Thursday, July 26, 2007

BELLINGHAM SPECTRUM SERIES: OCEAN VIEW PAINTED FROM MEMORY (COPYRIGHT 2007)

















It was late summer of 1973 when I left my home which was 10 miles from the Pacific Ocean in the San Francisco Bay Area and, out of curiosity rather than a desire to leave California and the Pacific Ocean behind, traveled to the east coast with a man friend who wanted to find a Pennsylvania farm which had been in his father's family from the 1700s until the 1950s when it was sold to someone outside his father's family.

He had a dream of working on the farm and possibly buying it at some time in the future. We found the farm, and although it was a lovely place, it turned out to be within view of Three Mile Island. He didn't see the nuclear power plant as a problem, but I had no intention of settling anywhere near a nuclear power plant and already was seeing a future where we would go our separate ways. On March 28, 1979, the worst nuclear power plant accident in U.S. history occurred at Three Mile Island. I was beginning to learn that I can trust my intuition.

We ended up staying the fall and winter of 1973 and the early spring of 1974 in Wayland, Massachusetts, near Boston, not too far from Walden Pond. A former housemate of mine from California was living near Wayland and doing his psychiatry internship at Massachusetts General Hospital. He offered us a room in his home until we found a room in a house on Dudley Pond in Wayland.

At that time, my grandmother's brother and his family may have still been living in Boston, but because I was traveling with a man to whom I was not married, something not widely accepted at that time, I did not feel comfortable looking up relatives with whom my mother and her mother had not been in close contact.

My great-grandfather and great-grandmother had come separately to Boston from Germany in the middle of the 1800s and my grandfather was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My grandmother and grandfather had met and married in Boston. My grandmother's family had come to Boston from Canada and Ireland. Here is a photo of my grandfather and grandmother in the 1920 in St. Paul, Minnesota, when my mother was 4 years old and my grandfather had been home from World War I for nearly two years. He had become a doctor when in his 30s and had served in France as a surgeon during the last days of World War I. This was my mother's favorite photo of her parents. She said that she did not often see them looking this happy.

















Currently, I'm reading WILLIAM JAMES: IN THE MAELSTROM OF AMERICAN MODERNISM, by Robert D. Richarson, and am wondering if my grandfather took classes from William James or heard him lecture, because he attended Harvard Medical School during the time William James was still teaching there.

On page 490 of that book, I was interested to find the following because, along with my plans for becoming a massage therapist, I plan to become a yoga teacher:

"James . . . quotes at length from his friend Lutoslawski's experience with hatha yoga, which James calls "the most venerable ascetic system and the one whose results [strength of character, personal power, unshakability of soul"] have the most voluminous experimental corroboration."

That's it for today.

SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THE EDIT FUNCTION ON BLOGGER.

WHAT SHOWS ON "PREVIEW" IS NOT WHAT IS PUBLISHED ON THE BLOG.

HOPE BLOGGER FIXES THIS SOON.

2 comments:

Loren said...

I'm going to have to put WILLIAM JAMES: IN THE MAELSTROM OF AMERICAN MODERNISM on my Amazon wish list.

It sound like it would be a nice complement to Pirsig's works.

Oh, nice picture by the way.

Theresa Williams said...

What a story about 3 Mile Island! Good intuition, that. I ordered that book about William James. I understand he had a great influence on Wallace Stevens, and I want to see what that's all about. I have on my bookshelf two books by James, THE MEANING OF TRUTH and THE WILL TO BELIEVE. I must take another look at those. Your paintings remind me serigraphs.