August 27, 2009
It’s a rainy night here in the Tower at Ragdale, and after being here a full week now, it’s time for a little rest, I think. To bed, to bed, after a series of very enlightening and galvanizing conversations undertaken with tea and raindrops. Prince Vladimir tea is the best tea in the world. Particularly when shared with like-minded comrades and conspirators.
An old house, old oak trees, and the water we so rarely see or hear in Los Angeles…perfect. (In Los Angeles, we have water features. Since nothing is real, it’s perfectly acceptable to say, oh my god, like what a totally awesome water feature. Let’s see what’s on TV. Los Angeles is where water goes to die.
Chilly – a two sweater day. Wool sweaters are amongst my very favorite human inventions. As though I am getting a very comprehensive hug from a clean, colorful, well-groomed sheep.
A late-night walk with the comrades through the rainy hamlet of Lake Forest tonight in the dark and the wet, with clean cold air in the lungs.We said,oh my, better look out for cars! There were no cars in sight. The nine of us dashed across the little lane and suddenly headlights appeared about six feet away. We screamed, and grew legs like deer and sped clumsily away.
This is extremely clear proof that there is, in fact, some sort of timespace kickpleat right outside the Ragdale gates. We walk out into the 19th century, and the 21st century is there waiting to mow us down with its highly digitized machines.
It probably wasn’t a car. It was probably a USB drive, late for a backup.
Spending many hours talking with comrades in a friend’s art studio, and getting the chance to see her works in progress, and share the pitter patter of so many inventive hearts and brains.
And within her studio, a self-contented mosquito that clearly has not just sucked the blood of prior residents, but eaten them whole.
Amazing synchronicity this evening – while we were chatting in my studio, my friend told me that her grandmother was a student at Sweet Briar College – the women’s college in Virginia where my grandmother (see last night’s post) taught mathematics…and the same college that hosts the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where I will be serving my National Endowment for the Arts grant next month.
Nearly seventy years ago, our ancestor women fought for their educations – attending one of the few existing women’s colleges in an era when women were not allowed admittance to most universities, or encouraged or supported in the decision to advance their intellectual and artistic and personal development. They had their reasons.
Just think – they meet at the same college, because not even one hundred years ago there were so very few to choose from. (Talk about true sorority, true sisterhood.)
And then two generations later, their legacy continues…would they have imagined that in the 21st century, their thriving, graduate-degree holding, feminist granddaughters would meet as colleagues at another uniquely female center for advanced study?
But there’s more…our grandmothers would have been studying in Virginia at the same time their peers – the Shaw women – were in Illinois, creating their own visionary concept for a place where their granddaughters’ generation could come to work.
We sat there a moment in what felt like a benediction of recognition. Magic in the air, and gratitude and anger and dreams and hopes.
Mosquitos and bats seem likewise active tonight in between the droplets. Navigating by heat and sound.
Ancestors and grandmothers are very much amongst us, it seems.
