Senses « Fridaville

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SENSEations

December 31st, 2008

Several years ago, I threw a New Year’s Eve party with one of my very best friends, a creative soul mate with whom I later shared a transatlantic blog. We put together a little booklet based on the 5 senses to give our guests: our favorite scents, our favorite music, our favorite blogs, etc. My post tonight is an homage to that party:

Tonight’s Scent: the wood smoke from an outdoor fire at a back yard oyster roast on a South Carolina island on New Year’s Eve.

Tonight’s Taste: salty ocean juice bathing the oysters pried open to yield their secrets.

Tonight’s Sound: fireworks exploding in my neighborhood–begone evil spirits!

Tonight’s Touch: the soft hug of my North Face down jacket on a chilly night.

Tonight’s Sight: a gold sickle moon hanging in the sky like a dream boat to carry us out of ‘o8 into ’09.

Happy New Year!

Posted in Senses | 5 Comments »

Christmas in Fridaville

December 22nd, 2008

I keep strings of fairy lights on my porch all year long, but they are so special at this time of year. The neighbors across the street have put up their lights, and this ordinary street suddenly seems hemmed about with magic and mystery when night falls. I wish the big live oaks that line our street could bloom with glowing Japanese lanterns and that there were spangled nets of lights strung above the roadway the way they do in the San Gennaro festival in NYC or in the shopping districts of London at this time of year. I’ll be digging in my closet to try and find the Pottery Barn lanterns I bought last year to hang from the crape myrtle tree by my gate and since we are having a warm Southern Christmas, I might sit on my porch, drink Champagne and get stars in my eyes.

Posted in Home, Senses | 4 Comments »

Speed Bumps

November 25th, 2008

I fear being on the bridge I commute over if an earthquake comes up out of nowhere. I’ve seen movies of the Golden Gate Bridge during an earthquake and the waviness and buckling that happened to the roadbed give me cold chills. Sometimes that happens in my life and then I have to stop the motor and wait it out or just gun it and hope I get to the other side in one piece. This morning I set aside 30 minutes to meditate, picked a good chair, put on the guided meditation cd, sat down and fell apart. I couldn’t keep my mind on my breathing. The more I tried to focus on meditating, the more my pulse speeded up. Instead of being here and now, my mind was racing around the room touching base on grocery lists, recipes, the face of an old love, the smell of a tweed jacket in the rain (my face pressed against it in a goodbye), a scene from a tv show, wondering if I’d have time for coffee, the tick of the clock–click, click, click–my dead grandfather, that snowstorm in 1967, the woodpecker in the dead tree, a sudden urge to get up and bleach my teeth…all bid for my attention. For 30 minutes, I twitched and tried to get more comfortable, felt like my breathing was fake and forced and worried about how fat my stomach was. By the time the chimes went off and 30 minutes was up, I was so agitated that meditating had probably raised my blood pressure. But in some ways it was one of the best sessions I’ve had because it forced me to recognize that neither life nor meditation is always going my way. That when things aren’t working according to my plan, just sitting still for 30 minutes is all I can expect of myself and it might turn out to be a major victory.

Posted in Enlightenment, Senses | 5 Comments »

Missing the Music

November 22nd, 2008

It was so cold in the old city of Prague on the Sunday afternoon I took this photo that it makes me shiver to remember it, but walking through the narrow, winding streets, turning a corner and coming upon someone playing a violin was like being in a fairytale. And every day, I went out into winter with the friend I was visiting — bundled, layered, walking and taking the tram, watching my breath make clouds in the air, stopping for wine or coffee, unlayering, bundling back up, taking photos of snow falling. I leaned into the cold, accepted it, lived it. Today at home in Charleston, it’s 48 degrees, nothing approaching that week in Prague, but I am flinching from the cold, recoiling, running home to escape it. Instead of walking through my neighborhood or in the downtown city streets, I layer on pajamas, fuzzy socks, a long-sleeved tshirt under an old cashmere sweater. If I were in a fairytale, it would be about a woman who turns into a bear at the first frost. When Persephone goes underground and everything on earth is waiting and storing energy for the spring, why can’t I embrace all the lovely bare, spare planes of her winter face? Why don’t I expect a violinist around every corner in my own hometown?

Posted in Nowness, Senses | 6 Comments »

Stop, Drop and Curl Up

November 19th, 2008

I’ve been lying in bed for four days with a tooth implant jammed into my jaw bone and throbbing hard enough to launch itself out of the top of my head. I considered calling my friend Joe the Contractor to come over and pull the implant out with a pair of pliers, but thank god the dentist ordered up some drugs before things got out of hand. Between doses of hydrocodone, I managed to get the cover prose written for my magazine day job right before deadline or I expired. Type type type/doze off/type type type/doze off. The art director loved it, so maybe I should always write high. I can see how Rush Limbaugh became a junkie, because I couldn’t WAIT for my next dose and I loved how slow and easy it took me under and made both my physical and existential pain go away. I cocooned in my bed with a novel by Wendell Berry (Hannah Coulter) and slid in and out of soft sleep and a slow journey around Hannah’s Kentucky farm that was so like the one I grew up on, only more prosperous and peopled with kindly characters who were close to the earth–okay, so it was more like the farm I wish I’d grown up on. Then being all doped up, I shed a tear or two about my vanished past and then got really depressed (more side effects of the drugs?) about how tractors made horse-drawn plows obsolete and then decided to text coworkers with garbled instructions about god knows what. Text text text/doze off, doze off, doze off/text text text/dose up, dose up, dose up. Today was my first day back at work, back to “normal,” and I’m grateful to feel so very much better. But a little part of me misses locking the door on the world, with no alarm clocks, nowhere to be, no expectations to meet because I was an invalid. This little interlude made me realize that I’m so hungry for a respite from the bullshit that bombards us day and night that there was an up-side to taking sick days. Just think of how many things during an ordinary day keep us running away from ourselves. Toward what? I’ve always been a ferociously ambitious person, partly because I felt invisible during so much of my life. Everything I’ve achieved had a goal of giving me an outline–”look at me, I’m here, I exist”–and of making sure I didn’t miss anything. It was the path I had to take and I learned a lot and it shaped me into the person I am, a person I mostly like. Now, though, I want to stop/slow time so that I can just sit still long enough to think. It sounds so frivolous, doesn’t it? But I am ever on the move, like a gadfly, and I crave a long stretch of time to stretch my mind. I want to light somewhere and sit a spell. Do you ever feel that way?

Posted in Home, Senses, writing | 3 Comments »

A Long Winter’s Nap

November 13th, 2008

I love the orange-flavored sunsets of winter, but not the shorter days and cold mornings. Driving home from work in the dark, I start to crave tacos and chili, cornbread and collard greens, apple pie with ice cream, beef stew or anything cooked in a crockpot (and I don’t even own one!). What I really crave with the onset of winter and the bleak prospect of a recession is the comfort of a tribe. I want to retreat to a cave and build a fire to keep sabre-tooth tigers at bay while my tribe cooks something on a spit and fat drips and sizzles in the flames. Afterward we might draw pictures on the cave wall or wrap up in bear skins and smoke wacky tobaccy while someone plays a flute. I want to go to sleep comforted by my family and friends gathered around me for safety in numbers, because the numbers that comforted us with the illusion of security–a rising Dow, low interest rates, high returns, 401Ks, annual raises–are gone. Can’t we just hibernate for awhile?

Posted in Senses | 3 Comments »

Ground Level

October 8th, 2008

For a clumsy non-athlete, I’ve spent a lot of time lately dreaming about kayaking. I love the way it puts me on eye-level with the earth–it’s like coming home. Instead of walking around all day in a two-legged hurry to get from the car to the coffee shop or the grocery to the car, toting bags or clicking my keys to open the door from yards away, I’m swaddled in a womb-like craft, drifting along among ducks, egrets and fish, listening to the pop and suck of water in the mud instead of an iPod strapped to my arm. For a couple of hours, my ego gets

Botoxed by beauty and the sheer absurdity of trying to work my little will on the world. Maybe if you’re a competitive kayaker, all of the above is null and void, but I go onto the water to get rid of my self, to be blessed by the sky, the marsh hens, the drone of a plane overhead that mirrors the buzz of insects in the marsh, by the rhythm of the creek that irons out all the creased and wrinkled places created by living in an upright world. I only wish I could learn how to carry that peace with me when the boats have been put away, but I forget so easily and before I know it, I’m going crazy over all the things that two-leggeds think are life-and-death important: the extra 10 pounds I can’t lose, the billing problems at work, the font that is all WRONG, Sarah Palin, a deadline I might miss, the boots I can’t afford, the book I never wrote. Today in yoga, the teacher “wrenched” my stiff frozen shoulders into a semblance of alignment, and I realized that I need someone or something to do that to my soul on a regular basis because I can’t spend my life in a kayak!

Posted in Nowness, Senses | 1 Comment »

Little Heavens

September 24th, 2008

One of my favorite books is Wind in the Willows, and even though I’m a nonswimmer who fears water, like Rat and Mole, I love messing about in a little boat. Yesterday after work, a friend and I launched kayaks into a tidal creek that runs behind her house and paddled out to the Intracoastal Waterway as the sun was going down. Being at eye level with the marsh grass, gliding across the silky surface, was meditation on the move. Coming back in against a strong muscular tide with the sunset leaving a neon red trail on the water behind us engaged every part of my body and mind. Almost home, I rested my paddle and rocked gently on the wavelets like a baby Moses adrift among the reeds. For a whole hour, I’d settled into my place in the physical world, surrendered to it, been cradled by it. For a whole hour, I wasn’t just a big giant head thinking my way through the day. When we pulled the kayaks up on the bank, my friend pointed out a small brass plaque fixed to a nearby rock. It was in honor of a longtime resident of the island, placed there by his family after his death. It was engraved with his name and the line, “Because he loved this creek.” I thought how blessed it would be to have your ashes scattered near your home, near all you cherished about being alive, leaving behind a simple, almost secret, love letter to the world.

Posted in Nowness, Senses, love | 4 Comments »

“And so to bed”

September 9th, 2008

I often think of this line from Samuel Pepys’ diary when I go through the house late at night, locking the doors, making sure the computer is off, the candles are blown out. I love bed and I hate bed. I love reading in bed and watching tv in bed and working on my laptop in bed–all no-nos as far as the sleep experts are concerned. And yes, sometimes I turn out the lights

and roll from side to side and pound the four pillows I can’t do without and grind my teeth and worry about my carbon footprint and get pissed off about why Jamie Leigh Curtis is doing those stupid commercials for constipation (or is it diarrhea?) and wonder if I should have taken one more Melatonin. I remember sins of omission and commission. I look at the clock. I turn on the light to make sure that wasn’t a brown recluse spider on my foot. But then, I pick up my book and snuggle up to it and love being awake in the middle of the night, even though I know I’ll pay for it tomorrow. When I was a teenager, I lay awake at night, listening to a dj playing Elvis and the Everly Brothers on the little radio on my bedside table, aching with unrelieved sexual and emotional tension for a bigger life. When my kids were little, the only time I had to myself was late at night after they went to sleep. That’s when I got into bed with cup after cup of hot tea, stacks of books and a journal to pour my heart into. Still looking for a bigger life, still yearning for something that seems so very possible in the middle of the big vast freewheeling night. In my bed.

Posted in Home, Inspiration, Senses | 4 Comments »

A Smack of Orange

September 3rd, 2008

I had dinner at a friend’s house this week, and as soon as I walked into her kitchen, I was shocked by the orange daylilies on her counter. Like Cher in Moonstruck slapping Nicholas Cage in the face and barking, “Snap out of it!” Lately I’ve been sleepwalking through work and coming home to put on my pajamas and shut the door on the world. In every way. Fine enough for a few days or even a couple of weeks, but I get used to indolence far too easily. I hate to admit it, but I think some of my planetary stars must be aligned toward inertia and sloth–both physical and spiritual. These lilies were almost vibrating they were so alive — as if orange was the blood in their veins and they had plenty to spare. I’ll have a tranfusion, please, of orange fieryness, of orange ardor, of orange juice of life.