Sunday bliss

Sunday morning, a pot of loose leaf Earl Grey tea with hot almond soy milk, my kindle, the couch, and the polyester-blend blanket that feels like cashmere.

 

A tropical forest and an alpine lake

One of the benefits of underemployment: a mid-week hike in the redwoods. Yesterday we went on an incredibly beautiful, eight-mile adventure on the Cataract Creek trail just outside of Fairfax. The climb up to the top of the falls was impossibly green and ferny considering the lack of rain lately. Let go of logical reason, and you'd think you were in Hawaii. Far below the treetops, everything covered in moss, the light bullied itself through the tree-slats.

After a few hours of steady ascent, we got above the trees and were treated to views of the corrugated valley below and Bon Tempe Lake, eight miles across. The sky a blinding blue, a circus of hawks fretting the clouds. And the crooked joy in a dog's smile, snout up, drinking the wind.

Devil on my shoulder

We had our first inaugural CinemaSampler Party this weekend with the theme Devil on my Shoulder. One of the pieces presented was a very short clip from a very trippy filmmaker (thank you Rory): Jans Svankmajer's Don Juan. Svankmajer is a Czech film maker whose actors are human-sized marionettes who inhabit the screen without human manipulation. He's been making films since the 1950's and he's still going strong; his most recent release is due out in 2015. Critics laud him as having influenced other cinema big-wigs such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and the Brothers Quay.

Though we only saw a sliver of the film, it was haunting, the way the wooden figures come to life, like carved figures escaped from some medieval cathedral. You can see a bit of it here:

Equinox

Without a structure to drape against the days, I've been thinking a lot about weather and the darkness of mornings and the way the air is fidgety one minute and drowsy-quiet the next. Edging toward Samhain, the periphery where autumn and winter meet, a compromise.

Came across this poem (thanks to Ms. Jen Spearie) and it spoke to me:

At the Equinox

by Arthur Sze

The tide ebbs and reveals orange and purple sea stars.

I have no theory of radiance,

but after rain evaporates

off pine needles, the needles glisten.

In the courtyard, we spot the rising shell of a moon,

and, at the equinox, bathe in its gleam.

Using all the tides of starlight,

we find

vicissitude is our charm.

On the mud flats off Homer,

I catch the tremor when waves start to slide back in;

and, from Roanoke, you carry

the leafing jade smoke of willows.

Looping out into the world, we thread

and return. The lapping waves

cover an expanse of mussels clustered on rocks;

and, giving shape to what is unspoken,

forsythia buds and blooms in our arms.

Theater without walls

Last night at Yerba Buena: Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Living Word Project – Red, Black and GREEN: A Blues.

We took BART into the city, one of those rare, warm Indian summer evenings in San Francisco, not a chill in the air. Little did we know there was a Cal football event happening at AT&T Park, so the trains are full to capacity with acne-faced, beer breathing coeds sporting blue and gold.

The walk from Market Street to the theater is stunning with the urban activity of the day morphing into an evening calm, the colors of the sky slowly muting as the lights of the city pierce the dusk. The round windowed disc of the Modern Art Museum shines like a concrete-rimmed moon. The outdoor tables scattered across the tiered patio of Yerba Buena are full of Friday night revelers.

The anteroom of the theater is packed and the audience waits just outside the double doors, ready for the show. As we enter, we’re ushered towards the stage where four small wooden sets are arranged in a square shape, adorned with metal sculpture and stapled fabric, each decorated in a different style. Four actors, three men and one woman, move among the sets, one sitting on a makeshift porch banging a washtub, one reaching to the sky in an improvised string of movements. Another leans against a painted beam and sings, low-throated, a plaintive gospel song. The audience walks slowly from set to set, taking in the living sculpture. It is theater without walls; the art in you and you in the art.

And then we take our seats and the multilayered landscape comes to life, the sets are wheeled into a multitude of configurations, and the actors leap, wail, twirl, and preach. Environmental activism meets hip hop jazz in your face poetry slamming. A human percussion. A hybrid activism.

Belief is breathing.

In the span of an hour, Bamuthi speaks to us of his attempts to ground the Green movement in the hood; of bringing a reconfigured racial perspective to Green politics. I am enthralled, entranced, grief-stricken, guilty, uplifted. A passionately viable message joined to an equally passionate, equally viable new art form.

I got peace, like a river, in my soul.

Gratitude

There it is -- the Golden Gate Bridge -- in all its glory. People flock from all over the world to snap pictures of the ochre expanse traversing turquoise blue. At Point Isabel today, I tried to snap this photo from across the Bay, but there was just enough fog still hovering in the morning air to blur the shot.

Several months ago I was in Mexico City, setting the foundation to build a life there. Fresh from a completed two-year teaching contract at an international school in Northern Thailand, we had traveled to Mexico City in December, interviewed at a slew of schools, and by March had accepted an offer at presumably the best school in the region. By June we were back again, meeting with real estate agents and making connections with the faculty before all the teachers dispersed for the summer break.

Flash forward, a few weeks later, on the day before July 4^th, and we're on a plane back to California with all our bags, no lease signed, and an email to the school postponing our contract. Why? The details are actually not as important as the emotional aftermath: my identity as an expat, as a world traveler, as an international educator was suddenly in flux. Major identity shift. As Woody Allen so aptly put it, "When man makes plans, God laughs."

Today, in Berkeley, the sun was high overhead by mid-morning, a slight breeze, wisps of clouds over the East Bay hills, the sky a brilliant blue. In short, near perfect Northern California weather. And I woke up light with the buoyancy of blessings, an immense feeling of gratitude, a litany of bounty rather than deprivation. I had an epiphany: take the blog intended for the new life in Mexico City and turn it into a celebration of this moment, this particular slice of my life, in a place of ruggedly landscaped beauty and clean air and amazing culinary delights. A daily tip of the hat and whispered prayer of thanks to this sudden, unexpected life I find myself inhabiting.

So back to the first paragraph: Point Isabel and the view of the Golden Gate Bridge is a perfect place to start. I can not imagine a place anywhere in the world as dog-friendly as the Bay Area and Point Isabel is the crowning glory.

This 23-acre, award-winning off-leash dog park has been my haven since we got back home; who can be disgruntled or downtrodden when walking amid packs of canines all smiling from ear to furry ear? From Chihuahuas to Great Danes and everything in between, everybody romps and runs and wrestles together.

And on clear days, which have been plentiful the last few weeks, the view across the Bay is absolutely stellar with the San Francisco skyline stenciled against the sky, and the two bridges reaching up and across.