In the still air - Gloria muses

Original art by Nancy Orme Mysak.

In rare times, when the sea winds stalled and shore birds waded trance-like in the shallow film of ocean on sand, in the trees of Billington's Cove, the warblers and trillers could be heard.  Avian song, not shrieking, not squawking, felt so pastoral, so English novel, so inland, that Gloria imagined she could see herself glide over a forest path opening onto a wildflower-spotted meadow, her floral cotton lawn skirt a classic Liberty of London print, her picnic hamper bearing a feast for body and spirit.

Rather than wishing for it to be otherwise, Gloria relished the variables that influenced her menu.  Weather was always a factor, a song that played in her head when she woke up, a color that appeared as though spotlit, the shape of a cloud, a dream, a memory, stillness or birdsong, mood, all had ways of dictating or at least suggesting what would most please her customers that day.  And what would please them would also please her with anticipation and diving into her tasks.  The spontaneous response to life was part of Gloria's works in progress.  She was unlearning ancient habits, the belt-AND-suspenders approach to days so planned and prepared for they lost all mystery.  A change of such magnitude felt like a series of chapters, rites of initiation, into the arcane art of living by intuition.  Its call was so insistent, its spell so magnetic, she might leave her house without shoes or dressed only in a slip, no longer reliably mindful of what she once thought was absolute.  How, she wondered, could days be as disorienting as the blindfolded spin of Pin the Tail on the Donkey yet leave her with no fear of stumbling.

"where closed human understanding is pried open by fate"

Navajo storyteller doll.

Thomas Moore on stories from The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life:

"Themes are interventions of providence that make an opening through which life can be born again and again, and the many stories with their many themes keep us aware of the liminality of everyday experience, the threshold where the human and the divine converse, or where closed human understanding is pried open by fate.  It is at this very point of convergence that enchantment is born, for our stories grasp and contain the mystery of that wonder of divine incarnation that gives our lives purpose, meaning, and value beyond all personal, human capacity."

and this:

"We are all bundles of stories that are interlaced, embedded in each other, and connected to stories of greater scope.  One story, even an autobiographical one, only hints at other stories that could be told."

Finally:

"The enchantment of a story lies in its capacity to take us away from the rules, expectations, physical laws and moral requirements of actual life, and that is why the best stories usually betray an influence of mythology, fairy tale, sacred parable, or some form of magic.  A good story is like a wand brushing against the mind, sending it into trance, teaching it lessons from another land, beyond East and West, or from a golden time before and outside this realm of fact and history." 

Butter to the rescue - further Gloria

Cover art from Josephine Tey's The Singing Sands, illustration by Harry Bliss.

Last night while sifting through books, a frequent activity here in the house of teetering piles, I was startled to see The Reading Man with a hat he would never have chosen looking back at me from the cover of a Josephine Tey mystery I read last year.  The lesson:  do not underestimate the power of an image to establish a base in the mind and begin sending out scouting parties to see what may be possible.  And here I thought he was, at least in part, my creation.  I admit the reading and Noel Coward are real.

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If only life could be belled like a cat to let you know when it was about to pounce.  None of that soft creeping in kung fu shoes.  Had it not been for the children's nature program and the moments she paused to watch about Galapagos tortoises, Gloria might not have had the words and pictures so near to connect her unusual state of being mysteriously uncomfortable with sensing herself shell-less in an inhospitable clime.  The serenity she found in baking, a task she could begin in moments, felt as though a portion of the balance had been embezzled, leaving her with not quite enough.  Where there should have been the kitchen's morning calm, there seemed to be someone swinging the ferris wheel seat above her, behavior that made her nervous as a child, trouble to come signaled by the dropped flip-flop that usually bounced off her head on its way to the ground.  Gloria's aversion to crowds amid sawdust and forms of forced public hilarity had only grown over time.  What, she wondered, had drawn her to, as it was now called, the hospitality industry?  Oh, that's right, she thought, straightening her hair where the non-existent flip-flop had made its imaginary first landing, the magic born of effort and heat and butter and flour and sugar and eggs and the people who were, however mildly, transformed by eating them.  Of course.  The fragrance of anything being cooked with butter  is one of the greater (as opposed to lesser) spells, her discomfort enigma was, for now, gone.

Why I love martial arts movies

This is Tony Jaa, who does all his own stunts - no CGI - in Ong-Bak The Thai Warrior, with a review here.  While the film is given 2 1/2 stars out of 4 here, Netflix gives it, I think more appropriately, almost 5 out of 5.

Over the past weekend, we watched three martial arts pictures, including the Indonesian Merantau, the first mention of which my son found at outlawvern.com, home of Vern, the Outlaw Critic and also home of Badass Cinema.  Of his 2006 Badass 100 titles, I, not to mention my son, have seen, if not all, certainly a lot.   This is how we roll when I'm not stamping or pondering or describing The Reading Man's PTSD.

Our third recent viewing, another Thai production, was Raging Phoenix.

Here are some of the reasons why I love martial arts movies.  It began as a shared adventure with my son after his father left.

He bought a book about Hong Kong action cinema - John Woo and others -  started reading it to me in the car on the way home.  We began to track down as many of the mentioned titles as we could.  While not all specifically martial arts, it was a new world and a place to begin.  There were themes of ghosts, revenge, myth, might, honor, valor and a lot of bad-ass-ness.  We have a Bruce Lee poster in the living room.

I find the action involving as it is real, actual skill and training being practiced there on the screen, discipline to be admired and appreciated.

How we found our way back to this genre last week was the result of trying to watch a Gillian Anderson mini-series which sounded okay and turned out to be yet another sad depiction of a serial killer.  I will not watch another underwear fetishist/psychopath and think of it as entertainment.  Correction:  I will not watch another underwear fetishist or fetishist of any kind/psychopath and think of it as skilled storytelling.  It is a cheap and lazy device.  Happily, our Netflix queue, thanks to Vern's recommendations over time, held other choices.

We were both flattened by whatever drains on psychic and other energies had hold of us and wanted to be transported, to other ways of being, to other locales.  The three movies we saw, on three separate nights, each followed by a new episode of Arrested Development, depicted, variously, commitment to tradition, values of honor, family and community above self, anti-materialism - not necessarily the intention but certainly the result - courage, physical and mental strength, focus, spiritual practices - lives with a strong spiritual component - and dazzling feats of skill. And attractive, appealing lead characters.  Always a plus.

Whether it is Jackie Chan, Tony Jaa, Jet Li, Iko Uwais, Gordon Liu, whether it is kung-fu (Shaolin and other varieties), Muay-Thai, drunken boxing, karate, Akira Kurosawa directing Toshiro Mifune's ronin (who undertook the most dangerous stunts himself), JeeJa Yanin playing an autistic woman with powerful martial arts skills in Chocolate, or a Quentin Tarantino-sponsored festival of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies rarely, if ever, seen in America, it is all Junior Mints mixed with the hot, fresh popcorn.  These pictures - action and stories - transport me, take me out of myself and restore proportion.  The village scene at the end of Ong-Bak, in which Tony Jaa demonstrates that his love of elephants is as great as his passion for martial arts, so touched me.  While our tradition of watching movies together goes back to my son's second or third year, our fanboy/fangirl status for martial arts has been going on for nearly 20 years.  It's a gift.

The art of materializing

Thanks to Women Who Run With the Moon here on FB today for sharing Karen Salmansohn's work, part of her "Self Help for People Who Wouldn't Be Caught Dead Doing Self Help."  It was especially resonant for me, as I hope it is for you.  xo

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Ancient magic - Gloria continues

Alchemist illustration thanks to this site.

It was not a conversation she'd ever had with anyone other than herself, how cooking was alchemy.  As she readied to start her day at the tea shop, Gloria was, of course, involved with thoughts of supplies ordered, supplies on hand.  She listened for her own wisdom which suggested choices of pastry and other product to be created.  She thought, briefly, of the actual business of business, profit, expense, depreciation, upkeep.  Mostly she saw herself setting to an ancient task, that of turning one form of matter into another.  She did not speak of it for it seemed a topic that was not easily translated into conversation.  She was clear that thinking about cooking, baking in particular, as a sacred act, was not a matter of ego.  It was a matter of being called.

Gloria Grace, her mother always used both first and middle names when she pitched her voice lower, softer, to pass on wisdom which experiences provided, felt the daily stretching of living in two worlds, or possibly three.  Body, mind and spirit.  She tended to lump body and mind together for their actual, quantifiable and verifiable physical presence, setting spirit off on its own separate atoll.  It was able to thrive there and not perish of loneliness due to the company of other spirits that had been similarly dispatched.  An integration of all the parts, happy and harmonious and no one living in anything like exile or seclusion, would, of course, be the ideal.  As it was, Gloria Grace, the younger and the less young, felt grateful that she could identify and claim her separate parts, that she knew their functions and could live, not always as simultaneously as desired, but at least in sequence, with the parts being aware of each other.

An alchemist, as the ancients would have described him, would not have been an idle man.  It was thought - known - to be a man's work, and not a poor man.   One of some substance, education, stature.  She envisioned him stepping from his doorway for the walk to his laboratory, his retreat, a fine renaissance cap of velvet and brocade as befit his station handsomely worn with garments of equal quality.  She saw her apron, which she donned fresh when she reached the shop's kitchen, as her robe of office, again without ego.  It could have been a mechanic's coverall or the fisherman's pants or the nurses' scrubs.  The ritual of dressing for a part, an assignment, a commitment.  Then she gathered her raw materials and began the magic of transformation through an application of heat.  As she stood with her implements, The Reading Man glided across her inner screen like a shadow puppet.  He appeared not in profile but faced her, a visitor pausing briefly to say without words that he knew her work, he knew the process.  Even when the image faded, Gloria sensed she was not alone.

More about the socks - Gloria, part 12

Mr. Apotienne had thought, on specific, unsettled occasions, that someone who was not him might write a book called Get Over It:  It's ALL PTSD.  As he packed for his holiday, gathering to himself all his dark woolen socks, he found his hands shaking as he confronted the open suitcase - how did it grow to be so cavernous?  -  his breath turned to rasping gulps and his eyes tearing.  One of the things about post traumatic stress disorder is the way it piggybacks into the room, like a brown recluse spider that lurks in the packing material of a long-awaited parcel.  The tick hidden behind the ear of the golden retriever you stop to pet in the courtyard.  No wonder we've been subjected to exorcisms and the casting out of demons, he concluded, once the ground stopped heaving.  How to understand that we continue to haunt ourselves with our own horror stories, not by intention but by the fact that they happened and will not unhappen and each new occurrence could not possibly have been foreseen, the mind making its own connections and we, always the last to know.

A piece of his generalized haunting might have come from an experience of his mother's, she and her brother having been sent to spend the night with a neighbor while their parents were out of town.  Mr. Apotienne recalled the description of the babysitter, accurate or not, as an elderly single woman who found it easier to mimic sanity in the daylight than in her own night-darkened chambers.  With the two children in her care and locked inside her two-story stucco house, she had thought it amusing to drape herself with a sheet and creep into the room where they slept, flapping and shrieking and terrifying them so.   It was fortunate neither had a weak heart.  These are the crossroads, he thought, where we begin to lose our trust.

For The Reading Man, there had been a near-drowning in paralyzingly cold water and, once safe, feet that never seemed to feel warm or dry.  Planning for times in the days ahead when he could be certain his feet would be both wet and appear nearly bloodless with the chill, he stocked his arsenal, saw there was ammunition in every pocket and loop of his bandolier, yet stood mystified as he began to unravel while he stockpiled his socks.  Once he permitted himself the necessary island of seated weeping, he recognized the devil for what it was and wondered just how many turns he would be forced to take around the dance floor with this death grip on his shoulder before he not longer had to endure it.  He could only imagine how much worse it would be without years of therapy.  So, he said. Socks.