The Moon Cycle March 2, 2020

In late September I headed to Morocco for a yoga retreat, run by one of my beloved yoga teachers at Point Reyes Station.  When she had mentioned that two slots had opened up at the last minute, I thought – Morocco, why not?  It’s on my bucket list, after all.  I had just finished architecture school, “retired” in earnest, and ready for an adventure.  For once in my life, free of all commitments, I could act spontaneously.

The retreat was held near Essaouira on the Atlantic Coast, in a beautifully furnished, capacious stone house.  The deck greeted us each morning with an array of pink yoga mats, white cotton cushions, and large sun umbrellas.  Lunches were on the patio, afternoons spent lazing around in the green-tiled pool with book in hand or going into town.  Evenings brought lectures under the stars, and in one of these, our teacher presented the idea of fostering creativity by tapping into the moon cycle. The idea, she said, is to use the new moon as a starting point, to build up steam on a project until achieving maximal flow on the full moon, and then to reap the benefits of the exploration in the waning moon. 

I was immediately struck by the wisdom of this challenge.  First, the moon cycle is long enough so that one might actually accomplish something if one puts one’s mind to it, but not so long as to lose sight of the target.  Second, the moon offers a tangible reminder each day of where one is in the cycle – “Oh, now is the first quarter, I’d better get a move-on!”  Third, and this is really the woo-woo, maybe there is actually something extra magical or powerful about accompanying the moon on its journey, befriending it, partnering with it.  OK, as I said, woo-woo.

Since I’ve returned, I’ve tied my energy to the moon cycle twice, and I’m now convinced of its merit. I confronted the new moon on October 27th with a determination to whip my long-ignored garden back into shape.  I called my landscaper of twenty years ago; fortunately he was still in business and ready to dig in immediately.  Concrete and wooden risers were replaced.  A cobblestone retaining wall was extended. Trees were pruned, or removed, or planted.  Wisteria and rose bushes were humbled, and new drought-resistant stuff with unpronouncable names was planted.  By the new moon in November, the project was completed.  OK, I did none of this myself, except pay for it, but it was a test case of what is possible if one commits to moving forward in a timely manner. 

For my second moon project, I will take complete credit, and here, I shocked even myself.  When my daughter Annie was growing up, I used bound lab notebooks with gridded lines as the substrate for her scrapbooks.  I would lovingly glue in photos as well as other little memorabilia and embellish them with some kind of commentary.  These volumes, so precious to her and to me, had been abandoned in 2009, during the fall of her sophomore year in high school. In retrospect, there were two reasons for this abrupt ending:  first, Annie became a rebellious teenager and our relationship was deteriorating, and second, this was the year we moved from film to digital cameras, so no longer were there actual photos to pop into the book.

On the new moon of January 24^th I began the lunar project, with the intention to fill in the ten-year gap in “Life with Annie”.  This meant three things:  First, I had to sort out a decade’s worth of digital photos.  Though I had lost a few years of photos because of a computer crash circa 2010, I managed to assemble everything I had from cameras, iphones, and external hard-drives into one database of 17,000 photos, collated and duplicates eliminated.  Of these, over several days I selected 454 for printing.  Luckily, Walgreens happened to have a 9-cent per print sale, so I uploaded the lot and voila, within a few hours the 4X6 photos were ready for pickup at my neighborhood store.

Second, I needed some supplies. I ordered a dozen gluesticks from Amazon.  Years of keeping a lab notebook had taught me that only UHU sticks from Germany are up to this task, and Amazon got them to me within a day.

Third, the biggest challenge in the whole process was an emotional one.  In order to fill in a narrative, I had to go back through my journals of ten years, delighting in the joyful entries as well as writhing in the overwhelmingly painful ones, and somehow bucking up to enter commentary into the books. 

And, I made it!  With even a week to spare.  This will be a hard act to follow.

Hiking January 13, 2020

It is really quite late in my life that I have come to appreciate the wonder of hiking.

A few years before I retired, I got it into my head to walk the Bay Area Ridge Trail, and I asked my buddy Barbara to join me. This discontinuous circuit falls along the crest of hills that circle the San Francisco Bay to the tune of ~350 miles, and it takes car shuttling over ten counties to complete it.  Filled with spectacular views and as-spectacular weather, the Bay Trail is one of the many jewels of the Bay area.  Barbara and I managed to make it through all of Marin and Sonoma Counties before fizzling out for various reasons.

Indeed, I got distracted from the Ridge when I signed up for a trail-hiking challenge in 2012 to celebrate the 50^th Anniversary of Point Reyes National Seashore.  This was a far easier enterprise logistically because very few car shuttles were required. Still, to keep myself going, I roped in friends weekend after weekend to complete my goal, and by that October, I had been on at least part of almost every trail in the Seashore.

Now in full steam, I booked a trip for the Milford Track, an iconic hike on the South Island of New Zealand, for daughter Annie and me during her Christmas break from college.  As a warm-up, while still on the North Island, we did the Tongariro Alpine Crossing Track, a 12-mile hike across an occasionally active volcano.  It turned out to be way harder than the Milford Track itself, mainly because the first few miles were steeply uphill, including several flights of steps.  It is eerily beautiful, if not a bit disconcerting as one encounters lights that flash in case of an eruption. The Tongariro track – which I hiked at age 60 – taught me that my years of hiking were limited.  It was time for a bucket list.

First on that list was the Salkantay Pass in the Andes, one of the routes to Machu Picchu.  Again, I wheedled Annie into my new-found obsession with an REI trip over another holiday break.  I hadn’t appreciated that the pass was more than 15,000’ high, and as we made our way over the ridge, in a stiff, cold wind and some precipitation, I asked her whether we might cross Kilimanjaro off the bucket list.  “Cross it off, cross it off!” she enthusiastically concurred.

I have a few more trips in mind for the next few years – the Laugavegur Trek in Iceland, the hut-to-hut in the high Sierras, the W route in Chilean Patagonia, to name a few – but for now, I’m back into the Bay Area Ridge Trail with some new recruits that live around the Bay and with the hope of completing that before I turn 70.

How important hiking has become to me, and how surprising that discovery!  A few years ago, when my daughter was in the depths of her addiction, my friend Julie walked a long loop with me in the National Seashore.  She listened to my grief, and step by step, I felt myself healing.  It was as though the act of walking, the slow but steady and determined pace of it, gave me the slow and steady strength I needed to get through the horror of those days.

Now that I have more time, I am trying to walk for an hour each day.  I have my own little route of trails right behind my house, up on Mt. Sutro and another set of paths in Golden Gate Park down below.   I don’t listen to music or a podcast, I walk alone.  I think, I breathe, I hope for Annie’s health, for mine, and for a better world for all of us.   

The Daruma Dolls January 10, 2020

A few years before I retired, I hired a life-coach named Cathy to help me think through possibilities and to prepare for the next phase of my life.  At one point, when I started singing again after a break of about twenty years, Cathy offered me a small red-painted Daruma Doll, a Japanese image of the monk Bodhidharma who meditated for so long that his arms and legs withered away.  The doll is used for goal-setting, in that both eyes are empty white circles: the aspirant fills in one eye with an intention, and then fills in the second eye when the goal has been achieved.  By working with Cathy, my goal had become obvious – I wanted to sing with the San Francisco Opera Chorus. 

So I filled in one of the eyes with a large black circle and on the doll's underside I wrote the words Opera Chorus.  When I retired, I started vocalizing every day and began auditioning for a few things here and there.  I sang with the West Marin Players in Pirates of Penzance, and I joined Marin Oratorio.  I started to take voice lessons again and to work with my beloved vocal coach Daniel. Eventually I got up my nerve for the annual auditions for SFO Chorus (which I had also done probably 30 years previously).  I polished up the Jewel Song from Faust and learned a new Mozart aria from Clemenza di Tito.  And I did it!  I made it through the aria, I did not forget anything, I did not pass out or throw up. I did not make the cut, but now into my seventh decade, I was very proud of myself for trying.  Yet the poor Daruma Doll had to remain one-eyed.

Meanwhile I was hopping along on some other paths, and I said, “Cathy, I need a few more Daruma Dolls!”  I had written a draft of a short book on the discovery of RNA splicing, and at the time had found a literary agent to shepherd my book to publication.  One eye of little doll #2 was filled in and underneath it I wrote “Splice”.  But the literary agent and I had to part ways, do to his inaction and my impatience, and – what with one thing leading to another – the book remains unpublished and that doll is still blind in one eye, too.

Doll #3 was the last to be declared, and the first to be fully filled in.  On its bottom is written M Arch for Masters of Architecture.

On reflection, I think these Daruma Dolls kept me going.  They are a physical reminder and testimony to my determination and tenacity. I kept thinking, “I am not going to quit!  I want at least one of these dreams to come to fruition.”

And so one has.  I keep the M Arch doll in my car’s glove compartment now, along with a Sharpie, waiting for a chance to get together with Cathy, who now lives in Napa.  I don’t want to fill in the second eye without her.  We did this together.  

Swimming December 3, 2019

As I was preparing to leave UCSF, the University ran a series of talks to help prospective retirees navigate the transition financially, medically, and psychologically. It was recommended that we not make big plans immediately, but rather let our passions percolate, trusting that eventually a vision would bubble to the surface. In fact, the counselors advised, it was often a childhood activity or dream that would grab our attention and propel us forward.

And so it was with me.  I started taking art classes at College of Marin after I retired, not because I had ever taken art before, but because I hadn’t.  I wanted to see what this was all about and whether any kernels of talent or creativity lie within me.  Yet as I continued, it was my childhood fascination with architecture that was rekindled, and recently that has prompted me to reflect about the simple joys of my Boomer girlhood.

Summers growing up in Pennsylvania in the 50s and 60s were lazy, and I loved that.  I would ride my black bike along the narrow streets of our neighborhood and over the dirt paths on a nearby golf course, often by myself.  We kids would congregate in our family’s large side yard after dinner, playing Red Light or Simon Says or catching fireflies till we couldn’t see anymore. 

On rainy days, my mother would take us to the Pottstown Public Library, whose smell I can still dredge up, and we’d borrow a stack of books that would keep us going for the next three weeks.  One summer, I think I worked my way through every biography on the kids’ shelf.  How I loved to settle into a read on our front porch during late afternoon thundershowers, gently bouncing in the embrace of a soft-cushioned metal chair whose arms and legs were formed by a single sinuous ribbon of wrought iron.  Or sometimes, my sister and our friend Carol and I would build a Barbie world in our cool cinderblock basement with bits of wood scraps my father had set aside for that purpose.

But above all, there was swimming.  Our family joined the North End Swim Club when it was under development, and by 1960 it was the centerpiece of my existence for the next decade.  I wasn’t a great swimmer, but I joined the swim team anyway, because that’s just what we did!  Practice was in the morning, rain or shine, and on warm sunny days, we spent the rest of the day there, playing canasta on our towels under the spruce trees, leaping off the diving boards for a cool plunge, frolicking like a dolphin, flirting with the boys, playing tetherball, or grabbing a Fudgesicle from the snack bar for all of 7 cents.  There was rhythm, consistency, friendship, sport, and delight. 

And so finally, 50+ years later, to celebrate my new relationship with unstructured time, I joined a small swim club in Marin, to slice through clear water in a lap-lane, to soak in some sun, to listen to the still-60s music blaring over the pool speakers, to rest in a chair, to read, and to refresh.  This is summer. This feels like home.

Mr. Rogers November 23, 2019

There is a restaurant scene in the new movie “Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” in which Mr. Rogers, portrayed by Tom Hanks, invites his interviewer to take a moment to consider “all the special ones who loved us into being.” 

I was already in full-lachrymal mode by this point, but there, mixed in with the other diners, appeared the real Mrs. Rogers and members of the real Neighborhood TV team.  It was a fleeting but still moment, powerful to me as I too have been reflecting on the personal forces that molded me.

Mr. Rogers had that quality that I have come to appreciate from Zen Buddhism of listening, of giving one’s full attention to another person, of even being the vessel for the other’s grief, confusion, fear, or anxiety.  Fostering that connection is part of why I enjoyed the interview process so much when I worked for a genetics journal, and it is why I do not enjoy speaking over the phone with friends or family who multi-task during the conversation.  Mr. Rogers puts it to his interviewer, "Do you know what the most important thing in the world is to me right now?  Talking on the phone to [you]."

The movie profoundly resonates, too, in the transformation of the interviewer himself, who had suffered the loss of his parents, one through death, the other through abandonment.  How would he be able to forgive?  His dying mother, through a dream, allows him to release his anger by telling him that his anger isn't what she needs.  I love how Mr. Rogers phrases the issue, "to forgive is a decision we make to release a person from the anger we feel toward them."  How hard I have worked on forgiveness for past injuries, and indeed making that decision was the first step.