Welcome, 2012!

That mysterious year is upon us. I believe that we will know in 2012 the blending of Spirit into a New Calendar, that is, as is true of all calendars, a day-by-day progression toward the growth of human understanding.

The bumps along the Way are undeniable. The world news defines them for us every day from every slant in every medium in shades of gray and black and in the colors of blood. For some, the New Year portends the end of the world, with the "end" of the Mayan calendar.--a register of time that repeats itself in cycles. According to Wikipedia, "the Maya name for a day was k'in. Twenty of these k'ins are known as awinal or uinal. Eighteen winals make one tun. Twenty tuns are known as ak'atun. Twenty k'atuns make a b'ak'tun."  Will such a cyclical view of time wind down?

The Wikipedia account continues:  "Sandra Noble, executive director of the Mesoamerican research organization FAMSI, notes that 'for the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle.' She considers the portrayal of December 2012 as a doomsday or cosmic-shift event to be 'a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.'"

The conclusion? "Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is the basis for a New Age belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012, is simply the day that the calendar will go to the next b'ak'tun."

The k'ins of 2011 circled me back to my age of 16, second cycle. Through nearly two years of working the Food Addicts in Recovery, weight is no longer an issue, as it  has been for most of my life. I'm living in a normal-sized body, eating fabulous meals of vegetables, protein, grain, and fruit. I shop (second hand) with joy, watching for colors and shapes and labels (!) that I've never worn before--so different from the black and navy days of 16, the first time around. I'm walking regularly, meditating, doing Taoist exercises, writing more, and working through the emotional aspects of life hidden while I lived in a "stout" (my grandmother's word for zoftig and above) and nearly inoperable body.

I've begun to keep my camera close, exploring Cloverdale's "wilderness," a 500-and-some-acre area behind the town's largest and most elegant senior housing development. A paved road goes continually UP to our massive water towers. Along the lower trail, Porterfield Creek, which once provided the town's water, winds through a canyon of manzanita and madrone, oak, pine, scrub, wild flowers, and early-morning spider webs, dewy and in multitudes in the low grasses.

You can check out my photos at http://byrdsbeautifulworld.blogspot.com. That website is no longer active but the archives remain. Scroll down the left column to the list of names (mine is near the top) followed by a number in parentheses. Click on that, and all my photo posts will come up.

Poetry readings this year have included three celebrating the state parks threatened for closure--seventy of them, mostly in Northern California. We're reading from What Redwoods Know, a chapbook edited by Katherine Hastings. More readings are lined up for 2012. You can protest the closures  at savestateparks.org by sending a message to California's elected officials. The state budget will hardly notice the changes, with no consideration for lost tourist dollars in the park areas.

I also read twice with Night Writers, a Cloverdale writers' group, and frequently at the open mic at the monthly Center Literary Cafe in Healdsburg, now home ground for a community of writers. And last week I read at Valle Verde Senior Residential Community to a group of elders, including my 97-year-old mother.

I'm planning a "news fast" during January--the worst and the best of what's going on in the world seems to filter through even when you don't follow the headlines! The tumult and turmoil requires standing steady. I sometimes remember my favorite quote of Thomas Jefferson's and wonder if that cycle, too, has not begun again:

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."--Letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780)

May the mysteries of 2012 entice you and inspire you as we enter into the New Calendar.

Photograph, "Foggy December at Kings Valley," by Luna Zeffer

Last Lap of a Long Race

for Ray

What is a likeness? When a person dies, they leave behind, for those who knew them, emptiness, a space: the space has contours and is different for each person mourned. This space with its contours is the person's likeness and is what the artist searches for when making a living portrait. A likeness is something left invisibly behind.--from The Shape of a Pocket, John Berger

He lived on the edge of death, hand in hand with his own mortality. At first, Death trotted along behind like a faithful dog, loyal as the memory of barefoot days by the lake of his childhood. Then it took his breath away as it ran in front, pulling him into its river, forcing him to swim upstream. 

In the rare still pools of his existence, his friendship ran deep. His wisdom, his compassion were gifts, radiant in connection.

When the darkness came again, he rocked himself to sleep, comfortable in the arms of the old shadow that had trailed him for so long. Death was as familiar as a well-worn garden glove or the cracking leather of his hiking boot as he ran on ahead and was gone.

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

Trees

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.” Willa Cather (O Pioneers!)

The nights turn cold and the days can't make up  their minds.  Crow flocks, raucous in the foothills, plan to stay over, while the sky practices for the rainy season by clouding up part of every day. On the road to Healdsburg, fog follows the Russian river all the way and blankets the wine country town with its posh plaza, tasting rooms, galleries of art.  Except for the hours of  cloud practice, Cloverdale stays clear. Our low mountains seem higher, magnificent in their gold jackets of winter grass and the rising river fog over their shoulders.

Along the back roads, light flushes the creek banks. In the dried grasses, whatever moves rustles, size indistinguishable--lizard? cautious step of a deer about to startle at my presence? a walnut falling, or a dried branch?

The trees turn late, moving quickly from yellow to maroon and then to brown, with none of the slow brilliance of last year but a new beauty. Along the creek trail in our "wilderness," the stream begins to trill with the early rains, and the hills look like China in their draperies of fog and river mist. In the vineyards, the turning has begun, and each wine grape adds its own color to the striped fields of leaves.

The tampering with time that goes on every year at this time has invited darkness into the late afternoon and light a little earlier in the morning."Spring forward, fall back." Time, already so arbitrary an invention, now gets pushed around into a change of schedule as though it were real. "Real time," we say, forgetting that we made it up back in the days of the serf, who kept "time" by the sun. The lords of the manor thought a clock tower beyond the fields would do a better job

I had a couple pieces included in What Redwoods Know, a book assembled by Katherine Hastings (and printed by her, and bound). We've begun a series of readings in Sebastopol, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz for the first round. Each work within the book reflects inspiration from a California state park, those that are destined for permanent closure next year. Most are in Northern California (a very few in the South), and many are oceanside. For one-tenth of one percent of California's budget, 70 parks will be closed, among them one of my favorites--MacKerricher on the coast north of Fort Bragg. It holds fragments of the California landscape--a three-mile sandy ocean beach with dunes, a small lake (or a large pond) with a trail through the woods with birds aplenty and a boardwalk around one end, a meadow, bluffs, and the rocky resting places of the harbor seals, white in some seasons. Otters swim on their backs in the shallows and gulls rest on the posts of the trailside decks.

Talk now is of real estate development on these lands, many given to the state by those who lived on them. Jack London's home will no longer be protected. Several parks have beat the deadline for closure, and more have closed campgrounds and visitor centers. This is what the redwoods know. Protest, if you will, to Governor Brown, your congressional representatives and senators, and support the Coastal Commission, which is endangered as well.

Redwood lumber yards make up a good hunk of Cloverdale's job possibilities.

Meanwhile, the maroon madrones and the manzanita (little apple) go about the business of growing up the hillsides and, on the golden hill, the live oaks still echo in their shadows. Trees. Burning in South America. Dying of this disease or that across the country.

Three redwoods stand at the edge of the buildings of senior housing where I live, patterning themselves against the sunset in silhouette. They are relatively young, but still they know. They've heard rumors about the lumber yards and the empty stretches of blank where the trees have been cut and hauled out, stark deforested areas hidden behind a few rows left standing. Circles of time trace the cuts, time by years and centuries, not the arbitrary shifts of light we humans bear with the season's change. After a time, our body clocks settle into the differing hours.

I've stood in the circle of redwoods, grown up around a fallen grandfather, and listened to them breathe in whispers, reaching for the sky. They almost reach it. Their electric presence trembles through me in the silent preserves that will no longer be available to those who love their beauty.

Photographs by Luna Zeffer

October Light

"If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you hav a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn’t the alphabet that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression."--Andre Kertesz

The light in the vineyards this time of year is sweeter than the grapes. Early rains interrupt the harvest and, on clear days, side roads are filled with the roar of transport of the mechanical pickers and lined with the cars of the human ones, who work night and day during the bringing in of the grapes. Many take as much work as they can get so that they can spend a month, or two, or three with their wives and children in Mexico before the spring work begins.

The vineyards are turning---a field of yellow where one wine grape grows, another of maroon, red, or gold. Their patchwork of color covers the hills. Soon, the fruit that remains on the vine will begin to ferment and the air will smell like wine.

In this season of beauty and change, I change, my body thinning and reshaping itself, my heart watching my lurches or unrippled flow and the urgency of seeing, now, the moment I am in, the truth of my life.

The Serenity Prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous has become my test pattern, the constant in the background of the chatter of the mind. Some days, i hear one line. Another day, the emphasis shifts. One evening, I hear a deeper meaning. I wake up some mornings with the chant of it halfway begun before my eyes open.

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

This year, it might well be the prayer of the vintner as Octobers scurries through the fields with the grapes still hanging on.

Kertesz quotation from Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography, by Barbaralee Diamonstein 

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

Broken Bough, Broken Vow

Last spring on a walk in Cloverdale I came across a broken bough, blossoms still fresh, across the road. I made several photographs, a little puzzled. Why record an act of violence, with little beauty to explain itself--not the heaping of clouds before a storm nor the ravages of flood that brush reflection across a field, but an act of blatant destruction--a smashed and broken bough?

Today, as I consider a broken vow, the photograph comes to mind. The considerations that evoked the vow still blossom. When I say "I vow...," to whom am I speaking? And when I break that vow, who is listening? How far can a bough, or a vow, bend before the breaking? If I add time as an element of change, when did the breakage begin?

I'm glad I've kept the photograph. Today, it shows me where I am. The vow was a promise to myself, to a way of health and healing. I didn't hear it break. No other was involved. For days my mind did not acknowledge the first crack nor the split nor the damage done. Today, I make the vow again, fresh as a spring blossom. I begin again to follow the path on which it led me.

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

Ohio Men

Ohio men never wanted to be boys. They strutted right out of childhood, drove tractors when they were eight and cars when they were twelve, got their own at sixteen, best if it were a ‘55 Chevy, turquoise and white, with the fins of a shark. Jerry Green, who got his black Mercury on his seventeenth birthday, drove it into the side of a bridge that evening and went without wheels until he got a job at the creamery.

They lent their basketball jackets, number on the back, to girls in study hall who pretended to be cold. They left birthday parties after the hot dogs and before the games, went to Emil’s for strawberry pie. They aimed everything at graduation, when their lives would begin.

They went to work baling hay or digging trenches for new septic tanks, realizing that graduation wasn’t the beginning but the end of their dreams.

They walked ruts along the edges of their territory, the small worlds they’d made. The ruts, too deep to cross, became the boundaries of their vision.  They worked hard, married, had kids—everything a good man in Ohio was expected to do--and wondered if it was any use at all to tell their sons what they’d discovered about life. Probably not.

--from The Sound of a Thousand Leaves, Redwood Writers Vintage Voices anthology, 2011 (forthcoming)

Photograph by Luna Zeffer (panel of mural, Andy's produce market, Sebastopol, California)

Picking Up the Camera

Hewn log...

"Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.... [The] very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images."--Susan Sontag, 

On Photography

When Office Depot put the Canon Power Shot digital on sale...well, it was an impulse buy. The first photographs I took at a stop along a side road caught lines of grapevines that led the eye to the range of foothills to the east of Cloverdale. A yearning for distance, for what was "over there," directed my eye. Our landscape is squared off and striped by the vineyards that dominate what grows here in a valley that once was rich with apples, pears, apricots, walnuts and mustard, artichokes, and table vegetables. Now the rolling rows define the hills in grids. At first, they got in the way, served only as pointers to what lay beyond them. 

The first photograph...

Then I turned to trees, silhouetted against empty sky and the sea at Mendocino Headlands.

The world out there, the more vast, the better. I began to post at Beautiful World, which requires only  that an image must reveal something beautiful--and no people, for reasons of privacy. I began to learn from other posters. They came in close, chose detail over far space, worked with color, texture, abstraction. When niece Jeny visited, she introduced me to the macro setting I didn't know I had (who reads manuals?) My images began to change. I moved in close. Soon the world was made of photographs. Everywhere I looked I saw a fragment that could be caught in a rectangle.

Road Chatter: Back road, Sonoma County

Overcast day, Bolinas Bay

Road by the Russian River, after floods

I set myself assignments. Don Worth, years ago at San Francisco State, set a challenge: Photograph in black-and-white but using color film (you remember film). I remember Minor White, with whom I traveled for some time for a couple summers at Capitol Reef National Park. (I paraphrase what he said about abstraction.)  Most photographers want something in the photograph that clings to reality, he said, one night around the campfire. When you can let go of that, you are beginning to work with the truly abstract.

Reflections in a tide-washed beach, Bolinas Bay

Music: Vineyard in flood--notice the touch of "reality" still showing!

From the early images that beckoned me out--mountain, sea, the vineyards marking the land--I came close, looking at the inner through contrast of dead stalks with new growth at their feet, a dried leaf on a living century plant, lost in details of form, color, texture, and something about meaning.

Now I've taken on the task of letting go of boundaries, of the dimensions of space--letting go, as Minor said, of the urgency of leaving a little reality in the picture! What's next? I wonder. But I'm not leaning forward to find out. My eye is right here, right now, looking at where I'm standing.

Fallen wall of early Cloverdale winery

Stream near Cloverdale, California

Last year's apple and the crop to come

Rest stop

Morning after an all-night rain

Carnival

Avila Beach, California

Comfort zone

Spring in wine country

Visiting armada of antique cars, Cloverdale

This is the way I see the world these days, and the camera serves as a device for grounding. 

Photograph by Luna Zeffer