Winter Solstice

"Octavia" 12" x12" Acrylic on canvas ©2008 C. Bain


Note: if you click on the highlighted text below, you will go to other interesting web pages. Click the "back" arrow to return to this page.

This is the shortest day of the year, winter solstice. The first day of winter, yet the darkness is diminishing and things feel hopeful. The focus can be on the upswing, literally. The sun's arc will slowly get higher in the sky until it reaches its apex six months from now. We are moving toward summer, and on June 21st we will move toward winter. Always moving toward something, right?

The octopuses in Indonesia who build houses out of coconut shells probably don't give a hoot about solstice or even the religions we attach to our heavenly bodies. Or do they? Maybe they have built temples in huge caverns under the sea, where they perform sophisticated rites. Or they have a university down there where they have developed all kinds of technologies that we cannot even fathom. Perhaps theirs is a form of biotechnology that our genen-techs haven't even come close to imagining. Is there a set of octopus algorithms based on the silent sinewy floating consciousness of these brilliant, mischievous creatures?

How about the octopus who opened a valve in her water tank and watched as the staff cleaned up the flooded floors? Hey, it got a "flood" of press for the aquarium and the animals it houses. Brilliant marketing stunt, don't you think? Octopuses have taste, too, you know, and they let you know how they feel: In one instance, an octopus given a slightly spoiled shrimp stuffed it down the drain while maintaining eye contact with its keeper.

Happy solstice. Wishing you freedom.

A Farewell for Lawrence and Sharafat

My friends Alfred, John, and I decided to do a ritual of burning messages to send to the spirits of our friends Lawrence Salazar and Sharafat Ali Khan, who both just died within the past week. As the sun set and the temperature dropped, we went to Garfield Park in San Francisco's Mission district. In 2008 Lawrence, his wife Phyllis (my sister), some friends, and I had gone there to make an altar for my sister Yo on Day of the Dead. Under a great group of birds congregating to sing their dusk signals on the wires, we found a good little natural shelf in a majestic tree where the roots meet the trunk. We placed our messages there and burned them so they could travel into the earth and to the sky in a brief but grounding moment of focus.

In Memoriam

Rest in peace, Lawrence
http://obits.abqjournal.com/obits/show/201348

Lawrence Salazar is my brother-in-law. He died on December 1st from throat cancer. He was 52.
He met my sister Phyllis at Albuquerque High School, where he was a student and she was an art teacher. This was about 35 years ago. Eventually they became friends, then partners in life. They built a house together that Lawrence and his friend designed. That was at least 20 years ago, and it was "green" and sustainable because it was of a passive solar design (like many dwellings in the region, be they three-thousand-year-old cave dwellings or adobe buildings): the south face of the house is all windows, and the north face is adobe more than a foot thick. In winter when the sun is low in the sky and its path arcs across the south, the house is heated; in summer it passes overhead and the thick walls keep the cool air inside and the heat out. It's a matter of knowing where one is in relation to the solar system, a kind of celestial proprioception.

My first knowledge of Lawrence was as another kid, a fellow high school student who went to a different school. I also did art at that time, and I really liked his delicate paintings that Phyllis would show us. There are more of his works hanging in their house that he did over the years . All have a particular sense to them, a delicate (that word again), sensitive feel. Not that he was delicate and sensitive on the exterior--he was a big, tall guy who had an expansive sense of humor and all the foibles that make us human. I didn't know him well. I know that he and Phyllis had a profound connection, and that theirs was a good life together. They were passionate: in love, in food, in art, in participating in the world around them from the New Mexico State Fair to the Feast Days at the Indian pueblos, to seeing the Last Supper in person, to eating late tapas in Spain...or dinner in San Francisco with our sister Yolanda, her husband Matt, my partner Bruno and me. I liked looking at the wild parrots of Telegraph hill here with them, and seeing artwork at open studios in Hunter's Point, and a lot of other great things. I am lucky to have spent time with them, and will continue with Phyllis, and she will think of how he would like the things we will see, do, and eat.

Or we will think of him making an altar with us for Yolanda at last year's Day of the Dead, the day after her funeral. Lawrence was a funeral director, his family's business in Albuquerque passed down for generations. He made the arrangements for her the day she died. He made arrangements for himself, "before need," and maybe he and Yolanda are in the same place, the Place That Is Not Here among those of us whose bodies are still animated.

I have been thinking about what I know of Lawrence's day-to-day life. I know he had a huge garden the size of at least two house lots that hold old Victorian houses here in San Francisco. This is around the corner from their house. Three blocks from where the streets end and the river woods and brush of the Rio Grande begin. Where you walk through a field to get to the river and look back to see a stunning view of the granite-faced Sandia Mountains with their alluvial fans, and all that geology is open to read like a great book. Lawrence had adopted a gorgeous dog who he named Jack that some locals were trying to find a home for. Jack is part pit bull and part beautiful, without the gargoyle jaws of a pit bull, just a lovely head and brindle pattern. Tall, lanky, goofy, loving, and silly is Jack.

When I read the series of mysteries set in Albuquerque by Rudolfo Anaya, especially the last, called "Shaman Winter," I thought of Lawrence doing things that the protagonist did: eating breakfast at the diner where chili, posole (hominy stew), pinto beans, and tortillas are as standard to the menu as bacon and eggs--and almost all restaurants in Albuquerque include those items. Or walking in the winter and seeing small puddles of water frozen in the tire tracks in the dirt roads. Except I don't know if he got to do that this winter. I don't think he walked much for the past few months.

The picture above is from "Macario," one of my favorite movies (I have made the trip over to the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley twice to see it when it comes around, and have watched it three other times on video). It takes place in Mexico and is the story of a poor woodcutter and his hungry family. It recounts events that take place on Day of the Dead, the Mexican celebration in which people honor the dead and put food on altars for them. It features some of the finest actors, cinematography, and puppeteers in cinema.

But what is even more important about it to me than its being a cinematic masterpiece is that it helped my sister Yolanda and me cope with her death. I watched it with her about a month before she died. Afterward, she told me, "Now I'm not so afraid of dying." Neither of us had directly discussed the likelihood of her death, but by the time we watched the movie, I know that I was facing it as a likely outcome of her illness. Watching the movie was a way for us to have a conversation about it, without directly saying the words. The film helped us to situate ourselves in the universe of human life and death. It has a profound perspective that helps me cope: that death is a purpose driven by a force even greater than God.

The image above shows the character Death in the place where everyone's life is burning in the form of a candle. Each of us has a unique candle, he says, made of a different wax and with a different time to burn.

I don't think Lawrence ever saw "Macario," but thinking of it helps me cope with the reality that no matter what we expect, death comes on its own terms and we have no control, ultimately. I always thought that when I was in my 70's I would start losing people, but now I see that it's started while I and those I have lost are still in our 50's, average life expectancy be damned. I just try to live well and take care of my health so I can have a good quality of life (not even to increase my longevity--while Lawrence smoked and that probably caused his cancer, Yolanda had the healthiest lifestyle of about everyone I know, and she got ovarian cancer).

As a patron in the library where I work once told me at the end of his tale of surviving a brain tumor:
"Laugh a lot. Eat chocolate... and eat pizza and just have fun."

I laughed a lot and had fun with Lawrence.

Thank you, Lawrence.