Weathering It

Frankly,I don’t know what I am about to say here, but I’m tired of the previous post that’s been hanging there all week, especially when I am finding it so difficult to maintain the sense of humor and compassion that I was advocating in it. (I suppose that was just the sound of me whistling in the dark.) In any case, the Sisyphus model still holds. The rabbits have continued their assault on my flowers – even including geraniums, that choice of desperadoes -- and as my gentle attempts to discourage them have failed, I have begun to develop a surprisingly hard-edged kind of anger. As for the situation with my mother, it has taken on a whole new dimension of difficulty, but I won’t get into the details now because I am still immersed in dealing with all that, and I don’t want it to be the theme of another depressing blog post tied together with a frayed ribbon of unconvincing optimism.  Two of my girlfriends happened to be visiting when some of this ordeal began to spill over, and they were unexpectedly treated to the spectacle of Cynthia Quite Frazzled. But here’s the way it is with those kinds of friends: Jan wrote to thank me for loving her enough to share my troubles, and Vickie said, “It feels good to be more than a fair-weather friend. I’m here for the tsunami, baby!”

In fact, I was so buoyed by friendship that I thought socializing might be a good antidote, and I overcame my reclusive mood and stepped out on Saturday night to a gathering at Dave and Karen Jensen’s house. There was even a sushi chef on hand, Byron from Burma, whose presentations were so artful and beautiful I succumbed to his invitation to sample a morsel. (Despite myNeapolitan adventures, I have not yet developed a comfortable relationship with raw fish.) The morsel tasted like the sea, but more personal, with a whisper of wasabi, and I could honestly see how someone might grow to like it, given time. “What is it?” I asked Byron.

 “Tuna,” he said, which was not the exotic response I expected.

 In the spirit of Naples, I also ate a chewy bit of octopus, but mostly I just admired the aesthetics of it all. I asked Byron where he learned the art.

 “Las Vegas,” he said, which again was not the exotic response I expected.

But the unlikelihood of our various convergences is always part of what intrigues and amazes me. The core component of this particular assemblage was Dave Jensen’s hiking group, which decided two years ago to sponsor a young Tibetan girl through nursing school in India. They simply wanted to adopt a philanthropic cause, something small and direct, as opposed to bureaucratic and anonymous. Of course it’s hard to zero in on one cause when there is so much need everywhere, but being good hikers they decided to follow a few existing footprints that suggested a path.

It turns out that Dave’s wife Karen, while teaching at Dunn School, had conducted an art exchange between her students in the Santa Ynez Valley and Tibetan refugee students at an art school in India; she in turn had developed a correspondence with the art teacher there, Mr. Sonam Choephel, and through Sonam, she had become aware of the struggles of a Tibetan girl named Tenzin Lhazey. The first and only of ten siblings to graduate from high school and be accepted into college, Lhazey was heartbroken at having to forgo her dream of becoming a nurse due to inability to pay the fees. Here's where our intrepid hikers stepped in, each contributing what they could, even literally emptying their pockets of loose change each week, and recruiting an ever-expanding group of friends.

 Saturday’s get-together was a celebration of Lhazey’s successful completion of her second year of nursing school, and included a slide show of our host’s visit to India to meet her in person, the unveiling of a painting by Sonam, and even along-distance phone call to India. A remarkable and idealistic young woman in her own right, Lhazey says that her blessings and gratitude have grown “like rolling snow” and she is eager to make the world a better place.

There’s more to the story of course, but mostly I am touched by how this circle of friends has changed a single life, and in so doing, the world. It reminds me how each of us can make a difference: start anywhere, start small, but simply start.

And sometimes my own life seems very small, but when I consider it in terms of the network of friends up close and in radiating circles, I don’t feel quite so isolated and insignificant.

Here, the world smells a little like campfire smoke. There is an eerie haze that gilds and ambers the light by afternoon, and when I awoke last night and looked at the sky, the moon was a wedge of orange. La Brea Fire is now up to 84,000 acres and 25% contained. It changes the weather. 

And it's true that I’m heading into a challenging week, but I guess so is everyone else. Maybe if we lean into each other we can weather those tsunamis.