Around the World by Private/Public Library

This brochure was in my mailbox (the one outside my house: how long will we be able to say that?) last week and at first, had me a bit frightened that Orwell's 1984 had manifested itself in the form of Big Brother's mind-reading, then it just irritated me. 


I haven't been on an airplane since May 2008 for a number of reasons, but the primary one being, for me, for domestic travel, it's just not worth it.  It's gone way beyond a-bus-in-the-sky experience.  And I've often said that the only way I'd travel by plane, domestically, would be by private jet. Then this brochure arrives and I start dreaming of where I'd go, all before even opening the brochure.


National Geographic's stellar reputation precedes itself and this brochure only confirms that:  there's a team of experts, researchers, explorers, all top-notch in their fields, ready to share their worlds.  And calling this experience "an epic expedition" is no doubt true.  But at what price, literally and figuratively?  The literal price is $65-$67,000 per person, depending on time of year.  The figurative price?  Incalculable, boundless, enormous, inestimable, you get the idea.  Just think of the impact to the environment, at large, then the impact to the smaller environment: the villages, the lakes, the groves, etc. that will be visited during this "epic expedition." 


Yes, National Geographic has been at this a long time and I'm sure it employs mitigating steps along the way, but the elitist bent to the trip really bothered me.  So, here is my own reading list for you to travel "around the world by private/public library." (I've touched on both places to be visited by National Geographic journey and my own favorites.)


*The Agony and The Ecstasy by Irving Stone
"The passionate biographical novel of Michelangelo" and an excellent background to viewing his artistic genius throughout the museums of Italy today, not to mention it reads like a novel as Stone breathes life into the creator of David, painter of the Sistine ceiling, architect of the dome of St. Peter's and, my favorite, The Pieta (pre- or post- encased).


*A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Mentioned in an earlier post, but worth a second mention here.  Read this and you too will succumb to the author's images of daily life in India and smell the dirt, taste the curry and hear the cacophony that is India's street traffic.


*The Island of Lost Maps, A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey
"Every once in a blue moon you read a book that leaves you absolutely breathless, reminding you of the bright, hidden worlds within our world (emphasis mine). This is that book, a glimmering supersonic journey into terra incognita, where Miles Harvey, acting as writer and sleuth, pursues America's greatest map thief. This is a riveting, hilarious book of twists and turns, unexpected confessions and deep human truths.  You will not rest until the last page." -Michael Paterniti, author of Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain (Ed. note: Catchy title!)


*Egypt: Read anything by Elizabeth Peters in her Amelia Peabody series; there are more than a dozen.


*Gould's Book of Fish, A Novel in 12 Fish by Richard Flanagan
From the front jacket: Once upon a time when the earth was still young, before all the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Sarah Island penal colony of Van Diemen's land---now Tasmania. A talented phony and art forger, Gould was enlisted by the prison doctor . . ."  Find this book at your local library or used book store; it's worth it and you'll find, despite his surroundings, Gould's story is "an affirmation of life rather than a lament for it.  And, yes, Tasmania, has always been on my list of places to experience.


Where would you journey?

Patsy Bolt: Bookbinder extraordinaire, dancer, musician, cyclist, friend

Heard the news last night that a friend and colleague had died.  Not sure of the circumstances and not sure it really matters other than for those left behind.  Before her "retirement" (not sure anyone would say Patsy ever retired) to Santa Barbara with her husband, Fred, Patsy worked in the conservation lab at Stanford Libraries and we learned about each other's lives as we spent many days cleaning old, dusty railroad ledgers and account books.

She lived her art when not earning her paycheck:  studying bookbinding in Berkeley, Morris dancing, playing the harmonium and working in her garden in Santa Barbara. Following is just a few examples of her artistry (keep in mind these books are all miniatures):

I would say "rest in peace," Patsy, but I know there'll be no resting for you.  You're probably cycling the mountain roads of heaven as we speak; that, or teaching a few of the winged persons the finer points of harmonium playing.

The Last Word

I’ve read obituaries for about 35 years and would guess that’s a much earlier start than my contemporaries: people in their fabulous fifties.  Since learning I couldn’t be a lion when I grew up (see “Bending Time and Growing Young” entry for background), I thought I better check into what adventures I could experience and get a handle on how best to live them.  There’s no better place to start that exploration than reading obituaries and autobiographies; what else is a great obituary but an abbreviated autobiography?

This might also explain my life-long fascination with cemeteries and the history buried (couldn’t resist that one) there and evident on some of the headstones’ etchings. In a cemetery on San Juan Island, off the coast of Washington, Pearl Fitzhugh Little will always be known as “Legendary Island Fisherwoman” and each person who passes and reads her headstone will remember as well.

Prior to departing for my silent meditation retreat in India, I traveled to New Zealand for almost 30 days of “tramping” (hiking) on both islands of that beautiful country and thought I should write an updated will. This led to obvious thoughts of my death and from there, to thoughts of what would I want said about my life, if anything, at a celebration of the same.

My will was handwritten and on several different types of paper (my love of books extends to the parts of the book and most especially, hand-made paper) and in addition to the boring legalese, irreverently modified*, of course (Mom always said, “You do things differently.”), specified songs to be played --- Lyle Lovett’s rendition, “Do Not Pass Me By” and “She Wept a Big Tear,” among others --- and food to be served --- margarita fountain (only top-drawer tequila, please) and all entrees Mexican, a la Los Golondrinas or Andales.

And to close the celebration, I wanted the following read:

“I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgment dawns, the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say when He sees me approaching with books under my arm, “Look, she needs no reward.  We have nothing to give her here. She has loved reading.” (With apologies to Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group)

For some of the best send-offs of both ordinary and extraordinary persons, see Margalit Fox’s obituaries in The New York Times or check out The Dead Beat by Marilyn Johnson (Harper Collins, 2006) where Margalit and the pleasures of obituaries are featured.

Here’s just one of her best that I clipped as part of my growing file of what I might grow up to be:

     Burt Todd: Adventurer, Advisor to Monarchs

     Burt Kerr Todd, an entrepreneur, adventurer and international deal-maker whose quixotic dreams and outlandish schemes more than occasionally paid off, as when he introduced the postage stamp to the tiny kingdom of Bhutan or resold the gently used Rolls Royces of down-at-heels maharajas at a handsome profit, died April 28.

     A dazzling raconteur . . . finessed his way into graduate school at Oxford . . . was once treed in Bhutan by a rampaging elephant . . . once tried to found a small kingdom himself, on a deserted coral reef in the South Pacific.  Its entire infrastructure was to be built on postage stamps.  His dream was dashed, he later said, after Tongan gunboats blew his island paradise to ruins.

     Except for the gunboats, all of the above is true, said his daughter.

*irreverently modified examples:

~I, TFJ, formally and legally Patricia (never Pat or Patty)

~share of the property commonly (I like to think it’s more “classically”) known

~I nominate _________ as my executrix (knowing she won’t act like a dominatrix)

~to pay all my debts and taxes, that by reason of my death . . . provided she has first explored to the fullest extent of the law, any and all ways to get out of these payments.  Long live the Montana Freewoman’s Association!

~that I am of the age of majority (but still feel only 37)

The Ripple Effect and Linguistic Linguini: The End of the Beginning

Ten days in India at a silent meditation retreat, in southern India, in January, in silence.

I had seen similar photos of the residence hall on the ashram's website, so I knew what to expect --- sort of --- but the reality of spending two weeks in silence didn't hit until we arrived and began day one (actually the day before the retreat began)in our dorm room, men and women separate, 4 persons to a room.

Prior to my arrival at this retreat, I had been in the practice of meditating almost every morning for about three years. And I was more than familiar with the guru leading the meditation retreat as I had attended many of her spiritual discourses and retreats in the U.S., read several of her books and had traveled to India five years prior.

But no amount of reading or preparation equipped me for the experiences that unfolded for me there and continue to provide me with lightbulb-going-on moments. 

Day one of the retreat and Amma (in India, spiritual women are likened to a mother-figure, caring for us all and "Amma" means mother)opened her discourse asking us all "to expand our thinking and caring for all society, not just our family and friends, but the whole world, the universal brotherhood." Well, I thought, this isn't saying anything new; most preachers, religious persons, even heads of state spout this sentiment. But, of course, there was more.

Amma talked about our purpose here and why we need to learn the art of giving. She gave the example of a tree:  patient and forbearing through all seasons, giving shade, wood for fire, fruit for nourishment, etc. 

From here, Amma spent several minutes expounding on variations of this theme and her soft voice allowed my monkey mind to wander until she broke through with the following.(Note: this is part my paraphrasing her, part my recollection and part fill-in with current research. It's in italics to emphasize this.)

Research on holograms, holograms of roses [hologram: from the Greek word, holos, "whole"; gram, "message"]has shown when the rose hologram is cut in half, you can still see the entire rose when looking at each individual half.  Conclusion: we are not separate parts of one whole, but the whole is in every part. Some scientists begin any hologram research with the thesis (not hypothesis) the Earth itself is a hologram: the whole is in every part. 

“If you continue to slice up the hologram, each fragment would continue to contain the whole image, that is, the intact whole object in smaller and smaller fragments. The only difference would be that the image would get progressively less clear, more fuzzy.” (David Loye, in his book The Sphinx and the Rainbow)

We are not separate parts of one whole, the whole is in every part of us. This resonates for me throughout the retreat along with Amma's message about communication and communication in silence.

We communicate in silence [hence the reason for the "silent" meditation retreat] and we're communicating across great distances in silence: mother to infant, infant to mother, Mother [as in "Divine Mother" or "Mother of God"] to each and every child.

We are receivers floating through a sea of frequencies transmitted from God, Supreme Consciousness.  Research yourself through meditation; communicate across great distances in silence. [Yogananda often cited Psalm 46:10, "Be still and know that I am God," when writing about meditation, along with "Prayer is talking to God.  Meditation is God talking to us.]

All of this only serves to remind me of the current catastrophic trifecta in Japan and the other area of Amma's emphasis during this retreat:  service to Mother Earth (in all meanings of that term).

In the 2004 documentary What the Bleep Do We Know?, Dr. Masaru Emoto "gained worldwide acclaim by showing how water is deeply connected to our individual and collective consciousness."  

THE WATER CRYSTAL FROM THE WATER
EXPOSED TO THE WORD "LOVE AND GRATITUDE"

This photo is from Dr. Emoto's diary archive and you can see and learn more here.

In the years since the silent retreat ended, Amma's frequent recitation, "For all things, meditation is medication" has entered and relieved the pressures of this monkey mind, even if I don't meditate at dawn as I did right after taking this photo in India.

Before the "official" madness begins*

Anyone who knows me and my fondness for this time of year, has often heard me say I may have to start watching high-school basketball games to get away from the "big-business" side of not only March Madness, but college sports in general.  When my niece played in high school (and my son's niece just completed playing in high school), it was a real treat to see them both eloquently and strongly demonstrate the fundamentals of the game. Should you actually do something other than watch basketball during the next three weeks, but still want to be a part of the "madness," check out the following:


Michael D'Orso's Eagle Blue: A Team, A Tribe and A High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska "has a gift for bringing ball games to life." (The Washington Post)

From Publishers Weekly: Eight miles above the Arctic Circle, there's a village with no roads leading to it, but a high school basketball tradition that lights up winter's darkness and a team of native Alaskan boys who know "no quit." D'Orso follows the Fort Yukon Eagles through their 2005 season to the state championship, shifting between a mesmerizing narrative and the thoughts of the players, their coach and their fans. What emerges is more than a sports story; it's a striking portrait of a community consisting of a traditional culture bombarded with modernity, where alcoholism, domestic violence and school dropout rates run wild. One player compares Fort Yukon to a bucket of crabs: "If one crab gets a claw-hold on the edge... and starts to pull itself out, the others will reach up and grab it and pull it back down." Among D'Orso's unusual characters are the woman who built a public library in her home, the families who adopt abandoned children, and, of course, the boys for whom "hard" has an entirely different meaning (e.g., regularly trudging through "icy darkness" to board flights to Fairbanks for games). With a ghostlike presence, D'Orso lends a voice to a place that deserves to be known.

Can't recommend this book enough for the sense of place, community, self-sufficiency and, of course, basketball fundamentals.

*Technically, the "madness" began yesterday, but I'm sticking with the traditional slate of 64 teams and that "madness" begins tomorrow.

The Ripple Effect aka Part Two, Linguistic Linguini

When last we met at “Linguistic Linguini,” the travelers had just begun their hours-long taxi drive to the ashram.

“My son knows the rudiments of the Hindi language and between that and 'international' hand/sign language, can get along fairly well while in India.  Bashir spoke the local language --- Telegu --- and a little bit of Hindi.  During this multiple-hours drive, we were treated not only to lunch at Bashir's house, but to . . .”

a trip back to the early 1920s? 1930s?  Not sure what decade the toilets, kitchens, electrical grids were in, but it was nothing like I’d seen even in my first trip to northern India five years earlier.  But isn’t that the point of both traveling and reading, to go where it’s not like home or something you’ve experienced before or to capture anew that sense of place and being?  And, with the purpose of this trip being a two-week meditation course, the surroundings were ideal:  ashram surrounded by waterfall-laced mountains, forests, lotus ponds; no distractions from electronic communications; delicious food, both Western and Indian; and government-run electricity so erratic that the DefCon-level-4-noise generated (pun intended) by the ashram’s generators soon became almost white noise and a great inducement to go inside, literally and metaphorically, and meditate.

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth is an epic and epic-length depiction of post-colonial India dealing with both Hindu and Muslim families while Mrs. Mehra searches for a suitable boy for marriage to her daughter.  It is a timely and timeless tome on tolerance, families and love while giving one of the best pictures of daily life in India (this from a New Dehli born and raised and 25-year U.S. resident).

In between getting through the 1,500 pages of A Suitable Boy, and to get a non-fiction, part memoir, part travelogue, part reflection, Westerner’s view point, pick up Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Autobiography of a Yogi completes the triumvirate and in its pages, Paramahansa Yogananda, one of the preeminent spiritual figures of the 20^th century, captivates the reader with “an absorbing account of a singular search for truth and a comprehensive introduction to the whole science and philosophy of yoga, revealing the underlying unity of the great religions of East and West.” [back jacket blurb of thirteenth paperback edition 1999]

“Underlying unity” and “great religions of East and West” bring me the perfect segue to this entry’s title, “The Ripple Effect” and its connection to the horrific earthquake and tsunami of March 11. However, just as in Part One of “Linguistic Linguini,” we’ll be interrupted briefly, not by March Madness, but something I like to call, “March Mindfulness.” Meditate on that until we meet for Part Three. 

No 'Big Dance' for Cal Bears: 'One and Done'

It seems basketball itself is the interruption to stop this blog's interruption.  USC managed to rout the Bears in the first round (hence the 'one and done' title) of the Pac-10 Conference Tournament yesterday and ended the season and hopes for hearing chants of "hip, hip Jorge"* become part of the national lexicon as the Cal Bears (and fans, too)hoped to march through the madness until the Final Four; okay, okay, realistically the fans we're hoping to at least get to the Sweet Sixteen, exceeding last year's performance. 


Selection Sunday is March 13; Daylight Savings Time officially begins as well.




*"Hip, hip Jorge" was this season's cheer for the outstanding performance of Cal junior Jorge Guiterrez, 6'3" guard, and coach Mike Montgomery's first scout selection as his first-year Cal coach, after 16 years with arch rival Stanford!

Linguistic Linguini and 'Marching' into 'Madness'!

Comments left on previous posts have niggled my noodling, ratcheted my ratiocination (I misspelled the word in an earlier post as "racination." That word has become associated with President Obama as in making something about race.), stimulated my synapses and fired my fingers to bring us to today's post.

In traveling, both figuratively and literally, I'm often confronted with translation problems.  Whether it's something about transportation, directions, food or local customs, I usually end up with more questions.  For example, in India, you only receive with your right hand, especially food.  In Italy and France, when asked how many scoops of gelato or croissants you'd like, holding up the finger next to your thumb means "two" scoops or croissants.  Hold up your thumb if you only want one, although why you'd only want one gelato scoop or croissant, especially while in their countries of origin, is a topic for another day.

Prior to my literal traveling, I like to read as much as I can about the destination, both fiction and non-fiction, and if available, have access to maps of the local areas, and a handle on some of the most basic phrases in that country's language. These have been a source of many funny and sobering moments, but, again, perhaps a post for another time.

While on my second trip to India, for a meditation retreat, time, time travel,

Bending Time and Growing Young

Whether today is February 29 or March 1, stories involving time travel, bending the time/space continuum or re-imagining a historical event in present day, resonate for me and were the basis for my belief, until age 9 or 10, that I could grow up to be anything, even a lion, the king of the forest.  And, no, I still don't know what actually turned my belief around on that issue, but I recall being heartily disappointed.


Ironically, that childhood lesson lead me to my current long-standing mantra that if you could read, and comprehend what you were reading, you could learn to do anything you wanted and transport yourself to the world in type before you.


I'm currently reading the second novel of Diana Gabaldon's outstanding Outlander series involving Claire Randall, a nurse in 1940s Britain and Jamie Fraser, a Scottish landholder in the 1740s.  Yes, a novel spanning two centuries wherein Claire travels back and forth to her husband, Jamie, and the reader is treated to a multi-layered tale in both history and myth, not to mention you-are-there descriptions of 1740s Scottish, British and French townscapes, landscapes and ocean crossings.


Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel captured my attention for several weeks traveling through King Henry VIII's court with consummate politician Thomas Cromwell negotiating the deadlock with the Pope and others allowing Henry to marry Anne Boleyn.  


Reading both these stories, I can't help but regain a bit of my childhood belief that time travel does exist.  Where are you traveling these days?