Welcome to China!

We have been in China for about 24 hours, and I have been so struck by the fact that so much is familiar, and simultaneously so much is different. Exhibit A: Yes, I can access the internet. But because of conflict between the Chinese Government and Google, I cannot directly access this blog, and the roundabout method I am using resulted in the photos-only version of this posting that I may have sent accidentally a few minutes ago! (Or maybe not .. it's hard to tell ...)

We are in Kunming, in Yunnan Province in southwestern China. The temple above is the Bamboo Temple, a Buddhist shrine built about 800 years ago and still in active use (monks and acolytes were steadily chanting as we walked through).

For lunch we had soup at a restaurant serving "Over Bridge Rice Noodle Soup," a regional specialty named for the characteristic of the soup that it stays hot when carried to farmers in the fields. We were each brought a huge bowl of steaming, delicious broth, along with raw meats and vegetables. Add the meat first, stir to cook, then add the vegetables and noodles. Delicious !

We proceeded to a museum documenting the cultures of the 26 different peoples living in the Yunnan region. Below, a percussion instrument made of bamboo; the strips supported by the bridge pieces are tuned like a xylophone. And then one of the many incredible woven garments on display.

On the street, below an advertisement, an open window to a small restaurant kitchen where a woman was putting the most recent fresh steamed dumplings into the stack.

In a public square, a vendor selling quail eggs, peanuts, and pickles.

At the temple shown at the beginning of this blog, I did not find a way to take a picture of the yellow-robed monk talking on his cell phone ... but I did get this shot of a group putting a fresh coat of paint on the door panels, in preparation for a festival in two days.

And finally, an incredible dinner at a local restaurant surprised to see foreignors; our guide "Tony" knew about it. Many delicious dishes, but I was so glad Amy had been intrigued enough by the woman in the front window making rice crepes and rolling them up with vegetables and meat to order a plate of them. We were told that they are a Vietnamese speciality (we are not too far from the border), and dipped in a spicy sauce these Vietnamese spring rolls were amazing !!

Best Things in Greece

In early June, Amy and I, and Rebecca's friend Philip, joined Rebecca in Greece, where she had been singing with her college choir. I had never been there before -- what a varied and marvelous part of the world! A few highlights:

Above: the Parthenon, sitting atop the Acropolis, at night. I had no idea how sprawling Athens is, or the way in which the Acropolis rises above the city, visible almost from everywhere. One imagines that 2000 years ago, above a smaller city with smaller buildings, the Parthenon must have seemed even more immense than it does now.

Below, one of the alleys that winds from old Athens up towards the Acropolis.

The olive trees (these in Crete) were growing everywhere we went in Greece. I love the shadows below the trees in this grove.

We spent three days on Santorini, an island in the Aegean Sea. The island is a C shape, the remnant of an ancient submerged volcano; the white houses and blue-capped churches sit on the rim of the island, looking from the distance like snow.

The tourist industry has kept some handcrafts alive in Greece. This woman, like most people we met, was incredibly friendly.

The bright sunshine and hot weather brought out beautiful flowers in every hue. This incredible flower is usually "nipped in the bud;" the capers we eat are the pickled buds of this plant.

There were street cats and dogs everywhere. They weren't exactly wild; while they didn't have owners, they were surviving on food and water put out for them by many Grecians.

Most of all, what caught my attention about Greece was the colors. The water, the sky, the flowers, the buildings, everything was blue and white and dotted with yellows and reds and greens. The gemstone reflections we occasionally saw in the sea seemed a reflection of all of Greece.

Playing With Fire

At our last ceramics class of the year, we did a raku firing. Usually once our pots have been low-fired ("bisque" fired), we slather them with the goop that will be melted into glaze, and then place them on shelves to wait. Anonymous ceramics apprentices will later place the pots into the big high-fire kiln, and a week later remove them to the closet that holds finished pots.

Raku firings are our one opportunity to run a firing ourselves. Under our teacher Debi's supervision, we load the pots into a primative kiln, light the propane torch, and later carefully remove the pots.

This year's class has been a really wonderful group. We chat through each Monday night -- sometimes about our pottery, and often about children, movies, books, pets, and politics.

While the first set of pots are firing, we put the next round (including my candle lantern) on top of the kiln to warm.

When the pots are "cooked," they are shiny and translucent. We remove them using tongs and great care, and place them in trash cans filled with paper, which catches on fire and makes a smelly mess, in the process giving the glazed pots more visual texture. From there, we plunge the pots in water to crackle the glaze.

This year we had two retired firefighters in our class; we thought they might report us to authorities when they saw the raku firing! But it turned out they liked playing with fire as much as the rest of us.

All told there's about an hour or more when the pot is firing and then still too hot to touch. The result is unpredictable. You never know what color or texture is going to come out of a raku firing. But some of the best things in life come through the fire, and their wonderfulness cannot be predicted.

Inside, Outside

"When the cat is in, it wants to be out; when the cat is out, it wants to be in," goes the complaint. But we're not much different.

The spring comes and we cut the flowers from the outside garden, and put them in a vase on the table. Then we go outside and plant flowers in a pot that sits on the patio.

The patio, of course, is the place we can sit at a table and eat breakfast, and still be outside.

But then we have our cars, which allow us to be inside while we're moving around outside. Unless you have Amy's Dad's convertible, in which case you can be outside while you're driving around outside, unless you put the top up, in which case you're inside outside again.

All this silliness actually points at something true about our lives: we like to be comfortable, and we have the accumulated knowledge and wealth to keep ourselves comfortable even when we're outside. Some part of us remains connected to the primitive ancestor who lived wild; we appreciate his flowers, and are happy to bring them into our comfortable abode.

Presumably the birds appreciate our beginning to do the same for them?

Brothers

My dad took this picture of my brothers (David and Eric) and me around 40 years ago. I didn't take any of the pictures in this post; I'm in all of the pictures though. Why the move to being a curator this week?

This past week has been Passover, one of my favorite Jewish holidays. We get together with friends and family, we eat foods that we don't usually eat ("Why is this night different ..."), and we celebrate freedom. On Tuesday night, we went to a friend's house for a nice seder. We had also begun preparing the Friday night seder at our house -- we were focusing on the logistics of the table to borrow, the food to make, and where the overnight guests would sleep.

Then on Thursday, I read my friend Rabbi Hesch Sommer's e-mail about the weekly Torah portion:

A friend of mind recently asked me how I felt about Passover. After I shared with her my sense of anticipation, she shared with me something I did not know about her, even though we have been friends for a number of years: that she has be estranged from her only sibling in recent years and the approach of each holiday is tinged with the sadness and disappointment that the reconciliation is still only a wistful hope. She is aware of the goodness in life that she is missing.

For all the efforts that my friend has tried to draw closer to her sibling, there is a barrier which is not able to be broken. To find grace in life is to acknowledge our imperfections, thereby finding compassion for the imperfections in others. When we hold on to hurts and use them as a barrier blocking a sense of closeness with those we profess to love and care about, we rob ourselves of the potential for tranquility in our lives. How much energy do we waste being angry? How much time do we spend in sustaining the self-righteousness that we feel is ours to harbor when another has slighted us in some manner?

Our parsha reminds us that the life of inner peace comes through an awareness, an observation, that grace, mercy and compassion only exist in our relationship with others if we actively work to make them a reality. If our seder tables were reenactments of our personal struggle from enslavement to freedom, then we need to be aware of what we still need to cast off, what shackles we need to release ourselves from in order to live lives imbued with a sense of grace. Being plagued by grudges diminishes even further the sweetness of life within each of our wine cups.

Reading Hesch's words, my anticipation of our Friday night seder was transformed. Preparation for the gathering became infused with a deep sense of appreciation of my family's connections. I was reminded of this picture, taken by my cousin Lynn Padwe 30 years ago at a Thanksgiving gathering at my grandparents' house.

This past Friday, for our seder, our children were home; a niece and nephew joined us; and both of my brothers came from out of town. There were various boyfriends and girlfriends. A few of our friends -- some of our "chosen family" -- were there as well. I did not let go of the gift I had been given: the opportunity to rejoice in having a family that remains bonded and loving, that seizes the opportunity to gather, celebrate, eat, share our commonality, share our love. I asked Sarah to take this picture of my brothers and me, to mark the moment.

Why Spring Matters

At the moment it is pouring rain. But we have already had several very nice days in April. Around Connecticut there are some lawns carpeted in squill (scilla) and crocuses, and the early daffodils are blooming as well.

One of the things I like about spring is its constancy - all the beautiful flowers we love that come back again and again. Last year at this time I posted a picture of my grandmother's favorite primrose; here are this year's blooms.

Of course, not everything stays the same. The primrose is below a rock wall, and a tree growing through the wall has pushed a big stone out so that it is hanging over the primroses. Better fix that before it drops!

The delicately-scented white forsythia (an import from Korea) is blooming

and when we walked in the woods, Sarah spotted both the white and the blue round-lobed hepatica (so named because like a human liver -- hepar in Greek -- the leaves have three lobes).

Spring is also the only season that has a strong sense of forward momentum. This past winter kept almost ending ("Is it over?" "I think so..." "No, here comes one more snowfall ..."). But in spring we see the buds form and swell, and we know the flower will follow.

This azalea bud is waiting, for the next sunny day. Perhaps Thursday?

Family Gatherings

A few months back, after Thanksgiving, I posted the picture above of the Hochheimer clan (my grandparents' family) gathering at my brother Eric's house. My confession is this: I have always preferred the pictures like the version below:

I like the pictures that show the real people coming through, almost from behind the photograph. The traditional family portrait has everyone on their best behavior (and sometimes we take the pictures over and over until everyone has their eyes open and no one is talking and everyone looks just right). But often it's the "imperfect" pictures that more candidly show who we really are. The next picture was taken by a professional photographer in Provincetown (Cape Cod, Massachusetts) in 2001; my brothers and I had organized family pictures in honor of our parents' 45th wedding anniversary. This is the "official" picture:

I have that picture hanging in my office -- but framed with it is this one, taken just before the "official" portrait. I love the way in which we are all interacting, being ourselves, before we straighten up and put on our "smile!" faces.

I thought of all this because last weekend I had the honor of being at Coby Goodhart's Bar Mitzvah and celebration in Wilmington, Delaware. I took a lot of posed pictures at the party (and the official photographer took even more). But before all the guests arrived, I asked Coby if I could take his picture; he knew that soon he would be posing over and over again for family pictures. Very handsome, with tolerance and humor, he stopped and struck a pose that was completely himself.

My favorite photograph of the gathering: Claire and her grandmother only had eyes for the mirror and the reflection they were playing with. I came up behind them unobserved. "She lives in D.C. and I live in Cleveland," Claire's grandmother told me later. "I wish I could see her more often."