layers of history

while in istanbul a few weeks ago, i visited the ayasofya. it must be one of the most magnificent human made structures in the world. built by justinian starting in 532, it has stood stoically through regimes and wars and earthquakes and fires, shifting religions and rises and falls of empires. it remains, implacable, its scars visible, but none able to mar its beauty.

the layers of its history are there to be seen - mosaics of kings and saints side by side with enormous quotes from the quran in arabic. tiles on the floor that saw the coronation of emperors and sultans. stone staircases worn smooth by the feet that trod on them for millennia.

we got in at the very end of the day, so there weren't many people. it was quiet and monumental. and in the quiet it felt like if you listened hard enough, you could hear the whispers of the stories that vast, ancient place had seen - the multitude of voices which had passed through, the games played, palace intrigues conducted, prayers said, speeches and sermons proclaimed. all of those stories whispering from the walls. i wanted to hide in some corner and stay after closing, to hear them all...

* * *

i'm so sad - andrei bitov is dead. 

i wrote my master's thesis on pushkin house and

had i finished my Ph.D., i would have written on his work.
but 81 is no bad age. my dad nearly made it there as well.
and today he would have been 85.

midlife tuneup?

i read this long piece on doing a midlife tuneup in the nytimes today. some of it seemed a bit meh and perhaps even patronizing- exercise, eat right, get enough sleep (blah, blah, blah). although i'm skeptical of the mindfulness/life coach madness that's about in the world today, the section on mindfulness and what it does for the ageing brain seemed a bit intriguing, so i kept reading. the following section on a midlife mission statement also spoke to me (being inclined to the odd personal manifesto (hmm, that one still rings pretty true...)). i've already been actively trying to have better bedtime habits (no phone nearby being the main one, tho' i fell off that wagon after a late coffee one day last week and did NOT sleep well for a couple of nights). also, i appreciate the irony of the fact that it's currently 12:44 a.m. 1:13 a.m. and i'm still at the computer. but the last section - about building up your resilience really spoke to me. all year, i've been writing intentions in a journal and they have been optimistic and positive. it hasn't always worked and there have been some dark times of late with reorg turmoil at work and the departure of my wonderful boss, but i faithfully continue, confident it will eventually seep in. i like the advice in that section - there are several things i feel i can actually use - rewriting the story i tell myself in my head, helping others and i've already taken a stress break when i could see that a situation was going to be more negative and unproductive than i needed it to be. the stress break really helped, even if the effects don't last long enough. i also like the idea of finding my discomfort zone - as long as it doesn't involve heights, that sounds rather intriguing. and i would do well to remember the times when i came back from adversity. perhaps the best start to it all would be that good night's sleep they talked about...

telling stories, weaving meaning and figuring out why the danes are so darn happy

my computer has been acting up for more than a week now, which is why i've been so absent again. this weekend, i gave it a thorough vacuuming, upgraded my smc fan control and it seems to be behaving like its old self again. i made sure it's backing up, as i do fear it's on its last legs. it's been a good iMac and it has served me very well. i hope to get some more time out of it, but i guess we'll see. computers aren't made to last forever, after all and those shiny new iMacs look pretty cool.

i'm down with my first flu of the season. i've got a headache that won't quit, a low grade fever and aches in all of my muscles. it really rather fits with the grey, dreary weather we've been having and if one must be sick, it may as well be in these dark, rainy days. there's no better time to curl up in bed with a book and a cat or to listen to the serial podcast again from the beginning. (seriously, if you're not listening to serial, you're really missing out, there's even a reddit where people are discussing it endlessly obsessively.)

serial feels to me like it's somehow reviving storytelling or retrieving it from the trite hollywood ending kind of storytelling that we've become so accustomed to. and i know that serial isn't the only place where a great story is being told slowly...there are spoken word festivals and other great story events/podcasts (like the moth), but it's such a sensation that it feels like it's moving us in a good new direction with stories. something sort of akin to the slow food movement, slowing down and enjoying the process, whether it's of a story or a dish.

apropos stories, at drink & draw on saturday evening, we got to talking about that whole thing with the danes being the happiest people on earth. and we talked about ways of drawing out people's happiness stories, since we did agree that all that happiness isn't necessarily visible to the naked eye. and i think that maybe investigating the happiness and talking to a whole lot of people, in a kind of a slow storytelling way ala serial just might be the ticket.  slowly gathering all of those individual happinesses of different colors and gathering (weaving?) them in a whole carpet of happiness (i had to make that photo go with this post in the end) sounds like a pretty good idea for a project, doesn't it?

kerosene: which one(s) to buy?

the house of kerosene is a niche perfumery based in detroit. i got a box of samples to try in order to figure out which one(s) to buy.

when no one was home

i read an article yesterday on the nytimes (when it's online it's on not in, right?). it was about how people who have a lot of family stories and a good sense of their family stories are better at coping both with tragedy and with life in general. and it made me think about sabin's craving for stories. every night at bedtime, she wants a horse story or a cat story or a childhood story. and sometimes no stories come to me, but often they do. stories of runaway ponies and broken carts, races up the second row of trees in the shelter belt when the trees were small, stories of first trophies and first place plaques in obscene quantities or that time that we decided when no one was home to teach switch, our calm paint gelding, to drive. we harnessed him up, made him pull a tire once around the driveway and then just hitched him up to the cart and went for a ride. or the other time when no one was home and we let elvira (a goat) in the house and she trimmed all the plants on the front porch. or the other time no one was home and there was a tornado warning and we brought skip's galley lad (a horse) into the basement. and i say "we" to implicate my sister, but i was nearly six years older and probably should start to take responsibility now. tho' that decision to drive her friend home in the chevette at the age of 12 (because no one was home...hmm, that was apparently a theme) is all on her shoulders, as i was off at college by then.

family stories fill our lives. dad's watermelons in the trees one hot summer, tales of warming his feet in a fresh cowpie as he walked to school barefoot on a frosty morning, or that time the old horse dumped him off into the water tank. or was that uncle red? and don't forget the disassembled ball point pen that got him into so much trouble he never picked up a tool again.

husband remembers at about the age of 4, riding his tricycle down to the harbor where ferries were coming in and out all the time and putting the trike up along the heavy beam, right at harbor's edge and careening as fast as he could along the water, precariously balanced and gripping the handlebars of his tricycle. he also remembers being spanked for it and going right back and doing it again.

we are a most complex sum of our stories and we are constantly adding new ones to the equation of our lives. and to think that they enable us to cope makes so much sense. i wonder if, in the contexts where there are no stories, it's there that things go wrong. there where the stories are separate and not shared, hoarded and even concealed. because stories need to be told, to take on the warmth and life of those who tell and those who hear them. imagine what stories are just waiting to be told.