Painting Paint

An Ojai afternoon, a matcha smoothie, sun and blue sky, an afternoon at Bart's Books, a fabulous outdoor bookstore. In the writing of this road trip, sometimes an image spurred a story and sometimes a story went looking for an image. Sometimes what might have been a great photo came out blurry, or a great story didn't have a place to fit. There were things I left out and things I put in, and the story of the journey became a journey of its own.

David Leffel says that one mistake painters make is they think they're painting an orange or a rose or a sky when really they're painting paint. We can get so caught up in our efforts to capture the likeness of an external object, the orange or the rose or the sky, that we forget we are creating something new altogether. Not an orange, but a painting of an orange made by painting paint. 

Born from a combination of your original vision (sky) and what you have to work with (earth), a new creation is right there in front of you, yet it can be so hard to see. The fear that you'll fail your original vision makes it hard to move, and is why most people give up on creating.

Again and again on this journey I discovered that my questions, whether about painting or writing or enlightenment brought me full circle, to answers that were really quite simple. What you're looking for is right in front of you. Not easy, but simple.

Ojai, California

The long and speedy drive through California led to beautiful, beloved Ojai. Two hours from my final destination in Los Angeles, it was the last stop I wanted to make. One of my favorite artists, Beatrice Wood, lived there and I wanted to be where she had been. 

I arrived just in time to be welcomed by wine and cheese hour at the Lavender Inn. Ojai is an oasis. It became my carrot-on-a-stick during a difficult internship. If you can make it halfway you can go to Ojai, if you can make it all the way you can go to Ojai. It feels like New England and Europe and Mexico all at once. I fell in love with the yoga studio there, Lulu Bandhas, and the Farmer and the Cook, where the smoothies are picked right from the trees. Flowers and fruit and sun and herbs, there's not a whole lot to do there and that's why it is perfect. 

Awe

You don't have to become something mysterious, do something yet unknown but spectacular, to fulfill God's plan for you. All you have to do is be in awe.

-Rabbi Yehoshue Karsh

Om

I heard the conch shell through the fog announcing the early morning Hanuman aarti. Shells appeared often in the places where I stayed. Maine, of course, but Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City? And now here, on the top of Mount Madonna on the California coast. The blowing of the conch shell symbolizes "Om," the Unstruck Chord.

Om is the sound of creation, the original vibration, a sound made not by striking two things together as ordinary audible sounds are made. All sounds are made by this striking this and that; a ball and a bat, water on rocks, wind on grass, feet on dirt.

This and that. How many times I had stood there in that place in between here and there, now and then, memories and moving on, city and country, laws and derrumbas, handmade and high tech, vibration and matter, responsibility and possibility, inner worlds and outer worlds, earth and sky. So many times I had stood in that place in between things, breathing into Om, the calm in eye of the storm.

As long as you think in terms of this one or that one, then you are still caught up in the world of duality. But if you can stand to live in the paradox long enough, then a transformation takes place and a new consciousness is born.  -Robert Johnson

Mount Madonna, California

I drove from the casinos and saloons of Winnemucca to an ashram at the top of Mount Madonna on the coast of California. I'd heard there was a Hanuman temple there. I first discovered Hanuman after the fire. I needed to get away from the blackened disaster and went for a weekend to Taos. I found myself at a pizza place with crayons and paper place mats and I wrote and drew feverishly about the fire. My waiter was stunned by the story and told me to go to the nearby Hanuman temple where there was a ceremony that very night in honor of Lord Shiva. I didn't know who Hanuman was, or Lord Shiva, but I could feel that I needed to go. Years later I learned that Shiva is the God of Transformation, destroying all that that is not Divine, and Hanuman is the Son of the Wind, the breath. It was a few key breaths that kept me alive during the fire.

Mount Madonna was founded by Baba Hari Dass, a yogi who took a vow of silence in 1952 and communicates by writing on a small chalkboard. Over time I'd noticed that many of the teachers whose teachings I loved had Baba Hari Dass at the source. On the mountaintop deer wandered peacefully around the temple and I rose my cup of chai high in a toast to the Pacific out in the distance.

A question from a student in "The Yellow Book, the Sayings of Baba Hari Dass."


Q. Did you start your life like us with lots of demands, and what spurred you to give it up?


A. When I was six or seven, I would feel I was inside a box of earth and sky, and I would weep.


Once I asked my mother: "Take me out of this box of earth and sky."

She said, "I can't."

Then I said, "I'm going."

The Martin Hotel

The best road food stop yet was at the Martin Hotel in Winnemucca, Nevada. It had been a very long drive across barren country that day, and by the time I got to my hotel I didn't think I had it in me for any more adventure. But I was hungry and curious and when would I ever be back in Winnemucca again anyway?

Established in 1898, The Martin Hotel serves Basque meals family style. I was seated at a long table across from another lone traveler, a man in his 60's who had taken the bus from Las Vegas to try to get a job building a pipe line. He'd been working in construction in Vegas "til everything went bust," he said. The pipeline job was 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. It was hard work but he needed the job, he told me. He was staying in a rooming house where the owner had told him about the Martin Hotel.

A couple of locals ranchers sat next to us and soon we were all drinking red wine out of small carafes and digging into communal dishes of smokey beans, tarragon carrots, garlicky red mashed potatoes, chicken marsala, and bread pudding. They loved hearing about my road trip, and one of the ranchers told me a tip for driving through Nevada. "If there's a jack rabbit in the middle of the road you just have to hit it. You'll get yourself killed if you try to swerve around it. Whatever way you swerve that stupid rabbit will turn and run right back into you." He also told us we weren't too far from the Burning Man festival. "I don't have a problem with those kids running around naked up there and doing their thing, they can do whatever they want" he said. "What I have a problem with is they kick up so much dust that when it rains, it rains mud on my house for days."

Riches

The gems of my longings in the biggest little city in the world. I stopped in Reno for a quick look around and was reminded of how the Divine is playful and truths are placed like crumbs for Hansel and Gretel in the most unexpected places, like a Jägermeister label along a river path.  

Years ago, I went on a tour of the stunning Royal Palace in Madrid, Spain. As I gazed up at an extravagant chandelier overhead, I thought about how the King probably could never have dreamed that common people, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, would one day be buying water bottles and mouse pads screen printed with his crown and crawling like ants all over his kingdom. 

The Wish-Fulfilling Jewel, the awakened mind, once understood by a rare few, is available to all of us. When the Communists invaded Tibet, the shattering of a country unexpectedly brought access to sacred teachings for the entire world. Once hidden jewels that hold infinite value. I think of Nyonindo where, for thousands of years, women hiked steep mountains just to get a glimpse of the inner holy temples from the outer edge of the forest. While today, on the internet, one inner world can be heard by the whole outer world at once.

Nevada

The border between Utah and Nevada wins for greatest contrast between states. As salty and conservative Utah gives way to Nevada's anything goes, I'm reminded of how a rubber band pulled too tight will snap in the opposite direction. As my trip comes to an end and I close my tiny treasure chest filled with things I longed to be, I wonder, do longings once attended to disappear?

Not exactly.

Most of the longings got longer. I would now love a whole summer in Maine, three months in Oaxaca, and a year at Studio Incamminati! Although it does seem to be human nature to want more and more and more, I definitely feel a deep shift from having attended to those longings on a small scale. As I look back and scroll from post to post, mile after mile, I am in awe. I did it! I really did it.


"The Wish-Fulfilling Jewel," is what the Tibetan Buddhists call the awakened mind. They  believe it is our minds that hold the remedy for all imaginable desires. And what Fatima could once only see as shards of her broken lives turned out to be pieces of the puzzle that led to her ultimate happiness.

Writing next to blue glass and shells in the window of Saint Mary's in Maine, gold flip flops on asphalt as I waited for the trolley to take me to the estate of Nelson Shanks, wandering days with charcoal and a sketchbook in New York City, time with the library, lake and family in Vermont, a ride on La Divina Concepcion deep into the heart of Santa Catarina Juquila. Attended-to-longings that, instead of disappearing, became like seeds, planted and watered. There's no way I can tell how they will grow, but I can absolutely feel that they are growing.

Great things come from a series of small things put together.   -Vincent van Gogh 

Side Roads

A road food stop in Salt Lake City before continuing on the very long drive from Wyoming to Nevada, through the salt flats of Utah. This is the loneliest road I've ever been on, I thought, while driving along Interstate 70. I looked at my road atlas and saw that state highway 50, that runs parallel to the interstate, is named "The Loneliest Road." There were no other roads around. It reminded me of this, something I wrote years ago.


I remember, after the fire, needing to drive. My car was the only thing I had left. It was clean. It could take me away.


I drove once to Madrid, New Mexico, an artsy old mining town nearby. I'd always loved that drive between here and there. I drove that day just after the fire to Madrid, New Mexico. I had time. I was here.


It was a still day in February, no one was around but the road and me. As I drove toward Madrid I became keenly aware of the side roads I had never noticed before. Turning left, turning right, I went down those roads. I had time. I was here. I took the time. I took the side roads.


It was a still day in Madrid, New Mexico. No one was around. I wandered to a shop, up the creaky steps, old wooden door slamming shut. There was a potter there, he was surprised to see me, he was watching the store for a friend. I told my story to him as I told my story to many strangers at the time, trying to make it real. I told him about the fire. I told him about the side roads.


It was funny, he told me, that I should come in on that day in February where no one was around, telling my story to him.


He had an uncle who, as a boy, drove with his father from Seattle to LA once a year to visit his grandfather there. It was his favorite thing to do, that drive with his father. They would load up on snacks and dreams and go.


As they drove that drive from Seattle to LA they passed all the side roads. They loved to laugh and dream about what might be waiting down those roads. Someday they would go there. They swore that one day they would take those side roads. Not this time but next time. When they had time, when they had time.


It's years later this potter told me. He'd lost touch with his uncle, you know how things go. Funny thing though, he'd gotten a call on this day in February when no one was around, before I came in telling my tale. It was him, his uncle who called. He was somewhere in Oregon or California, it seemed. Somewhere along the way.


He had been diagnosed with AIDS and what he was doing was driving that old drive from Seattle to LA. And what he was doing was taking the side roads. He was calling and he was taking all the side roads. He was taking his time. He was taking the side roads.

Home to Malcontents

People tell me I was brave for doing this trip alone. I think of it more as just doing what had to be done. What else can you do when you're here and want to get there? From walking the long dirt road to taking the bus from Old Gold, I learned early on that if you don't find a way, you don't get to go.  


I look at the pictures of me now heading West then and I think, Turn around! That drive and internship and job are going to be harder than you think! Stop here and marry a cowboy! Work at the bakery! All those ideas that sound good when you're not really in them. An image without the weight of gravity and bones and bills. What do you do when you find yourself in a Wild West Show unsure and alone? You have to keep going. What would giving up look like? What do you do when you don't really know?

Laramie, Wyoming

I stopped for lunch in Laramie, Wyoming. Laramie comes before Green River on the highway, but after in this story of now and then. I was curious about the Parlor Bar, but enchanted and intrigued by Madam Opals. I was dying to know what went on behind the lace curtains, my mind whirled in delight with images of Wild Western scandal and history.


Then the still, small voice within said, "Why don't you just google it?"


Oh.


So I did, and it led me right back here to blogger. Like a lasso, full circle. The intrigue of someplace far away, mysterious, and exotic brought me right back home. And Madame Opal's, once a bordello, is now a condo.

Wyoming

I was thrilled when I opened the curtain to see these views from the windows. When I asked the lady behind the desk about taking a walk on the trails, she said, "Go ahead, just mind the rattlesnakes!" I decided to pass. 

My friend Sarah and I took our first road trip was when we were twenty-four. She was moving to Oregon for graduate school and we decided to make an adventure of it. We worked as waitresses in Bar Harbor, Maine all summer long to save money to zig zag the country for five weeks. I loved the way one state changed into another and the way you could feel that shift even before the actual border arrived. 

We were surprised by the slice of the Flat Irons in Boulder and the unexpected ice in the mountains in New Mexico. We laughed at the lady in Las Cruces who thought Vermont was a city in California, and were laughed at for the way we pronounced the "J" in Jemez and the "lls" in Bernalillo. People warned us about long boring states in the Midwest, but I had never seen such open space, I found the endless fields soothing, an eraser for eyes that are constantly searching.

Mornings were full of energy and curiosity but in the late afternoon, as day shifted into night, we would grow quiet. Things were changing, an island summer and road adventure were shifting into career ambition. Where were we going? We were, of course, going to Madison or Boulder or Tucson, but where were we going? We would be twenty-five in a year and we couldn't possibly picture it. We just looked straight ahead and kept on driving that road between responsibility and possibility.