Fragments, Figments, Figuring Something Out

It was an impromptu New Year's Eve...just a casual convergence...Monte's cousin KC, our old bike-friend Skip, and our dear neighbor Jeanne, who has appeared in this blog often. We had an early dinner of whatever we happened to have on hand, and we stayed up until New York's midnight, which is about as late-night as we get around here.

In fact, we set up my iPad on the table and watched a few live-streaming minutes of the revelry: the ubiquitous backdrop of brand name advertising, inane chit-chat from minor celebrities with very white teeth, Imagine badly sung, then the dropping of the ball right here on our Gaviota table. What a world.

Jeanne had brought over two bottles of champagne and her legendary homemade caramels with bits of jalapeño peppers in them, and we indulged. She and Skip were talking about kayaking-- at one point in her colorful life, Jeanne did a lot of that -- and they were describing a maneuver called an eskimo roll, which is the strategy for getting yourself back upright and breathing air, glorious air, when you find yourself up-side-down underwater.

The very idea of it is so scary I can't fully imagine it, but you're supposed to rotate the paddle in a certain way, keeping your head down on the shoulder of your outer arm, and executing a sweeping motion and an underwater hip-snap technique, even though what you desperately want is to get your face out of the water, asap. You're completely turned around here, so nothing makes the usual sense; you just have to over-ride your first instincts and follow the expert's advice.

And I'm not likely to go kayaking anytime soon, but it turns out that the eskimo roll has applicability in my life too. Skip suggested it was a good metaphor to help me cope with a difficult situation I've been dealing with lately. "In this crisis you have to be able to do exactly the opposite of what your first instinct tells you," he said. "Your impulse to rush in and try to help might be as natural to you as breathing, but the objective here is to get your own boat upright and survive." I'm going to keep that in mind.

I guess KC added the glamor quotient to our guest list. She is a classical musician based in New York for many years and although she now lives up in Berkeley, she still flies East to play her viola in some pretty high-falutin' orchestras. Her approach to music, though, particularly in the teaching of it, is to retain a spirit of playfulness in playing. (By the way, she's not a name-dropper but it came up in passing that Garrison Keillor's wife is a friend of hers...oh my goodness...Garrison Keillor! Down to three degrees of separation!)

Anyway, I brazenly used KC as my human sound-hound to see if she could identify, from my humming of it, the mysterious tune I hear in my head whenever I wake up in the night. It's been driving me crazy (or maybe it's just evidence that I am already crazy). KC thought it sounded familiar and might be a Bach cantata, which narrowed it down slightly, and even while the name eluded us, I was absurdly happy to be told by an expert that I am not tone deaf and my humming of a tune is a tune.

But later, with new confidence and motivation, and using Bach cantata as my clue, I found the song that plays in my head when I cannot sleep: it is Bach Cantata BWV 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme...otherwise known as Sleepers, Wake.

_____

Finally another digression, but this is something I've been meaning to share somewhere along the line. It is a link to a beautifully written essay, "Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist" by Paul Kingsnorth, which raises thoughts about the natural world, the ongoing assaults upon it by our overpopulous species, the insidious message implicit in making "sustainability" the new environmental goal, what we have forgotten, and what we must remember.

It's not an article that will make you feel good, and it admittedly sounds an alarm without offering solutions, but it is nonetheless food for thought. To me, it is a call for us to respect and cherish what we have almost destroyed, and this final paragraph is a poem in its own right:

I am leaving on a pilgrimage to find what I left behind in the jungles and by the cold campfires and in the parts of my head and my heart that I have been skirting around because I have been busy fragmenting the world in order to save it; busy believing it is mine to save. I am going to listen to the wind and see what it tells me, or whether it tells me anything at all. You see, it turns out that I have more time than I thought. I will follow the songlines and see what they sing to me and maybe, one day, I might even come back. And if I am very lucky I might bring with me a harvest of fresh tales, which I can scatter like apple seeds across this tired and angry land.

So...Sleepers awake.

Could that be what the universe has been telling me in the night?

I think I just found my theme for the year ahead.