My oldest friend

This same moon saw me crying through the back window of my parent's car as a song on the radio broke my heart open, it watched me spin around and around with a group of people to Rembetika music outside a cafe in Chios , as it rose blood red over the Mediterranean. I can even imagine it catching my attention as a baby slung over my mother's shoulder on a summer evening a brilliant, glowing ball on the horizon.

One of the first things I look for when I go outside in the evening is the moon. Throughout numerous moves, lonely evenings spent smoking out back (when I was smoking) and times of transcendent joy it has been there. So much changes, but it has been with me wherever I go and whatever I'm doing.

***********************************
It doesn't matter how well you know yourself...What matters is how you relate to what you do know. ~Mark Epstein

Every Thursday evening I drive along the Braes Bayou to the meditation center and the moon is there keeping me company in the damp green heat of Houston. Over the last month or so this winding road past trees dripping with Spanish Moss has moved me past something, a resistance I have had all this time to this place and myself in it. My feelings about sprawl and a car-centric city haven't changed, but something has shifted. I'm not looking to leave here unless something very specific comes looking to take me away.

I had dinner on Friday with a friend at a restaurant I had been dreaming about since we moved here. The entire menu was local and the food was stunning. I told my friend that I was tired of always wishing myself elsewhere, not to mention moving, and that we will make our lives here as if it is the only place there is to be. We walked outside the restaurant and I stood under a peach tree full of velvety ripe fruit and saw the moon through its branches and thought of it shining on my own garden: the fig tree, meyer lemons, blackberries and muscadines.

I thought, where the moon is, that's home.

Here

This weekend there are no fixed plans a relief and a luxury after over a month of weekends on the go. Fridays are traditionally family nights so we had dinner and then Madelines and tea outside with the local wildlife.


Sofía is my nature chick. She reminds me of myself at that age. I spent hours staring into a creek bed, catching frogs and even more hours turning over rotting logs to see if I could capture newts. I wanted so much to be a herpetologist and to write for National Geographic. My own father saw his dreams of being an "ologist" in me. The last time I visited him he pulled out a record he found that was made in a booth when he was 10 where he talked about wanting to become a scientist "geologist, zoologist or some kind of ologist." He used to hang out around the staff entrance of the Museum of Natural History in Washington DC hoping to learn more about the things he found, and he learned how to do taxidermy from one of the scientists who must have seen some potential in him. The sound of his young hopeful voice made me very sad. College was so far out of the reality of anyone in his family and he never managed to make it there. He had a family to support instead. I grew up with snakes and lizards and preserved these pets when they died in the formaldehyde my dad kept in his closet. I regret never having been challenged in science and I do think a lot of it had to do with being a girl. Sofia announced this evening that she wants to be "a natural scientist that studies frogs and toads" that would be a herpetologist! No pressure, but it would be cool!

The only fixed plan I have this weekend is to go see Marjane Satrapi with Micaela. My very good friend Adam gave Micaela her first book a few years ago. We have yet to see the movie, but Micaela is looking forward to getting her book signed for her collection of books signed by women authors including Isabel Allende and Gloria Steinem(a picture of her getting the book signed and she wasn't 9 she was 4!). The only man in the group is Ira Glass who we saw earlier this year.

I'm feeling rather insular these days...I'm trying to be here in my life even when it sucks, which the 8-4 part definitely does. This too shall pass.

Heaven

Today was spectacular. The weather was perfect and I was on my own. My mom and stepdad took the kids to a horseshoe tournament. My stepfather just so happens to be ranked 4th in high ringer average in the world. So he's pretty serious about horseshoes. Before I met him I had no idea horseshoes was a bona fide sport. Micaela was scoring the tournament today to make a few extra bucks.

I headed for Dupont Circle, an area of Washington DC that I know very well and that holds lots of memories for me. It is my favorite neighborhood in DC, and while I know I could never afford to live there it is probably one of my top five places that I would like to live. Maybe number one considering it is right near my family. I bought Jane Hirshfield's newest book of poetry for reading with coffee later in the day, ate lunch, and then I headed up to S St. specifically for this:

I saw a gorgeous exhibition of central Asian tent bands. The colors, the textures, the insane amount of work that went into these practical works of art!! I so wanted to take pictures, but alas no pictures in the gallery. Not so in the gift shop where I saw books on natural dyeing and knitting and spinning that I had never seen before. Plus the textiles for sale were museum quality themselves with prices to match. I didn't buy, but I did admire. This is just one corner of the store.
From here I walked to another favorite neighborhood, Adams Morgan, where Madame's Organ is still to be found keeping watch over Columbia Rd.
Coffee, poetry reading and writing ensued before walking back down the hill.

More wall art in Adams Morgan

Everywhere I went I felt like I was going to bump into my 16 year old self dressed in a dirty black slip on her way to the nearby hotel to wash herself in the "public" bathroom sinks off the lobby. Or maybe my somewhat older 18 year old self dirty and sweaty from working as a bike courier locking my bike to a parking meter for the dash into a building with a delivery. This trip home has been all about the past. I've met up with various people I haven't seen in over 20 years and for the most part it has made me feel good about the direction my life took. Still, there is a bittersweet sense of my youth and being in such a beautiful, walkable city makes me yearn to live here again.

On my way back to the car I took this picture and then realized, when I got to the end of the block, that this house was only three or four down from the abandoned house where I squatted with some other kids when I was 16. I walked down this street a few weeks ago when I went out to dinner with some friends and couldn't place exactly which house it was. Once this street was so familiar to me, now I can't place it a few weeks later. It all looks so posh and upscale now!

One last picture before I got in the car. I've always loved the National Headquarters of the Supreme Council of Scottish Rites right behind me, but I didn't do such a great job of getting it in.

I think I got some sun today.

Flashback...Fast Forward

Yesterday an old friend of mine sent me this picture...

I was 17 and in my very first apartment after a time spent squatting in an abandoned factory, and then in an abandoned house. The house was busted while I was on a whirlwind adventure to Virgina Beach in a car that was too small with a limited soundtrack (we had exactly one tape in the car; Metallica's Ride the Lightning). When I got back to DC all my stuff (conveniently stored in a big black trash bag) had been removed by the police, all I had left was what I was wearing. A few months, and several sofas later, I was living in a basement apartment in a building that was owned by a friend's father. I was the youngest tenant, but most of us were young, unemployed and irresponsible. These were my "dorm" years.

Now the fast forward...

We took my mother-in-law to San Antonio for the day. Somehow when I was 17 it seemed like I would always be 17. This past week I have been encountering my past at every turn...A friend sent me this book and I saw lots of familiar faces, including a picture of the friend who sent me the picture. I watched this movie and re-lived quite a few shows I went to, and I had two old friends find me via the internet. I plan to meet up with them, and my friend the photographer, when the girls and I head to DC in July.

Time marches on...

In the moment

I recently celebrated another year on this planet; my last year of being in my 30s. Birthdays do not freak me out, but this last move and my desire to figure out what fulfills me has led to lots of soul searching and unfortunately a lot of down time (emotionally). I prefer to think of the year beginning with my birthday and in that vein I am committing to the 28 day Meditation Challenge sponsored by Tricycle. I have been sitting off and on since Sofia was born (some 7 years ago), but would really like to place it firmly in my life in the same way I brush my teeth twice a day, without really thinking about it. I kicked it off by going to sit with a group of people that meets once a month. It was really wonderful to sit in a group and I look forward to returning.

In other news I've started seeds for my dye garden and the woad, yellow bedstraw, sacred purple basil and marigolds have sprouted. Not so the indigo which according to the instructions is challenging to get started. The bed is ready to go (I gave away 10 azalea bushes to someone on a plant exchange list). We also planted muscadines, a celestial fig and blackberries last week.

Today I finished this sewing machine cover
Front:

I like the top and side fabric best, I've used every last scrap of it (bought via ebay a few years ago):
I also received my redwork swap package (sponsored by the lovely Dorie!). I figured the bird needed to out of the house.

Many thanks to Faun! New art for my room.

Here's what I sent to her

Illustration copied from old children's book. 'Nuff said.

A day of art

Micaela and I got out of the house today and went to the Museum of Printing History and then to the MFAH where we saw an amazing exhibition of French painting from the Met 1800-1920.

I always feel a mixture of sadness and exhiliration when I see the female models especially knowing they were the rebel women of their times and most of them only live on anonymously, captured by the brush. I try to imagine what it might have been like to be a woman outside of the mainstream at that time; more difficult I imagine than now. I can't look at paintings and the texture in them without imagining it placed in its time and environment; some dusty studio, the smell of oil paint and an itchy nose that couldn't be scratched. That painting in front of me was part of a life that is now gone...makes me feel small, but inspired!

I'm not a huge fan of impressionism, but the organization of the paintings from early in the 19th century into the beginnings of the 20th gave a real feeling of how painting evolved over that time, including, of course, the impressionists.