.” Whereas bad art, like nihilism, condemns and criticizes without solution or creation.

Art may not be useful or even always good, but a life without it, a life where every man is the same because he has the same spleen, is not a life worth living.

[shepherdsvoice]

Norwegian Wood

I loved this book. And in a way, I love the song. I just finished the book on the plane to Tel Aviv, surrounded by Hassidic Jews, and now I listen to “Norwegian Wood” on repeat.

I think everyone in college has to have a time when they’re super depressed and just listen to a sad song on repeat. For my dad it was “Rain Song.” For me it was “Ashes on Your Eyes.” Toru and Murakami listened to “Norwegian Wood.” How lucky we are if that’s the most depressed we ever feel.

Feeling lonely and depressed in college is merely a growing pain and a longing for deep grief and felt pain. It’s part of becoming your own person, growing up, severing ties so that you can make your own. Not knowing where you will go or what you will do or who you will be. Trying to remake yourself – clinging to the best parts of yourself and trying to slough off the rest and struggling to discern between the two. It’s an exciting and painful and poignant time. And it’s a perfect time to engage in such work, for you have no other responsibilities. In that way, college is worthwhile for it is a Petri dish nurturing good adults. It allows you to focus on getting better. Being better. Growing up. And meanwhile, you’re surrounded by people from far-flung places who also don’t know the world and everyone is groping blindly ahead. And your mind is being filled with brilliant and ludicrous things and thoughts and philosophies and you can focus yourself on something ridiculous and niche or expansive and epic and it’s all up to you. And you can make mistakes and try to find your space. And of course you won’t find your place, and that’s the greatest blessing of all for it means that you can continue to dedicate yourself to growth and betterment and evolution. And that’s something to keep living for and to occupy you once you graduate and start real life.

I digress. The book so lives within the song. Plucky, foreign, fantastical, forthright, and achingly sad. It really captures the loneliness and yearning of college and first love. The desire to make things work between people who have not the tools to make such things a reality. Inviting someone in but not having a chair for them to sit in.

I guess I don’t have any deep thoughts to say about the book. But I found it haunting and lonely and beautiful and perfect. And in the end, I realized that it, too, is encapsulated by a line from Donne. It is about how grief matures and ripens us and makes us fit for God. For affliction is a treasure and scarce any man hath enough of it. Again Donne comes through with the elemental themes of life. The archetypes. And again Murakami comes through by fleshing it out and giving this idea life and breath in a lingering and echoing and mournful and poignant little novel.

[shepherdsvoice]

Crime and Punishment

This one took me a long time but I thoroughly enjoyed it. And it surprised me. Who would’ve thought that a book called Crime and Punishment, a book filled with mania and violence and confusion and cruelty, should have a hopeful ending?

I feel like I missed 90+% of the imagery and symbolism and meaning of the book but I think I was able to clutch at a few straws and grasp some things, though they be through a glass, darkly.

One of the things I realized was that Hamlet was wrong. People don’t go on living and suffering merely for fear of death. Hamlet didn’t realize that people suffer willingly for things that they believe in and for people they love.

That is a major theme in the novel: wilful martyrdom (misplaced martyrdom?). Sonia specifically. Throughout the novel there are people throwing themselves on the pyre often misguidedly in order to try to connect themselves to something. Something bigger than themselves. Something meaningful. At some level, they understand Donne’s idea that affliction is a treasure. That it makes you better. That it matures and ripens you and makes you fit for God. But the people of Petersburg are so lost that they can’t find an appropriate cross and so they give themselves too willingly, and waste their sacrifice, and think that suffering in itself will help them when in reality they lack the cause, the meaning, behind the suffering which is what truly brings us closer to God.

The other side to the suffering is that people don’t understand aright the dignity of it. The helpless mare is whipped terribly and cruelly to death by society and Raskolnikov is one of the few who tries to speak out and stop it. Witnessing this senseless violence makes him deplore mankind and turns him into one of the merciless, too, for he places himself above man. He believes that he can decide who lives and dies and what morality supersedes life because there exists a clutch of great men who rise above the maelstrom and are proven virtuous in the eyes of history.

But of course, Raskolnikov is wrong. And the rest of the book after the murder is his slowly coming to realize his error and his banality. He is not a great man. He is truly a louse of the lowest kind. For he is a man who cries when he should not. He has a sister and mother and Razumikhin who would gladly do all they can for him. He is from a well-off family, was given the opportunity to go to school and squandered it. In that way he is truly one of the men who whipped the mare for he did not recognize or treasure the sacrifice of others but instead beat it to death and took it for worthless.

….

I read this book and Notes from Underground with “Meditation XVII” hanging heavy in my heart and rattling around in my mind. I memorized the meditation on long bus rides through the East African landscape and I still rolled the words and ideas around my tongue and tested them out and grew accustomed to their weight and meaning as I read Dostoyevsky around the world – in a hammock in Malawi and an airport in Paris and a bus in Marin and a park in London.

I think of “Meditation XVII” as an antidote to nihilism. For it is all about connectedness to our fellow man whereas nihilism necessitates a schism (raskol). Nihilism requires that you divorce yourself from mankind either by denouncing it or by renouncing it. Nihilism is something that can only happen in a godless society for as Donne points out, it is religion and God and the Church that bind us together and make all mankind inseparably connected. Donne cares about his fellow man and feels his pain and sympathizes with him and pays attention to him and this makes Donne better. Makes him fit for God. He hears the bell and knows it tolls for him. He takes on the responsibilities of life. The hardships and the pain and the joys, and makes them his own. Heeds the call. Does what he can – even if it be but little – to make the world better, specifically by making himself better (an idea that Peterson is a proponent of).

Raskolnikov does the opposite. He gives up. He refuses to take responsibility (until the end – and this is when he is saved). He lets all the evil in him seep out and it goes on to infect and affect those around him and makes his world a living hell.

Peterson said that C&P is an investigation into what happens if you take the idea that there is no intrinsic worth in other people seriously. I guess I do understand this – looking back on what I’ve written above. That’s what I’m getting at. But while reading it, I had trouble realizing this. Maybe a forest for the trees situation...

(Addendum: about a month after I finished reading C&P and wrote this little essay, I was listening to another Peterson lecture in the back of a minibus somewhere outside of Jerusalem with the lights of Jericho glittering distantly over the hills of the West Bank, and Peterson explained C&P as the exploration of what happens when you do something wrong and know it’s wrong and then long for punishment. Raskolnikov successfully gets away with murder and he’s all the more miserable for it. He does everything he can to get caught, seeks disgust and exile from those who love him, and finally has to turn himself in to get the punishment he so desperately has longed for. Because living in a world without justice is too hard. It is too hopeless even for a nihilist like Raskolnikov. To look into the darkness and see that – see that evil men get away with it, that the men who whipped the mare woke up the next day unchanged while her corpse lie fetid and festering where she fell – is too much. Is too horrible. And in the end makes us turn back to what we feel is right deep in our bones. Just so we can go on living and make the struggle and suffering of life somewhat bearable.)

I think this book lives somewhere around Hamlet – a plot that should be straightforward but is paralyzed by overthinking. Its native hue of resolution sicklied over by the pale cast of thought and consciences making characters cowards. And in the main character’s fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of life or at least the purpose of going on living.

I must admit that I’m shocked that I didn’t realize before that To Be or Not To Be was wrong. I guess I was overwhelmed by the poetry and beauty and poignancy and depth of thought of the words and so forgot to measure them on their accuracy. Plus, I’ve lived with those words in my heart for so long – 10 years now – that they’ve almost become gospel. But still, I so often find new meanings and perspectives within them, it’s truly incredible. Incredible that a gem that has lived stuffed in my pocket for a decade has not tarnished and become opaque but is still able to capture and refract light in new and dazzling ways.

Lastly, I’ll just say that the ending came totally out of left field for me and I’m not sure that I completely buy it. It seems like an eleventh hour, tacked-on happy ending. I’m not convinced that it arises organically out of the rest of the novel. I guess it is a reflection of Dostoyevsky’s own unflinching dedication and belief in the goodness of Christ and redemption. It is another example of a quote from the introduction to The Idiot, in which the writer said that Dostoyevsky is consumed by the “pious desire to confront Christian faith with everything that negated it, in this case the laws of nature and stark reality of death.” Or in this case, the evil committed by man when he gives up on mankind. But still he finds his way back.

Anway, like I said before, I’ve missed most of the meaning of this book but these few thoughts and insights that I’ve jotted down here have been extremely meaningful and worthwhile. I hope that C&P lives on in my heart, still fresh and ready to be re-examined. For I expect that its meaning and themes and profound ideas shall become clearer to me with time and age and experience.

[shepherdsvoice]

There is a story in every thing, and every being, and every moment, were we alert to catch it, were we ready with our tender nets; indeed there are a hundred, a thousand stories, uncountable stories, could they only be lured out and appreciated; and more and more now I realize that what I thought was a skill only for authors and pastors and doctors and dream-diviners is the greatest of all human skills, the one that allows us into the heart and soul and deepest layers of our companions on the brief sunlit road between great dark wildernesses.

Brian Doyle

[shepherdsvoice]

One of my Heroes

I just found out that Brian Doyle died last May from a brain tumor. From cancer which is only to be endured, not beaten. He was sixty years old. He died in Oregon, smack dab in the middle of spring when seeds that have lain dormant through winter bravely burst forth from damp soil, and trees are studded with neon green buds, and kids stomp in puddles, and winter coats are put away, and rain falls suffusing the world with heavenly fresh smells, and earthworms from goodness-knows-where litter the sidewalks, and summer days occasionally come too early making you realize how much you missed sunshine and warmth.

Brian Doyle was one of my three heroes, along with Ricky Skaggs and Abe Lincoln – not bad company. I wrote about him back in July after Ricky’s concert, not knowing that he had already been resting in his beloved Oregonian soil for over a year. They were (are) my heroes because they are God-fearing, dedicated Christians who made beautiful things. Who made the world a better place in their own ways. Simple, good, salt-of-the-earth men. Men who knew God and loved Him.

Brian Doyle instantly became my favorite writer when Mr. Hettleman made us read and write a short essay on “Joyas Voladoras” at the beginning of sophomore year. I have wept and laughed, marvelled and raged while reading his essays. I have mimicked his style and often unabashedly stole his lines. I have memorized two of his essays on my narrow bed in my cluttered room in Vermont and spent summers driving around reciting them along to my stereo. He has changed me as a writer and as a person and for that I would just like to say this to God:

Thank you for Brian Doyle. Thank you for the joy and love and beauty that he brought into this world. Thank you for the arrows he loosed and thank you for letting them fly true into my heart. Thank you for his faith and for how he shared it. It is a faith that I can only aspire to and hope to one day feel myself. Thank you for his humor and candor, wit and optimism, and love. Thank you for the endless depths of his empathy and compassion. Thank you for the startling, stunning, sticky beauty of his words that have rattled away in my heart and soul for nearly ten years. That have made me smile and cry. Made me grow and learn. Words that I have returned to time and again for wisdom and comfort, as one goes to the sea. Words that I have hung on my wall, quoted on this blog, and etched onto my heart. Thank you for his ability to listen. To find stories in refrigerators and falcons and heart surgeons and basketballs and hummingbirds. In the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, and the expanse of the sea, and the horror of Ground Zero. Thank you for the good he did for this world in his quiet way; injecting it with love and wisdom, making sense of the impossible and unspeakable, groping with clumsy hands but open eyes around this world of here below.

His words have come to me at times when I needed them most and have inspired almost everything I’ve written in one way or another. My heart and prayers go out to his family and friends whom he immortalized in prose saturated with love.

It seems blackly appropriate that the sickness which ended his life far too soon, should have emanated from his mind but spared his heart. His unsullied heart with which he wrote and spoke and cried and marvelled. With which he touched the hearts of others. Including my own.

His words have been a storm in me and for that I am grateful.

[shepherdsvoice]

A Supplementary Story

It’s 11am but my phone says noon. I’m currently on the Stansted Express heading towards Liverpool Street and it’s a typically grey London morning and most of the leaves have fallen from the trees and I’m listening to “Supplementary Story” and feeling a bit sad.

Although I just said goodbye to Ngawang, Aja, and Tania as they left to catch their Uber to Gatwick, I never walk alone. I spent this last week tumbling from group to group and place to place. It began with a weekend touring a very chilly London and eating at cafes and racking up miles and taking unsuccessful photos and pulling my yellow coat tight around me and yearning for samgyeopsal and making tea and taking the tube and delivering history lessons that fell on deaf ears. On Monday I had a test where I conferred with colleagues and studied in the library and went over study guides. Then, that night I caught a bus to Paris. I took the ferry from Dover to Calais and slept on a couch on the top deck. I saw the ghostly silhouettes of the white cliffs in the misty dark. I ate a mint aero bar as we drove through dormant hamlets. I slept. Then I caught the metro to Bir Hakeim and made my way to their Airbnb down the narrow dark streets of the 7th arrondissement. I fell asleep in their warm white bed and then we headed out into the frigid sunshine and spent the day exploring. Hiking up hills, strolling along the Seine, taking marginally more successful photos, petting spaniels, eating croissants and quiches and beignets. Waking up slowly in this beautiful, bundled up European capital.

The next morning began with a quick train back to London, one more test taken in a stuffy room, a hurried lunch on a crowded couch with tight hugs and secret Santa, then a rush home to pack for an 8am flight out of Southend.

When we met up in Malta we all felt that we should have just gone there directly and skipped the chilly continental cities. For there was sun and surf and palm trees and limestone buildings crowning the hills. And here was a scene from Bon Voyage and there another. Here was a group of friendly strays, there was a lookout over the Mediterranean. We spent the few days there taking one euro ferry rides, slightly more expensive taxi rides, eating lunches al fresco, posing for pictures, snapping up souvenirs, arguing over Foodie filters, taking cheap shots, eating more ramen, nibbling on pastizzi, marvelling at the scenery, and laughing constantly. I didn’t realize how much I was missing sunshine and warmth and light jackets. I didn’t realize how much I was missing our easy camaraderie. For as grateful as I am for the new friends I’ve made here in London, there’s no replacement for time. For how it smooths and striates and forms and fits people together. There’s no replacement for tangling in a heap on the couch around the laptop, doing choreography in the street, making silly faces for photos, sharing anything and everything, righting debts only to instantly accumulate more, exchanging pictures and clothes and memories and frames of reference and jokes and jabs and love.

On the plane ride back to London this morning I went through my 17,000 photos to clear space. How soon unaccountable I became tired as I realized how much I’ve crammed into my life. Beautiful vistas and exotic locales and miles travelled and food eaten and sunrises seen from airplane windows and metro rides across foreign metropoli and afternoons lazily spent in sunshine and winters hibernated beneath a mountain of blankets. And through all of it was constant love and friendship. Friends new and old, brief and long, close and distant. I may walk far and wide but I never walk alone.

[shepherdsvoice]

Meditation II

I reread my “Meditation I” just now and it made my heart physically ache. That whole period of my life is over. No more chilly hardwood floors, no more mirror above the dresser, no more Rosie at the end of mom’s bed, no more five minute commute. What I said is true – that entire chapter has already been compressed by the compacter of my memory. Set aside on a shelf to gather dust. Soon the binding will fray and the letters on the spine will be unintelligible.

It makes me think about this new chapter that I am living right now. I’m only two months in and I am already stressed about how little time is left. Just ten months till I officially graduate. Ten months! I am halfway through my first semester. I am starting to study for my final exams. I still don’t know what I want to do my dissertation on. I am still learning how to get around London.

But at the same time, I am already so deeply settled into this life. Sara, Lexie and I went to Vienna this weekend and on Saturday night we talked about how much all three of us were looking forward to be being back in London. How strange that what had once been so foreign was now our new normal. I have no desire to go back to California anytime soon. I feel like I am home here in my dorm, 18 stories above the London skyline. With Guy Fawkes fireworks going off in the distance. With my increasingly-cramped wardrobe. With my cheap and pilled Primark towels. With my collage of postcards. With my shared kitchen. With my tiny desk. With my weekly Facetime sessions with Ngawang. With my slowly dying potted plant. With my journals and my calendar and my hairbands cluttering my desk. This is my home now.

The whole city of London is my home now. I love long bus rides like the one I took today to see Clara a week post-op. I sat in the front seat and listened to Mono on repeat. I let myself feel the loneliness and sadness of those songs but they didn’t penetrate my heart. Because those emotions are foreign to me here. They belong to another me in another place. I still haven’t found the proper soundtrack for London but I think it resides somewhere in the neighbourhood of low-fi. With chill, muted beats, repetitive lyrics, and the vocals way up at the front of the mix so that when you listen on headphones with your eyes closed in the front seat of a red double decker, it feels like the musician is singing right against the front of your skull and the sound is being transmitted through your very bones.

I love walking here. Wandering to wander. Always taking new routes to new places to do new things. Trying not to look at my google maps. Paying attention to street names. Memorizing the mews. Tweaking my ankle on cobblestones. Staring up in awe at the skyscrapers in Canary Wharf. Smiling contentedly as I walk along the Thames. Taking the back streets through Marylebone. Dodging tourists in Trafalgar. Finding new eateries in Soho. Watching the mist rise from the grass on chilly mornings in Hyde Park. Avoiding Oxford Circus like the plague. Admiring street art in Shoreditch. Sending pictures of back alleys to Ngawang in Notting Hill. Taking the train to the end of the line. Transferring at the dreaded Bond Street Station. Catching the 27 to Lexie and the 2 to Clara and the 205 to East London. I am getting to know this city slowly. And it is getting to know me. We are both being constantly made and remade. Updated and restored. Preserved and demolished.

I love my classes. Only twice a week morning till night. I love that I know each classmate personally. I receive daily calls and texts from them. I go to Diwali festivals, study sessions, and cute cafes with them. I laugh with them. I complain about the professor with them. I review with them. I share ideas with them. I go over the schedule with them. They too are coming to know me and I them. They know me as the outgoing American. As this new me, who to them is just me.

I love the camaraderie of our class. That we truly want all of us to succeed. That we are not competitive or closed off. That we all come here from different backgrounds with different skills and we have found comfort and companionship in each other. That we can transcend our differences and pool our skills. That we are there for each other. That we may each be an ark unto ourselves but we are still a fleet heading united into unknown waters.

I love who I am here. I am no longer shy or self-conscious. I like meeting new people and being in new situations. I can give a presentation or sit for a job interview and not be nervous. I gain strength from the stereotype of overly friendly and chatty Americans. I try to embody it. I have friends who serve as models for outgoing, friendly people. I watch them and try to see how they are able to become friends with everyone they meet. I am trying to be more open and it has come easier than I thought it would. I had planned to do a lot of rigorous self-improvement when I came here, but after I arrived I realized that I had already done all the heavy lifting. Instead, this period of my life is an opportunity to sink into this new self. This new me that has formed over the last several years. To slip into this skin, letting myself fill this body till my hands fit like gloves, wiggling my toes and fingers, stretching up tall, taking a deep breath, and exhaling. I am who I want to be. Already. It is tempting to say that it just happened naturally but I think I was doing more work behind the scenes than I noticed.

I have been thinking a lot about Vermont recently. About who I was in Vermont. She is so foreign to me. This me can’t fathom how she sat through whole semesters and never spoke to another classmate. That me spent every weekend inside. That me never explored Burlington. That me never went for walks or to shows or museums. This me feels guilty for spending a few hours in her room. For neglecting the great big city waiting right outside my door. This me walks 10,000 steps a day. This me wanders just to wander. This me was in Vienna last weekend. This me spent a sunny afternoon in Bratislava hiking up hills to war memorials, looking out at the Danube from castles, eating potato gnocchi with crispy bacon on top with a girl who was quickly losing her voice but couldn’t stop talking. This me texted Bea the whole train ride back, eulogizing the city. That me never did the reading. That me waited till the last minute to do assignments. This me went to the library this morning to finish assignments that aren’t due for weeks. This me read 4 articles today for research. This me tries to impress teachers and guest lecturers. This me is engaged in what she’s learning.

I feel like Burlington was my life on pause (for four years). I never fit in in Vermont. I was the only west-coaster in a foreign land. I was a staunch conservative in a state as blue as the pacific. I was in a neuro course that I wasn’t interested in and knew I wouldn’t pursue after school. I was in an English program just for fun and had no intention of becoming a writer. I was in an art history program just to learn and not to practice. I had no group and accepted that outright. I didn’t fight it. I found Heydy and Ngawang the first day of class and never ventured outside of that circle.

It is so strange that in two months here in a foreign country on the other side of the world, I should find what I never could in Vermont. Much of this is owed to this new me. I did learn new floats, new strokes and I am happy to report that I didn’t succumb to the waves this time. I am treading water. No, that’s not right; I am floating on my back in a calm sea. Not exerting much effort. Just feeling the warmth of the sun on my closed eyelids, the steady lapping of the waves on my arms, listening to the perfect silence inside me. All the while with a small smile on my face.

[shepherdsvoice]

Go the extra mile

[shepherdsvoice]

Thank You Notes

Dear Mishka,

Thank you for being so kind and welcoming to me from day one. I really admire how open you are with everyone and how you immediately make people feel like your friend. I’ve always wanted to be more outgoing and personable and watching you has helped me learned how to do so. You are a great listener and make people feel heard. You really hear what people have to say and are able to engage with them. Thank you for being a role model for me in that way. Also, I want to say that you are only thirty four and you have so much more life to live. New experiences and adventures and relationships and successes await you. I hope that you can live the kind of life that you want to live.

 Dear Kim,

Thank you for being such a great leader for our department. For constantly putting out fires and easing crises. For always having a clear vision and plan while also taking our thoughts and feelings into account. You are the rock of the department. The office didn’t really feel complete until you were back from maternity leave. Thank you for sharing office gossip and thank you for all the group outings and adventures that you planned. Thank you for showing me what was in my own backyard.

 Dear Dashal,

Thank you for being so kind to me from day one. I really admire your ability to make friends with anyone and everyone. You never hide who you are or act fake. You are so funny and fun and genuine. You are the energizer of the department. When you’re not in, the atmosphere is much more somber. Everybody in the office really cares about you a lot, including me. I am so grateful and proud to be your friend. Our friendship means a lot to me and I hope we are able to keep in touch. I want to hear all the office updates and also about all the adventures and new experiences and great things that you will do in your life.

 Dear Bea,

Thank you for being so kind and caring to me. You are the heart of our department. You radiate compassion. You always look out for us and take into consideration our needs and feelings and thoughts. You are so thoughtful and motherly and you really made the office feel like a family. I so enjoyed our walks with Dash and our talks of travel. I wish you all the best with your mother-in-law and your visa process. And I hope you will be able to have many more adventures to exotic lands.

 Dear Alex,

Thank you for teaching me about Russian history and culture. Thank you for your off-color jokes that always made me laugh. Thank you also for teaching me professional lessons about work and delegation and dealing with clients. I really tried to listen to what you told me and integrate it. I admire your work ethic and your dedication to both your job and your family. I know that you will be a great dad to Samira as she gets older because you have a lot of wisdom and a lot of valuable lessons to teach her.

[shepherdsvoice]

Thoughts Over Greenland

I feel like I’m finding the shape of my life. For so long, I’ve been hungering for knowledge, imbibing anything and everything to try to find the edges of this life. To understand. Like feeling around in a dark room for the walls and light switch, for furniture, paintings – any sort of clue. I’ve tried to learn about literature and art and history. Trying to make sense of what has happened before so that I can understand what’s happening now. I’ve studied the words of great men who grappled endlessly with the fundamental issues of life. Who packed dense ideas into beautiful nuggets and phrases which rattle around in my head and heart. Which I constantly pull out and reconsider, holding them up and watching the white light of the truth break apart into the prismatic colors in the many facets of their words. I have listened to great and wise men who advise me on how to live a good and proper life. Collecting their aphorisms and slowly day-by-day, trying to work them into the fabric of my being. I still fail, often, every day, but I succeed almost every day, too. I’ve been listening to Jordan Peterson, who takes myths and fairytales and shows the truth underlying them. Who sees literature and stories as a distillation of truth, a hyperrealism. Who views the world as a struggle between chaos and order and celebrates this struggle. Because we all need chaos and order and because in the end, Sisyphus was happy, because he had a purpose – one that would occupy him for all of time.

I’ve spent so many years feeling around – finding edges, uncovering truths, enacting rules. But now it feels like the universe is converging, saying the time for archeology is done. Now it is time to build. To take an active part in the construction of my good and proper life. To distill a mantra, a manifesto. To stop merely observing and collecting and start acting. I’ve felt this feeling building for a few months now – I think it started with Peterson’s call to arms; his insistence that this, this right now matters. That this is your life and it’s serious! And this week a foreign, beautiful book fell into my lap as I explored a foreign, beautiful land. Both filled with emptiness and wonder, sadness and the prickling of magic. The book is about now - the fleetingness and eternity of now, the passing of time and the time being. It’s telling me that now matters. Everything ends and begins right now. And so now is when I must act. Before now is over.

                                                          .    .    .

 Senior year, I returned to Vermont with a goal, a motto: put away childish things. It was time to grow. No more YA, no more YouTube, no more financial dependence. It was time to get serious. To get ready for the future which was rapidly approaching (encroaching?). In many ways, I failed. But in some ways, I didn’t. I’m immeasurably more mature today than I was at this time 2 years ago. Even more than this time last year – a fresh graduate, with no plan, just back from the Balkans with the future unfurling, uncharted before me.

Now I sit on a plane, returning from a trip to Iceland which I planned and financed myself. And I am attempting to better myself. To take a more active role in the shaping of my future, trying to find my struggle. I want to make sacrifices to the future, to be aware of the time passing and being. I want to better myself, to recommit to change. I’ve grown complacent in the past year – dedicating my ambition to travel and my mind to the day-in and day-out. Now it’s time to wake up. To not just do the next right thing but to do a thing. T change and grow. By putting away childish things. By waking up. By paying attention. By challenging myself. By dedicating myself.

It’s true that I have moved beyond sitting in my room in Vermont with my two friends. Once I got my job, I started living the life I wanted to live (was ready to live) – my evening filled with friends and plans. But now it’s time to take the next step to expand my horizon and my comfort zone a bit more even in the tumbling dark of this chapter. September is a brand new chapter. One that I want to be ready for. A challenge and a plunge – one I’ve taken before. But the first time, I succumbed to the cold water. I stayed afloat but never moved closer to the shore. Each year, I compile more tools – new strokes, new floats. I’ve waded in up to my knees. Now it’s time to take a deep breath, hold it, and plunge head-first into the waves. Swimming confidently and strongly into the abyss instead of leaving my fate to the buffeting of the waves.