Jelisava

Pirate stronghold and imperial city

Paulo arrived with a cardboard box of treasures from another time and place. When I saw the color and pattern of the ceramic (it took a minute to register that it was an ashtray; oh how times have changed), I thought Morocco! Spelled out along the rim of the tray were the words "Hotel" "Rabat" "Tour-Hassan" / presumably abducted from Rabat, once known as a pirate stronghold and an imperial city, now the capital of Morocco / Jan. 2010

The newscast says that they've reached a compromise on taxing health care plans and that an individual paying $8,500 a year has a “gold-plated” health insurance policy. Excuse me? Since when is there a correlation between what health insurance costs and the benefits that you get? Not in any of the plans that are available to me. I am only $868 away from that number — and I'll probably be there next year. OK. I just read a story about this at the NYTimes. It mentions “employer-sponsored” insurance plans. Does that mean it doesn't include me since I pay for it all myself? Just like everything else in this health care bill nothing is clear and: “Congressional leaders have been careful to stress that nothing is agreed on in the health care talks until everything is agreed on.” Great. Maybe I should take up smoking and imagine myself sitting under the Moorish arches and tile work on the patio cafe at the La Tour Hassan Hotel. Perhaps that will calm my nerves?

On your way

On the boathouse at dusk / Mountain House / Sept. 2009

“If you get far enough away
          you'll be on your way back home.”

~ Tom Waits

The everyday practice

Late summer afternoon / Beach Haven, NJ / August 2009

“The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete
acceptance and openness
to all situations and emotions.

And to all people — experiencing everything totally without reservations
and blockages, so that one never
withdraws or centralizes onto oneself.”

~ an excerpt from the Maha Atia text

The idea of movement

Katica and Mitza / Sv. Vid, Croatia / May 2005

“The idea of movement was more important than actually going somewhere.”

~ Persis M. Karim writing in her story Paris Rendez-vous

Life is a mystery

Cafes at night in a livable city / Ljubljana, Slovenia / May 2005

Cleaning off my desk trying to make some space in my mind and calm the demons I find a scrap of paper that says: A mystery is not the same as a puzzle.

Light up the silence

Guatemalan weaving on my christmas tree helps send K on her way to Guatemala / Jan 2009

The night begins,
when the moon
—Grandmother of the villages—
comes out with her lime-white candle
to light up the silence.

The darkness
hides in the canyons,
the small birds
roll up their songs
and the trees
lie on their own shadows.

The grandmother
who hasn’t slept for centuries
sinks
into the eyes of the night.

~ the grandmother by Guatemalan poet Humberto Ak'abal

His poems “speak for a people still close to the earth, whose language allows us to enter a world that still recognizes the divine aliveness of nature.”

Throw open the windows

A garden on the windowsills / Ljubljana, Slovenia / May 2005

AMAZEMENT
O what daybreak in the windows! Cannons salute.
The basket boat of Moses floats down the green Nile.
Standing immobile in the air, we fly over flowers:
Lovely carnations and tulips placed on long low tables.
Heard too are hunting horns exclaiming hallali.
Innumerable and boundless substances of the Earth:
Scent of thyme, hue of fir, white frost, dances of cranes.
And everything simultaneous. And probably eternal.
Unseen, unheard, yet it was.
Unexpressed by strings or tongues, yet it will be.
Raspberry ice cream, we melt in the sky.

~ Czeslaw Milosz

A line of continuity

Traveling shoes / Mountain House / Aug. 2008

AFTER TRAVELING
How strange life is! How incomprehensible! As if I returned from it as from a long journey and tried to remember where I had been and what I had done. I can't quite manage it, and the most difficult part is trying to see myself there. I had intentions, motivations. I made decisions, performed acts. Yet from here that man seems so irrational and absurd. As if he did not act, but was activated by forces that made use of him. For, after all, I wrote many books, here they are, and there he is; how to trace between him and them a line of continuity?

~ poet Czeslaw Milosz

Observations

Me looking down and observing the woman looking down and observing / Dubrovnik, Croatia / June 2001

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Steps like a smooth dance floor

A city that sits on the edge of the sea filled with steps like a smooth dance floor / Dubrovnik, Croatia / June 2001

“The city stopped at the point of my pen. And power multiplied like steps on a smooth dance floor. And the evening’s necklace, like eyes strung on the track of the dark, began to rustle.
    Meshed summers behind the doors of houses and inhabitants from quiet shadows sensed this prismatic joy in the bready warmth of the sun and deaf peace of the rain.
    It happened at a troubled hour when all that is red pales, when all that is yellow quiets, when every shadow rests on the oars and sails, and when a darkened track hovers over all, for no clear reason.
    And I recognised at once that condensation of violet. Of course I did: in place of the edge of the sky a city had stopped at the point of my pen.
    And I watch it, and I watch myself, standing here at the edge of the table, and my gaze is a border of lights and of angles, intricate and lazy, because it belongs to me; while  roofs and towers come down the darkened corridor, islands and seas come, sounds and city-squares come. While I go by.”

~ Stairway by Croatian poet Gordana Benic