We were in Brooklyn this weekend for 24 action-packed hours. Here’s what happened:
- Jonas and Gisela made us pancakes and coffee, and Linus invited Jane to watch his soccer game in the park.
- Jack played at the train table outside of Little Things for way longer than he’s ever been allowed to before.
- We stocked up on our favorite coffee: the Firecracker blend from Leaf and Bean.
- Cem, Isil and Maya treated us to dinner at their place. It was one of Isil’s magical, Turkish-inflected meals where a half-dozen exquisitely prepared dishes appear on the table at the same time.
- We saw Stew and Heidi’s new show, Brooklyn Omnibus, at BAM.
- Josh scored fresh Sunday morning bagels at La Bagel Delight.
- Andrew and Bill joined us for brunch at my old favorite Belleville and even accompanied us to the Fifth Avenue playground for some monkey bar and swirly slide action before we hit the road again.
And it all felt… really good. Before moving, I wondered, if I ever left, what it would feel driving back when the Manhattan skyline first comes into view from the Bruckner Expressway. I imagined it would be a sense of loss, of not belonging, of being unable to claim that staggering sight as a little bit my own. But that’s not how it was. I saw the view, marveled at it, and realized that whatever it stands for or signifies is inside me whether I have an NYC zipcode or not.
It was wonderful to be back, and to be in the company of beloved friends. I felt completely at ease and, unsurprisingly, at home. But I could also see very clearly the limitations and stressors of life in the city. I was aware of the compression that weighed on me so heavily and deprived many of my dreams the oxygen to breathe.
And so it was with great gratitude that I climbed in the car when the clock struck 12 noon and headed back to Northampton, where I dwell in a deep sense of expansiveness and possibility.
I’ll say much more about what this means in the days ahead.
It was the art class I’d been waiting for my whole life. The ’studio’ in which we worked was anywhere in the woods around Squam Lake. The materials: sticks, stones, leaves, branches, sand, moss, bark, berries, blades of grass. Christopher Frost was the teacher.
A lot of things clicked into place for me that day as I sat on a carpet of pine needles and golden ferns, and came up with ideas, and made stuff. First, I knew that I was in my element. I was enveloped in the easy and satisfying energy of being exactly where I belonged. Second, I knew that I was free — unconstrained by what I paid for art supplies and my lack of confidence about how to use them. After all, what does a pine cone cost? And what is the right way to employ it in a work of art? Third, I knew — felt — that I was happy. Deeply and unequivocally.
Those things, for the most part, came from me. They bubbled up from the primal layers buried in my gut and embedded in the soles of my feet. But there was something else. A gift that this day brought, which meant more than I can say. Christopher Frost treated me like an artist. Not an amateur, not a student in training, not a writer trying on a new medium for size. He listened to my ideas. He offered new ways of thinking when I was stuck. He helped me lug buckets of sand from the lake to the woods. He created a conversation, within the class and after it ended, about what we had made.
I’ve written repeatedly on this blog about seeing and being seen. (Here, here, and here for starters.) In this class, I felt as if a part of me that I’d barely glimpsed myself was visible, maybe even vivid, and received with love and respect. It was nothing short of life-changing.
I just could not stop laughing. The vast majority of photos that happen to capture me at Squam show me busting a gut to some degree. Even when I was flat-out exhausted, I chuckled with what little energy remained.
There’s no grand theory for why this should’ve been. I was simply happy to my core. The primary reasons were Jen and Helen, whose friendship inspires a kind of continual rejoicing. But then there were my cabin mates: Aleece, Cinderella, Elizabeth, Lisa, and Monica. We lounged by the lake, told stories by the fire, drank wine, and compared notes. It wasn’t all hilarity, but it felt pretty close to it.
During, it didn’t feel like work or catharsis or anything except rollicking good times. But, now, I think that long weekend of laughter was roughly equivalent to five years of therapy. And a hell of a lot more fun.
There was a woman at Jen Lee’s Companions retreat in February who wore her enthusiasm on her sleeve, had the ability to focus on you like a flashlight, and put an inordinate amount of love and wonder into the room. I remember thinking, “What she shows on the outside is exactly how I feel on the inside. I’m just not brave enough to show it.” I loved being around her. It was thrilling to see, through her, a secret part of myself out there and at work in the world.
That woman was Elizabeth MacCrellish, founder of Squam Art Workshops. Squam is like being in Elizabeth’s warmest embrace for four days. Enthusiasm, intensity, joy, and wonder are welcome. It is a space to become or to just be — perhaps both. I was deeply, almost indescribably, happy there. I want to thank Elizabeth for making a place where a restless soul can feel that she is exactly where she wants and needs to be.
I don’t have a photograph of Elizabeth. But I think the picture above, of Squam Lake at twilight, captures something of her soul.
Tomorrow I leave for Squam Art Workshops, a four-day lakeside retreat for artists and creative types in New Hampshire. I came to the decision to attend kind of impulsively. I was flipping through the Squam Journal, thinking for the millionth time, Yes, I’ll do that someday. When money is less tight. When the kids are a bit older. When I have more accrued vacation days. When I can do so without imposing anything on anybody. Then I closed the journal and took a nap.
I didn’t sleep because a question kept nagging me: Why not now? I could think of ten really good reasons, but I still wanted to do it. In fact, it began to seem crucial that I do. As a way of saying ‘YES’ to everything I want to do and be in this world. As a way of saying ‘No thanks’ to the need to plan it and map it and nail it down.
So I’m off in the morning, with a tote full of Josh’s old art supplies, several new canvases, wine, chocolate, long underwear, and a flashlight. I’m meeting friends from far-flung places en route. I’ll be back Sunday, with a better idea of what it might mean, for me, to make something without words.
Anyone who wants to stick with me as I work toward my doctorate in Rolling Stonesology, read on.
I never much cared for Mick. The preening, in-your-face sexuality. The on-stage rooster walk. The freaky body. It was all just too much. Twenty-odd years ago, our paths crossed momentarily in a village in Bali, and he was so unappealing that the story quickly fell from my celebrity sightings repertoire. But, today, my eyes have been opened.
As part of my ongoing You Tube study of Stones’ clips from the 1970s, I came across this rehearsal of “Tumbling Dice,” a song I’ve probably heard 11,000 times. This video is a revelation. Because without the prancing and leotards and eye makeup and drugs that define his Seventies-era stage performances, Mick is lovely and amazing. And still quintessentially Mick Jagger. Even, I’d wager, more so than with all the characteristic trappings. I don’t argue that armor, of one kind or another, is necessary in his line of work. But when it falls away and the person, the artist, behind it is visible, Wow. That’s something worth paying attention to.
Another bonus to this video: I was able to decode many of the lyrics, and they’re pretty amazing in their own right. Case in point:
Women think I’m crazy but they’re always trying to waste me,
make me burn the candle right down,
but baby, baby, I don’t need no jewels in the crown.
All you women is low-down gamblers, cheating like I don’t know how,
but baby, baby, there’s fever at the funk house now.
This low-down bitchin’ got my poor feet a itchin’–
don’t you know the deuce is still wild?
Baby, I can’t stay, you got to roll me
and call me the tumbling dice.
I know it’s only rock and roll. But I like it. And, even better, I learn from it.
After 9/11, I worked at Ground Zero as a Red Cross volunteer. I saw these words scrawled on a wall, and they have haunted me ever since:
I am an iron worker
I held you in my hands
I did not know who you were
and now I am showered clean
but I still feel dirty.
I don’t know why
but I feel ashamed.
Who were you?
Rest in peace, all.
I am in the midst of a full-blown love affair with Exile on Main St., the Rolling Stones’ ragged masterpiece from 1972. What began as a flirtation last summer, when I put “Torn and Frayed” and “Loving Cup” onto a playlist that was in frequent rotation, has become something much deeper and truer. I cannot stop listening.
At the same time, I’ve had an epiphany about music generally. If you’re like me, you’ve had the experience of listening to a particular song over and over and over. From time to time, something gets in there, and it can be weeks before the need to stop hearing it on a constant basis fades. This happened to me with Stew’s “Come Down Now” a few months back and then a few weeks ago with “This is the Sea” by the Waterboys. It’s happened hundreds of times in the course of my life.
Just a few days ago, it finally occurred to me what’s going on: in these instances, the songs are my soul’s attempt to communicate directly with me, bypassing the brain and delivering the message to a much more core place. And the beautiful, circular magic of it is that the songs are also the voice of the songwriter’s soul, giving expression to something true in a language another soul can understand. It’s mystical, and real.
Now I’m paying close attention to such songs and the way they make me feel and what they have to tell me. I should point out that it’s not necessarily the lyrics that I’m talking about, although they can certainly contribute, but it’s the whole of the song: music, tone, layers, words.
Exile on Main St. is essentially shaping my own personal and creative manifesto. This album is loose, unselfconscious, and soulful to a thrilling degree, and I am declaring those as the three qualities I most wish to cultivate in my writing and artwork, and in my life as whole.
Below I share my soul’s current, urgent communiqué: “Let it Loose,” a song from Exile that will take you somewhere sublime.
It was 1974. High summer in Bedford Hills, New York, a small hamlet an hour north of the city. A little boy was playing in his driveway, bouncing a superball as high as he could. On the 22nd bounce, that superball went so high that it disappeared into the sky.
As the boy peered up into the blue, shading his eyes, everything around him was still. No bird song. No dog bark. No car horn. A moment later, an enormous shower of dandelions fell all around him. He was engulfed in a cascade of buttery blossoms, the scent of deep taproot in the air. The boy stood there, considering what had just happened and grieving the loss of his superball. Then he skipped off to find his dog.
I believe there is magic in this world. Huge swathes of things that operate beyond our cognition and escape our awareness. But, as far as I can tell, that magic doesn’t come with strange rules or arcane trappings. It’s an everyday kind of thing. Music, for instance, and its power to influence our emotions. Stories and other feats of imagination that take us out of ourselves. Fleeting natural phenomenon that crack us open. (Double Rainbow guy is a particularly vivid example of this one.) It’s all around us, if we can only get ourselves into the state of mind that permits us to see it. Like the little boy in the dandelion shower.
That boy was Russell Langsam. Mystical ballplayer and musical badass, Russell was the first person to correctly name the Waterboys as the inspiration for my recent post “This is the Sea.” His special powers are wit, conversation, parenting, and a drive to do work in this world that has value in human terms. He is magic, and so are you.
Russell doesn’t particularly care for the Waterboys, but I am still sharing the song “This is the Sea” below, in his honor, so that some of its magic may guide him to extraordinary, double-rainbow-across-the-sky opportunities. (Photograph above by Andy Goldsworthy)
I went to high school with a girl named Amy MacKinnon. I have a memory of a shared moment that I’ve thought about from time to time over the years. Amy and I had a Latin class together. I was in the miserable midst of growing out a short, layered hair cut — a style I’d impulsively adopted after years of belonging to a local dance company that required the pulled-back bun of the ballerina.
I was generally a mass of insecurity, self-consciousness, and low self-esteem, and I must have been bemoaning my hair. I remember Amy taking an appraising look, considering a moment, and then assuring me that I could, in fact, catch most of it up in a ponytail. In a kind and matter-of-fact way, she gave me an entirely new piece of information about myself, one that would push me over the threshold from short- to long-hair again.
It was a tiny conversation, about something trivial, but I never forgot it. How come?
I’ve written on this blog repeatedly about seeing and being seen, and my issues around those ideas. In that instant, Amy looked, and saw, and reported back with some good news. The fact that I remember our brief exchange so clearly suggests how rare it was for me to experience being seen without also perceiving that I was being judged harshly. When I looked at, and saw myself, the only thing I had to give was a long list of criticisms. Amy held up a different image, one that neither flattered nor mocked. An honest assessment. And within it was not just the possibility of ponytail but a suggestion that maybe the truth, the reality of myself, was not as awful as I feared. It cracked open my self-image in a way that permitted hope to enter, ever so slightly. And it makes me wonder, today, why Amy and I weren’t fast friends.
Given her capacity to see clearly and assess without judgement, it’s no wonder that Amy MacKinnon became a writer. I just finished reading Tethered, her debut novel. It is the tale of Clara Marsh, an undertaker, and the damaged people, living and dead, who threaten the walls she’s carefully built around herself. Set in towns south of Boston, not far from where we grew up, it’s not only a page turner but it allows you to engage questions like how much faith do you have in the people closest to you and how far would you go to save someone outside that circle of familiarity.
The book also allows you to consider if you might have an aptitude for the art of undertaking. While I must answer with a resounding ‘no,’ I can imagine something compelling about working so near the mechanics and mystery of the human form. So long as it is alive, that form holds within it the potential for kindness, courage, love, and change.
