travel, transience, transition

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I have been thinking that we are now living in an age of change, so rapid that it is hard to keep up, and that this is sort of new. Change is so prevalent, we're wired for it. Before the latest iPhone is released, we're anticipating the next version. But the truth is, everything is transitory. It always has been.

There is a way of living that is called wabi-sabi and looks at the transitory nature of things. My friend George has been talking about the wabi-sabi way. His excellent posts are here and here. I also wrote about it back in April 2008. It's hard to sum up wabi-sabi, as George says -- a world view that has been around thousands of years, but this is what I'm focusing on in this post: it emphasizes the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

My friend Tracy is moving soon, transitioning, traveling from her temporary home in Australia, back to Texas. She sent me a poem she'd heard the other day, which made her think of me, because it's about Michigan. I told her I'd posted it back in 2008, accompanied by this temporary map collage of Michigan I laid out with some significant Michigan symbols. (See that post for good comments about them.)

The map of Michigan existed for an hour or so in June 2008, then I put everything away. But the photo is still here for us to see. Think of photographs, and how they last and last, making us feel that things are permanent. They make us think we can hold on to something. As Susan Sontag said, on top of the already overwhelming happenings in the world, we also have photographs of them, adding to the weight of what we "know." Somehow by seeing those images, we think we understand, or think we should understand.

So. Things change, evolve, wear out. Funnily enough, I have a preference for material things that do change. Patinas that evolve. Not chrome. Not plastic. I love organic things. Wood. Leather. Paper. Natural fibers. Have you noticed that for the most part, organic materials age gracefully, but man made materials do not? A wool carpet is better after decades of foot falls. A wooden door frame gets polished with oil from hands. The marble floor of a cathedral begins to lie less perfectly flat after centuries of scuffling feet, in beautiful subtle waves. But a chrome fender is less attractive after a few decades of spreading rust. Plastic just looks dirty over time, with embedded grime in those artificial textures that factory molds create. Do you think it's an accident that my laptop made of steel and plastic is called Apple. And I named mine Apple Blossom?

It's time for another temporary collage -- this time, of me. Ruth. Featherhead. I have already been dismantled and elements put away. What is doesn't stay is for long.

But guess what. Sometimes things stay constant too. A little synchronicity I just found, post script: the tiny striped feather slipping down off the Upper Peninsula in the Michigan map collage is the same feather in the me collage below, in the middle of my forehead. Post post script: 2 more items in both collages, I just noticed -- two petals of the orange flower in Michigan became my lips, and the shell near Lake Michigan became my nose. EEEEEE.

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Cloud Gate

I was in Chicago with five friends for the weekend to celebrate Inge's birthday, happy me! It's just a 4-hour drive, and we don't get there often enough.

Inge's sister flew in from Germany, and three friends from Minneapolis took the low cost intercity Megabus, which turned out to be a 13-hour nightmare Friday of three miles forward and two miles back through the flooded plains of Wisconsin. Horrible! I hope they're home by now, since the bus driver for yesterday's return trip didn't seem to have a clue about the floods and after 4 hours on the road last night they were headed BACK from Milwaukee toward Illinois!

But we had a fantastic couple of days in the city, with gorgeous blue skies.
I had never seen the stainless steel bean sculpture by British (but Bombay-born) Anish Kapoor called "Cloud Gate" in Milennium Park. (Please click on the link in "Cloud Gate" to see the bean shape, which I didn't photograph.) It's inspired by liquid mercury, which I remember playing with as a kid when a thermometer broke. Do you see my reflection, below? (Sorry, I don't know why the image doesn't enlarge when you click on it. That feature is so inconsistent for me!)
The weekend was clouded for me big time by the death of Tim Russert. I still can't believe he's gone. No one will be able to take his place. And in one of the most stimulating presidential election years ever!




I added a closer picture for you, Sharon. Me in the bottom right wearing my new $7 linen skirt from Filene's Basement.

Ann Arbor

Yesterday, Inge and I went to Ann Arbor for our annual winter jaunt. It's an hour from my house by car.

Don and I had just watched Thursday on the national news that Ann Arbor is the first U.S. city to use all LED lights in the traffic lights, street lights and walkway lights. You can read about LED technology here. The mayor of Ann Arbor said these new lights are like taking 400 cars off the road, that's how much energy they save. They "burn" cold, not hot.

But seeing the LED lights was not the primary reason Inge and I made the drive. It was time to visit our favorite bookstore, Crazy Wisdom, and browse around Ann Arbor.




We pulled books off the shelves and ransacked them.

We looked longingly at other merchandise in the bookstore, all so alluring.

We drank coffee and ate scones.

After the bookstore we wandered into shops, like 10,000 Villages, a fair trade store that's gotten too expensive. I wonder how much of a cut the craftspeople receive.

'Kindness does not go rotten.'

We ended the day at the Common Grill in Chelsea, where we had a delicious meal and exchanged Christmas gifts.

I ate shrimp and lobster on linguine in red pepper sauce. Inge ate veggie wraps. We toasted our friendship with our glasses of wine, mine red, hers white.

I am grateful for my dear friend and how she grows more precious to me as the days, months and years go by.

self

My friend rauf and I were chatting about the luxury of getting a portrait taken. He does portraits that are amazing.

Well, just because I was thinking about it, and because I'm a little strange, but mostly because I've never had my portrait taken, I went to the local photobooth and had some shots taken of myself.

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Have you ever had this done? It's peculiar to say the least, because you're sitting there by yourself, posing and making faces. Unless you're there with someone else, which would be more fun. Don and I had one taken in Paris at a photobooth after seeing "Amelie."

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I think it would be a fun blog idea to have everyone post their own self portrait taken at a photobooth on the same day. What do you think?