Heather King's Blog, page 52

TWO FAVORS

One: Is someone out there conversant with Adobe InDesign who would be willing to change the date on two flyers? I am balking at paying up to 100 bucks–though maybe I’m just being cheap. Or maybe I’m just asking in the hopes I will receive!

Two: A reminder about my newest book: HARROWED: Life Lessons from the Garden.

This is my usual sunny, carefree romp through the byways of life.

An excerpt:

April 16, 2018

Last night I was overcome with a sense of sorrow so acute it was all I could do not to cry out. For at least four years I’ve been contemplating making a will, figuring out whether I want to be buried or cremated, buying a cemetery plot.

Last night I suddenly realized the reason I have been dragging my feet on “getting my affairs in order” is that I haven’t been able to bear the fact that I will die alone, do not have even one person I feel I can ask to be my executor, must arrange for and pay for my own funeral, burial and headstone.

I am a grain of wheat that is dying.

Up till now, I simply have not had the strength yet to “die” alone.

May 5, 2018

I cannot believe how gorgeous the garden looks. It has surpassed my wildest expectations, especially in light of the fact that I’d never before gardened and had no fancy equipment nor tools.

The fremontodendron, after my practically daily prayers over the past year and a half, has produced one glorious deep yellow-orange-gold flower, cup-shaped with a scalloped edge.

The silver bush lupine that I planted last fall October is already beautifully filled out and is flowering, pale purple.

Likewise the showy penstemon, hummingbird sage, and two kinds of sticky monkeyflower. The toyon is taking off, the redbud is sporting small shiny leaves  and clusters of dark pink-purple buds, and one of the three coral bells has sent up a stalk with tiny round salmon-pink buds.

All, all, all glory to God. I did nothing. “I am the vine, you are the branches.”

Well, there’s one kind-a favor I’ll ask of you
Well, there’s one kind-a favor I’ll ask of you
There’s just one kind favor I’ll ask of you
You can see that my grave is kept clean…

A VOCATION OF WATER: HOW ONE MAN IS BRINGING NEW LIFE TO EL SALVADOR

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Paul (aka Pablo) Hicks, a project manager for Catholic Relief Services, is married with three young children. For the past 11 years, he has lived and worked in El Salvador.

He grew up in the  central Valley, one of seven kids. As a teenager in the 80s, he went to Tijuana with a church group.

That was a turning point. “Because of the wars in Central America there were massive numbers of refugees and migrants coming up through Mexico to get into California. It was the first time I’d experienced that kind of poverty; not just economic but sexual slavery. Young women, victims without recourse of a broken social fabric, being trafficked. How do you pay your way to the coyote across the border? I’m grateful for the exposure because it took away any romantic thoughts of poverty.”

Another experience from that first visit was pivotal. “We were working on a house and we had a generator that was running power tools and the generator gave out. It had enough fuel: what could be wrong with it? This kid who was there, he wasn’t even working with us but he was watching, took out the spark plug and brought it to his dad. They changed it. They pulled it out of their car or something. The kid put it back in and the generator started right up. That has stuck with me all these years. That idea that you’re there saving people, and here’s this kid who’s super sharp, who has ingenuity: he solved the problem.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

WHOEVER I AM

“I am a question-asker and a truth-seeker. I do not have much in the way of status in life, nor security. I have been on quest, as it were, from the beginning. For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me: no ambition, no interest in tenure, always on the march, changing everything every seven years, from landscape to landscape. Certain elements were constant: the poetry, the desire for relationship, the sense of voyage. But lately I have developed also a sense of destination, or destiny. And a sense that if I am to be on quest, I must expect to live like a pilgrim; I must keep to the inner path. I must be able to be whoever I am.

For example, it seemed strange to me, as to others, that, having taken my Ph.D. in English, I should then in the middle of my life, instead of taking up a college professorship, turn to the art of pottery. During one period, when people asked me what I did, I was uncertain what to answer; I guessed I should say I taught English, wrote poetry, and made pottery. What was my preoccupation? I finally gave up and said ‘Person.’ “

—Mary Caroline Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry and The Person

LOTUSLAND

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Madame Ganna Walska (1887-1984) was the type of Southern Californian eccentric over whom  people from back East love to roll their eyes, muttering “land of the fruits and the nuts.”

Born Hanna Puacz in Brest-Litovsk, Poland, she was an opera singer who was married six times. She resided in New York and Paris, toured Europe and America, and eventually became attracted to California.

She eloped as a teenager with her first husband, a Russian count. Her fourth, known at the time as “the richest bachelor in the world, proposed the day they met. Madame became interested in séances, Ouija boards, spiritualism. Her sixth husband, twenty years her junior, was a yoga guru.

Done with disastrous unions, she purchased a 37-acre Montecito property in 1941 and spent the next 43 years creating the garden—routinely named one of the top ten in the world—now known as Lotusland.

And the creative energy poured into this wondrous space establishes her as an artist and a human being of the highest order.

Reserve in advance and be prepared to cough up fifty bucks. The day I visited, the wrought iron gates of the estate swung open, I checked in at the pale pink welcome kiosk, and the magic began.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

HARROWED: LIFE LESSONS FROM THE GARDEN

IT IS HERE. My newest book.

the back cover copy.

“This is the story of the garden: my first, and perhaps my last.

I started it at the age of 64. I’m 68 now.

The garden brings me satisfaction, beauty, astonishment, joy.

The garden also requires an inordinate amount of worry and work.

When I started out, I thought simply to put my creative energy into arranging a bunch of plants. I didn’t know the garden would overtake my life.

I didn’t know the garden would help teach me how to order my day, pray, let go, love my neighbor, die.”

Cover and interior by the great Rowan Moore-Seifred of doublemranch.com.

ALL HAND TOOLS. ALL LOVE.
AVAIL IN PAPERBACK AND KINDLE.
BUY HARROWED HERE!

THE CELLIST: GREGOR PIATIGORSKY

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Gregor Piatigorsky (1903-1976) was a Russian-born cellist who emigrated to the U.S. and ended up making his home in Los Angeles. He was a beloved teacher at USC, an inspired mentor, and a sublime musician.

Born in Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine, he began playing cello at 7, and was soon supporting his entire family by playing in bordellos and cafes. He credited a gypsy singer he met during this time with helping him to attain his singing cello tone.

With a small inheritance, his father Pavel moved the family to Moscow so that Gregor could continue his studies at the Conservatory.

Conditions under Lenin were abysmal. People went hungry and without heat: funding for the arts dried up. As a young musician, Piatigorsky was so broke that he sometimes had to make do with harp strings, which he could cut in two and thus make last longer.  In 1921, he and a group of fellow musicians bribed some guards, snuck across the Polish border, and defected.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

“When a man is born a coward, and yet combats this of his own accord, then he has done what he ought to have done, and need not be ashamed of the weakness he has been born with.”

–Hans Christian Andersen

For a long time, I’ve had it in the back of my mind to learn more about the life of Hans Christian Andersen. During New Hampshire winters as a child, I closely identified with the heroine of his story “The Little Match Girl,” tearfully imagining that I, too, would one day expire of hunger and cold on a street corner, lips blue with cold, and be carried off to heaven.

Then I learned that when he died, a 40-plus-year-old letter from Riborg Voigt, the first woman he ever loved (of course unrequited), was found in a little leather pouch around his neck. That was when I knew Hans and I were soul-mates.

Biographies abound (he also wrote a couple of memoirs himself). Recently I came across Monica Stirling’s The Wild Swan: The Life and Times of Hans Christian Andersen.

Stirling doesn’t analyze the stories, nor especially connect them to Andersen’s life. But she charts his childhood, lifelong travails, the development of his psyche, his delightfully charming if overwrought personality, his love for travel, his longing for a home and the concomitant failure ever to settle in one place: he spent most of his life in hotels, rented lodgings or the palatial homes of loyal friends, many of whom set aside a special suite of rooms that could be readied at a moment’s notice and in which he was welcome to stay as long as he liked.

Here are a few excerpts. The first describes in incident from his student years:

“He was plunged into misery until, after class, a fellow candidate, Miss Tønder-Lund, gave him a rose, whereupon he became as blissfully sure that he was surrounded by friends as he had a few minutes earlier felt himself a prey to enemies. The diary he kept intermittently for most of his life shows that what would be mere trifles to a person with an average nervous system—if such exists—were thunderbolts to him, with the result that he constantly oscillated between joy and anguish with almost no intermediate stages. The Dean’s condemnation of his artistic exploits meant death, the young girl’s rose meant life, and he responded to both with the same disquietingly whole-hearted emotion.”

“The kind of help Andersen needed did not exist. There was then no psychiatric treatment and his fears were attributed to his liver and his age—although he had suffered from precisely the same type of fears for as long as he could remember, Nowadays a psychiatrist would recognize that he had a psychasthenic constitution, a combination of hyper-sensitive nerves with a need to justify his existence by creative achievement that might have driven him to the madhouse had he been less gifted. As a boy, Andersen was undermined by a well-justified sense of insecurity that produced concomitant feelings of inadequacy, unworthiness and guilt; as a man, his lack of family ties and his failure to experience requited love and thereby found a family of his own made him utterly dependent on his friends for emotional sustenance. He was therefore constantly aware of a need, terrifying in its urgency, to please in both his private and professional life. From this came his hunger for fame. Once a friend accused him of being either a great simpleton or a great rogue, to which he answered unself-consciously that he was a bit of both—‘But that is a good thing too, isn’t it?’ It was good in that it enabled him to maintain his fragile mental equilibrium, but he paid a heavy price for this—as Dag Hammarskl[image error]old wrote in his diary for 1955: ‘While performing the part which is truly ours, how exhausting it is to be obliged to play a role which is not ours; the person you must really be in order to fulfil your task, you must not appear to others to be, in order to be allowed by them to fulfil it. How exhausting—but unavoidable, since mankind has laid down once and for all the organized rules for social behaviour.’ ”

“In Andersen’s case early poverty, insecurity, a sense of being awkward and unattractive and an idealization of women that was far more genuine than that often attributed to Dickens’s heroes, made him exaggeratedly humble in love. He idolized, suffered and failed to assert himself as a man. This same idealization, and native fastidiousness, made him recoil with distaste from women attracted by his fame; once, after a young and beautiful woman had declared herself as infatuated with him, he was so distressed by her immodesty that he felt positively relieved to learn that she was mentally unbalanced. Only the common sense and robust physique that he inherited from his mother, together with his capacity for self-criticism and [wonderful sense of] humor…enabled him to maintain his precarious emotional equilibrium and, eventually, resign himself to his celibacy and put all his energy into loving his many true friends and winning the fame for which he had left home at fourteen years old.”

And I especially identify with the following tendency, a fear of abandonment that manifests in collecting, treasuring, ordering, storing and arranging small objects found on sidewalks, paths, woods, city streets:

“The passion for hoarding up little treasures of every kind—pebbles that friends had picked up, leaves that had been plucked on a certain day, odd mementoes of travel and incident, was always strong in Andersen. He hated to destroy anything, and he dragged around with him, from one lodging to another, a constantly increasing store of what irritable friends were apt to consider rubbish. In like manner, he could not endure to tear up paper with writing upon it, even if that writing were derogatory to his dignity”…

–quoting Edmund Gosse, on the autobiography Andersen wrote in 1846-47.

–All from Monica Stirling, The Wild Swan: The Life and Times of Hans Christian Andersen (I bought my copy used on ebay for something like six bucks).

Then again, perhaps I’ve moved forward a bit. If I die with a leather pouch around my neck at this point it will contain a crucifix, i.e. a letter from Christ. And nowadays I collect pebbles, leaves and seedpods not because I’m afraid of being abandoned, but because I find the objects fascinating and beautiful. I can let them go, too! Lo and behold, turns out there are more where they came from.

THE FOUR QUADRANTS OF CONFORMISM

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Software developer Paul Graham recently posted a piece called “The Four Quadrants of Conformism.”

An individual’s conformist tendencies reveal themselves in childhood, says Graham, and he asks us to imagine a Cartesian grid.

“The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.”

“The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are the sheep. They’re careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will.”

“The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones. They don’t care much about rules and probably aren’t 100% sure what the rules even are.”

“And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite.” In adulthood, he continues, the aggressively conventional-minded cry “Crush !” The passively conventional-minded fear “What will the neighbors think?” The passively independent-minded shrug “To each his own.” And the call of the aggressively independent-minded is “Eppur si muove”—“And yet, it moves”—Galileo’s dogged insistence, apropos of the earth, in the face of the Inquisition.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

KIMSOOJA

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

A little of “performance art” can often go a very long way.

So when a friend sent me an Art21 video by a Korean-born female artist named Kimsooja, I steeled myself. The adoption of a single name—Michelangelo! Madonna! Prince!—I did not take as a good sign.

Then I watched the video—and was captivated.

“Kimsooja’s videos and installations blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience through their use of repetitive actions, meditative practices, and serial forms. In many pieces, everyday actions—such as sewing or doing laundry—become two- and three-dimensional or performative activities.”

The video covers a series of performances—“A Beggar Woman” and “A Homeless Woman”—taped during 2000-2001 in such far-flung cities as Lagos, Mexico City, and Cairo.

For “A Beggar Woman,” Kimsooja sits cross-legged, completely still, one hand outstretched. Her long dark hair is pulled back in a long ponytail. Her clothing is loose and pajama-like. She could almost be a statue. A crowd gathers. People surround her, staring.

Reflecting on watching her own performance in Mexico City, Kimsooja noted, “I was really struck by her posture. She was sitting very tight in a zocalo, a crowded square. Tiny body. Old lady. Totally wrapped within herself.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

DIGNITY AND JUSTICE: UNPACKING IMMIGRATION LAW

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:

Linda Dakin-Grimm grew up Catholic, first in Riverside, then in Portland, Oregon. In college, she moved away from the faith, then became an attorney and for decades worked as a trial lawyer in high-stakes business litigation. She was partner in a prestigious firm, with offices in LA, where she makes her home, and New York.

She was at the top of her game. She could look forward to ten more lucrative years before retirement.

It was then that the call came. Without much understanding why, she found herself drawn back to Mass and prayer.

“Wake up!” she heard. “I took more seriously my obligation to listen. What was the Lord asking me to do at this point in my life?”  She started “reading like crazy—all the Thomas Merton books. Philosophy, theology, social justice.”

The news at the time reported on the ‘surge’ of unaccompanied minors at the Southern border. She happened to be on the pastoral council at her parish.

“A guy came into our monthly meeting and said they were trying to figure out how to help these kids. And none of us knew anything. We had no idea how to help. So he just left. That made me feel uncomfortable. We’re sitting in this kind of rich white people’s parish by the beach and we don’t know a single thing about how to help these kids. That bothered me.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.