© Skip Schiel 2005 |
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I tap away at precisely 6:20 am Napa time, the moon full tonight but now either set or obscured by fog, L sleeping on the porch, D also, K inside, after a long cold night sleeping outside. Which is one of the many blessings of living here. Along with the live oak trees (greeting them last evening on a short solo walk down the rd, making my first live oak photos with digital, inadvertently letting in the demons of fear), the silence, the utter silence, the pool, D the caretaker, the house so rich so elegant so simple and hospitable, and California which I’m coming to love more and more, reluctantly. Photographing might include the Napa house and environs, most esp. the trees, also perhaps the nearby area, Napa valley, with some concentration on land use, namely rapid development, and then friends and family. I’d like to think of Monet while here, imagine this is my Giverny, the trees my lotus ponds, my eye floaters the growing cataracts that so plagued M in his last yrs and became part of his painting. —August 21, 2005 This dream telling: I accepted the responsibility for conveying suggestions a group I worked with, a Quaker group, had made about relandscaping the entry way to the 911 memorial site. I had to call someone in charge, another Quaker, early one morning when I knew his or her kids would be going off to school. It was an imposition to call this early, and I apologized gushingly. The person I called then appeared to me, stood before me, and was a cross between male and female, but obviously haggard, tired, drawn, and possibly sick. I made my recommendations and they seemed not to relate to the site, I was befuddled, as was this androgynous person. Quaker meeting at 1801 Oak St, Napa. I came in late, had to pee. Felt a bit disappointed that only one other had shown up—a man a little younger than I, tanned, handsome, strong and trim looking, wearing shorts and t-shirt and sandals. Named JW. At about 11 (the meeting ran from 10:30 to 11:30, same as Friends Meeting at Cambridge) first a man, then a boy, then 2 more boys, then a woman entered, sat down, greeted J. This is becoming lively, I thought, excellent. After about 15 more minutes of silence, J spoke: “I ask you hold in the light someone (his son, but I’ve forgotten the name) and R who have just arrived at their first yr of college this week. He is our last child to leave the home and he is anxious about the transition. “ J gave more details, mostly about the stress on the 2 and their families. This led me to offer the following message: “Another sort of rite of passage is birth. I ask your prayers for my eldest daughter J and her husband L and their about to be born son C, my first grandchild.“ And I said something about the irony of giving birth to humans when the earthly conditions are so painful. And how birth reawakens in me the mystery of the birth process, its majesty and grandeur, how it renders me reverentially silent. I learned, once we’d broken from our customary mode of being together, that the family lived in Congo, once in South Africa, and the eldest boy, now in grade 9, attends an international school in Swaziland. In ways such as this, the micro community, thru my macro community of Quakers, serves to link me with others and help me locate community no matter where I find myself. —August 22, 2005 Last night for the first time here I tried time exposure under low light, with the trees, having no idea how these might process. I also, again for the first time, used iPhoto to generate web pages. I used photos I’d made here, or coming here, one set of trees in daylight, the other from the airplane window, called East to west. Whether I’ll install Dreamweaver to tweak them further and send them to my server at this point I‘m not sure. I hesitate to dive too much into photo work when I intend to mostly write and read. For the writing I’ve tentatively decided to at least plow thru my notebooks from the last journey to Palestine and Israel, mining for stories that I might rewrite. Whether I write or not might be less important than the fact of actually pouring thru the old notes. This is evocative, brings back and recenters my experience on the last journey to the Levant. And for the reading I’m about half way thru John Hersey’s The Wall, finding it deliciously detailed about life in Warsaw during the ghetto. I continue to wonder what Stella’s view of the book is, since she survived the ghetto. I should write Martha or call Stella. On the day before, L noticed the late afternoon light bathing K in its warm glow, suggested to her and me that I might photograph this. I did. Then yesterday, a similar event, this time D in the warm seat. We might make an entire series of portraits while folks sit in that position at that time of day (and yr). —August 23, 2005 |