InMotion

  Like perhaps thousands of other couples, in 1984 Carol and I included Kate Wolf’s song GiveYourself to Love in our wedding ceremony.   I listened regularly to several of her albums in the early ‘80’s, after first hearing her on Mike Flynn's syndicated radio show, The Folk Sampler, and we got to see her perform and briefly speak with her, in Lansing Michigan in 1985. She died of leukemia at age 44 in December of the next year. This was a monumental loss for many, and in 1996 a memorial concert was held in Sebastopol, CA.   It became an annual festival, moving north to Laytonville, CA in 2001.   Once we heard of it, after emerging from the haze of early child-rearing, we vowed to go.   Finally, we arranged to meet two of our best music buddies there for the 25 th annual (rescheduled from 2020), said to be the last one. We drove eight hours on the first day so that we would only have an hour’s drive the next day to the festival site. Having been advised by th...

  In December of 2020 I came up with the strange idea of reading everything in an issue of a magazine and then writing about it for a blog post.   Now, with 2020 hindsight and a terrible, disabling case of “writers block”, I set out to do something like that again.   After reading the entirety of the May 30 issue of The New Yorker, I sat down to write. I started, but then froze up again.  The  read-it-all tactic to help thaw out wasn't working. Finally, here’s what I came up with.    The cover of the magazine features an illustration called “Open Vistas” and the artist is Cannaday Chapman . My initial impression of it was of a woman in a hat gazing off down the way.   On closer scrutiny: Two women sit at an outdoor table with their café-au-laits and powdered beignets, one is wearing a large hat and sunglasses and is looking away as she stirs her coffee.   Her companion has her sunglasses hung on her shirt while she studies her cellphone...

  Last week, I drove 100 miles north from Salem OR. and parked my borrowed car at Cloud Mountain Retreat Center . Inspired by friends and readings, I wanted to be on retreat with others seeking to deepen our meditation practice. This would be a retreat held in noble silence, no speaking, reading, phones or other digital devices.   As I walked the grounds at Cloud Mountain, I would reach in my pocket to discover that there was nothing there.   No oblong device there, my pocket had achieved what we retreatants were leaning into: emptiness.   If you attend a 6 day retreat and maintain silence for the duration, stuff happens. Questions come up: who am I?, why am I?, what's my next step? Having a daily meditation practice as I have for a number of years is helpful, but for what?   Sometimes I think my meditation is done in order to check a box to get credit in the category of “spirituality”.  As in, "i f I don’t go to religious services, pray, chant, perform s...

  Preface : in re-reading and tweaking this post, I notice that I have not once mentioned, you know, IT.   Would it be possible to try that out in real time (no talking about IT). Like maybe as a new years resolution. That would be challenging (97.5% of the time it’s the first thing you hear on NPR in the morning).   Nevertheless, I am considering   it.  Maybe regular periodic moratoriums.  That’s all I have to say about that. 2021 started out with meeting the gutter man, the electrician, and the handy man as final preparations were made on sprucing up our 160 year old condo in New Orleans. It sold right away for the asking price. It was fun to review my Google Calendar for the early months of last year, recalling my visits to doctors (I am an old   man) and friends down there as we had our last visits together in the Big Easy. One last bike ride along the shore of Lake Ponchartrain. I would have had a last bike ride along the Mississippi river with ...

  My wife Carol and I have always been contrarians regarding menu planning for Thanksgiving, being intermittently vegetarian all our adult lives and almost always featuring menus not including turkey on Turkey Day.   Carol has supreme confidence in whatever she gets involved with, I have supreme anxiety about achieving success in whatever I do. You know how they say “just get out there, you’ll be fine”.   Well, I have gotten out there numerous times where I have experienced it being Not Fine, which seems to confirm my fears.   I am fairly certain that this is a circular logic bullshit loop, but I digress… WARNING: the following includes details of a disturbing culinary misadventure.  But hey, I say read on because this is how we learn!  Take the path less traveled!  OK, enough of that. But I do feel better now. Living in New Orleans inspired me to learn how to make a Cajun-style gumbo. I use skills learned from a cooking class at the Southern Food ...

  Greetings blogsters!   It’s been over two months since my last post.   I’m not on the success track outlined by blogger gurus (optimally it would be 2-3 posts per week).   But this is this, so I am happy about that. I hope you find here something funny, useful, goofy, or just of interest to you. As long-time readers know, I often write about my uncomfortable moments, so here I go again. We’re still in the plugging-in phase of our lives here in Salem, learning the layout of the city and arranging to meet new people, perhaps find some new friends.   Combining a social event with biking is a nice option for us newbies. The local bike club arranges regular weekly rides on weekends and a few weekdays. Riders meet at a local parking lot and bike out from there as a group.   This last weekend saw Saturday as likely to have the most favorable weather and so I showed up for that ride instead of the Sunday which I’d done a few times.   A gentleman I hadn’t m...

  Discussed in this post : struggles we face; shirts; memory; live music. I hope the hyperlinks work for you and the pages are still up, there are some sweet ones here.  My last blog post was almost 2 months ago.   My wife and I are moving into a new home so stress is high, even as we are enjoying much about the process. And our new home is wonderful.   I’m dealing with some hopefully minor health issues, but it’s requiring seeing a bunch of doctors.   Aging is getting to me.   It’s been really hard to “find time” to write.   As usual, this is the best that I can do.   In order to post I have to stop editing. Here it is. The next paragraph is not what I originally wrote. That one just disappeared mysteriously; this word processor is freaking me out.   It seems to do what it wants to do, and what it wanted to do this time was destroy a paragraph.   I thought I could retrieve it with CTRL “Z” but it didn’t work this time.   Maybe ...