Beatrice Wood

I don't know when I first heard about Beatrice Wood, but I remember that when I did hear of her I felt like I already knew her. We have similar last names, and my grandmother's name was Beatrice. I love her drawings and the ceramics she is famous for, but more than anything I love the way she lived her life. She lived to be 105 years old, and said her last 25 years were her most productive as an artist. She wrote this in the opening of her autobiography, titled "I Shock Myself."
 

For a long time I hesitated writing about my life. For the mind is tricky, colors with infinite subtlety the ramifications of any act. In the early part of my life, it is as if I made nothing but mistakes. I am convinced we would not be on this earth, if we did not make mistakes; only through them do we learn. But through the bad I was always battling for the light. "No" may be the most important word in the English language. Now, near the end of my days, it falls glibly from my tongue. Much protected in childhood, I wanted to know what the world was like, willing to pay any price to understand humanity. I paid the price.

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."