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Recent Entries A Blustery Thursday, as Pooh might say Posted: February 25, 2010
There's a wonderful Winnie the Pooh animation where Pooh and Piglet are blown around by the wind. They go flying through the trees and have all kinds of adventures as a result. That's sort of the way it feels around here tonight.
I'm house sitting for a friend whose place is at the base of Overlook Mountain - at least I think it's Overlook - on the eastern edge of the Catskills. The wind whips around here pretty regularly, but tonight, it's really active and loud. I love the wind when it blows like this. I feel alive and ready to go out and take it on. I want to feel it on my skin. I want to feel the power of the heavens pulling and pushing me - at least that's the way I experience it. If it's really loud, I sing or laugh as loud as I can to see how much of my voice the wind will swallow up. I feel a little bit like a kid again, so maybe that's why I like it so much.
I've been "snowbound" for three full days. I put snowbound in quotes because there really isn't any snow on the ground. Weather reports have threatened snow, and snow has fallen, but none has accumulated where I am. All of my students cancelled, or I cancelled them because I thought there would be snow, but in fact, there's virtually none. I think we all needed time off or everyone would have made the effort to get to their lessons. I would have, and my students would have. Instead, we all opted for the quiet and peacefulness of a day or two at home with nothing in particular to do. For myself, I've read a couple of books, worked on a few pages of my book, written a couple of letters, ignored emails that are way overdue anyway so what's a few extra days. I've done yoga everyday, practiced my guitar and the piano, taken at least one hike every morning, done some laundry, swept the kitchen, called my mom and generally slowed down my pace. I’ve also slept at least nine hours every night. What a relief! It's been a mid-winter vacation I hadn't expected, and I am grateful.
One of the books I read was Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. I've read it a dozen times, but a friend is reading it now, so I thought I'd read it too. It's a dated book - written in the '50s by a woman reflecting on life as a wife, mother, artist and woman at that particular time in history. She talks about the importance of solitude for all of us. She wrote the book on a two-week vacation away from her husband and children taken to rejuvenate herself. I agree with her about the need for solitude. I think time alone is invaluable. I seek it out almost every day and wonder how others live without it. This afternoon, after three days alone and not a lot of human contact even by phone, I finally needed to go out. I didn't go far. Just up the street to the post office. But it was enough. The postmaster greeted me as he always does. He told me to take my time on the roads. He sold me some stamps. It was simple but it was exactly what I needed.
On my way to and from the post office, I tried to listen to the news on NPR, but I didn't like what I heard, so I turned it off. Congress was debating health care. Their words did not sound like discussion to me, and they are so far away from anything that I would call reform that I am disgusted by all of it. There’s such hostility in everyone's language; such condescension and arrogance. I'm tired of it. I wonder if I could survive as a hermit and ignore them all for the rest of my life, but I couldn't. Next week will come and I'll head back in to town. My students will return to my studio and I will be glad to see them. Lindbergh talks about the ebb and flow of life; the intermittency and lack of continuity that makes life so interesting but also difficult for us. I feel that today and that's a good thing. Tomorrow, I'll be back in the flow, or not. The weather will help me to determine what my day will be like. In the meantime, the wind is blowing, the sky is dark and I am glad to be here by myself in the mountains.
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