Reflections

First Stop: Worden Farm

California produce has rocked my world, inside and out.  It began in 1991, with a visit to Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, which at the time, was a smaller shadow of its current self.  I marveled at the little field greens that have since become de rigeur on most upscale restaurant menus, and in many health- and cuisine-conscious homes.  I later melted in delight around organic, dry-farmed tomatoes whose roots reached far down into the ground to collect the nutrients to produce the most delicious sweetness I’d ever tasted in a tomato. 

Okay, the dry goods hooked me too: powdered buttermilk and maple sugar stopped me in my tracks.  All in all, my exodus west was pretty much a done deal by the time I left the store.  I moved there later that year. 

As the years have passed, and I’ve learned more and more about organic foods, how wonderful they taste and how good organic farming is for the planet, I’ve become more and more of an organic foods aficionado.

So how much more thrilled could I be to learn my cousin Eva had begun her own organic farm, right in my home state?  The only organic farm on the Gulf coast of Florida, Worden Farms has structured itself as a community supported farm.  This means that area residents may “subscribe” to the farm, helping to sustain it throughout the year.  They in turn receive a weekly box of the farm’s best: lettuces, squash, radishes, other root and leafy vegetables.  All in all about twenty or thirty varieties of vegetables. 

The running of Worden Farm is truly a family and group effort.  Eva and her husband Chris, armed with PhD’s in botany, headed south when school was finished to plant their dreams—literally. A couple and half years ago (I know because Eva and I were pregnant at the same time), little Asa James Worden came into the picture.  Now, he helps around the farm, hangs by Mama’s side and, one afternoon, napped atop the farm golf cart while Papa worked nearby. 

At any given time a number of interns also live and work on the farm.  Mayra from Ecuador, a mechanical engineer by training, was learning organic farming, as was Rebecca from Texas via L.A.  George, who cooked and cleaned up a lot was also a staple.  Another local, Al, had cows grazing in one of the Worden’s fields.

Eva’s conscious about doing things organically because it’s “what makes sense,” rather than coming from a staunchly oppositional consciousness about how conventional farming sucks.  She points out that organic food fans can go overboard: What’s the point of organic if you’re eating stuff from New Zealand and ignoring local farmers, just because they still use conventional methods?  Local is the flip side of organic—to sustain ourselves over the long haul we need to think about what’s in our own back yard.

Did she really have to go get a PhD from Yale to become a farmer?  “No, you don’t,” she admits, “But I had to do it that way.”  Her dissertation topic was community supported agriculture, the process I mentioned above through which individuals or families buy into the farm and in turn receive the bounty. 

Eva and Chris decided to buy and work land in this area in large part because they knew nothing like this would be available to the residents.  Whereas in the Berkeley, California Farmer’s Market that happens three times a week in my area, about 80-90% of the farmers are certified organic, at the Sarasota Farmer’s Market where the Wordens hawk their haricots, they stand as the lone organic beacons.

As for me and my family, we joined the rhythm of things with ease. Cainan had a grand old time climbing on the tractors and trying to convince Cousin Asa to let him drive the toy tractor.  A true cooperative sort, Cainan was content for quite a time to push little Asa around on the toy tractor, and then be driven in the trailer attachment, which suited me just fine since Cainan has not yet mastered the fine art of steering self-powered toys.  In fact we removed the battery from his pickup truck since the forward thrust of movement when he pushed the gas pedal scared him.  I think Asa’s finesse on the toy tractor inspired him, though.

Alex spent some time in one of the free-standing cabins designated as the office.  Complete with wireless computer hookup, Worden Farm is a twenty-first century enterprise, however organic its produce.  I got to catch up with Eva, bond around being first-time mamas of two-year-olds and share perspectives on our ongoing common interest in being ever more conscious parents.

Eva’s got the patience of guru combined with the creativity of a preschool teacher.  While Alex and I had resigned ourselves to taking turns chasing Cainan through restaurants on those occasions when we felt brave enough to take him out, Eva directed all her attention toward engaging Asa and Cainan in coloring, playing with post-it notes and drawing faces on drinking cups.  Wow, I thought, this is a whole other level of parenting—and multitasking.  Eva noted that this kind of dinner means you don’t get to focus much on your partner.  This is why we usually spend family time in places like parks, and save dinners out for the grownups. 

Still, it’s good to know we have options other than jogging maze-like around restaurant floors chasing our spirited toddler.  As we headed south to stay with Pepi and Raul (Eva’s folks, my aunt and uncle) for the night before embarking on the cruise, Eva handed me a little child-restaurant survival kit she’d assembled.  It had crayons, post-it notes, index cards, stickers and such for Cainan to play with next time we decided to try to sit down someplace with him. What a sweet parting treat.  Thank you, Eva!

A Sense of Place

For a long time I’ve wondered what gives me a sense of place, a feeling of being in one place rather than another.  Some obvious things, like weather, plants and accents, and some not-so-obvious things like a level of openness, the history and subtle culture differences all come into play.

I spent the last week in St. Paul, Minnesota, a place I had never been, taking a break and visiting a friend from many lifetimes ago. I had most of my days to myself, as my friend went off to work at a day job, and so walked around looking, stayed at home writing and working and watched my friend’s dogs.

Some locales carry with them a passel of associations, like New York City, Macchu Pichu or Niagara Falls.  Other places, particularly in the U.S., can’t be distinguished from one another: identical shopping centers, housing tracts, language.  Unlike Europe, in which you can travel for a couple of hours and be in another country, the U.S. sports monoculture for long geographic stretches.  How does one get a sense of place from city to city in the U.S?

For the second time in two months, I found myself away from home in another United State, with an offer from my host to visit the local mall.  And not just any mall this time—the Mall of America, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the largest mall in the country. Anyplace, U.S.A., squared. 

Part of me wanted to go.  Just for the mall-ness of it. Chris, my host, likes to shop.  Perhaps we’d shop, though I cringed—and my ancestors turned over in their graves—at the idea of paying retail for anything.  Maybe we’d find stuff on sale.  Then we’d catch a movie, probably in a supersized metro-hoosie with twenty theatres and a vat of popcorn the size of the Rose Bowl.

During the days, which I had to myself, I explored the residential area where I was staying. As I tend to do when in a new place on my own, I gravitated toward shops and cafes to interact with people, or sample local fare (in this case, shoes, albeit a nationally-distributed brand).  I guess this is the urban equivalent of the watering hole or marketplace.  Maybe the mall serves that purpose for locals.

My partner’s cousin in Virginia goes to the mall almost every day with her twin toddlers. On one of our recent visits, she offered to take me and my family there.  Why don’t I want to go to a mall in a strange U.S. city?  I think it’s because I don’t believe it will satisfy my hunger for a Sense of Place.  To the contrary, I expect, with its fully enclosed spaces and controlled indoor environment, it will numb my sense of connection to the outside world and make me forget, rather than know, where I am.

And yet this is the place both hosts offered to share with me. In some sense, the mall helped define their sense of place: this is where I live, where I spend my time, this is Something My Homeland Has to Offer.

I realize what I seek in a sense of place is specificity: to somehow get in tune with what this latitude and longitude offer up in this moment that’s particular to the locale.  It’s almost like meeting a person: we can go through all the expected social machinations without ever entering into the depths of each other’s souls, and in fact, we do that every day.  But if you really want to know someone…

When I notice plants I can’t identify, how they cluster, line up and circle one another, wonder what they are, and learn (or not) their names, I feel a sense of place. I sense that the soil, the air, the humidity differ from my home environ of Northern California, where I still marvel at the succulents and hardy seaside flora that populate my area. When I move through an old Oak Grove and see trees who began their life on this earth centuries before me, I feel that sense of place.

On my last day there, I borrowed my friend’s bike and headed out in the opposite direction I intended.  I wanted to bike next to the Mississippi River, but found myself in neighborhoods with American flags, swingsets and front porch furniture.  Front porch furniture!  You don’t see much front porch furniture in my neck of the woods, let alone park benches on the far stretch of lawn after the sidewalk.  People actually sit outside and say hello to passersby.

Year ago at a social gathering for the bisexual community (yes Virginia, there is such a thing), a civil engineer friend of mine told me humans are generally wired to need private, semi-private, semi-public and public space.  Front porches used to fill the semi-private (or was it semi-public?) need, but now gatherings such as the one we were attending helped fill that gap. 

Minnesotans, at least the ones in St. Paul, haven’t abdicated this part of their social being.  In addition to porches, people actually sat on benches on the little patch of lawn between the sidewalk and the street, and said hello to strangers.  Tall, white, blond and smiling, I got greeted many times by these happy, flat-vowel-uttering Midwesterners. I thought of their Nordic forbearers, and the miles they traveled to settle on this new continent, also in the northernmost region, answering to their chill genes.

My ancestors came from the Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Russian continent.  On my mom’s side, Austria, Hungary and Poland.  I had relatives who survived the Jewish Holocaust, and relatives who didn’t.  When I traveled to Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 1992 for work, my knowledge of myself as a Jew and the history of these countries treatment of Jews during World War II colored my perceptions of the culture and physical surroundings.

On a midnight run through a thousand-year-old city in Switzerland, I realized the cobblestones under my feet had never been blasted to bits and rebuilt, because Switzerland has remained neutral—indifferent?—for centuries while those around them have risen and fallen in violence.

What do I make of a ten-year-old sidewalk in Minnesota?  Minnesota is a native word, from the Dakota Sioux tribe that means “hazy water” or “sky-tinted water.” Mni means water and sota, hazy/smoky, or not clear.  The tribes of the area had villages around the land’s many lakes.  Now white moms push their jog strollers, the kind you can get at the Mall of America.

Because I wound up setting out on the bike in the opposite direction from where my friend told me to go, I wound up biking about eight miles, much of which bordered the Mississippi River.  This “mni-sota,” or hazy water indeed reflected the sky, and took me along its winding path, extracting a lot of my own sweat, or hazy water, in the process.

My host grudgingly joined me, even though she had gotten dressed anticipating the mall visit.  We sat on a big rock watching the sky, and a young man being photographed, presumably for his graduation pictures.  His mom watched with big love eyes as the photographer directed him into a number of positions: pensive, jockish, Calvin Klein model.  He probably could have been, tall, thin and conventionally attractive as he was.

I had arrived.  Sweaty and full of the days sights, smells and grit, I sat where people before me have perched for centuries, and witnessed a ritual native to the current inhabitants of this place.

Of course I might well have been able to say the same thing about the mall.  But the light outdoors was so much better.

Lost In Translation...Or Not

This is from my friend, photographer and yoga teacher Cara Judea Alhadeff, who's in Korea right now.  Read and be moved, as I was.

Lost in Translation...Or Not

I love the Korean people I have met here!  They are extremely affectionate, fiesty, playful, and genuinely present!  Their language has such a lyrical rhythm--so different from the pacing of speaking English.  Their pace is all together different.  Here we go:

City Life:

Past midnight, women squat in the subways selling their ginseng root and control top stockings.  Everyone is constantly working--selling and buying.

The continual activity throughout Seoul blows every stereotype of New York City out of the water. 

Unbelievable, Feeding Frenzy, Full-blown Chaos--the indoor department store shopping markets--women in uniforms-plastic aprons, strange leg warmers, and mini-minis selling everything imaginable--each worker so eager to please with her particular product: 12 different kinds of Spam next to 399 different kinds of Kimchee next to 50 different kinds of nori among 200 different kinds of seaweed among $8.00 imported Muesli among grilled, marinated, dripping, dried, deepfried, slimy, coated, crispy, rubbery, raw, boiled, crunchy, chewy, spicy, icy samples on toothpicks--anyone who has ever been disturbed by the bread in the bread basket going back to the customers for reuse would be stupified by not the double-dipping, but the quintuple dipping into the vats in the deli containers behind the sliding glass doors. I couldn't stop laughing the whole time as my friend literally dragged me through the crowds from one taste to another--toothpick bearing shopping and sensory fanatics; stimulation fiends--their energy does not have one ounce of hostility, but just a genuine zing, lust for movement that at the same time holds a beautiful internal stillness.

My food ethics have flown out the door.  Several times as I am in mid-chew, I find out that I am eating another, different part of pig.  I even went to (and had an incredible meal) a restaurant whose front window held a man stirring gargantuan boiling drums of Beef.  Oh! My vegan, Jewish, Buddhist brothers and sisters!   At other times, I discover that my traditional, ultra fabulous cold summer soup, has pear slices in it (a thrilling discovery for me), along of course, with the cow bone broth and the egg before-and-after ritual that go along with eating this special soup called Neang-myoun.  God it is Mat-sit-seo-yo!

 

There is so much Construction/Demolition, that every day I leave my sweet little square room, I am amazed by the changes.  99% of the signs are in Korean (except for an occasional sign advertising pizza:  "Made by a Man, but made for a Woman"--I never thought of gendered pizza--how exciting! , so I get around by pointing to the little maps on the back of business cards--my knowledge of Korean body parts and STD's in Korean doesn't really help.

On some sidewalks, there are parapeligic men wearing thick black rubber over the lower half of their body that they drag along on a dolly and push a cart with a loud radio and a small bucket for money.  I don't know how they stay alive.

Every day is a game of Poll Division.  Red lights and STOP signs, for many cars, buses, taxis, motorcycles, mean quickly speed up and weave through the 6 lanes of traffic coming from 4 directions.  It's not the speeding cars that careen around unseen corners, some making obscenely wide turns, some driving on the sidewalk, and it's not the womens' amazingly high heels potentially getting stuck in between the hand laid bricks that make up the sidewalks-as they flee from oncoming vehicles, it is the motorcycles, not mopeds or scooters or vespas, but full out Erik Estrada helmeted motorcyclists that barrel full speed down the Sidewalks that make me fear for my life, or at least my physical ability to teach yoga ever again.  Ironically, I have been riding on the back of one of these motor beasts--dodging pedestrians and laughing at how ridiculous our worlds are.

Subway sleepers:  men in suits, women in high heels with cosmetic surgery, women in high heels without cosmetic surgery, hikers, teenagers, senior citizens--all like a field of reeds--asleep, and moving quietly back and forth as the subway shifts.  Never, in public, have I seen so many thoroughly exhausted people.  90% or more of the subway passengers are fast asleep.  Performing contorted forward bends to keep in their individual seat; heads, necks, shoulder, and backs bobbing back and forth; an occassional head slung back emitting deep guttural snores--only disturbed as passengers arrive and depart.  Everyone tells me that the speed of International "Development" has created so much stress in these 10 million people.  Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times gone kamakazie beserk. 

I have joined the Seoul population of working (including my meditation practice and learning Korean) all day and playing all night--getting between 0-5 hours of sleep and crashing on the subway.  The nightlife here is too strange to do anything but jump into. 

It is completely strange and wonderful.  There seems to be no difference between daytime and nighttime.  Everything that someone can do in the middle of the day, they can also do in the middle of the night. 

John Waters would have a mighty field day here--especially at the wholesale department stores--8+ floors of commodities only available between 11pm and 6am; and then, he would absolutely flip out at the public baths.

The Public Bathhouses:

We arrived in the middle of the night and were given bubblegum pink uniforms with little matching beanies to wear. 

In their plastic-surgeon-like uniforms, men and women were lying around in different saunas with fragrant smells coming out of the walls; some people had the stamina to hang out in the Iceroom with its Philip Guston-like radiators coated in a thick, rich ice; and others were lying on a heated floor watching "Platoon" or in a special pitch-dark theatre with enormous cushy chairs watching "Sex in the City." 

Other rooms included manicures, pedicures, facials, threading (facial hair removal), waxing, acupuncture, moxibustion, a barbershop, computer room, red bean ice desserts, new clothes, new muscles, Everything!   All 24 hours a night.

Kegel Mania--The Rabbinical Method:

I have no idea what the translation for this particular ritual is in English.  This only exists in the woman's section of the bathhouse:

Wearing nothing but a Thick, frosting pink, armless rubber cape, with only a small hole for my head, I tentatively squatted over a chair with a big hole in the seat.  Under the chair was a hot plate with a ceramic pot boiling Woman Herbs and Woman Minerals.  A sturdy attendant ordered me to fan between my legs and gestured that I needed to clench and release my sphincters in order to suck the steaming herbs and minerals into my body.  Among other benefits, the couchie-steamer is supposed to be really great for the menstral cycle.  For over an hour, in our little pink caps, my Korean friend and I laughed and squirmed, (at one point, we looked like we were dovening in a synagogue) as we sweltered and and fanned and kegeled--constantly having to readjust so as not to burn our sensitive tissue!

Hotter than the Russian Bathhouses in New York's East Village, where if you're really lucky, you get whipped (seriously whipped) with birch branches and ice water, hotter than Les Bains Maures in Tunisia, where women with a lot of flesh, a lot of hair, and a lot of facial and breast tatoos are happily commited to body archeology with Loofahs and special mud; so hot, the moment I entered, the skin underneath my fingernails got prickly.  I quickly looked around before darting back out to earthly safety.  I had seen a tall upside-down beehive dome ceiling, earth circular walls with an omnious looking entrance for the "fire," some special black wood to provide extra oxygen, and rows and rows and rows of chicken eggs.

Around 4 or 5am the bathhouse people would luxioriate in their torpor--crawling into sleep cubbies with their cell phones. 

Little did I know, there was a whole world I had yet to experience in the public baths.

Following an exquiste traditional Korean dinner with the Lifestyles Editor of the major newspaper here--probably 30 small plates of green and red and orange arrangements ranging from tangy mugwort marinated in red chiles to garlic stems that gave me such a high, to hallelujah, frozen persimmons, just before midnight, I arrived at the what I was told was going to be a department store.  I was in search of my next spa extravaganza.  The place seemed deserted.  I found the elevator with glass doors facing the city.  As I got higher, I began to hear a murmur grow louder and louder.  The low stir of voices abruptly became about 50 or more octogenarians--all no taller than below my shoulders--carrying cellophane wrapped thick black visors shaped into the comedy/tragedy faces--and Everyone was determined to fit into the elevator at the same time--Seoul and being raucaus seem to always fit well together.  The smashing together of bodies and voices continued up and down the floors until I managed to pry myself free from the crowd and their visors.  I finally arrived to find streams and streams of naked women, every age and size, with orange towels wrapped around their heads--Scrubbing, scrubbing one another, sometimes several friends scrubbing one person, squatting to get more leverage, like there was no tomorrow--bright green and yellow mits flashed across their bodies doing forward bends, backbends, sidebends--so Loud!   In the middle, on heated marble platforms, women (and I)slept--a deep, wonderful sleep.  The wet hot rooms with a different temperatures sprayed herbal mists, while the dry ones with stacked minerals emitted amazing smells.  Then there were the mud herbal, chartreuse lime baths and gloriously cold pools.  Among the eight pools of different sizes, shapes, temperatures, massive rock frogs spewed their healing contents--rock pools, wood pavilions, cold pools with different temperatures shot out waterfalls, pummeling the women beneath them--People in Seoul seem to seek out continual vigorous stimulation-Every sense fullly engaged--from their taste buds to the pores of their skin.

By the end, I had become a limp mollusk--sliding across the 1950's pink plastic massage table, lined up among the eight other tables and shiny flaccid women.  Every surface was wet and hot.  The masseuses, who gave themselves a thorough scrubdown between sessions, were all also heavily sweating--some wore black panties and bras, some were naked, mine wore magenta.  She used almost every part of her body to release almost every part of my body.  Time and space felt completely displaced.  I didn't know how many limbs were rubbing and scrubbing and slapping me.  An occassional "Oh God!" or low grunt would slip out of me.  I felt like I was experiencing fireworks--we were the fireworks--between the sound of slapping flesh, water splashing, and womens'  constant Korean voices--One after the other, more amazing sensation--I was in constant awe, being conscious without thinking, there was always one more layer of total yumminess for my body to drop into.  It was a true lesson in abundance.  From the feeling of being engulfed by the warm sudsy aroma, like Luke Skywalker thawing out among Star Wars's biped camel creature's intestines, to the lemon, mashed cucumber wrapped around my face, to the way the masseuse got IN-BETWEEN the sutures of my skull, metacarpals, metatarsals--miraculous!  My spleen meridian and lymphatic fluid were crying out, "Let's Boogie!"  Because I have been reading novels about food, I kept have flashes of meat being tenderized.  I don't know if I have ever gotten such a clear sense of myu own anatomy--the interconnectness of the paths of nerve and lymph channels--connective tissue gone wild!  Skin and our DNA grew a whole different meaning for me.  This experience redefined Charles and Ray Eames and The Powers of Ten.  The micro and macro really did enter one another!

My clothes that had been tight on me when I entered the spa, were baggy when I left the following afternoon--I had lost that much Skin.  And the next day, my blossoming bruises were the color of my masseuse's underwear.

Yoga:

It turns out that during the first few weeks when I wanted to find out if the students had any injuries, I thought I was asking "Where do you have pain?" (in Korean); but I was actually asking "Where is your father?" as I would point to different parts of my body.  In spite of, or maybe because of these communication lapses, the students are really present.  It is such a joy to work with these students who clearly have faith in themselves and in me and as a guide to help them explore the consciousness within their bodies.

The wonderful women (one who calls herself my second mother) who work in my favorite studio joke that my assistant's nickname is Cara2--her real name is Oh Ju Hee.  Even though I resist from making references to Mel Brooks's films, we all have fun together.

Students often spend the entire day in the studios (which are kept spic and span by older women using sticky tape)--going from one sweaty class to the next and then the next.  I don't know how they do it. 

Buddha's Mountains:

The sign said:  "Gyeongju is Breathing".  Gyeongju is a small town I visited last week--a gift from the universe that I cannot even begin to explain, just to share. 

The Silla people from the first Korean dynasty, who have lived here since the 6th century, say the breath of Buddha exists in these mountains.

We climbed and climbed through a steep dense forest.  The sun was setting by the time we arrived at "halmaebucheo", "granny Buddha", her hands covered with her stone robes, sculpted before the 7th century.  Her form deeply recessed, carved into a huge rock, smell of incense mixed with the fragrant little white flowers covering the mountainside mixed with tall bamboo and pine trees, layers of Owl and Coocoo Bird calls, silence, cars in the far-off background, and an occassional helicopter (maybe visiting from North Korea to check out the Buddhas from above. 

As we hiked down the mountain side, we passed a woman, bent over using a cane, maybe in her eighties or nineties, with skin the color of beetlenut.  She said something to us in Korean about water and continued climbing up past us toward the halmaebucheo.  We were told that she visits her buddha in the rock, every dawn and dusk.  Amazing!  And, to add to the thrillingness, there was a persimmon grove at the bottom of the mountain!

Instead of waking to the crackly loud-speaker of a man's voice reading from the Koran, we woke up the next morning to a blow horn announcing the sale of little anchoives, oranges, and garlic.

The local people say that the sounds from the Brahma Bell Pavilion overflow the whole Universe like a shadow.  We actually got a chance to see a monk ringing the bell--ringing with such force, he had to use his entire body to sway the enormous log into the bell which stood on the edge of the slope, surrounded by mist-covered mountains.  The other sacred bell I saw was called the "Mommy" bell, because a child had been thrown into the 19 Tons of molten metal when the bell was originally cast--the sacrifice made the bell sound better.

The temple grounds were a labryrinth of stone covered entrance ways.  Each temple was so different:  Circles of stone monks enacting different gestures, holding, maybe offering, different objects.  Gargoyles of Dragonheads, Pigs, and Lions emerge from layers and layers that made up the thick ceramic waves of rooftops.  A beautiful rock, almost vertical, stairway--each step massive--led to an enormous beautifully detailed painted drum resting on a huge turtle's back.  Stone Pagodas stood among the various temples; the beautiful colorful lanterns casting shadows that made me stop and wonder.  There is a massive gold Buddha with a little Pepe LePieux moustache and goatee surrounded by wooden mosaic tiles, huge wood columns, stone statues, and exquisitely detailed drawings of myths.  The one that really, really got me was a drawing behind one of the Buddha's heads of concentric circles of hands--big on the inside circles and becoming tiny on the outer circles--each holding a different object for prayer.  Just looking at that image was like breathing.

Another temple, the most famous in Korea, and one of the most important historically in the world, was constructed inside a cave--it is covered in earthberm and before the Japanese took over, there was a complex irrigation, humidity system within the temple to protect this massive stone Buddha which was carved from rocks brought from the North in the 7th century.  No one knows how they were able to carry such humungous rock from such a long distance--it is incredible how many stories there are like that globally!

Bodhisattva of Perfect Compassion, "One Who Listens to the Cries of the World" is carved in Relief in the stone face of the Moon-Swallowing Mountain--facing a neighboring Atomic Power Plant.

Except for the party I went to with the writers and editors of Seoul's major newspaper, I am the only non-Asian person I see in every public space.  In the Buddha Mountains, I had met a wonderful French-Canadian and we explored these National Treasures together.  It took me a couple of days to go back to speaking English and Korean and not French when I got back to
Seoul.  Maybe because we were in the "country-side" or maybe because there were two of us, the children laughed and shouted when they saw us--They were so delighted!  I got a chance to see some incredible childrens' drawings of Buddha and the history of the region--their images were so beautiful and vivid!

The Art Scene:

Wow!  I just had the most stimulating, thought-provoking, integrated, eye-opening, empathetic and HUGE discussion about my photographs with the director/curator and her translator/assistant of a gallery here with whom I will be working.  My God!  we were all so completely engaged--talking about each and every photograph (xerox copies) from so many different perspectives--all the things I love to think about--this woman, in Korean, asked me the most interesting questions that anyone has ever asked about my work--can I even repeat them? I am so excited!   We were all listening so intently, discussing with such detail and precision.  The director loved my explanations to her questions--we spoke about Chi and ambiguity and unfamiliarity and universal tension and the third interval and yin and yang and containment and more simultaneous contradictions and the notion of contradiciton itself and self-awareness and Buddhisim (I did notice a cross sitting on her clean desk) and gender categories and the inside in relation to the outside and differences betweeen Western and Eastern social constructs about otherness and the act of constructing vs. revealing and inventing vs. encountering--what already exists and utter presence and again tension and the individual beat within the rhythm of the universal (Rabindranth Tagore hovered in our midst) and when the inside isn't really coming from within, but exists both in and outside--like one continous spiral, seed--no inherent distinction between in and out except for our superimposed concepts of what is supposed to be in and what is supposed to be out--all of this in relation to my photographs--(one curator I spoke with at a museum in the US had reduced some of these ideas down to Formalism!)--How me teaching and practicing yoga is a path of investigation into what I am compelled to explore/reveal with my photography--I am telling you, it was fabulous! SATISFYING!--I felt we were going further and further --getting deeper into the most succulent goo of what it is all about!

There is more to say but...more happened:

So, I decided to cancel my other appointments with the galleries.  But, since one of them was, I thought, near my home, I said, why not?--one last one, Galerie Pici--just to see--oh my God!  As usual, it took me Forever to find it and on my third phone call to them to figure out again where they were, I was going to cancel, but they had sent someone out to find me so I had to go.  When I got there, the curator/artist and her daughter/architect/business partner swarmed in on me with warmth and publications they have put together of young foreign artists--beautiful publications in collaboration with each artist's country's embassy--I, of course, was Seduced.  (I also really liked the curator's art work and the art work in their space, which is usual for me).   The curator looked through my portfolio in less than five minutes and offered to introduce my work at next week's Korean International Art Fair (www.kiaf.org).  So after more conversation about working together ( I was their first artist from the US) and showing my work at the Beijing Art Fair, Shanghai Art Fair, Singapore Art Fair, she and I flew off to the photo lab to develop my most recent self-portraits, ones which I took last week.  Before I left, we exchanged gifts and hugs.   We had decided on using those images as 8X10's for the Fair.  But, I had to confirm that my participation in the art fair would not be a conflict of interest with the gallery with whom I had had that crazy perfect conversation.  It turned out they wanted exclusive representation of my work throughout Asia, and they felt my participation would be a conflict of interest.  So I chose connection and longevity, rather than spontaneous, immediate gratification.  This was a major professional decision for me.

I have a solo exhibition here scheduled for July 8th.  And another, potentially, at the photography museum where I met Jean Baudrillard last week during his photography opening there.  He gave me an "Oh La La," when I asked him for his autograph.  I couldn't help myself!

And now, I am on a treasure hunt for artists who have children who are willing to model for me and my camera in front of (or underneath or inside of) their parents' artwork.  I have been shooting a lot and meeting more great artists.

Yesterday, one of my students took me to her calligraphy drawing class, rooted in breathing and meditation.  Emptiness is the focus of traditional Korean aesthetics.  Beauty is defined outside the boundaries of time.  The teacher, a nationally known traditional artist, said in Korean that when using the brush, the artist only has one chance, like a photograph, he said!  I got shivers up and down my spine.  As I watched him demonstrate, I wanted to cry--the exactitude of his gestures, the pressure and weight of his brush, reminded me of my photographic process--something inside made sense.  Again, I became aware of how my yoga practice and photography are so intricately connected.

The Peeping Monk:

At a peculiar festival celebrating Einstein's history, I saw one of the most fascinating video pieces--It was titled, "What do you want to see?"--a room sized cube comprised of four walls of zippers, horizontal and vertical--on the inside of this zipper box were four video projectors--two different sides projected eyes peeking through peep holes, blinking, one side projected lions mating and playing, and the other projected still images of classical and contemporary nudes (from the Naked Maja to Cindy Sherman's historical spoofs); from the center, a porn soundtrack played.  The audience could zip and unzip these walls of zippers to see fragments of the projecting images on the opposing walls, including the zipper teeth shadows.  At an absolute synchronous moment, I unzipped one of the zippers and saw across from me, with the porn sounds in the background and the image of Manet's "Olympia" spread across the portions that I could see of him, a Buddhist monk peering back at me through a zipper hole.  It was perfect moment--a super collision of creativity, spirituality, and outrageous irony.

One reason I feel so happy here is because the contradictions in these peoples' lives feels so apparent.  The external speed, the internal silence.  It all makes sense inside my system.  May 2005 has been one of the most powerful times in my life with both professional and emotional challenges and realizations--I feel a flood of clarity around what and how it is that I am doing and  being in this world--many lessons from Judith Lasater that I have been exploring with my students for years, I am finally experiencing in my body consciousness and my mental consciousness in a whole new light--connections between my photographic process and living my yoga that feel like a voice that is finally finding the words or sounds to sing and I feel an emotional clarity that sprung open (and is continuing to spring open)--because of the universe's phenomenal accuracy of timing--I guess it is not phenomenal, it is just the way it is.  And It makes me want to laugh!

Gleefully and Quietly Yours,

Cara

*We began our day walking and talking, walking and talking, through the hazy hot air-Urban Weight-stopping at a vendor to eat pig's blood and sushi rolled in an omellete, topped off with thick red gooey yummy goo.  The heat increased.  We wandered most of the rest of the day through a 15th century Palace--I was completely surrounded by flashes from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," and "Hero." (luckily so far I have not been surrounded by images/flashes from "The Isle"---HaHa!).  The ceramic tiled rooved (each tile imprinted with its own design) pagoda-like pavillions with rows and rows of intricately painted posts--gorgeous details of greens, reds, blues-lotus blossom-like patterns repeated over and over--the queen's quarters were situated so that she could look through room after room without moving--spaces looking into spaces, looking into more spaces (maybe similar to the Winchester House?!)--geometric patterns on sliding doors--all so richly detailed.  Deep blue painted wisps overhead on the poles with white dot wisps coming out of the blue like wings that reminded me of Tantric paintings.  The Palace ponds were full of fat Koi.

Then there were two trees completely different from one another that led us into Biwon, the Secret Garden.  The first was a huge Asian plum tree whose trunk and limbs were tightly bound with thatched wrappings, burlap, and thick heavily coiled rope--each branch was supported by massive (ridiculously sized) crossed metal poles--I felt like I was looking at an Ancient Alien-Signourney Weaver gone Earth Mama Hyperbole--the second tree was a 750 year old Chinese Juniper whose own limbs were so completely twisted and growing each which way (it looked like a familiar conversation)--these two trees lured us along a path to the Secret Garden.  The Palace has about 115 acres--most of it wooded--along the first part, we could see the Palace's neighbors-actually tennement housing--each roof covered with huge urns filled with, according to Yumie, spices and kimchee--and then we hit some wacky-ass modern-all-windows architecture--lined up with traditional pavillions, stacked one on top of the other longitudinaly along the hillside--it was so bizarre--it really felt like we shouldn't be seeing whatever it was that we were trying to decipher--and then there were the trees, the birds, the flowers--Yumie and I spent long moments of silence and just being together in this mythical space--and then we were caught!  (more later!)

After "our release" we sat down in a fabulous dive with Yumie's friend to eat dinner (a bowl of cold Kimchee soup that sent me into such raptures and gratitude, and not until I jumped into the main course, did I realize that the soup had taken the first (at least) layer of skin off my tongue--and I didn't spend the next hour or two squirming-wildly-because we were plunging into a gargantuan plate of fish goo--I mean major Goo--I am not even sure what--but actually, no regular/familiar fish meat--I know there were textures that I never want to have in my mouth again--but I did scarf down the fish intestines of a variety of sizes and textures--all basically the same creamy gray color; fish egg sacs, and more mussels (and I just read Kitchen Confidential's rational of why not to eat unknown mussels...), squid, pulpo than I have ever seen-or eaten; and more fish intestines (Hugo would have been proud, I think)--but I was not because of all of That, but I was squirming out of control and gushing and unable to breathe most of the meal because it was so SPICY--my membranes didn't know what was coming or going!

We eventually made our way past funny vendors and excruciatingly fashionable youth to a Buddhist Temple.  It was late at night by the time we got there, but I could still see the beautiful carved wood, a massive drum with sumptuous paintings of flowers and life, a bell the size of a port-a-potty with a suspended log as its donger.  There were representations of lotus flowers everywhere and detailed narrative painting and Repetition--Buddha's face-again and again-in preparation for Buddha's Birthday celebration, the lanterns covered the sky--the white ones are for people (I suppose just people) who have died and all the colorful ones--a waving sky carpet extending out in all directions-are for people who are alive--I like that.