The roughness of the world is as sweet as its silkiness. Sweeter even because of all it asks of us. The beauty of something like my repurposed backyard cactus takes more work to find. But it’s there. This summer I am rewarded for my care by the sudden starburst of flowers, unlikely coral-hued beauties that suddenly appear along each spikey finger. And I dare not touch. Just look and imagine its secret life.
I’m inspecting the inside of the oven door. Yes, it really does need some attention from a single edge razor blade. You see I plan to set my fat-encrusted oven on “Self Cleaning,” a process that will require the dedication of four hours during which the house will smell not good. But before that four hour immolation of hardened bits of caramel, chicken grease, and demerara sugar occurs, I must get in there and really scrub off the most egregious masses of baked-on ooze. If I don’t, when the self-cleaning process is in motion those highly combustible bits of sugar and fat might catch fire and turn the kitchen, my antique rugs, my sweetie’s paintings, our computers, and the odd floor lamp into blackened ruin.
Hence I’m in there inspecting the inside of the oven door in preparation for the oven-cleaning event.
If you know that a writer is busy pre-cleaning the oven, on her knees, working it over with a single-edge razor blade, then you also know that the writer in question is avoiding some looming deadline. (more…)
“Perhaps because I had no roots to hold me tight to one path or one place, I was free to explore. In the process I have filled each event in my life with as much color, movement, and awareness as it could hold.
The quest for home has provided me with incredible joys, silly fun, and adventure as well as many awkward moments and occasional terrors. Along the way my attitude of curiosity helped to open doors, metaphorical as well as literal, which would otherwise have remained shut.”
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[from, Inside the Flame, Parallax Press, 2016]
“Many of us have trouble parting with old clothes, toys, or games from childhood, papers from college, single gloves that have long since lost their mates, and empty perfume bottles still heady with scent. We keep them because they still transmit an aura of pleasure, or importance. Our eyes love to look at them. They haven’t faded into generic oblivion. We refuse to part with them because they keep us whole. They are our history, kept close at hand, available to open up and touch once more. (more…)
After so many years of writing about wine I experienced another epiphany yesterday. In the company of 75 gathered aficionados I listened to winemakers and viticulturists talk about their land, their soil, the tender regard they had for their particular slope of eden.
And as they talked, we tasted wines made from their grapes ranging throughout the appellation, a cross-section of four of the AVA’s distinctive winegrowing areas.  And in each of the four flights (four vineyards x three winemakers = a dozen wines), the individual personalities, desires, and  vitality of those vineyards unfurled.
Wine. A living work of art existing for the moment of time it takes to travel from sip, to palate, to memory. Liquid music.  Like music, wine is a living creation, existing as long as it is tasted (experienced, played). Music isn’t quite right as an analog, but it’s more apt than painting (too concrete) or sculpture (again, extant in a specific time and place). Music exists in many states—altered states, if you will. In Brian Eno’s head, on a cocktail napkin at Brian Eno’s favorite saloon, in Brian Eno’s computer (software program where it can be emailed to his friends and collaborators), and finally in both the real spacetime world, as well as infinitely in cyberspace. (more…)
Unsettling and yet soothing. Our mother, the sea.
A book of sensory adventure: The rituals, passions and discoveries of an engaged life.