Remembering Larry, with Gratitude

When I learned that my brother in law Larry had passed away a couple days ago, my first response was to feel a sense of loss--on my own account, especially on Sandy's account--and what an inspiring, mutually strengthening couple they were--but also a loss to the world of a highly talented, extremely goodhearted and genuinely lovely man.

Old picture from this blog, with Sandy and Phil's Mom, 2011

But this regret was soon followed by gratitude, seasonally appropriate, and celebrating Larry's life is the happiest and most fitting reaction/

I am so grateful to have known him. And after my grandmother died this year just as I was thinking that I should seize some time with her before it was too late (and then it was too late), I am so grateful to have had some time with Larry this last August. It was a short visit as I passed through Portland, ironically just a few days before I almost died myself, but I stayed with Larry longer than I'd thought I had time for. We looked through a photograph album of the mural he was working on--still working, still making art, even as his prognosis worsened and his body weakened. We drank green tea with stevia. We talked; we shared silence. When I left, I felt awareness of the possibility that this would be the last time we met in life.

Now, I remember the words of a wise friend many years ago: our dead are always with us, sometimes as intimately and vividly so as when they were alive. I salute Larry's spirit that remains with everyone whom he loved so well and who loved him.

Here are some of the examples Larry set in his life:
--He was unwaveringly positive in his outlook. He accepted what came his way, including cancer, and loved the world just as it was, in just the configuration it offered itself.
--He supported other human beings--with generosity, kindness, helpfulness, and support of all kinds.
--He was so committed to his work, and he took pride in it. Larry's murals were physically demanding to produce because of their large scale, but they display a sense of intimate detail in the small things right down to clothing and facial features, and there are always some humorous touches also. Perhaps the largeness of his canvas helped him not to be self effacing about the work, but he shared pictures and touching personal stories (e.g. of the real-life people who ended up featuring in the murals) with enthusiasm and a sense of wonder. I always felt inspired by his deep-seated knowledge that his art, art in general, was worth talking about and sharing.
--He encouraged other artists. He encouraged Sandy to let her creative talents blossom, as they have indeed. Whenever we talked about creative writing, I went away feeling empowered to ride out the blankity blank times or the troughs of despair and self flagellation.
--He was always learning. Recently he had been taking photography classes and developing his considerable talents in that arena too. The most stunning picture of Phil I've ever seen was taken by him.

The only time Phil and I asked what his advice was for happiness and success in life and relationships, his answer was simple and frank: focus on the love first and foremost; let everything else come second to it or go by the by in its service.
I wish I could be better at taking that advice.
I knew a man who practiced what he only preached when asked, who walked his talk.

I give thanks for and celebrate Larry's life.

At Sea, Back in England, Still a Writer?

In Israel, I learned that this baby's play area is called a "university."

And this "rose red city" encountered through a slot canyon (look deep into the picture) shows the indivisibility of "human" and "natural." 

Back to work today, I got so cold upstairs that I came down to sit in front of the electric heater and sat so close I scorched my cardigan! Even the temporary flush of a big dose of niacin didn't heat me enough.

Back from Israel, at my parents' house which is still the place I've lived in for the longest continuous time in my life, although my grandmother's apartment in Israel is the place that's been there for me my whole life, I'm still not home. I saw my last warm sunshine possibly for many months before entering the airport yesterday morning (although thankfully there's been some November sun in England too)...

...and with one foot in Israel, the other in England, and most of my material and emotional center of gravity in Alaska, I feel like the arches on that baby university. And at sea, actually--neither or none of my feet are on anything solid right now.

Nausea? It's from the Greek word for "ship", their chariots of the sea. And with so many seas between my feet, perhaps it's not surprising that I've been so continuously nauseous for such a great while now. Something has to shift.

I loved my friend Dawn's comment on my last post that inside-outness can often be a feature of travel. 
Who am I now? And where should my axis center? Axis center...accent...
By the time we left Israel yesterday, my accent in Hebrew was driving me nuts, and at the same time I was so tired that I was saying words with all the consonants reversed and forgetting basic words for things. I was very single minded about speaking Hebrew the whole time I was there, but since I'm not used to speaking it that was quite a workout, with so many features of language to juggle plus the intensity of communicating with real people about real things as opposed to doing exercises.
And that ferocity of linguistic focus, plus the almost-complete absence of downtime in this very social trip, begs the question of why Hebrew is so important to me (i.e. why am I practicing it instead of German or Spanish). It also left no energy or time for creative writing, with the clock ticking on my critical paper deadline and much still to do on my creative thesis. You wouldn't even know I was in an MFA program.

I am so confused. Every once in a while in the past week, I've read a poem and felt a moment of "ahhh" as a poem begins to surface from my own subconscious. Every once in a while I've eaten a date and felt a sweet spot of acceptance from my guts. But most of the time it's swirls of word sounds and grumbles of the self-contained ocean of my body. 

My mum's three brothers and their families are such awesome, admirable people. I see how direct some of their paths have been and how they have created their own success within that path through commitment, intelligence and perseverance...

...and I can't help but look at my own flounderings and fumblings and feel I don't belong/deserve/measure up. I'm too old to have so little to show for any of what I have to offer. And I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. Or where.

Now that I'm not focused on speaking my second language, and now I'm not in that intense, fresh-tasting country to which I feel such a connection, even anxious to catch up on work and get those book reviews sent out, I hereby commit to opening up some time just to sit with pen and paper, or a clean Word file and nothing else on the computer. 
I don't believe these waters upon which and surrounding which I'm a seasick sailor contain monsters or darkness. I believe there is so much that may come to the surface, and writing is the best way I know of to midwife that surfacing.
I have a feeling it'll have to be a process of surrender and innocence, and that I'll have to let go of any presumptions about what/who/where. I'll even have to let go of any expectations of my own success or even continuation as a writer. My writing might be the end of my writing. 
I am numbed by my unknowing, and yet willing to embrace this unknowing. 

my mum and her three brothers--album cover shot. how wonderful to still be
standing around in shirtsleeves in late November!

First Postcard from Israel

Time, high time! Our first relatively quiet day since arriving here almost two weeks ago, and it's taken a little finagling and following of learning curves to get an internet connection and to transfer photos from phone to computer... We arrived in Israel promptly for my cousin's wedding...

my mom with my cousin

 ...which was beautiful, and our dance card has been full from sunrise to sunset every day we've been here.

It's been wonderful to catch up with friends and relatives, and simply to be here in this small, relatively affluent, expensive country that has so little remaining wilderness on the surface, and certainly compared to when I was a little kid (let alone when my mom was), and yet is full of wild nooks and corners everywhere. 

I visited a friend I hadn't seen for many years--from all the way back to my fruit fairy days in California--and was reminded and recalled to a very different time in my life and a very different way of living my life, on which more soon.
Also more soon on my mom's and my visit to the Babylonian museum, and our day trip to Petra.

My mom had been wanting to go to Petra forever. I'm never normally into one-day tours, but this was just perfect. A truly unforgettable experience--much more in my next post.

Short and sweet for now. The wedding was two days of festivity and gaiety (bet you haven't seen that word in type in a while!). In Israel they know how to do it in style. 

But I think the fact that the outdoor environment is so effortlessly gorgeous helps a lot! This was at a former kibbutz in Kfar Saba.
My mom is so lovely...

The second "leg" of the wedding was the Shabbat Chatan--the bridegroom's sabbath--at a hotel right on the beachfront in Tel Aviv. At the end of the Shabbat, my mom and I took a walk on the beach, full of people watching, full of boats and waves and cloudscapes...
...and these birds--geese, I think--flying south. They came in v-shaped waves, so directed, so intentional.

 The sunset speaks for itself.

I don't know how to speak for myself here, except to say that I can't help feeling at home here, despite all the mismatches and despite my frustration with my far-from-perfect Hebrew. Even if I don't talk a lot, being able to talk and to talk well is so important to me.
On the other hand, I was careless and got glutened at some point during the wedding, and am having the familiar experience here that while everything is so much more delicious, my digestion sucks even more than usual. It's taking a long time to recover from the gluten, most likely, but many times before I've had this physical inside-outness here.
Maybe it's an overturn I need to embrace...
So much more to think and talk about.
More soon--off to visit another great aunt.
Much love!

Gut Feelings--No More Eating To Please

Just at the four week mark in England, heading to Israel tomorrow; I finished translating Alpha this morning! And sent in the final portion of my second packet of this year's MFA work (i.e. thesis and critical paper work). Doesn't it always feel good to have some closure before a trip?
For a little more closure, since I'm burning the candle hard at both ends anyway, the promised post on some food stuff that isn't going away (yet?)
You'd think--I keep thinking--that a light bulb will go off and I'll have it all figured out and have created a sustainable, simple, failsafe way to fuel my physical existence in this world and perhaps even understand that this is necessary as a prerequisite to other things.

But just as I failed to find one single "bottom", the light bulb moment is elusive too, and I keep bobbing around the same old gyre. That said, my current problem is a result of having tried something "new" but finding it led back to "same old." Since getting out of the hospital--two months now, yay!--I'd been trying to eat a variety of foods rather than living mostly on coconut milk. This meant experimenting with legumes and gluten free grains, and even, via an ill-advised purchase of a marked-down-gluten-free boxed brownie mix, with some refined flour and sugar in the dynamite medium of chocolate. Oh, my proclivity for marked down goods! Always gets me in trouble. And then I allowed my mum to get me similar gluten free packaged goods to sample over here. I learned that my body, like most bodies, is susceptible to addiction to the chocolate/sugar combination, and suffered much guilt and painful cravings even while being able to taste the essential emptiness of that food.. 
I continued with the illusion that my body could cope with these foods...
And even relaxed my ban on sucralose so I could have good old English ginger beer in the zero calorie version.

This ginger beer is from Sainsbury's; the "diet" versions from two other supermarkets I looked at had barley malt in the ingredients! Diet soda that isn't gluten free?! Aside from the sucralose, the above picture has two other issues. The enormous amount of liquid recalls a flagging of massive liquid consumption as ominous in a post of about 18 months ago. And, well, the diet product. Um, of course it's reasonable for me to try the products over here and see what they're like, right? It's quite good, incidentally.
I got sick. Not from the sucralose--so far that seems okay. From the food, from expanding my palette and kidding myself that I could handle a broader range of foods. There were two days in the past week that I basically couldn't do anything, except some translating, and was just in abject pain all through the inside of my body. I've had to scale the variety way back and to accept that I have to be super careful. Even relying heavily on charcoal and silica gel and enzymes, if I have one bite too many I am in agony. I already mentioned using tons of charcoal a little while back, but I wasn't yet ready then to face that the things I was choosing to eat were simply making me sick.
So, no I can't just eat anything gluten free and be okay. And I can't just go out to eat and trust I won't get sick if I order something I know will work. And no I can't just eat more of something because it tastes good. I was doing quite a bit of "eating to please" also, and can't do that anymore. Whether my gut issues are a result of having celiac or are created/exacerbated by the history of self starvation is a moot point at this stage, and saying a person can go gung ho on all kinds of foods in the interests of "recovery" or of fitting in with other people is misguided if there are genuine problems, even if getting sick doesn't happen immediately.
If you have gut permeability issues, they can preclude good digestion even if you're not getting symptoms of indigestion. Inflammation will build up, until you're confronted with it harshly as I was last week, and as I could have avoided being by laying off grains, legumes, and refined sugar also. Since sucralose is sucrose with the hydrogen bonds replaced with chlorine, it's pretty likely it could penetrate a leaky gut in a not-so-nice way, so I should probably reconsider the ginger beer and (unpictured) energy drinks.
Duh, right?! A light bulb turning off and on like a fireworks display--can't I just keep it on and act on the realization?
The best part is that my mum has undertaken to remind me not to eat "too much", which will be a welcome contrast from her expressing concern over whether I've eaten "enough".
Ugh, I don't love talking about food! Do you hate me talking about food? It's good to have this under awareness before we go to Israel, since the food is so fantastic and tempting there. I'm relieved to be back on the straight and narrow, and to have overridden the "eat to please" imperative, to have headed back to more bearable ways to deal with the problem that generally, eating tends to beget eating.

Encountering Strange Fruit--Medlars!

Time, high time for a post. I've had the delight of encountering weird and wonderful fruit in various far flung places of the world, and in one of my lifetimes was nicknamed "the fruit fairy". Who knew that I'd find an unfamiliar fruit right here in London? Show and tell must ensue, but after I put up this post I also need to talk about food in a more serious way, as the time has come to face up to some issues I've been trying to ignore.

The apples are russet apples, which I mentioned before, crisp, sour-sweet, special texture, never had them outside of England. The little fruits that look like tan-colored rosehips?

These are called MEDLARS. I said they look like rosehips, and the juxtaposition with the russet apple insinuates the relatedness to apples and yes, they are in the rosaceae family, as apples and roses are too. They are mespilus germanica. I had read about them in classical texts--the Greeks and Romans ate them. But what to do with them? In the above picture, they look pretty green. and they were firm. I bit into one, knowing I would probably get woody and astringent, and that's what I got (probably not an example of manifesting your reality).
I let them get really dark brown, soft, mushy, which they have been doing serially, not all at once (as you can see in the picture below). I peeled off the husks and removed this brown, mushy pulp with five sizable seeds in a loose star shape at the center (just like an original, ungrafted apple).

 Mushy, mealy--a texture not appealing to everybody but obviously very rich in pectin, which is good for many people's gut. Mild in flavor, not strong or outstandingly delicious. It's usually boiled up with a bunch of sugar for jam.
I mixed it up with another product I haven't been able to find back home. The Turkish and other ethnic shops here are a treasure trove for my Israeli palate--whole shelves of houmous and tahini and halva and pickles and unusual herbal teas... And in the jar below is carob syrup! 

The only ingredient is carob pods, but obviously they've been boiled down into a sort of molasses. Full of carob's natural sweetness, with its complex dark and bright notes prominent also.

I then stirred in some tahini (carob syrup and tahini is a very normal dip, as are tahini/honey and tahini/date syrup). And thus, I created a dip slightly less dense than straight up carob syrup and tahini, with the gentle, soothing texture of the medlars.
Fun fun! I love getting to know new fruits, especially when they're actually old, heritage fruits, and I love getting to be in the abundance of carob and tahini and all things Middle East palate oriented.

I don't want to make this post too long, so I'll post another very shortly addressing the too-long-ignored food situation.
Love from London!