the greatest adventure

Wednesday was our 25th wedding anniversary. It was silver. That is the tradition apparently. Somehow in this lifetime I missed the instruction book. I am the one who forgets anniversaries. And so jerry began reminding me about this event several months ago. The conversation went something like this.

Twenty-five years. August 27th. It’s a big deal. A meaningful look would come darting my way. A warning. This is not something to forget.
I know it is. Of course I won’t forget!!
Should we have a party?
Okay if that’s what you want.
We are supposed to have a party.
Okay. But I don’t really like parties. I mean if we have the people we really love then that will be a dinner not a party.
Disgruntled sigh from jerry’s corner
Okay, I said again, obviously something very wrong with me. We will have the party.
But then in a tiny whiny voice I added. Why do people whom we hardly know care about our wedding anniversary? Do we have to do that?
It turns out no; we don’t have to do that. We are having a dinner with our dearest friends and family who are close enough to come. It’s truly wonderful and here’s the thing.

I was never the girl who planned my wedding. Who dreamed of the dress and the house to follow. I dreamed of wandering and adventure. I dreamed of no fixed abode. Of no fixed man. There were so many cute ones. Why settle on one. I dreamed about the adventure of life and if there was someone with me then how grand. And then I met jerry. In England, and he just seemed cuter than the rest. We went to Sicily. We had such a grand time. The dream of adventure seemed to pale without him, and so how startling that I was the one who got myself married, to a guy from England, when I was 24. And then immediately began popping out these most precious people who were my children. I mean, what a thought. When I was 30 with two babies I realized it was not a thought but my life. I woke up with a start. I had given up adventure for domesticity. Huh. Not my plan at all.

So waking up, or what I thought of as waking up, can be a bit uncomfortable for those around you. They are all still sleepy and woozy and cozy in the former dream. They usually aren’t so keen for one person in the pod to start rearranging the covers and finally springing from the bed altogether and declaring that the light has dawned and it was time for us all to wake up! Snap snap!! But Jerry, looked at me silently, and slowly climbed out of his dream and said. Okay. Now what. Always. Every time.
No matter what gauntlet I have thrown down. He has calmly picked it up. Silently but sweetly shown me to be wrong over and over again in my assumptions about love and that the unruly wildness at the heart of me does not have to be tamed in order to love.

So really this is what I come to. I am married to the most extraordinary man. Some consciousness greater than my understanding obviously gave me guidance. I have been a ruthless rearranger of the covers. I have behaved in ways that would have caused almost every other person I have ever met to abandon this dream of living with me a long time ago. But jerry peele has stayed. He has stuck true to his word. He has been the most loyal and abiding friend.
We have moved from London, to Bermuda, to NYC to a farm in ancramdale and millions of houses in between. And just as many incarnations of ourselves.
He has loved me through thick and thin. And because of him I have learned that the great adventure I thought I was searching for has always been right here. The great adventure is love.
I suppose I go on and on about unconditional love. Te ammo. And here it is.
Wow.
I am humbled with gratitude.
Happy anniversary, jerry peele
Te amo truly. Te amo te amo.
Your errant and untraditional little wife
iva
Xxx

slideshow of teo images

this just seems like fun to me, to add a slide show of the photos from mexico and so here they are.

flying from one dream to another.

pyramid of the moon at first light
spirit dog

the church during fiesta
first light on pyramid of the sun.  

 

Last night i returned from a ten day trip to mexico.   

in mexico i was on a journey inside a journey, led by my friend lee and staying at his vision of a  of perfection which he has brought to life,  called the dreaming house.  

the dreaming house sits at the foot of the pyramids, teotihuacan, in the village of san sebastian.  the dreaming house is beyond a dream come true and the village is small and the pyramids, remind you of the dream of heaven on earth.   spending ten days there on a journey is perfection in every way possible and  flying back home can be startling.  it actually has a name,  this disorientation.  it's called re- entry.   because  sometimes the bumping back to your reality can be hard.   but this time that wasn't so.   a total stranger cushioned my landing.  

here is the story.   a lot of words,  but i hope you can get the image.   

i arrived at night and jerry picked me up in newark, new jersey.   we stopped for food at a rest stop on highway 87  before driving back up to the farm.   the rest stop was packed with people.   and somehow the burger king and the dunkin' donuts and s'baro's pizza had all run out of food. this was a new experience  but i was floating and still in my teo dream and so all these throngs of people flowed under the fluorescent lights,  with no expression on their faces or looking grumpy about the long lines and scant amount of food.    a land of the zombies kind of thing.   i stood in wonder with my mouth forming a little O and watched and marveled as if i was in  a 3d movie and the world of people flowed past like a river.  jerry stood close beside me as if i might actually begin to float away or something.    

   

we  settled on a slice of pizza and got into the line.  i  began to giggle and kind of dance around.  well sort of a cringing dancing laughing kind of thing about how the food was inedible anyway but i was hungry and there wasn't very much food and  i didn't really care.  i was watching my little zombie  movie.  all glowy and laughing and detached.  

"my god,  we are in america,  and no where has it's usual abundance of inedible food, on the day i have decided to eat what ever i can get.  hee hee.  this is funny.  " 

 

i laughed.  jerry laughed.  

and a stout little man,  with a balding head and glasses piped up from behind us in the line. 

"i'm watching the music of your conversation."  

i turned to him in wonder.   

how amazing!  one of the extra's in my movie was engaging me in conversation! 

"what do you mean?"

"i watch people and their body language and how they speak is like music."

"oh i love that.  how we move and speak is music." i said and probably did some dorky thing like clap my hands together as i responded.  

 well he wasn't done with us,  and the pizza wasn't ready and so we began to chat.   he was a charming man,  funny ideas about this and that and inside i was thinking what a brilliant character to begin speaking in my 3 d movie of the rest stop on 87 north.  and so to keep the conversation going,  i asked him what he did.   he said he was an opera singer.  

"my teacher was pavaroti's understudy.  i'm just an amateur,  but i know what i'm doing."

"wow that's cool. that's why you see music everywhere!" 

he smiled.   and then he stepped in closer so his face was right in mine and he opened his mouth and began to sing!!   big!!   he sang big!!  in a beautiful opera voice just for me, in the line for sbaro's pizza in the rest stop on highway 87,  in new jersey!!  this is true!!  i swear swear swear!!  

 a rotund  little opera singer began singing an aria just for me.  .  singing me back into to the dream of america.  

i think the world may have stopped.  i'm not sure.  but  his song gathered gusto.   he began moving his arms,  gesturing towards jerry as he sang, 

"she is  the woman of your  dreams...."   and jerry,  because he returned from teo less than a week ago,  replied "that's true."   my movie was rocking now.  

the opera singers  voice gathered strength again and rose above the crowds and hovered around the awful lighting and fell down on the throngs of  sad looking faces.  a fat little man doling out pure joy.  

jerry and i stood riveted ,  hardly daring to breathe,  in case he turned out to be an apparition and vanished.   but he was in the flesh and when he finished the song he told me to kiss jerry and so that is what i did.  

now that for sure is love.  for the opera singer and my husband.   

the te amo kind.  

perhaps the rest of my life can rest in that utterly divine scene in front of the glass counter of the s'baro's booth.   

we oohed and ahhed and told him how wonderful he was and  gathered our cheese pizza slices and floated back to the car.  

i didn't ask his name and so for the opera man in the rest stop in new jersey,  this is for you,  where ever you are.  

te amo.   te amo.  

 thank you so much for flying me from one dream of heaven on earth back to america and showing me that even a grimy rest stop can be  a little piece of heaven if you look at it that way.   I have laughed all day.  i am still laughing with wonder and joy. 

 

thank you my opera singing stranger!!!!  and thank you lee and emily and sage and all of you who were in teo with me,  thank you  for everything,  all beyond words!!

xxx 

Peace like a River

Sometimes this yearning starts up in the summer. A yearning for the south, where I grew up. A yearning  for the marsh outside of Charleston where my brother and my friend Happy Erwin and I spent hours wandering shirtless and barefoot. Sinking in the marsh mud. Talking in hushed tones about how the crabs would eat you if you sank too deep. Eat out your eyeballs. We slapped at mosquitoes and watched the pelicans lope across the sky. I loved the cabbage stink smell of the mud at low tide and walking up to the 7/eleven, covered in mud and bites, to get an icee. Past the graveyard and the haunted house. It seemed in every moment there was magic. It dripped down from the moss and rose out of the marsh. Sometimes our mother took us out to the Angel Oak on John’s Island. That tree is 1300 years old, her branches long as octopus tentacles reaching up to heaven and snaking yards and yards along the ground. if you sat under that old tree and listened real close you could hear the angels sing.

Here, in the northeast, on the farm, it sure gets as hot as any southern summer, but the marsh is fresh water. Fed by a river instead of the ocean. There is magic here too, but to my untrained eye, sometimes it’s harder to find. You have to search. So, the other day, because I was homesick and in search of memory I went down to the river to play.

The air was cool. Gusts of gadflies skimmed the smooth surface. I let my memories of the south get all tangled up in this yankee river and all the old spirituals I used to know rose to the surface… Just when I thought my soul was lost, I heard the angels singing. O sisters lets go down let’s go down come on down o sisters lets go down down to the river and pray…I’ve got peace like a river in my soul I’ve got a river in my soul…

I ran those songs all together as the sun fell down the sky. I sang loud and splashed around and took the pictures. Off in the distance my husband mowed hay, his tractor rattling across the field.

Here are the pictures that came.

Lifetimes in Bermuda

My house in Bermuda is called Ardsheal. She is old, at least 300 years, and sits on top of a hill overlooking Hamilton, the main city in Bermuda, on one side and the Atlantic stretching down into the Bermuda triangle on the other. The Hamilton side is constantly changing, the town growing into a small city, evidence of the times we live in, never enough, never enough, got to have more, more concrete, more cars, more noise, more money…. The view from the other side of the house is timeless and this is where the ghosts gather, where the view has never changed, the ghosts are clustered in thick pockets and running into them is like getting tangled in the fine filaments of a spiders web. Not unpleasant, but a little sticky, noticeable for sure.

So , What does this all mean?
I have no idea.  

There may really be ghosts or they may be the fancy of my imagination. Everyone is free to believe whatever he or she chooses. But for me, they are there, and the stereo turns on by itself and so does the air conditioning, floors creak, and when the house is empty I hear them whisper. The culmination of all this is that I feel I am constantly living in the presence of layers and layers of human time. It reminds me of the continuum of existence. And how one step leads into the next. And how decisions made 100 years ago shape how we live today. And how it’s important to be aware of our thoughts and our actions and keep growing, otherwise we may stay fixed in time, ethereal and not quite of this world but simply floating through. And yet, I feel protected by the ghosts in my house. Swept into the understanding that there is no end of time, only time periods, as we understand it. 

This past week my friends Lee and Mee came with their children to do a workshop in Bermuda and stayed at Ardsheal.  ( Mee, knows something about ghosts and has a fascinating theory about ghosts and memories by the way, which I hope she writes about on her blog.)  On Sunday night, Lee put on a dinner party to honor the spirits of the place. We sat at the big dining room table, 11 Bermudians and Lee and Mee and Jerry and I. We made a toast to the ghosts and they came out to play. There we were, the visitors, (that’s how I count myself) and the Bermudians that carry the last five hundred years of memories for their ancestors in their genes, and then the ones from the other side, who joined us, for the party. The ghosts swirled around the dinner and through the house that night, like the apparitions in Disneyland’s haunted house. One in particular came to Mee to say to me that she was worried about all the change. That the house is her house. And I had to concede. It seems she’s been there for at least a hundred years and I have only been there for fifteen years! Anyway, she is worried about what is going to become of the house and I had to gently explain that I had to move on, I couldn’t stop time. I am not willing to really become of this place where the living memory is impossible to decipher from the memory of the ancestors. That I was not stopping here in time but going forward. The change that is rumbling in the world seems to be reverberating through all levels of reality, even the world of spirit and memory. You can get stuck and hang on or you can go with it and move forward. See what’s around the next corner.  I'm going with peering around the corner and moving on.  

Anyway. Last year with these same thoughts and imaginings, I took photos and here they are. But before that

Mee’s blog www.princessknowitall.blogspot.com

Lee’s blog www.spiritrecovery.blogspot.com

What an adventure is what i know for sure.  
xxx

something new

feel like i have got back to myself, whatever that is,  and the other morning i woke at 5:30,  okay that's not a self i'm that familiar with.   anyway,  the mist was thick and i tromped out with my camera and for the first time in ages the inklings of a new project began revealing itself to me.  something about the end of the machine age.   hmm.   we'll see how it develops but here are some beginning images.  i haven't been ruthless with the edit.  that can come later.

the observer/ the observed.

my friend John Nelson,  who has an exellent  blog, www.jrnelsonphoto.blogspot.com,   gave me some good advice regarding editing.  he was referring to my post of the moon images,  and he was absolutely correct. "be ruthless with the photos," he said,  really only put what you really like.   so i am taking his advice and putting only one photo here.  i took it on my recent visit to bermuda.  it interests me because i can construe it in many ways, but primarily,  i am watching myself.    and there are two of me going forward,  the observed and the observer.    in the end the journey is our own and our greatest gift is the potential for awareness. to live in this gift requires ruthless editing.   it requires honesty of oneself that can be hard to look at.  and finally it requires love.   the te amo kind.  and so here we all are,  going forward, ultimately with only that to focus on.   

i am grateful,  deeply grateful,  to all of my people who have my back and  put out their hands to catch me when i falter .  you know who you are and   i hope you know that i am there for you in just the same way.  

and, Dick,  where ever you have gone you will always be in my heart.  We will miss you sorely down here.  i love you so, honey.   

te amo, te amo, te amo!!!

xxx