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).

genetics

i sent some cheek swabs into the genographic project about a month ago and got my results back today. here they are. i'm part of a haplogroup R1b. my journey begins in africa about 50,000 years ago, moves through the middle east, into asia and then turns west to europe, where my ancestors spread out and colonized. about 70% of men in southern england are haplogroup R1b. this correlates with my genealogy, which indicates english, french and italian ancestry on my father's side. no surprises.

relaxed tense kitty

this is my cat missy. i marvel at how she relaxes and tenses and then relaxes. she seems to go from one extreme to the other, like a baby. the only time she doesn't switch quickly is after she comes in from outside. out in the "wild" her defenses seem to go into high alert and take a while to back down after she comes in. she prowls my apartment as if danger lurks around every corner and every sound is a potential menace. anything that has changed inside requires thorough tip-toe inspection. sounds that make her tense: the sound of a dog collar, the tea kettle whistle, trains going by.

grilled pizza

one of the summer delights up at bunny and frank's house.

sawmilling

operator's perspective

loading a log

jay

stacked

clark

michel

mckim

the blade

last weekend i headed down to the faerie camp to oversee the sawing of about 40 logs that had been cleared from the faerie land last fall. mckim mitchell, a sawyer from new hampshire, brought his portable saw mill up and parked it near the log pile. saturday and sunday a crew of faeries helped load, unload and stack the timber. it was amazing watching each cut reveal a new pattern and it dawned on me, as it has many times when opening up anything that grows, that i'm the first person to ever see this specific pattern (and i am the first human it is to see!). it happens all the time and i have to remind myself of the mystery and beauty being revealed to me. some of the cuts exposed spectacular patterns which we kept as wide slabs to be used for benches or some other large flat surface. it was hard work and we all sweated up a storm in the summer sun which has arrived finally after weeks of rain. in all we got about 3500 board feet of timber out of our logs. a refrigerator is about 20 cubic feet, to give you an idea. the saw mill itself is an impressive machine which can lift logs onto its bed, slide them forward and back, roll them, and lift and level them. the largest beam we sawed was 12" tall by 6" wide by 14-1/2 feet long. all of our logs were eastern hemlock and carry a great deal of water in them. the 6x12 weighed about 400 pounds, by my calculations. i did a lot of "one-two-threeing" to coordinate the crew lifting.

purple head

a friend, robbie joy, is visiting from new orleans. he brought along some pictures from last mardi gras. here's one of me at the "purple party," a party to which everyone wears purple. that's the whole concept. there should be more things in life so simple. if i'm ever feeling down, i pull up some pictures from mardi gras and the day immediately feels more well adjusted.

bush does U2

as an aficionado of cut-ups, i recommend this one (brought to my attention by my friend hugh). my friend roger and i thought about doing something like this after we'd cut up the wizard of oz. slice and dice is in the air. video cuisinart!

bush sings bloody sunday

re-org

as a prelude to turning my life upside down, i cleaned my studio space over the weekend. i took two languorous days to do it with trancy, ambient music floating overhead. i pulled old equipment from my shelves, dusted them off and put them into a "free" box. my shelves are organized, clear of the old, plenty of clear space for new. my desks are clear as the big blue sky. i placed books in one section, supplies in another, cds, video, music in a third. this all makes me very happy. i love organized spaces even though i'm not known for keeping my own spaces organized. my friend victory from new orleans spent a couple days last winter teaching me how to organize. actually, he commanded me for two days and afterward i pretty much got the drift of how he worked. he was a strict and wonderful teacher and i think i got it.

my studio now feels better prepared to become a design studio. i'm not sure what to do with all my video gear. i tell myself that i'll figure out some way to integrate video and architecture. but i feel strongly that i want to dedicate my time to architecture. i know how much i'm capable of when i dedicate myself to a single path and go deep and intensely into it. as much as i'd like to do everything all at once i'm ready to organize and prioritize my activities! as in yoga, core strength is critical. defining and energizing my professional core is helping everything else in my life find a place and a purpose.

happy birthday

it's my birthday. i'm 43. and i'm starting the process of becoming a registered architect today. this is something most folks do right after architecture school. i wouldn't have done it any sooner. it didn't feel right.

it's been 16 years since i graduated, almost to the day. i went to the yale school of architecture, which, it happens, was built in 1963, the year i was born. there is a stamp featuring it. yale was extremely challenging for me and by year three there was nothing i wanted to do less than be an architect. i burned out, fried, never wanted to hear another talk about architecture or engage in a conversation about it, which, naturally, was what people wanted to do with me knowing i'd just graduated.

instead, i dove back into my prior haunt: software engineering. the problems were simpler, shorter and what i did—create software—was invisible. i went into hiding behind a veil of binary code. this led to that and in 1992 i purchased a down-and-out building that i happened by one day. over the next seven years i, with the help of my sister and a few others, conceived and constructed a small artist colony within the shell of this 160-year-old mill building. i learned how to frame, sheetrock, paint, mix concrete, learned the building code, how to work with contractors, how to build with very little. i ended up spending about $12 per square foot. but, this project also burned me out, and i told everyone, "never again!" but, in 1999, i wandered into a 45,000 square foot bakery dormant in the center of town and asked to rent some space. they offered me the building and by april 2000 i owned it with my parents, brothers and sisters as partners. i got out the drafting board and with architect friends danny sagan, alisa dworsky and daniel johnson as my "design therapists", worked up a schematic plan which i executed over the next three years. this building, called the tip top, is another arts building like my first, but on a much larger scale. it is a success. it attracts hundreds of people each day and has served as the poster child for the revitalization of our small town.

it's been three years since i finished the tip top, which also burned me out. being the architect, general contractor and manager wore me down and i found myself saying "never again!" but, with practice, we all become more resilient and grow. our little town is now growing, changing and seems poised to become a very happening little spot. i feel a role for myself as an architect here. there are lots more buildings that need work and i feel capable and want to help. being a licensed architect may help—i don't really know. my gut feeling is that it will but what's important is not the license. it's that i'm taking myself seriously and believe in my intention and dreams.

architecture

my birthday is coming up in a couple days and it seems that the cosmic present coming my way is a strong determination to pursue architecture professionally. i've been doing architecture for the past fourteen years. i've renovated two large buildings and am currently working on a project in southern vermont with a large number of volunteers. so architecture has been with me ever since i graduated from architecture school. but, i've always held it at a distance, said to people, "i will never become an architect." but, as it so often happens in my life, "never" means "i will". and, so i find myself excited and looking forward to the process of becoming a bona fide architect. i hear the exam is gruelling. call me if you need a house designed!

small is better (and more sustainable)

gabriel found these online: some fun small houses: tumbleweed houses.

lawngisland

sculpture, southampton

painting i did in 1992

discarded orange

wrapped boats

young bunny

gabriel

southampton nipple

i visited my parents in long island last weekend. gabriel came along. it rained most of the time making everything lush and the beach all blustery. long island has always felt almost out of control to me. trees, bushes, vines crawl all over everything. green is everywhere. my parents are well. on saturday, my mom, gabriel and i, took a trip to southampton to check out the museum there. mom did a lot of window shopping. mom discovered a tiny bunny hunkered down in the driveway earlier in the afternoon. while moving it, it shrieked. i've never heard a rabbit make a sound before. its mom showed up soon after.

wilted blog

this blog's been fading like this pepper i found in the grass. but, lots has been going on. i'm working on the radical faerie camp intensively. two weeks ago we held a film festival here in our little town which attracted double the number of people we had last time, about 800. we had four sell-outs and all shows had good attendance. the weekend after that i led a timber framing workshop (details here) for the radical faeries. we cut a nice gateway from rough-sawn timbers that will be erected on their land this summer. i also bought a truck! my neighbor accuses me of being a yuppie. it's hard to justify buying such a gas guzzler, but i am going to be doing hard construction this summer and my little VW Golf is not up to the task. i picked the truck up for $4,500. it's a 2002 Dodge 1500 with 136k on it. body is in great shape. engine sounds fine...we'll see. this weekend, going to visit my parents with gabriel. they're on long island at my grandparent's old house.

tra la la

i'm super busy right now, getting ready for our small town film festival this coming weekend. so, i've not been writing much. but i did have time to hang out with friends bunny and frank in randolph, along with gabriel and david. bunny is an amazing cook who delights us with her culinary talents every time we visit. she also has a fabulous new studio to paint in. at the moment it's empty which makes taking minimalist abstract pictures fun and easy. there was a mod chair in the corner that david chose to be his throne for drinking. nate, bunny's assistant, was also up for the weekend. he chose the wall. bunny had some great socks on.