Alchemy

The Pacific Northwest is a glorious place to live. Lush wetness, moss, frequent rain and cool winds. Just before dusk today, I was out walking and saw these mosses turning light to gold, and suddenly I was five years old again, under the crabapple tree in a world where time lay before me in endless ribbons of moss on stone, my companion an aging basset hound named Jack. I carry him in my heart.

The weekend was splendid. Time with Sue, the inspiring concert on Saturday; Sunday we went to the symphony with Sue’s son Shawn and heard the genius of Hannu Lintu conducting Copland, Barber, and Sibelius. Lintu's work reminds me of a talk by Seiji Ozawa I heard years ago: the power of music is the silence between the notes. Lintu makes sublime use of silence. 

Before we parted, Sue and I watched a moving documentary about intersex people, made by a Romanian production team in South Africa. Most of the documentary is in English and all has subtitles, but I got to hear again the soft, melodic language of Sesotho, the mother tongue of my daughters, a language I once could speak but now have mostly lost. I watched it twice and may watch it a third time, it is so artfully put together, though I question its class bias. It's available in the USA through the Point of View series on public television (PBS). 

Art makes survival possible in this time of fascism, and this place where I live makes sublime use of moss.