Saying Goodbye...

This is not a day I have been looking forward to. Later this morning, we have to say goodbye to George...


... and leave him in Laguna with his caretaker, Lisa, and her dog Chazzie, his chum, while we head north to Los Angeles to pack and get ready for our long European journey. It is not easy to say goodbye to George. He is such a dependent, loving, trusting little cuss, and an important part of our lives. We get very much attached to these animals who entrust us with their lives and offer us in return their extraordinary loyalty, their companionship, and their love.

Harder still, perhaps, to say goodbye to George because I find it harder than ever, these days, to leave at all. I'm also very much attached to my routine and it gets no easier, with age, to change it. The discomforts and perils of travel are bad enough in themselves, but I have grown exceedingly (too?) comfortable with the way I live my life here at home. In concert with Ellie, I have designed it and worked for it in accordance with my desires and needs. The familiarity of our daily life brings with it a kind of ease that is hard to sacrifice, even for the more exotic pleasures of travel.

Still, we are committed, the airplane tickets purchased, the visa (for Russia) stamped inside our passports, the hotel reservations made and the deposits paid. We leave tomorrow morning, and will be back around June 10. My posts in The Buddha Diaries, assuming I can make the time to write, given a busy travel schedule and assuming that internet connection is inexpensively available at most destinations these days, will follow our journey, first to England for a couple of days, then on to Finland and Russia for a ten-day tour before returning to England for another week with family.

I hope you'll join me on the trip. I won't be reading elsewhere as assiduously as I usually do, and will miss the daily adventure of that invitation into other people's joys and tribulations here in the blogosphere. But it would drive me crazy to attempt to check in with everyone AND keep up with the travel schedule AND post my own adventures, so I'm choosing to make that determination in advance. And if my own entries are sporadic, well, so be it. The one thing I don't need to pile on to everything else involved in going away is that absurd, sometimes obsessive sense of obligation to my writing. Let it be a good exercise in learning to let go.

May we all find true happiness in our lives...

Oh, and...

... while we're at it, it pays to take a moment to look at these wonderful photographs from Africa by the Spanish photographer Ana Yturralde on her whimsically entitled blog, Where My Owl Flies Free and the Lion Roars Wild. For those of us who know little of the continent besides what we read in the press and see on our television screens, these portraits provide and intimate and dimensionally human view of her subjects, and her notes provide an interesting context. Well worth the visit. I found Ana in the comments at I AM KATIA.

The Buddha Diaries Travels--and Comes Home...

... to the blogosphere.

I find these days that there are many things that are hard about traveling. Many joys, too, of course. But one of the hard things is leaving, and another is coming home. I come home with the hope of finding a still point, where the traveling stops, somewhere the spirit finds a familiar place to rest and take its ease.

All of which is a part of my experience--the good part. The bad part is finding a mountainous stack of mail to be sorted, bills to be paid, junk mail to be thrown out. It's trying to play catch-up with dozens of neglected emails, getting back to jobs that were left unfinished, tying up the loose ends of the journey, finding a place for all those airline stubs and credit card receipts, the brochures you've picked up along the way and now can't quite bring yourself to discard because they may secrete some important piece of evidence that your memory will surely lose by the time you come to need it. It's finding the house in small but annoying states of disarray, things not there where you're absolutely sure you left them, light bulbs mysteriously blown in your absence and needing replacement, that little pile of termite droppings you had never noticed in the past...

And yes, the neglected tasks you like to think of as your "work." I have fallen far behind in my commitments, and find myself faced with the prospect of scrambling to fulfill the most essential and letting go of those "shoulds" the plague the conscience. While traveling, even though I managed to keep up with the writing of these pages, I neglected my not-quite-daily rounds of other blogs, the community of like-minded scribblers whose efforts are a constant source of surprising information, humanity, and fun.

I dove back into the blogosphere for a while yesterday and surfaced, as usual, with some pearls. Like Primordial Blog, whose subtitle is the delightfully Bushian "Making the World a Little Less Stupider." Nothing less Bushy than this blog, however, which is the brain-child of a reformed "BibleThumper and Young Earth Creationist"--now, thankfully for the rest of us, "a proud member of the reality-based community." Try this entry for a taste of post-religious fervor.

For a more than slightly salacious---but literate! and witty!--take on life, visit the irrepressible Glamourpuss at The Pole Affair. This pole-dancer/trapeze artist does... er, swing! And how's this for an astutely-phrased oedipal insight: "School was a complicated place for me. My father expected me to do better than everybody else, except him. " Puss falls a lot, it seems, but is always ready to bounce back and learn. Her other blog is the surprisingly lyrical Clairvoyance.

And finally, for today, there's The Dragon's Eye, where you'll have fun, as I did, with Kiyotoe, who has a sharp eye for a photograph with a story to tell--and tells his own story to accompany it in a few funny, sometimes poignant, always precise words.

I wouldn't call these exactly Buddhist blogs. But bring a Buddhist mind to them and I think you'll be surprised how much they have to teach.

"The Story of the Weeping Camel"

Enough of politics for the moment. Let's talk movies. Ellie and I Netflixed "The Story of the Weeping Camel" last week and enjoyed it immensely. What a treat! It's not about camels. Well, on partly. Mostly it's about this extraordinary Mongolian family of sheep- and goat-herders in the Gobi desert, who live in circumstances that we Americans, with our material well-being and our creature comforts, can scarcely imagine. Here's their little nest of yurts...


(is that the right term for these circular dwellings put together out of skins and wooden supports and camel-hair ropes?) in an environment as remote inhospitable as any I could dream of. And yet the interior is rich with carpets, tapestries, and all kinds of beautifully


made utilitarian artifacts and religious objects. Here, as you see, the family gather over tea, four generations of them so far as I could tell, from ancient, hoary great-grandparents to sweet-faced children. I imagine--what else can I do?--that they are not poor by the standards of their own society. They have plenty of livestock and can afford, so it seems at the end, a black and white television set with a satellite dish outside their home. Is this a suggestion, I wonder, at the end of the film, of the dangers inherent in the encroachment of technology on what must be one of the last enclaves of its kind on earth? Their distant neighbors in "town", a long camel's ride from their encampment, have motorcycles, cars, trucks, computer games...

Well, now, the story concerns the difficult birth of a white calf to one of their camels, who soon rejects his every advance to her, whether for food or affection. She turns him away, sulkily, and refuses the family's patient and loving efforts to bring mother and calf together. A heartless mom, indeed. In desperation, the family finally settle on a remedy and send their two young sons off on camel-back to the big city in search of a skilled musician! Just the thing to cure an an emotionally deficient camel! When he arrives on the scene, he readily grasps the situation and woos the mother camel with his two-stringed instrument,


until she finally weakens and allows her calf to suckle. Her tears at the eventual reunion, we suppose, are of repentance for her earlier intransigeance. A touching scene, for those of us who have soft hearts for other species and tend to humanize them. Here they are, reunited:


The wonderful part about this movie, though, is not the sentimental "story" at the heart of it, but rather the humanity of the people around its edges. They remind us that we are pleased to call our "civilization" has cost us dearly in terms of our relationship with the earth that nurtures us, with our fellow beings--both animal and human--and with that great, mysterious spirit that informs it all. Where we are scattered, individualistic, ego-centric, the people we meet in this film share a powerful bond of common interest: call it survival, call it love. They share everything. And the hardship of their lives serves to give them a strength and wisdom and clarity of purpose that is hard to find in our society, while the paucity of material goods provides little room for selfishness or greed. It's a film that has much to offer in understanding the best about our human species, along with a great deal of sadness that the last of this wisdom is so rapidly giving way to "progress."

This England….

I’ve been thinking a bit more about my brief, weekend visit to England, the country of my birth. Forget the stereotypes: I ate well, everyone I met was warm and friendly to a fault, and the sun shone happily throughout my visit—though I’ll admit I brought that with me from California.

As those who have been following The Buddha Diaries know, I was in the Cotswolds—ferried there from Heathrow on my arrival by my sister and her generous friend, and returning to the airport four days later on the early morning bus from Cirencester—and saw nothing but this small corner of the country with its rolling hills and its villages of beautiful stone cottages whose exterior, at least, has nobly withstood the test of centuries. Not having been in England in the winter time for many years, I was struck by the pervasive silvery pallor of the light, and by the still green hills contrasting with the wonderful, intricately skeletal outlines of the trees and the pale blue of the sky. Early morning, there was frost on the ground. And everywhere, the birds sang.

How much of this I have in the bloodstream and the long, often all too narrow avenues of memory! The countryside sang to me, like the birds, and its song plucked at responsive chords somewhere deep within—call it heart, call it soul, call it consciousness… And I realized that in America I do live the life of an exile. I have made my life in this adopted country for now nearly half a century, and am grateful for all the fulfillment those forty-plus years have brought my way. And yet… I recognize that I am at heart an exile.

With the current election campaign so much in my thoughts before I left—I flew out on the Wednesday following “Super Tuesday”—I had been hoping to get some perspective on America from across the pond. As it turned out, however, I heard barely a word about Obama, Clinton, McCain or Huckabee, and the enquiries I had planned to make seemed somehow, well… irrelevant. No question but that my former fellow-countrymen—those who ventured any opinion at all—are looking forward to the exeunt omnia of Bush and his gang who couldn’t shoot straight, and to the return of America to the community of nations. But they have, as they say, their own fish to fry. The newspapers I saw, and the television new reports, paid scant attention to the American presidential election. Of far greater interest and concern was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s quickly infamous gaffe about sharia law.

There is a civility, I think, still evident in English life. And by that I mean not just good manners, that dreaded “politeness” that threatens to stifle the kind of intimacy we value—perhaps over-value—this side of the Atlantic. I mean a sense of civic responsibility, a respect for others that is in some way structured into the history and the social life of the country. It’s the kind of civility that takes, for example, universal health care (socialized medicine!) as a given; that provides non-grudging care for the elderly and the destitute and schools for the young and transportation systems that make it relatively easy to get around; that recognizes the importance of a cultural life. All those things, in a word, that we “taxpayers” here in America fight so hard to avoid having to pay for with “our money.”

And of course things are not perfect over there. Of course there are those who get left behind, there are the horror stories about those who slip between the interstices of the safety net. But there is nonetheless a general understanding, I think, and a general consensus that any human society is a complex, constantly changing organism, and that each part of it must bear a certain responsibility for carrying its fair share of the common load.

Such are the thoughts, anyway, that I brought back with me from my lightning visit “home.” I could, of course, be perversely mistaken. I could be immersing myself in a romantic nostalgia for a place that never really was. But I like to think I wasn’t.

A Walk in the Country

Sunday morning, my sister and I took a long walk out into the country, starting from her house. Another beautiful day. Having started out in the cold with my winter voat, I gradually had to shed and carry as the day warmed up. Here's some of our route:







And on the return from our furthest point out, we took the mile-long avenue leading back into the town:






On our return, we stopped to buy a newspaper at W.H.Smith (I noted that he used to have "& Sons") and enjoy a cop of coffee with one of those Garibaldi cookies we used to call, as children, "squashed flies"--because of the dark raisins squashed inside. Then home for a quiet afternoon, a cup of tea, and time to pack before leftover Indian dinner on trays in front of the TV, to watch the BAFTA Awards show (the British version of the Oscars.)

A rather easy journey home, with a very early (5:55AM) start at the bus stop, and a long coach ride through frosty fields and hillsides with a low mist hugging the ground and the icy pools along the way. Heathrow was busy, but I managed a bit of duty-free shopping (a handful of cigars for my Sunday afternoons, a cashmere scarf from Harrods for Ellie) and a good English breakfast. And finally the long flight over the Atlantic and the frozen tundras of northern Canada, with Ellie to greet me at the airport.

The freeways of Los Angeles, I have to say, seemed a very long way from the Cotswolds!

Cirencester (cont'd)

The good citizens of Cirencester had reason to be grateful to me, yesterday, for having brought with me another day of California sunshine. It was a truly gorgeous day, barely a cloud to be seen. But quite nippy, as we say hereabouts.

We started out taking Hugo to his drama class. Here's Hugo:



He's an actor:



No kidding. He performed a couple of pieces for us on my first night in town--including a tricky Shakespeare piece--and there's not doubt about the talent. And even though he's only ten, there's not doubt about the intention and the real dedication. And this is not just grand-avuncular pride! He's off to London today, auditioning for a rare place in a dedicated drama school. Wish him luck!

Then on to the Brewery Arts building, just re-opening after a major remodel with a fine show of Midland crafts and a good number of artists' studios. We paused for coffee at the new restaurant, where the staff were obviously green and underprepared for the large numbers of people who showd up for the occasion. But we managed to accept the delays with relative good nature, and enjoyed a good talk with Charlotte and Richard as we waited.

A pleasant lunch at home, then off to a wonderful farmer's market, just outside of town, where they sell all kinds of home-grown, organic goods--including homegrown lamb and pork from the farm--along with a wide variety of other organic groceries and household wares.

Here's my sister, Flora, by the way:



Good-looking family, no?

Back in town, we took a brief rest before returning for a stroll around the still-crowded shopping streets, stopping here and there for a visit with one of Flora's many friends. Followed by a quiet evening at home, with a delicious take-out Indian meal and an hour of entertaining British TV.

Flora's Birthday

What a wonderful day in the Cotswolds, startimg out with the cold grey-silver light of the English winter, and leading to an afternoon of bright, cool sunshine. Could not have wished for better weather, despite the low temperature--well, low for a Californian. But then it has been unusually cool in California of late.

Hugo had spent the night at his grandmother's, so the first thing--after a good bowl of porridge (with fresh, raw ginger--a surprise! Something I should add to my repertoire!)--was to get him off to school. He chose recently to switch from the big school in town to a local village school way out in the country, in a tiny place called Sapperton. Here are Flora and Hugo on the way to school...



and here is Sapperton, nestled in a lovely valley...



After dropping Hugo off at school, we stopped by the local church, where we admired the wood work of the pews...



and the lichen and snowdrops outside...



... then took a fortuitous wrong turn and drove back through more lovely countryside...



... to Cirencester.

I spent a little while trying to get used to Flora's PC, to get the blog posted and download some pictures, and was rescued with the latter task by Charlotte's (Flora's daughter, Hugo's mother)friend Richard. I can now, as you see, post some pictures with my narrative.

Late morning, Flora and I walked into the town center,




where she did some shopping at the market while I investigated the local antiques fair (sorry, Ellie, nothing caught my eye!) Time for coffee, then. We found a pleasant coffee shop and were surprised, while enjoying our warm drinks and a shared slice of chocolate chip cake, to find Charlotte and Richard peering in through the window next to us. They are researching coffee prices for the arts center, due to open Saturday, so we went on with them to yet another coffee stop



before heading home for a light lunch or soup and cheese. In the afternoon, Flora drove me out to the countryside again for a truly wonderful tour of some Cotswold villages that I'd never visited before, off the beaten tourist track, without the usual ice cream and souvenir shops. Here's some views...








Lovely villages with lovely names... Winstone, Duntisbourne Abbots, Middle Duntisbourne, Duntisbourne Rouse, Elkstone. And lovely churches, some dating from Saxon times, others Norman and Gothic, amazing, beautiful testimony to the history of this part of the world. Here are some of them...










Oh, here's one where Charles was there before us. Prince Charles, that is...



And back to Cirencester through these gorgeous lanes...





That's all I have time for at the moment. We went out for a birthday dinner at a Chinese restaurant with the improbable name of Mayflower, where we ate well and enjoyed a very pleasant bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc. You'll be relieved to hear that I forgot my camera. Collapsed on the soaf before ten o'clock, and went up to bed shortly thereafter.

In Cirencester

Well, here I am, waking up at five in the morning at my sister Flora's house in Cirencester, England. It never fails to seem somewhat miraculous to me, to start in one part of the globe one morning and wake up thousands of miles elsewhere the next. It's a small planet, these days, and increasingly fragile, as we all now know. Cna't help wondering, can you, how much your jaunt across the globe contributed to its pollution.

But this time it was worth it. Today is my sister's birthday--an occasion we have not celebrated together since we were very small children. Flora was always away at school for her birthday after those first few birthdays, and boarding school lasted for both of us until we were eighteen, when we started to go our separate ways. It does feel like a sad reflection on the way we were brought up, brother and sister scarcely knowing each other because our parents deemed that kind of education (I think we both thought of it as torture) to be more important than our family life. We came together three times a year: two weeks at Christmas, two weeks at Easter, and a month in August. That was it. Then Flora, one and a half years my senior, went off to Africa for a while, and took a job on the high seas, traveling on the Queen Mary and other cunard liners to New York and back... then lived in London; all while I was at Cambridge, and soon after off to Germany, first, then over the Atlantic, where I have spent all my years since my early twenties.

So there has not been much brother and sister time, and now that we're getting on (just a bit) in years, it seemed like the best gift I could give us both was a few short days together. The flight was relatively easy. I had managed to upgrade my ticket to business class, which made it that much easier. The bigger seats made it it possible to grab at least a couple of hours of slumber--though I was annoyed that, having specifically requested and in fact booked an aisle seat, I had been moved to the window--making it virtually impossible to get out to the "lavatory," as they like to call it, or to stretch one's legs. It was also a good decision to carry on my bag: getting through immigration and customs was that much easier, ahead of the crowd.

Flora picked me up at Heathrow with her friend, Marigold, who graciously drove us back to Cirencester from the airport. Very easy, very comfortable. And Flora had cooked up a wonderful, warming soup for lunch, along with a bite of cheese. After a quick nap, I felt refreshed and ready to go when my ten-year-old great-nephew Hugo (have I got that right, my sister's daughter's son?) arrived, and we ventured out into the town to buy shoes (for Hugo) before wandering on, he and I, to a bookshop, where I wanted to catch up with my delinquent gift-giving (he found three books by authors who arrived long after my departure from these hallowed shores.) And on, we guys, leaving my sister behind, to Boots to find some corn plasters (for me) and a coffee shop, where we indulged in a hot chocolate (Hugo) and a cup of English tea (me) and a very sweet hour of guy talk.

Dinner at home, at Flora's--a delicious lamb roast with various mashed potatoes, vegetables and mint sauce, with a nice bottle of Beaujolais, and for dessert, delicious pears prepared with wine, ginger, and citrus zest. After which I pretty much collapsed and went to sleep three times in front of the TV before having the good sense to get myself up to bed.

New York City: the Last Day

I'm now two days behind and playing catch-up. Looking out over the Hollywood Hills from where I sit at my desk, with a small breeze rising and the first glow of the sunrise yet to touch the city with its glow, I find it hard to get back to the constant flow of restless energy and the chill in the air of New York City. Ah, here comes the sun this minute, catching the windows on the slopes of the hills with the glint of gold...

New York, then. Sunday. Sunshine... We were delighted, leaving our small apartment for a newspaper and coffee run, to walk out into a beautiful, crisp fall day, perfect for the celebration of our anniversary. The sunshine felt like a special blessing after two days of cloudy skies and rain. We had booked matinee theater tickets for the afternoon, and were rather glad to hear that the show had been canceled due to a stage hands' strike: we would be able to enjoy the day out in the fresh air instead.

A subway ride up to Columbus Circle, and a lovely walk through Central Park up to the Natural History Museum.



The park was glorious, at its best--though we were surprised at how green the trees had remained, this far into the fall. That's global warming for you, I guess. Great crowds of families with children, strolling, cyclists, roller bladers, joggers... waves of them flowing toward us and passing us constantly from behind. We left the park at 77th Street and made our way up to 79th, where we had been invited for Sunday brunch by our friend Victoria, whose family had been theater friends with Ellie's family since the 1930s, and whose mother had for many years welcomed us to stay in her apartment on our vistis to New York City. Also on hand, Ellie's nephew, Danny, of whom we see too little.

So, lox, sturgeon, cream cheese, bagels, coffee... and good conversation. A true pleasure.

After brunch, we summoned our remaining energy and strode across the park to the Met--one of the most amazing places on this planet for anyone interested in art, archeology, anthropology, the history of human culture and the products of the human imagination. We started off in ancient Greece and Rome--a whole new installation--and were once more stunned by what those forebears of our Western civilzation achieved in marble, clay, and other media.



Here's the new central atrium for that period...



and the four graces...



Count 'em! We wandered on through Africa and Mexico, pausing here and there to admire what was once called "primitve" art--that now seems so sophisticated in its breadth of understanding of the universe and man's place in it. And could not resist a tour of the modern and contemporary galleries. Here's a big David Hockney...



...with myself posed carefully to obscure your view of it. (I earned the right, I think. I wrote the Abbeville Modern Masters book on Hockney.) I often wonder, in a place like the Met, how our modern and contemporary art will stand comparison with that of ancient Greece and Rome or, say, the Renaissance. Or the Baroque...



Such marvelous things they made! How much of what has been made in the 20th and 21st centuries will look as good five hundred years from now?

Well, it's an imponderable question, really, but my mind seems to like to play with it--usually, I have to confess, in disfavor of our own time. We left the Met at closing time and walked back down Fifth Avenue in the gathering darkness--distracted momentarily by the work of the window dressers at Bergdorf Goodman, preparing far too early for the Christmas season.



I hate to get commercial here, but they were doing a beautiful job--very Baroque--if not Rococo.

We enjoyed an extravagant anniversary dinner at Estiatorio Milos Restaurant in midtown, with lofty ceilings, excellent service and cuisine, and a good wine. Here we are...



...barely the worse for wear, it seems, for all our New York exertions. We ended our day and our stay in New York, fittingly, amongst the elbowing crowds and the garish lights of Times Square, and took the subway south to our temporary digs.



And finally, Monday morning, breakfast, apartment cleaning, and a taxi ride out to JFK. A surprisingly easy passage through ticketing and security, an okay airport lunch, and a long flight back to Los Angeles--with an enormous neighbor who spilled over into a good half of my seat. Ah well. A good thing I have learned to live through these experiences with at least a small measure of equanimity.