still drinking coffee

it's got me. coffee shenpa. my feet are tapping, my fingers tingling, my teeth gnashing. it's chemical stress and i'm a coffee achiever! i used to hate the way it tasted. i had my first cup on a hot summer day in silver plume, colorado. i'd not had a drink of anything for hours, my parched lips begged me for cool moist anything, my head ached with the kind of pain that can make you cry. why i'd not asked for water is now a mystery to me. i was a nervous teenager obsessed with the illusion of self-reliance. i came across a kitchen-service-sized percolator in the back of a dusty general goods store, the kind with the glass tube on the side that shows you how full it is. some cups next to it invited me plus no one was watching. i drew a cupful, drawing the black spigot tab toward me, watching my cup fill. an acrid steamy smell filled my nostrils. i had my doubts but took a swig anyway. i gagged. it tasted terrible. in fact, it probably was terrible in the scheme of coffee these days, but i didn't know that then. i added lots of powdered creamer, so much that it became sludgy. i couldn't bring myself to finish it. i don't recall how i found water later, but i'm sure i thought it was nirvana.

nico's roast

some pictures from nico muhly's birthday lamb roast over the weekend. nico is an up and coming composer and conductor and the son of painter bunny harvey and filmmaker frank muhly. david ford and i met bunny and nico in rome while visiting my friend garrett finney who was a fellow at the american academy. bunny was also at the academy during a break from her teaching job as an art professor at wellesley college. we ended up renting her apartment for a week while she was away in paris. when she returned we discovered (well, probably before then) that we all lived very close to each other in vermont. nico was then 13 years old and could play a mean streak on the academy's piano. he's now 25 and has been called one of the most promising young composers in america by the new yorker, has worked with bjork on her recent album, has conducted and premiered pieces at tanglewood, will debut his own album soon and the list goes on.

the lamb roast was somewhat grisly. the sawing and carving was done on a woodworker's bench with a hack saw! nico requested a roast to put to bed or at least acknowledge an early life trauma around his pet lambs being put before him on his dinner plate. i'm not sure how the event worked for him but everyone seemed to delight. the liver was the best i've ever tasted. yes, i ate meat. i've been doing it lately. hmmm.

shenpa

shenpa: tibetan for "attachment". read about it here!

nova scotia

bench at gampo abbey

sunset at gampo abbey

gabriel and i travelled to nova scotia, canada, last week, to visit buddhist friends and buddhist places there. the car became our home as four of us crossed the vastness of nova scotia on our pilgramage. the land is stark and beautiful, quiet and reverential. it's no wonder it was chosen for the seat of shambala's western practice. the elements force plants, animals and buildings close the the ground, creating a short and messy haircut of a landscape. i took lots of pix. more are here. i'm being lazy. i only posted a couple here.

the highlight of the trip was a visit to gampo abbey, a tibetan buddhist monastery quite literally at the end of the line on the north side of cape breton. this is the place pema chodron lives, teaches and practices. she's a fairly well known author now, apparently canada's best selling. despite the monastery's distant and difficult location, quite a few "pilgrims" showed up for the afternoon tour. we were guided through the main floor, library and finally the meditation hall, passing many shrines to shambala's teachers. those who wanted to meditated for about a half hour.

our friend deborah, who kindly drove us hither and yon, is a buddhist shrine and flag expert known as the "betsy ross" of shambala because she sewed the first shambala flag designed by chogyam trungpa rinpoche. she prepared the shrine brocades in gampo meditation hall and, i believe, also makes traditional clothing for monks and nuns including pema. i enjoyed seeing and being in this place that i've heard about for so long. it is much smaller than i imagined. but the setting is more spectacular and inspiring than i could have imagined. set upon a cliff high above the sea, the sun sets through the meditation hall windows over water rippled by the play of whales and dolhpins. it's breathtaking.

we took a ferry home across the bay of fundy to cut some of the drive home. coming back we realized how much wilder nova scotia is than coastal maine, which felt like a shower and shave after a week of roughing it.

willoughby and bread and puppet

jenny and eran

sky above willoughby

a bread and puppet ship

moving the crowd

hands in the forest

after the show two performers cross the field

some of vermont's highlights: lake willoughby and bread and puppet. the former is a lake in the northeast kingdom of vermont that sits between two enormous rock cliffs. it never seems real to me. just too darned amazing. it works pretty well as a wind tunnel too and on saturday sitting on the beach felt more like being on the prow of a ship.

the latter is theater troupe based in glover, vermont that puts on shows during the summer in a giant outdoor semi-circular theater vaguely reminiscent of greek amphitheaters (it used to be a sand pit, if my memory serves). back in the good 'ol days tens of thousands of people showed up for one giant event. they're now doing shows on weekends to smaller, less insane crowds. the way they use the landscape in their productions is breathtaking. the way they use cardboard is inspiring. one of their mottos is "cheap art".

with smaller crowds the performance moves about the land. we started in the theater, moved in procession up the hill, back down to the theater, then another procession to the hill, then into the forest where the performance ended in silence. slowly people left.

there's some information on bread and puppet here.

coffee, AGAIN!

for the past few years i haven't drunk coffee. i'm now working on architecture and i find myself drinking coffee. nerves, feeling stressed over designs, worrying about quality, comparing my work to others...anxiety! i ran into these stresses in architecture school and i wonder if unresolved issues are surfacing. a few months ago i was happily eating a healthy diet, no suguar, no caffiene, no meat, just grains, beans, veggies, cultured foods, getting plenty of sleep, daily yoga, a balanced life and i felt good. but, i'm resolved to work through this, figure out how to find balance in my design work and restore balance in the rest.

unshaven operator

here i am, unshaven, unwashed, hard at work blogging for the first time in a good long while. what have i been up to? i've taken about 500 pictures, almost none of which i've put on the web. i'm up to my neck in architctural drawings. i'm now chairman of our town's design review board which oversees all downtown projects large and small to make sure that egregious architectural mistakes aren't made. so far we've mostly examined fence installations. i visited gabriel at the sterling renaissance faire a couple weeks ago and had a nice time with his friends there and meditating while walking the shore of lake ontario. i'm taking a trip to nova scotia in a week with gabriel. gabriel and i are still working on our relationship, doing a lot of counseling, which is challenging but very rewarding. i've taken a couple jobs as a designer doing interiors in downtown white river junction. my application for architectural internship is happening, but the beauracracy that oversees it seems anything but professional so far. i'm rearranging my studio to suit my new focus, giving away old equipment (a piece a day, at least).