LETTING THE BRAIN REST...

The western sky is an extraordinary pale green shading lower to warm yellow and further down into almost orange, with dark purple trailings of cloud here and there to give it contour. Here in Chiang Mai it’s just past six oclock and time for night to fall.

Many people here have already closed the shutters or sliding metal doors on their shops and businesses and headed home for a well-deserved rest. Others, especially bars and restaurants, are just opening for business. 

It’s “well-deserved rest” that I want to talk about here, “down time”, to use another term. Several days ago I read a posting by a meditation guy about our brain’s need for down time or repose. His argument is that our brains are designed for long pauses where nothing much happens, a time to reflect and be centred, rather than engaged in active “seeking”. He’s starting from the premise that the way humans lived in the time before cities developed involved long periods when nothing much happened, and where there was no stimulus for the brain. He says if we time-machined back to that time, we’d be bored silly.

And he argues that meditation techniques were developed by the great religions precisely when humans developed cities and started living in  stimulating environments. He says we are born with the urge to seek stimulus. And in the modern era we can go on doing that 24/7. Just as the modern easy availability of sugar (another thing we are genetically programmed to want and seek out) leads many to over-indulge, so the easy availability of distraction, of things to want and seek for and obtain, leads to over-indulgence and is damaging to our health.  The article is here: http://www.wildnessandwonder.com/2011/06/downtime-for-the-brain/

I’m not sure of his science or his reasoning from the Paleolithic, but I do agree that taking a pause from the hamster wheel of running in endless circles checking Facebook and links and then Twitter then circling back around to Facebook with perhaps a stop in to check personal mail, and so on, can dull the mind and lead to a kind of self-loathing. And of course it also cuts deeply into the capacity to get any original thinking or work done. At least that’s the case for me.

A long while ago I wrote about the need to allow ourselves “buffer days”, days when we don’t work and don’t put pressure on ourselves to produce. I’d argue now that there’s an urgent need to give ourselves a holiday from the button-pushing stimulus seeking that our laptops or smart phones entice us into. There are days when I have lots to get done, and so I am not tempted into the round-robin described above. But on days when I’m at a loose end, or procrastinating about getting started on a project, I’m vulnerable to getting sucked into the whirlpool. And then an hour or two later I realise how much time has passed, and I feel a little nauseated. 

I wrote all the above two evenings ago.

Since then I have taken several breaks from the hamster wheel, and it has felt so good. The most outstanding brain rest was the long bicycle ride I went on yesterday with three guys who pedal a lot here in Chiang Mai and know good countryside routes. We ended up covering about 110 km (over 65 miles), on what was a beautiful but very hot-in-the-early-afternoon day. Whew!

I was immersed in conversations occasionally, but was mostly in a nice undemanding zone of pedalling and looking at the places I was passing by: fields of rice stubble with lean lop-eared white cattle grazing, often with an egret perched on their shoulders; hamlets and villages with shady trees and wooden houses and small village markets; clumps of tall graceful bamboo; and in the distance beautiful hills/mountains, cleanly etched on the near horizon. A perfect day, except when the heat bouncing back up off the tarmac at around 1 pm started to make me feel a little queasy.

(Perhaps I wasn’t coping as well with the heat because of our lunch. We stopped at “the pig place” as they called it, on a small road off the road to Pai. There the poeple roast/grill whole pig, one at a time, then cut it in portions and charcoal grill it a little more. Unbelievably delicious, as was the nam jiim sauce they served in it (a touch of coriander seed in it) and the som tam. Meat at midday is not recommended when there are over 50 kilometres to cover in the hot afternoon! But it was so special that it was worth the discomfort of a little queasiness an hour later.)

I cannot imagine sitting still for long periods and meditating. But moving meditation, being out in my body and centred there rather than in restless thoughts, sure seems like a good way of having brain “down time”. 

Other options, pleasurable ones, are a little less kinetic, and also wonderful: singing, drawing or making some other creation, walking, swimming... Even getting lost in a good book can still your brain’s searching.

While I was on book tour this fall I failed to take the pauses I needed, I got swept up in the buzzing to-and-fro of schedules and other people’s expectations. The one exception was when I was in St Helena for the CIA’s Worlds of Flavor conference. The conference itself was intense and charged, but each morning while I was there I was able to swim lengths in a lap pool, getting up at 5.30 to swim in the calm California-scented darkness. It was healing in ways I didn’t realise at the time.

Now as I pack up for a short trip into Burma and then a flight back to Toronto for a month there (I’ll be back in Chiang Mai in mid-January), I’m imagining forward as I try to decide what to pack and what to leave, and at the same time in a small way mourning the fact that I am leaving just as I’ve found ease and restedness. 

AFTERTHOUGHT: It’s the King of Thailand’s 85th birthday today. When I went out for coffee near Chiang Mai Gate this morning, almost everyone was wearing yellow in his honour. I read on Twitter and elsewhere that many people are lined up in Bangkok to see him, or planning to watch the ceremonies on TV this morning. And on the King’s birthday the rule is that no alcohol is served, so though restaurants are open, straight bars will not be.

CAPE BRETON DAYS - PART TWO

(I'm just back from a week in Cape Breton, staying with friends. I had no internet access there, but wrote two blogposts. The first one went up on July 31; this is the second)

The day after that mist and magic swim I had a quite different morning that started with pink dawn and became leaden-skied grey with soft mild air. My river swim was as invigorating as the previous day’s but not nearly as beautiful, with one exception: there were wild rose petals drifting along in the water, bright patches of pink on the silvery-grey-brown surface, little travelling companions as I stroked along slowly.

And on every subsequent morning my swim was distinctive - always a mix of soft mild water and chilly cold - and always a pleasure, but each day different. Now, this afternooon, as I sit in Halifax airpot wating for my flight to Toronto, I can picture each of them, like a small short film of body sensations and moving images. 

And the same goes for the other hours in my days.

On my first trip out in the boat, we left Judique port in mid-afternoon. There were some substantial swells and a wind as we headed out, but the wind gradually died down. We anchored in the lee of Port Hood Island, where the water was millpond smooth and inviting. But it sure felt cold when I dipped a foot in. I slowly inched my way into the water (as unbrave non-dive-right-in-people like me tend to do) from a ladder on the side of the boat; once I was immersed the water immediately lost its power to chill.

I tend to think of sea water and ocean swimming as very second-best compared to the lovely light slipperiness of fresh water swimming. In all that attitude I forget about the fabulous bouyancy of salt water. On that first ocean immersion, swimming around the anchored boat and drifting along on my back, and chatting and hanging, the effortlessness was a delight. And so was being able to get straight into the water from the boat rather than having to wade in from a sandy or stony shore.

We cooked fresh lightly olive-oiled scallops, just barely, on a grill on the boat, and feasted on them, with tender corn and chopped tomatoes too, as the sun disappeared behind the island and the sky paled into opalescence.  And then it was time to head back to the harbour on the now-calm sea, sated.

****

One day we were out in the boat and saw a pod of pilot whales (which people from hereabouts call “black fish”). We thought they looked like dophins, and so they do, but they are whales, small and elegant. In the pod were two very young ones, one of them a pale grey. The whales were hanging around close together in the lee of Port Hood Island, in a shallow bay. The bigger ones would surface casually with a lovely sighing exhale, then dip below the surface, leaving a dorsal fin casually trailing above the water. They were feeding, it seems, and also teaching the young ones. And so suddenly one and then the other “baby whale” did a kind of headstand in the water, so that it could slap its tail - slap-slap-slap-slap - on the surface, before finally toppling over. 

Maybe the naturalists are wrong and there was no teaching but instead just the babies goofing off. And later we were told by some experienced people that one of the whales was giving birth. Whatever the reality for the whales, it was amazing and moving to see these creatures out freely in their element, on a lovely calm day.

The next day as I slowly breast-stroked my way up the river in front of the house in the early morning I tried to imagine the feeling a whale or porpoise must have in the water. I love swimming in the river, welcome the water’s slipperiness, but I’m almost always aware that it’s an alien medium, that dry land is where I feel safest. Water is like a slightly risky treat, temporary sensual pleasure, but not home. Nor can it ever be, even when we put on mask and a tank and give ourselves the freedom to stay underwater. 

Is there an analogy in other parts of life? Do we feel safer and surer in our home environment than elsewhere? Can we ever feel as secure, as grounded, in another cultural or emotional environment? If our home environment is NOT safe and secure, how do we find that feeling elsewhere?

And speaking of baby whales, I haven’t spent time with a small human baby in the last few years, and so it was a treat when, a few days into my visit, a gorgeous three-month-old came with her parents to stay with her grandmother in the house in Cape Breton. Her strong cry is firm but not really penetrating, but her gaze, her steady blue gaze, is deeply so. She’s a reminder that the person in a small child’s body is already all there. She’s going to bloom and develop in ways that show us more clearly who she is, but in fact she’s there from the start, mostly hidden from our view, except for the occasional clue, like her penetrating gaze.

We drove with the baby and her parents to Mabou market; it’s held every Sunday in a large hall. The place was filled with small stalls selling everything from produce (kale, lettuce, potatoes, fresh garlic, etc) to local sausages and meat, to locally spun and dyed wool, soap, hand-carved wooden spoons, and more. Hard to resist those spoons!

Later that afternoon as I sat writing in my airy whitewashed cosy bedroom, the day having turned grey and a little threatening, my friend C brought me a small plate of squares of local bread, each topped with bright green pesto she’d made from the garlic scapes we’d bought, a pick-me-up that jolted me from the calm of writing and back into engagement with the here and now. wowza.

On my last evening a bunch of us headed to a weekly dance at a community hall inland from Mabou. The place was packed when we got there at ten, people sitting in chairs along the walls and also at long tables at one end of the hall. At the other end, on a raised platform, were the musicians, a fiddler (in this case an ex-premier of Nova Scotia named Rodney MacDonald) and a piano player, playing and playing, as circles and lines of dancers, people of all ages and descriptions, danced their way through the measures. (Many jokes of course about whether “Rodney” is a better fiddler than politician - the answer seems to be a sure “yes!”.)

I watched and wondered and longed to dance, but couldn’t imagine how that would happen. And then a kindly older man, distantly related to my friends, asked me to pair with him for the next set (three dances in a row). What a pleasure. He’s a very good dancer, and his footwork was lovely; I managed footwork issues by retrieving steps from the highland dancing I’d done as a child, simple jig movements. And as for the larger dance patterns, they were similar to the contra-dancing I’ve done in Grey County, so suddenly I stopped worrying at all about messing up. Fun!

The big crowd made navigating a little complex at times, and the dancing formations not as tidy as they might have been, but there was good will all round, many experienced dancers, and the sure rhythm of the fiddle, to keep us sorted out. I danced the next set too, in an even larger crowd, the fiddler that time being the wonderful Kinnon Beaton.

The tunes are still echoing in my head, days later. So are the stories I heard during my stay in Cape Breton, of the flight of people from the Hebrides to the New World, of the traditions and family connections they share, of the hardships and richness of life on Cape Breton in the last two hundred years. It’s another place of complexity, dealing with plenty of outsiders like me, while holding onto a   distinctive culture in a challenging world.

I’m looking forward to being back there - next year? perhaps...

CAPE BRETON DAYS - PART ONE

{I’ve been in Cape Breton for a week, away from internet access, staying with friends. I’ve written two blogposts while there, this is the first, posted from Halifax airport on my way home.}

I’m on a different coast this week, the west coast of Cape Breton, where the early morning sun has come up over the low hills to the east, the small birds are twittering, and the crows are giving an occasional caw-caw. The wind is coming up now, so the poplars are rustling in crescendo.

There was no hint of wind an hour ago, sometime before seven, when I walked across dew-silvery grass chilly to my bed-warm feet, down to the edge of the small tidal river below the house. The river is narrow here, about eight metres wide, with tuffted green banks. On the far side of the opposite bank is more water, sea water in the inlet. 

The river’s surface was smooth but moving, flowing gently out to the sea, drawn out by the receding tide. Looking east upstream where the river curves away in the distance, a soft mist flowed and drifted above the water’s surface, lit by the young sun, like a romantic Impressionist dreamscape.  I left my clothes and towel on the bank and stepped into the water, then pushed off, heading upstream toward the sun.  The top inches of water were soft and warm, and below that was the chilliness of the salt water. As I swam upstream with long breast strokes I disturbed the still water so that before me, like an announcement, the ripples headed upstream in parallel straight lines into the bright mist.

Do otters and muskrats feels the same pleasure as they slide through river water, leaving beautiful rippling wakes?

Swimming upstream against the outgoing flow, I made slow progress. I had time to look at the details of the long grasses on the banks, to notice the occasional darting bird, to glance up at the hills beyond. Eventually I got farther upstream, around a curve of river, and almost to the small wooden bridge that carries the coastal path across the water. It was time to turn around, for by now the water was shallow, not past my waist, the bottom firm-packed when I stood up.

The trip back was less beautiful - no sunlit mist - and much faster of course.  I zipped along  with the flow of the water, feeling like a strong powerful swimmer for once.  As I climbed out onto the grassy bank the crows in the big tree complained in loud caws, then went on to something more interesting.

This morning’s swim is just another in a series of delights since I landed in Halifax airport yesterday late morning. The three hour drive up with my friend C (she did all the driving, leaving me to gaze at the landscapes we passed through) was filled with layers of talk. When we got here to this welcoming wood house, the interior painted in wonderful colour combinations, the outside soft grey wood shingles, it felt like a coming home. In late afternoon we drove a short way to the Fish Co-op to buy fresh haddock and there in the lobster tank was a one in two million (they say) amazing sight: a cobalt-blue lobster, startling and beautiful, too beautiful for someone’s pot. 

Later, after eating grilled haddock with coriander chutney, and grilled kale, and basmati rice, we drove to a small hall nearby to hear the fiddling of Andrea Beaton, a young woman whose music flows from her in the great tradition of Cape Breton fiddlers. She’s a first cousin of Nathalie MacMaster, but that’s not the important thing about her; her fluid, supple, marvellous music is all. People danced as she played, sometime step-dancing, but to most tunes the wonderfully practised form of Cape Breton group dancing that has its own patterns and order. What a treat.

BRIGHT DAWN PROMISE

I watched sunrise looking west this morning. I’m on the Lake Huron shore, aka “Ontario’s west coast”. It’s a long long stretch of sand rimming the enormous subtle blues of the lake that runs from the Bruce Peninsula all the way south to Sarnia with few interruptions. I’m near Grand Bend, staying with friends at their cottage.  There’s an oceanside look to the shore here, but that’s lovely silky fresh water out there, and the waves are all from wind, not tides.

Back to the dawn display this morning.  I went out about 6, into the humid cool air, the sky a pre-dawn milky pale.  As I came through the trees and down the steps  onto the soft sand, I was lit by an orange-gold burst of light to the southwest, high in the sky. It was a ‘birth of a new world’ kind of scene: a vast pillowy cloud glowing with almost lava-like intensity, a rich pink-orange light. On one side of the huge cloud cauldron lurked a blue-grey menacing slice of clud and on the other a line of golden small cumulous towers stretching across the southern horizon.   

The sun was low and out of sight behind the shoreline and trees, perhaps not up at all yet, but the cloud was high enough to catch sun energy and reflect it back - quite magical. It was a Tiepolo angels in clouds ceiling painting come to life, and me with no eyes to see the angels!

I slipped off my sarong and waded into the “breakers” (the incoming waves curl into foam as they hit the sandbar out from shore) and then swam toward that high outsized glowing cloud of light. Between us the water radiated back a line of cloud-brightness, a brief shining path. 

As I stood drying myself and staring at the clouds, there was a rumbling and more rumbling. The glow of gold was fading, the cloud’s molten feel had gone, and then suddenly there was a spectacular vertical fork of lightning, and a second, long and skinny.  I listened for their thunder, but couldn’t distinguish it from the ongoing low rumblings. 

And now, nearly half an hour later, the rumblings continue though the cloud mass has moved east. There’s a feeling of expectancy, with no wind and the humidity climbing. Mother Nature has more surprises for us, TBA.

Sometimes her surprises are not beautiful or pleasing but instead just a hassle. So it was the other evening when we sat outside for supper. The cottage here is on a ridge made of old grass-covered sand dunes, so it catches the breezes and has a view out over the vast radiant blues and greens of the lake.  But as we were eating we were joined by a crowd, a crowd of what my friend calls “beer bugs”, small black insects with little white bands across them. They don’t bite; they just intrude, onto plates, into glasses of wine, onto hair, etc.  One of us was not drinking wine (or beer) and she was not invaded. And I guess that’s the reason they’re known as beer bugs: they’re attracted by the smell of alcohol. I’ve never seen them before. Are they special to Southwestern Ontario? Very strange.

And on to some more appetizing thoughts about food and meals.  Last night my friend R made salmon fillets, lightly brushed with olive oil then cooked skin side down under the broiler for five minutes, or slightly less. They were perfect with a Petit Chablis. 

My part of the meal was a mushroom salad: sliced portobello mushrooms dragged through olive oil mixed with a little soy sauce and Thai curry paste, then grilled. (My usual pre-grill bath is oil and fish sauce, but there was no fish sauce to be had.)  Grilled mushrooms are so succulent, all meaty and tender. And then I added to them a food new to me, fine strands of kelp that look like glass noodles, now being packaged and sold by a California company. They add wonderful texture to salads, and get coated with flavour. I also put in some chopped green onion, small half-slices of local cucumber for crunch, a spritz of vinegar, a dash of sea salt, and a generous squeeze of lime.  

There was a bowl of blueberries and “canary melon”, very sweet, with a squeeze of lime, for dessert, and a wonderfully ripe and ready Camembert from Normandy alongside.

When there are appreciative flexible eaters, and with the clear air and lounging lazy ambience of a cottage on the lake, everything is so easy to make and it all tastes so good.

Back to the city today, through the bleached hot farm landscapes of this year’s drought-oppressed summer. The dawn-of-the-world promise of the golden cloud, and the silky feel of the water from this morning’s swim will carry me through the drive and the chores that lie ahead...I’m sure of it.

LIFE IN THE HEAT, DANCING & SWIMMING

Another hot night in Toronto. We're now into the second day of August, just, as midnight has struck, yet still the air is heavy and sweat starts trickling whenever I make any physical effort.

I've got no light on in the office, to keep things cooler, and doors and windows are open to catch whatever passing breeze manages to find its way here.

Tonight I walked out to Queen's Park a couple of blocks away. I'd been hearing music all afternoon and finally felt cool enough to go out. There under the huge old trees in the park was a crowd dancing and hanging as Jamaican music live on a stage, came rocking through the hot air. Lovely. I got there in time for the last three tunes, danced and danced with the crowd, and then the music was done. The crowd hung on though, buying food from the patty stands, and from the rice and plantain and fish and salad places that had been set up all day under the trees. What a luxury it is to have free music on a hot long weekend.

I had the water on in the back garden this evening trying to cool things off. Yes everything got wetter, but no, it didn't feel any cooler. I've been thinking, as I drink huge cups of water, about all the people who are fasting for Ramadan, just started at the new moon a couple of days ago. At this time of year the dyas are long, so the tenacity and endurance required of people who fast is even greater. It's a time of coming together and mindfulness, this fasting month. But I hope that those who are vulnerable to the heat take care of themselves...

I'm just starting to get back in the groove after my time away in Skowhegan. On the long drive back from the kneading conference we stopped in to visit the mill of La Milanaise, who produce the most carefully milled commercial flour around. It's all organic, and it's of wonderful quality. The mill is very close to the crossing at the Maine-Quebec border (Woburn/Coburn Gore) and Sophie, the miller's daughter, whom we'd met at the conference, had said she'd give us a tour of the mill. Thank-you Sophie - I learned a lot!

It's awe-inspiring to look at the huge sacks of flour (900 kilos each) and then the smaller 2 and 5 kilo sacks, and think of the sequence that got them there: farmers growing organic grains, who plant and harvest with enough care that the grain comes to the mill with not more than 14% moisture and passes various other quality tests; and then the mill with its machines that grind either with granite stones (for non-white wheat flour) or metal for the unbleached white flour. The granite stones are imported from California. Every month they are re-incised, sharpened you could say, and polished a little, and every year they are replaced. It seems incredible that stone can get worn that quickly.

The grain is blended before milling not after. All wheat flour is blended, a mix of higher and lower protein wheat, so that the final product is consistent. And the details of a particular flour, its protein, and ash content, and other details besides, are printed on the side of the large bags that go out to bakeries.

When you think of the care involved, five dollars for a loaf of hand-made bread baked in a wood-fired oven seems low, way too low.

After the mill we stopped in to see some old friends of mine near Knowlton, and then it was a long drive northwest to the Gatineau. What a pleasure to swim out in the dark night in the soft waters of the Gatineau River. The sky was dotted with stars. Floating on my back I could lose track of which way was up, weightless and drifitng in a star-speckled darkness...

Early next morning I walked back down to the river and found it dreamily mist-shrouded, wisps of pale cotton floating above the water and draped over the rounded hills on the other shore. I slipped into the water, still and glassy under the mist, and swam and swam, my ripples the only disturbance in the surface as far as the eye could see.

It was like an Eden, a rebirth, a miracle.

RECIPROCITY IN A WORLD OF WONDERS

The moist overcastness of today was almost a shock, as were the few spatterings of rain, since we've had nothing but clear blue skies and sunshine for almost four weeks. Yikes! It is about to be autumn, in a few hours. I'm not ready!!

With the new moon, and the momentousness of both Rosh Hashana and Eid (the end-of-Ramadan celebration) this weekend, as well as the equinox, everything feels full of meaning, a turning-point and a time to be especially attentive. Because of the new moon, on Saturday night, after a crystalline day, the sky was alive with every star possible. No wonder the ancients marvelled and studied the night sky. What could be more astonishing and miraculous? We in the modern industrialised world have other distractions and so we often miss out on the essentials. They, the ancients, lived face-to-face with the vastness of the universe every clear night. And on Saturday might it was so clear up in the lovely unlitness of rural Grey County that the Milky Way wasn't a hazy band but instead a number of distinct strands oriented south west to north east, split apart in places so that they trailed off in several ribbons toward the horizon in both directions. When have I ever seen it so clearly?

I looked and looked for the moon, the sliver of the new moon, but never found it, even though it was after 9 by then, so surely it was up?!

Perhaps, you'll say, you were hallucinating? Maybe the Milky Way wasn't so marvellous, it's just that you were in an altered state? Perhaps. But I don't think so, despite the fact that the late afternoon had been quite astonishing, with a long intense sauna at Jon and Lillian's: inside in the intense dry heat, outside into the chill of early evening air and the trees all around, back in for another even deeper and more penetrating dose of heat, the air burning up into my nostrils, and so on. Finally we all dashed for the car and drove the half mile to the river. In we went, into moving rippling water that carried us along, practically singing with exhilaration, the bottom clear, the water completely transparent, the sky equally limpid above. We waded slowly out, laughing with pleasure. My bones felt warm, my whole body too, except that my skin was sharply tingling with that "I am alive!" tingle that the best and luckiest sauna can give. Steam drifted off us as we stood in the road, the sun aimed straight down it from due west, our shadows crisp and long in the golden dust.

Later, on our way back into the city under that spangled sky, Ian and I talked about the shape of things in the house, the way Dom and Tashi and Ian share cooking and cleaning and how best to communicate about it all so everyone feels equally responsible and equally appreciated. It's about reciprocity, I think, and that seems to be a good thing to think about as we who live here at 45 degrees north hit the equilibrium point in the year and start to tilt (slide? creep?) toward winter.

Reciprocity is equal connection, balance, mutuality. When we're assured of it, we relax. When it's not there we feel resentful or angry, or we withdraw. It's not about alternating who pays for coffee each time we go out (though it can be I guess), but instead it's about loosely but clearly maintaining a sense of that balance of giving and taking in a relationship.

Sometimes there is no obvious balance. Sometimes the gift that we are given is so precious, like the gift of time in the magical post-sauna river, that there is no specific equivalent to balance it. But that's not the point. In the larger and longer arc of a long friendship, it's the sharing of wonder that becomes the precious gift, and sharing is by definition reciprocal, isn't it?

SUMMER SENSATIONS, LIFE LESSONS, AND FRIENDSHIPS

How did it get to be July 28?  Suddenly the month is almost gone, when so recently it was waiting for us, full of promise, long and juicy to contemplate.

Looking back, July seems more sodden than juicy, loaded with huge downpours and cool temperatures, green lush gardens and green unripening (unripenable???) tomatoes.  It's also been full of friends of all kinds, and with new encounters and new growth...

Last week I had eight visitors staying in the house.  There was Melissa of course, who has been here since May, visiting from Thailand to get her English fluency better and to have a good long first-time-in-North-America kind of trip.  She's nineteen, so it's all new and interesting.  She's now in New York and not due back for another week or ten days.  And then there was a large lovely contingent from Spain: our old friend Rick and his partner Astrid and their six-year-old son Mario, and then a family of four who are friends of theirs.  The mornings began with "hola!" and ended with "hasta manana!" and in between there was lots of action and conversation, embraces and laughter. 

Last Thursday we had other people over (if you're going to feed 10 you might as well feed 20, right?) for a loosely conceived supper.  I grilled some beef and then sliced it for grilled beef salad.  There was a potluck aspect, so there were several huge gren salads, lemon pudding, a ricotta tart topped with sour cherries, some stir-fried green beans and asparagus, etc etc.  We also made "pakoras":  we whisked up a batter of besan (chickpea flour) and deep-fried some zucchini blossoms (halved lengthwise, since they were huge!) and also some fresh garlic bulbs, cut lengthwise.  I added some ground roasted coriander seed to the batter (proportions are about 1 cup besan and scant 1/2 cup lukewarm water whisked in, plus 1/2 teaspoon salt and some generous amount of coriander seed, 1 to 2 teaspoons).  The peanut oil heated in the wok and then we slid in three or four battered items at a time, using a slotted spoon to turn them, then lift them out (pausing to let oil drain off).  They were crispy and delish, the garlic a real taste hit, the flowers softer and milder.  The cooking goes very quickly, and then they all get eaten just as fast!

Then on Sunday night, with the same crew from Spain, up in Grey County at Lillian and Jon's, we deep-fried pakoras again, this time on the wood stove (the wok fits into a hole on the stove so beautifully).  Ian did the frying.  We used day liles from Lillian's garden, freshly picked by her.  Some were in full bloom, some were buds, and some were the softened drooping day-after faded blooms.  They were all delish, and beautiful too.  We made a potato salad using newly dug spuds boiled, peeled, then dressed with stir-fried (in olive oil) sliced shiitakes (grown by Jon and Lillian on maple logs in the forest) and loads of chopped fresh herbs, as well as local cider vinegar.  What's not to like?  

And somehow the taste of place, in all the food, was intensely life-giving, perhaps most of all in the salad of greens that practically leapt off the plate and into the mouth, greens from Lillian's miraculously generous garden.

The hummingbirds darted around us as we ate outside on the deck surrounded by airy deciduous forest.

I had a huge appetite, because before supper I'd had a sauna with Ian and Misha in their newly built sauna house.  I had a lot of saunas in my twenties with the Puhks in the Gatineau by a lake, but that was long ago.  It was wonderful to be back again, breathing in the familiar hot wood-scented air.  I felt my bones take in the heat and melt, somehow, and my skin prickle.   Slippery with sweat, after being in, then out to cool, and then back into the heat for more, we leapt into the car for the two minute quick drive down the road to the river.  (The car windows steamed up with our heat!)  The current flows swiftly there, carries you along in its cool flow, so we played and floated, waded back upstream and floated down again.  Bliss.

But that Sunday began with another kind of miraculous encounter, not with mother nature, but with the wisdom and lovely energy of a remarkable man named Menahem Pressler.  He is famed as a pianist and as the founder of the Beaux Arts Trio, but also as an extraordinary teacher.  And that was my luck, to be able to sit in on a Master Class he gave here in Toronto at the Faculty of Music.  To hear this charming and focussed man in his mid-eighties talk about music, and guide the young pianists that morning with such clarity and insight, was an enormous privilege.  I felt there should be a tape-recorder on all the time, just to catch his comments.  

And I felt, as perhaps one does with all great teachers, that what he said about music and attitudes toward music, was also true of life.  He talked about the need for the performer to renew his or her relationship to a piece of music each time, to make it fresh and clean, a lived experience for the musician and the listener both.  "Music should sanctify us, elevate us, inspire us" he said.  His intelligence and energy, his warmth, his generosity toward the young performers, and his insistence that there be attentiveness and respect, joy and engagement, were a tonic, a lesson, an inspiration.

SWIMMING IN THE RIVER OF TIME

I feel I've been far away, but in fact I've just made a four day car trip to Ottawa, my home-town, with Dom and Tashi.  The drive is less than five hours, but was transporting.

It's mid-July, my birthday time, and I love to mark it somehow, so that later I can think, ah, yes, THAT year I was doing such-and-such... (So as I said to Dom, twenty-two years ago, I was pregnant with you and walking up the pass that is part of the circumambulation of Mount Kailas, in western Tibet, and here you are tall and grown and hopefully undamaged by those early in utero exertions!)  

This year we slept in a friend's cabin on a hill above the Gatineau River, on a chilly night (but we had sleeping bags and quilts and were comfy).  On my birthday morning I could get up early and walk down through the trees to the gleaming wide river, slip off my sweater and sarong, and step into the water.  I was bare, but warm with the remnants of sleep.  The river was warmer than the cold morning air, so it was soft and welcoming, slippery smooth on my skin.

I love swimming in the Gatineau.  It flows south into the Ottawa River at Ottawa, and its water carries some suspended clay in it, making it almost silky to the touch.  Any place that we spend our childhood has magical connections for us I think, and for me the Gatineau sure has those.  There's a before-thought kind of familiarity and welcome to all of it: the feel of the water as I first sink into it, the subtle cool scent of the air over the water, the slight ooze of the river bottom as I push off to start swimming out toward the far shore.  

I don't actually swim across the river, and have rarely done so.  It's very wide.  When I was a kid we would occasionally swim across, but only if accompanied by an adult in a rowboat, for safety, and always it seemed so far and such a marathon.  I think I'm in better shape, and also am a more confident (though not a more elegant!) swimmer, so the crossing looks less daunting to me now.  But I don't do it.  Instead I swim out then luxuriate and float and paddle and swim a little more and let myself just BE there.  Heaven.

Once back out, that birthday morning a few days ago, I wrapped myself in a towel, slipped the sweater on top, and walked over on the path to my cousin's dock.  Under it the water makes a lapping sound as little wavelets reach the rocks and shore.  I lay there in the sun, getting slowly warmed and feeling connected to and almost inside all the times I've been in that place, listening to that water.

But of course the water I heard before, all those other times, is somewhere else on the planet or in the air now, and the dock I lay on as a child has been replaced by a fresh dock with fresh planks.  As always there's that lesson about life, which can seem the same, and feels the same but not the same, feels continuous but also renewed and altered over time.

So as the river flows by, we step into it at the same spot, but into different water, and we too are different, not the same person who stepped in yesterday, or ten years ago, or fifty (fifty!!) years ago.  But inside I feel like the same person; I'm still me, aren't I?  

These are birthday thoughts, or thoughts for the new year, when we ponder life and time and change...

And so it felt entirely right that on that trip to Ottawa, apart from the pleasure of swimming, and of seeing old friends, and of having travelling time with Dom and Tashi, I also had a visit with my aunt.  She is eighty-seven now, lives in a present that is ephemeral to her, and with the past just a vague impression, so conversations are tangential and like those inside a dream state.  She now looks very like her father, my grandfather, as he did in his late eighties, especially the way her mouth shapes words as she speaks.  It's a precious glimpse of the past.  I found myself in tears almost, touched by that family connection, and, once again, by the intertwining in life of continuity and change.

THE WORLD FRESHLY CREATED

Last week was so momentous that it's hard to write about.  After all that anxiety that things would go wrong in some terrible way, I watched and cried, with millions of others, as Obama won and gave his fabulous speach on November 4 in Chicago.

The next day I flew to Charleston South Carolina for an East-West conference on the Asia-Africa connection that was put on by Trident Tech out on Seabrook Island.  Some time perhaps I will write about the details of the conference and other good things that happened on land while I was there, but for now I want to talk about rebirth. 

At dawn last Friday morning, 6 in the morning, I walked with Nancy, both of us in swimsuits and wrapped in layers of warmer clothing, out to the beach on Seabrook Island.  It was low tide, the sea a gleaming smooth silver sheet, the beach firm under our feet.  We walked west along the shore, but walked backwards a lot so we could face the glowing pearly eastern sky that slowly turned into a persimmon glow, intensely orange, gilding the silver sea.  We were looking for dolphins, and suddenly there was one, and then another, sending little breathy percussive grunts into the air as they surfaced.

I unwrapped my wool shawl and left it on the beach with my towel, then waded in, the water cold but not impossible.  I took some quick strokes, thinking I'd soon just leap back out of the water.  But then, surprise, the cold was tolerable, and so Nancy and I floated, and paddled and floated some more, carried by the current east toward the glowing sky, the dolphins' breaths and small triangular fins not far away.  

And then the birds started coming, flying westward toward us out of that glowing dawn sky, right over our heads, and low.  They were black silhouettes against the brightness, the sound of the air in their feathers, and the creak of their wings, loud and clear in the quiet dawn air.  The ducks flew in V-shaped wedges, twenty to fifty at a time.  The pelicans, large slow-beating frigates in the sky, flew in an offset line four or five at a time.  They kept coming, the birds, another wedge, a small line of pelicans, two more V's of ducks, and more still.

It was like the dawn of time, the world freshly minted, the dolphins swimming, the birds winging their way past, the light intensifying.  And two very happy women immersed in it all, unable to believe their good fortune at being a part of it.