LOST IN THE SPRING DUNES

A couple of generous friends introduced me to one of their favorite secret walks in the sand dunes on the coast of Massachusetts. I had never seen anything like these sandy hills full of scrub oak and pine and blossoms and mosses and all sorts of mysterious vegetation. Of a stunning beauty.

And because it had been raining hard, everything was blooming or just beginning to leaf out. I was surprised at how vibrant and colorful this quiet, hidden place actually was. Lots of fresh new poison ivy too.

How delicate the baby oak leaves.

I went back the next morning with my camera; the fog-shrouded dunes looked even more alluring. Tiny creatures were burrowing into the rain-pocked sand.

I got a bit lost but how lost can anyone get when you can hear the ocean pounding the shoreline? Well, very, if you are me. Somehow the fog turned me around several times, the paths are blurry and indistinct in places, gone altogether in others, but it only meant that I stumbled on a few more lovely features of this landscape, including some bogs and marshes.

What follows is a mostly un-captioned photo spill from my walk--perhaps a friendly reader will fill us in on what's what.

At least I recognize the beloved sassafras.

It would be nice to take this walk with a scientifically-inclined sort of person. If I had the names of plants then I might also get their stories, too. So, with apologies; but how could I resist sharing all this? (And I will spare you my increasingly deranged obsession with the many deflated balloons tangled, half-buried in the dunes....for now, anyway.)

MOTHER'S DAY MUSINGS: ACTING WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF CIRCUMSTANCE

Often I will see something that strikes me, but I am in a hurry and rush past. Then I cannot stop thinking about what I have just seen, so I return. Even if I have only my cell phone, I snap some pictures, because I know that I am going to want to think about (and share) what's caught my attention. Walking under the scaffolding erected around a building this winter I noticed that some of the branches had been tucked underneath. I wondered how they would fare. And then I forgot about them. A week ago I happened to be on the same route. The trees, sturdy urban pears, as it happens, were resplendent, leafed out. But what was truly wonderful was that the branches trapped by the metal siding were equally boisterous. They were on their own time clock, a bit delayed in their development. But they were blooming.

At around the same time a friend sent me a lovely little book of days--meaning, a book that one is expected to read one page at a time, every day. I'm usually not good with such contours. I want to rush ahead through the month, look back to see what I missed over the year. But I decided to curb that enthusiastic impulse as best I could and instead focus on where I was (supposed to be.) I feel, at some intuitive level, that I'm in one of those life "wrinkles" (a karmic moment?) in which I am meant to be learning a very important lesson--but I'm not sure what it is. I'm really training myself to be open to leads--"what the universe hands you" as some put it.

The book is 365 Tao: Daily Meditations, by Deng Ming-Dao. Since college, I've been drawn to routing around in the literature and living of Tao, and as my younger son is studying the same, I'm humming alongside him. I try to keep open avenues of connection with family and with friends--those conversational highways often require maintenance, keeping up, finding on ramps, that sort of thing.

Theo, as a ten-year old, once complained about an adult he wasn't connecting with, and whom he felt didn't appreciate him: "We just don't have topic compatibility, Mom." I had never considered that concept but since then have found it enormously useful. Techies refer to "stickiness"-- or "connectivity". Velcro is a useful image, and so are burrs. (Can there be too much connection?) Some peoples' minds connect, affinities instantly spring up and there is no limit to talking, searching, examining, getting to know one another. With others, meh.

Anyway, a recent entry in 365 Tao is about "Acceptance", and in metaphorical spirit it seems to be about rain and drought. (Useful enough, that: the writer advises that we not plant a garden of water-demanding flowers during drought, as that is ignorant and egotistical.) But acceptance does not mean passivity or stagnation.  "Those who follow Tao do not believe in being helpless," he writes. "They believe in acting within the framework of circumstance."

And perhaps that's why those flowering branches stopped me in my tracks. "I am Tao," they seem to say. "I am trapped under scaffolding, out of the light, away from rinsing showers. The wind cannot even shake my flowers loose. But what do I do? I bloom, anyway! The scaffolding is actually a marvelously-textured backdrop for my extravagant beauty--like the meticulously-raked grooves of sand in a Zen garden, against which prickly pine needles will look soft and feathery. My blossoms have nothing to do with my circumstances. They have to do with who I am. My beauty comes from deep within, from the essential core of my being, from my rootedness. I will make the most of this unfortunate circumstance. Because I cannot help myself. I must bloom." 

Lately I seem to be hearing so many stories of people feeling trapped, stuck, unhappy in their lives, unable to take root. Does acceptance help? Does seeing how you are, in adversity, help you see who you are? So: Whether or not you have topic compatibility with someone you love: Bloom. Whether or not you feel noticed, attended to, in the sunshine of someone's attention: Bloom. Whether or not you asked to be pinned up against life's scaffolding: Bloom. Unfold in your own time, but bloom, because that is who you are, no matter what the circumstance. 

AND THEN THERE'S THE POWER OF NO COLOR AT ALL, AT THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM

Children are magnets and so I am pulled more often to Brooklyn, where my older son lives. I like to meet him at the Brooklyn Museum, because there is so much to look at--lots of Rodins, for starters--even if you don't enter into the galleries of this enormous treasure house. The Brooklyn Museum holds New York City's second-largest collection of art. And they are quite clever about juxtapositions among pieces.

One of my favorite works is a marble by Salvatore Albano, called The Fallen Angels.

I've seen this piece many times but for some reason yesterday I really looked at it, lingering for a good half an hour as I circled.

(I had only the camera on my cell phone, so apologies for photo quality.) The late afternoon sun on the piece only added to the sense of life.

Feet twist and tangle through feathers. A snake slithers across one angel's shoulders. Another bites a knuckle in anguish, as if stifling a scream.

A feverish tangle of limbs, hands digging into flesh, grasping for a hold. The skeletal underside of a mortal wing. The confusion of falling.

OK. Not Bernini. (Nothing tops the Rape of Proserpina.) But... Brooklyn.

CROCHETED COLOR IN MADISON SQUARE PARK

The piece is kind of funny, once you get over feeling startled at such an intrusion on the plantings of Madison Square Park. There are times when I wonder why a garden can't simply be...just a garden.

The answer, I suppose, is when an artist has an exuberant joke to tell. Orly Genger and a few assistants spent two years crocheting fisherman's rope--after they had picked out bits of lobster shell and fish bones, then cleaned and painted 1.4 million feet of the stuff. Most of it, of course, comes from Maine.

Genger laid the rope down, piling some of the "scarves"on top of one another so the undulations would mound up high, letting some of the ends die into the grass.

Rather than the heavy rusted steel of powerful Serra sculptures, which these forms resemble--as if some primal Serra ancestor, a giantess, had spent the winter on earth, manically working her crochet hook. Electric blues and reds and yellows (not yet installed when I wandered into this...situation) snake through the park. Springtime foliage was given a vivid backdrop.

Already the smart squirrels had figured out the on-ramp potential, fast-tracking to their nests up in the trees. I'm hoping the clever sparrows spot the nesting possibilities inside the coils. And perhaps the piece will do what art does so well: make us see something we hadn't noticed, make us slow down and actually feel the presence of the color blue, make us wonder what is art, anyway?

COLOR RUSHES IN WITH ANGELS FREE TO TREAD

Do I really need to say anything at all? Color suffuses the Northeast once again....flower stands and shop windows and florists' arms full of rainbows.

And the fragrance of lilacs as I walk down the street....I cannot keep my nose out of the enormous bunches at every deli stand.

My friend Amy Merrick, who often works with Frances "the Potter" Palmer, always manages to pull together graceful, sweet combinations. The Flower Girls are always ahead of the season; here's what's in store...

Enjoy all! Happy Spring!

TOXIC AIR POLLUTION, MOMS, MERCURY POISONING, AND CHINA: AN IMPORTANT STORY

An article in today's New York Times is of critical importance--to our planet. And it goes to show you: revolutions can happen when moms get mad. Mothers in China are justifiably concerned about raising children in cities with such extremely high levels of filthy air pollution that they cannot see down the block.

Children are becoming seriously ill. Mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants are damaging developing brains, hearts and lungs of fetuses and toddlers. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin. The article interviews Chinese mothers who don't let their children go to playgrounds. They don't let their children leave their apartments. Families who can afford to are leaving China to work in places with cleaner air. And "Clean Air Vacations" are being marketed--for those who can afford them--to mountain refuges far from Chinese cities. People buy air purifiers for their apartments, though those have limited efficacy.

And Chinese parents are angry about the pollution. They do not trust their government to keep them safe.

A few excerpts from the piece are at the bottom of this post, but I urge you to read it through. Why? Because the Chinese government will continue to make serious inroads on developing renewable energy supplies--or face revolution from people who know they are being poisoned.

As goes China, so goes the planet.

You all must keep in mind: here in the United States, many coal companies are doing everything they can to stop progress on cleaning up their toxic emissions. Right now, those mercury regulations we fought so hard to win are on the ropes. The rules are being tied up in courts for years by coal utilities, led by Nick Akins, president and CEO of American Electric Power. That's right. A consortium of utilities is suing for the right to spew toxic mercury into the air we all breathe.

We can read stories about poisonous Chinese air, and feel rather smug about how clean our air is by comparison. But we must remember that there are plenty of clean air enemies here who put profit above health, even our children's health. And we must remember that we share the air--including poisons, whether they are blowing in from Ohio, or China.

EXCERPTS:

Scientific studies justify fears of long-term damage to children and fetuses. A studypublished by The New England Journal of Medicine showed that children exposed to high levels of air pollution can suffer permanent lung damage. The research was done in the 1990s in Los Angeles, where levels of pollution were much lower than those in Chinese cities today.

A study by California researchers published last month suggested a link between autism in children and the exposure of pregnant women to traffic-related air pollution. Columbia University researchers, in a study done in New York, found that prenatal exposure to air pollutants could result in children with anxiety, depression and attention-span problems. Some of the same researchers found in an earlier study that children in Chongqing, China, who had prenatal exposure to high levels of air pollutants from a coal-fired plant were born with smaller head circumferences, showed slower growth and performed less well on cognitive development tests at age 2. The shutdown of the plant resulted in children born with fewer difficulties.

SEBASTIAO SALGADO: "WITH THIS PROJECT I FELL IN LOVE WITH MY PLANET. THIS WORK IS NOT ABOUT LANDSCAPES. IT IS ABOUT LOVE."

I was delighted when my editor at the New York Times Sunday Review asked me to interview Brazilian photographer Sebastio Salgado. He has long been one of my heroes; I had already placed an order with Taschen for his upcoming book, Genesis.

I reached Salgado in Paris (5 a.m. my time--a three-alarm-clock morning--so I spent the  rest of the day feeling deeply jet-lagged, and profoundly happy.) The interview is posted online and the paper has printed two photographs with a short introduction, but more are available to view online; they did a beautiful job incorporating text with slideshow. I could not think of a better way to celebrate Earth Day this year than to talk to someone who has honored the "beauty of things born again." Only in falling in love with what we have do we realize what we stand to lose.