NEW YORK PIECE/PEACE OF MIND - 26 June 2011
26th June,2011
What the hell! I walk to the F train to go visit my daughter in Brooklyn and this is what happens to my feet?!
Talk about summer in the city: I wear flip-flops for one month then put my plates of meat in a pair of pumps for one evening and it's like I've turned into the ugly step-sister. It would seem my feet have spread more than my wings! Still, the good news is we had a great evening and a luscious dinner and we walked passed these gardens:
Gardens in Brooklyn. Suddenly they seemed so achievable. Forget having a garden in Manhattan, unless we change careers and become hedge fund junkies. That's a different kind of gardening. I'd rather stick with privet.
It was nice to be in Brooklyn. It felt right-sized and civilized and later I said to Joel that maybe that could be our last stop, after we've trotted around the globe for a couple or few years, maybe we could trade in this apartment for a house and garden in Brooklyn and be close to our daughters and granddaughter. We've filed the idea in the "Interesting Possibilities" folder.
In the meantime, we count the days until Wednesday when we return to Provence. So this might be the last post until next weekend when we've had a chance to recover from jet-lag and the exhaustion of the last few weeks. We figure a few days among the lavender fields should do it. That and 6 days at Les Trois Sources in Bonnieux, where we'll be back in our 13th century room of prayer and silk. And by then the Flying The Coop site will one again be rich with Joel's photographs. It's been impossible for him these last days: besides having a molar extracted, he's been checking 600 scanned images from 50 years of his work for his retrospective book, finding many of them to be in poor shape and even more disturbing, some gone missing.
It feels like our lives since we were last in Provence in the spring have been one long retrospective. Between Joel's book and trying to close the book on the Cape. I still dream of it every night and at some point will write about the nature of attachment which this process is bringing into consciousness. My attachment to regret certainly does me no service and the dreams make this clear. For in every one of them I am struggling to achieve something in that place that I can't achieve and I am just now realizing that much of what I tried to willfully accomplish there, via the manifestation of my aesthetic vision, blinded me to the reality that I/ we would never be able to achieve there that which was becoming more and more important to us: solitude.