A few more flowers from the past week. It's rose blooming time here so there will be more roses. And small wild irises, some of which are in my backyard..... and simple, humble small flowers.
Traveling has been my passion since I stepped out of a taxi and onto Rue Cambon in Paris in 1986. I knew at that instant that no matter what happened, I would be fine in Paris. In a way, I felt like I was returning home.
Since 1986 I have traveled to 20 countries, many of them with my friend Tom. I have always stated that living out of a suitcase is never a chore and is always good for my soul. While traveling, I never am ready to come home.
Now, after a year of enforced at-homeness, with no travel options available, one would think I would be lining up journeys left and right. Oddly, it isn't happening. For some reason, I am reluctant to plan a trip, even a small drive-up-the-coast car trip. This attitude is puzzling and depressing. And sad.
There are probably underlying reasons for my hesitancy but I can't find them and part of me doesn't want to go to the trouble of analyzing my travel paralysis. It seems like too much bother. It seems easier to simply stay home.
Therefore, I am scouring the internet for places to stay north and south and east of Sonoma County. Part of me feels as if I must make myself get out of the comfort of home and part of me knows that it is imperative to change the venue of my day-to-day life for a short time. Otherwise, I am afraid I will become wedded to my 200 square foot cottage in a way that is not beneficial to my mind, my psyche, my soul. Bottom line, I need to get my travel mojo back.
I will keep you posted on when and where the open road takes me.
Cathedral in Lyons, France.
Again, it is amazing how much beauty is out there in the world when you stop and let it come to you. So many of the flowers I have photographed were easy to miss, they were just unobtrusively hanging out, minding their own business. Most of them are not showy, but all of them are charming and lovely. All I can say is Look Around! See what the world gives us to counteract the ugly.
Of course, if you could smell this lilac, you would be very happy.
In cleaning off a bookshelf, I found about a half dozen New Yorker magazines from December 2019 to the beginning of March 2020. My subscription ran out at that point but I had kept these magazines for no other reason than I hadn't yet read them. I stuck them on a shelf and then the Year of Quarantine Thinking began and I forgot all about them.
There's a kind of sad nostalgia looking at these tiny time capsules now. Things that we took for granted in the Before Times now seem whimsical and outdated: a feature on what was going to be opening in New York museums and what plays were slated to run in various live theaters, the schedule of the NY Philharmonic, music that would subsequently never be heard. Reviews of movies, of night club shows. So much that seemed so normal.... and now seems lost forever or at least deep in shadow.
Of course, we know theater and music, art exhibits and movies will return and we will enjoy them and yet some of us will be wary of being in an enclosed space with strangers. Where once we looked forward to a concert or a special show at a grand museum, now we have trepidation. It's as if something shut down and will never actually reopen in the same way.
But there is hope. The reality of that hope may not be in the near future, but let's concentrate on the possibility of hearing live music again, sitting shoulder to shoulder at some wonderful venue like the Ryman Theater in Nashville, listening to the likes of Lucinda Williams, joyfully forgetting for two hours how we once thought nothing about mingling with strangers. And marveling at the fact that we can.
Even the weeds are lovely.
