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| New Year's Eve view from my daughter's apartment in Oakland |
A chilly, brilliant day in Berkeley/Oakland. Slowly I orient myself to this new locale and somehow make my way through the possibilities that the various neighborhoods offer. How to negotiate myself in a car is the biggest challenge in this hustling place where it seems everyone knows their way around but this often lost soul. The area is confusing and north/south/east/west don't always make sense.
The usual interiority that I feel at the New Year isn't here. I imagined myself considering deeply the change of scene, the life shift, a new direction in the quiet of this evening, but I'm on too much of a learning curve, and tomorrow I move into the cottage. I'm full of logistics, map study, instructions on how to care for the cottage, and figuring out a billion details of daily life. No doubt the quiet of January will stir the heart and the art.
Speaking of art, there's an Ansel Adams exhibit at the Bancoft Library on campus. Background to the exhibit: it seems that Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California system, had collected photos by Adams that had been commissioned to celebrate the 9 campuses and the 100th anniversary of the UC System. When Kerr was fired by Gov. Ronald Reagan following the student anti-war demonstrations, the photos disappeared and went into storage. Now they have been unearthed and catalogued and are being shown in the library gallery. My daughter Laureen had a private tour by the curator with a few other UC people and she says they are a remarkable presentation of a body of work second to Adam's Yosemite photographs. I do plan to go up to campus to see them.
Happy New Year 2013 one and all! May each one receive the gifts of numerous blessings to benefit our lives in the coming year. May we all engage our most fulfilling expressions and find peace in our true work.
