Chance = Change

Peter's off to a drinking/carousing/birthday night with his guy pals, (this particular and delightful group of World of Warcraft geeks are off for an evening at the Medieval Times dining establishment somewhere in the wilds of New Jersey...they will quaff , verbally joust, and bounce buxom serving wenches on their knobby knees, rolling home sometime later, filled with ales and tales and burping rales rumbling around in their sated bodies....all in celebration of his old childhood buddy's birthday...HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHRIS K....and that is as close as I am going to get to the festivities! Enjoy it, one and all!

No , I am off to the blown steppes of Russia, small-village-Tolstoy style: The Mint Theatre's lauded production of THE POWER OF DARKNESS....a cast of terrific actors, gorgeous language and a somber powerful tale well told, I have no doubt...The Mint does good , good work in this city. And, though i did have several callbacks for a substantial role in this production, they cast the inestimable Randy Dansen, whose work I have always admired. So I am truly looking forward to seeing it tonight.. Also, as they have asked me to step into what may be an extension of the run ( Randy has obligations elsewhere), I am seeing it with an eye toward estimating the possible hard work such a commitment would involve. I respect the Mint company too much to "short-change" them, and do not want to give a quick and easy answer, in case the offer becomes a firm one. So, they generously put a ticket aside for me to see the work tonight. So, soon, I'll go midtown and be in a solid audience of genuine theater-goers. I know I am in for a good evening, though no buxom maidens or pints of ale will be in evidence. I leave that to the guys.

Next week, we'll go to two events at the NYMF (New York Musical Theater Festival) , one for which a friend's music supports a dance concert, the other ,WITH GLEE, has several of my students in it...that will be fun....and, from all I've been reading, we are in for some more good theater on both counts! YAY!

My darling goddaughter Evalyn Bair and her family (Karen , Jeff, and sisters) will come next weekend to stay here in our home while they go to a wedding...Peter and I will go live Upstate to give them all the room they need here) and I am so glad we can give them a place to comfortably stay...they are making the trip all the way from Minnesota!

THEN: Peter and I will spend the following weekend in our beloved Abingdon! We will drive down there on the 12th, stay at The gorgeous Copper Lantern B and B (at the kind invitation of our darling Ann and Chris Johnson....see shows, be with old pals, and get all nostalgic for Barter days! I can hardly wait! The precipitating event for this trip is the beautiful Harvest Home Weekend that Ann and Chris throw every year. A gorgeous Open House dinner for the community to celebrate the coming of Fall to the mountains of SW Virginia....these wonderful people know how to throw a party, and are the most gracious and generous of hosts.....we are so glad to be going. As I said, I can hardly wait. Everything will be perfectly beautiful, surprising and lovely, because that is how Ann does everything: with flair, uniqueness and marvelous taste (and I mean the woman can cook too!)...so...we've a sort of social time these days. Even the drive down will be a soothing change of rhythm and scene.

My Thursday night poetry class at The New School , with Kathleen Ossip leading the workshop, is very interesting. Also, inspiring. My knowledge of poets is expanding, and I can hardly stop writing poem after poem myself, there is so much input, new voices, ideas, forms. It's amazing, really. And I am glad I decided to do this 15-week study. She is introducing me to so many new writers, I am grateful. And, as I said, my pen has begun to flow again, after many years. Poems come spilling out. When I am in an open place like this, everything i see looks quite different. That, plus my daily meditations, and the world looks...well....unusually communicative. Energies everywhere. Odd revelations. Uncoverings. Insights. Surprisings.

All that and Facebook too! Yikes!

To the right is me in a supplicating posture, and I am gently intoning: "Save me, save me,save me,save me from my middle-aged Facebook addiction! I have become, in my middle years, a junkie for that online community that is peopled mostly by creative college students and enterprisingly youthful art folk, and I am happy to make daily discoveries - dare I say hourly?- every time I log onto my account: I have reconnected with old friends, giggled at the various Applications that have allowed me to sling chickens at acquaintances, send calorie-less sticky pastries that don't cost a cent, since they are virtual, and chat with pals at Happy Hours that are also virtual, as are the alcoholic concoctions purchased with imaginary money! I fly through the air with Harry potter spells, (I was assigned, after a swell test, to Gryffindor), I plant imaginary flowers sent to me by people who know I love gardening (Steve C. sent me a garden gnome,even), and I am a total chump for browsing new Applications....i tell you: I am a Facebook addict! AND I now have 114 "friends" who acknowledge me as theirs, and I am on a constant search for more! So, if you want to be my Facebook friend, please please please send me an invitation and I am yours.....Am I not pathetic? Actually, it is amazing, this Facebook thing...and it is also the reason you've not read a fresh blog entry in a while....I have spent all free time on Facebook....sad but truer than true. SO: JOIN FACEBOOK and be mine!
Sure, i know, I know :"they" are tracking my every commercial whim and making me part of all future marketing schemes...THEY rule my life....but I dunno....somehow this makes it fun not to care! It all seems so harmless...and there is this thing about connecting across the years and miles...talk about making it a smaller world...Time shifts and becomes pliable in the realm of Facebook.....and I have many more philosophic thoughts on this subject, but alas, I must get ready for my next student, and ....yes I want to check my Facebook account! Bye for now....Virtually yours: EB

We've all seen, quite often , references to how our lives are like journeys on a road....with the old proverbial stops along the way....going through the dark forests of despair, coasting the highways of happiness,etc....And cliffs and mountains are large geographical references to how we negotiate the varied ups and downs of living.....just today, one of my favorite students read a quote about stepping off the cliff, metaphorically, and realizing she could fly and not fear falling to the ground. Geography is maps and we map our life out the best we can, hoping for the best around each bend of the proverbial road. Today I want to explore the idea of coastlines, what are they, what makes them a coastline and not just another road, and other items concerning the coastlines of land and soul. See------------=?
A compelling actual coastline indeed, on the West Coast , of course. In fact, gorgeous, inspiring, perfect: the perfect coastline....where one large land mass definitely ends.

So what are the land masses of our lives..I guess we'd have to figure that out in order to demarcate coastlines.....events? Are large events the land masses of our lives. or are long periods of time such? We leave the coastline of youth at about age 18 or so....we swim to the shore of adulthood by 21 or so....the shore of middle age? The shore of living as a single person? is that a coastline? Some shores are rockier than others. Some are too distant to reach or even considering trying to....Some coastlines beckon, and there are twinkling lights dotting them, welcoming new visitors....I feel each time I begin to write a new poem, for example, I am leaving familiar coastlines and diving in for an unfamiliar swim.

What are your coastlines?

To your right is an actual photo taken by Steve C...on one of their jaunts around the highways and byways of San Francisco, and as they drove me down the Pacific Coast Highway on my last visit there, I do remember thinking I had never never ever seen such gorgeous natural beauty in my life, and I recall also thinking how sad it would be if that expected Big One - the earthquake to end all earthquakes - were to simply snap that loveliness off from its geographic moorings and make it an island off the coast of California......but I always have thoughts like that when i go out West....
Such thoughts were soon dissolved in the sheer headiness of the beauty i kept seeing and seeing for miles and miles....I tell you: it's humbling. Mankind thinks itself so special...but Nature is better than we are at everything....it's truly no contest....so why we human animals have such arrogance and ego-cherishing...well....that is part of our nature. ...and Nature (with a capital "n" ) smiles on us for it most of the time.

Pat Yonka, Peter's mom, is here for the United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations Conference.....she'll be with us for a few days and we are so glad...we miss both Pattie and Chuck whenever we go too long without seeing them.

The past week in the country Upstate was ideal...i am energized and ready to get back to work and this week is filled with many students and things. My poetry class at the New School starts Thursday and that should be interesting....the last time i was a student was maybe two decades ago when I took a fiction writing course at the New School, and i did love it then. Could it possibly have been that long ago? Surely not. Anyway, I look forward to it very much.

The 46-10 Group was wonderful today ...I decided to take a break from working on the Spoon River material we are doing, and go back to reading some of the material we started out with: Shakespeare monologues, two-character playlets, etc. and it was terrific to see how much they have all grown. And, BY THE WAY: you have not lived until you experience an 84-year-old man say words like : "We are such stuff as dreams are made on...." and a 93-year-old Southern belle speak "Juliet's" immortal balcony scene...it is enough to make you actually appreciate growing old: wisdom comes with it, God willing....it certainly has grown into the very skins of these wonderful new actors.....and words i thought I knew well take on exceptional meaning when spoken by older folk.....it's so gorgeous to be with. I feel blessed to have discovered this particular thing in my life.

So much to write about - especially about one particular day we all spent at the Kagyu Thubten Choling Monastery last weekend...an amazing day, filled with meditation and service around the gorgeous grounds that are right on the banks of the Hudson River...in fact, that photo i put in the blog a few days ago of the prayer stupa...well, it sits right on the hudson banks, with an astonishing view, and when winds blow off the River, the hundreds of prayer flags that adorn the stupa just gently flap in the breezes and make a beautiful sound...Wang Mo, a new young novitiate just out of the 3-year retreat, took us inside the stupa, where sits gorgeous and monumental statues of both the Buddha and Padmasambhava, (Guru Rinpoche) the Buddhist saint who brought the Dharma to Tibet...awesome, really...and we were able to actually sit meditation there for a while....i felt deeply moved and refreshed after that, and so so so peaceful. Grateful to Wang Mo...

And so we wend out way into yet another Autumn.
Summer 2007 is complete, though of course that is not actually so until the 21st of September or something like that...but, vacation is over, schools is back in session and isn't it time for a new lunchbox? And a spiffy new pencil case? And lots of new plaid clothing?

When I was little, I used to vomit before the first day of classes.......I imagine I was nervous: would they like me? was i good and smart enough? was it safe to venture beyond the familiar confines of home? I rarely vomit anymore...but the questions, of course, remain the same.
Don't they? We may know the answers, or think we do, but that does not stop us from wondering anyway. That's part of our nature too.

Day Off

It stretched before us,
A freshly washed sheet of cotton
On a clean bed.

The crisp air bit
With a stinging joy
That wakened the dead
From a sleep of blue smoke.

Our lungs were full
But soon were clear,
As we breathed in the possibilities, and

We walked beneath the scarf of sky
Like a bride and groom on the way
To a long anticipated glass-smashing,
While Mother and Father
Floated above us on old chairs.