There is no such thing as a passive witness.

Some reflections on Illusion 5: Fuera del Barrio Beyond Our Block...

There is so much to say, and I really want to say these things to either folks who were at the De Young today, or to a man who up and left this city, fuera de su barrio, and ended up surrounded by art.

I came home tonight, with my white dress and my white suitcase touched here and there with blue paint from someone's artwork. My job was to go between artists' work and "integrate" separate pieces with my writing. When I got home, I was exhausted and drained. It takes a lot of energy to be around a ceaseless stream of people, integrate all of them into the project as well as integrate the seemingly disparate works of different artists into a whole. I observed and absorbed a great deal. I am filled with what I experienced, and I feel drained. At the end of it all, though, I am utterly rejuvenated beyond words.

I can see there is a journey coming...the figurative kind. I can sense my life is about to take me to a new place even if I can't see the path yet. I am where I had set out to arrive 12 years ago when I left home. I teach. I travel. I know what home is and what it isn't.

I am also where I did not imagine. I am surrounded by artists and musicians. I am surrounded by people who give back. I am surrounded by good food, good music, many languages and nationalities, and just simply, by good people.

Surprising to me is how I have become a participant in what surrounds me, how I have been absorbed into a community of creativity and imagination explored daily in conversation, in cooking, in hanging out and being, in playing, in swimming in the freezing Pacific Ocean, in being silent on the beach, in making art to be taken down the next day

I don't know where the path leads, and (not but) I am happy.

There is no such thing as a passive witness.

Half past beach o'clock.

When it's time for me to have some beach time, my body can tell.

And recently, I've been feeling something unsettled in me. Today, I finally named it. It's time. It's been time, beach o'clock, for a while now. I have been needing to touch a body of water, taste the salt. And I just identified this need today, while I was writing to Caleb.

Then, I realized something else. It's Rosh Hashanah tonight. The Jewish New Year. No one said "Shana Tova"; no one said anything until I got an "e-card" from my family from Turkey and Israel.

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"On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, after the afternoon services, Jews visit a body of water or pond, containing live fish*, to symbolically "cast away" their sins into the river.

*The fish's dependence on water symbolizes the Jews dependence on G-d, as a fish's eyes never close, G-d's watchful eyes never cease."

***
I am a cultural Jew. I don't practice every custom, only the ones I grew up with in Turkey. And we didn't grow up visiting a body of water on Rosh Hashanah. But somehow, my body knows its religion, it seems.

Maybe I'm making this up. I can't explain it. Science can't explain it either, but there IS something there:

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"An average adult body is 50 to 65 percent water -- that's roughly 45 quarts.

Water content differs throughout the body. Blood is made up of 83 percent water, bones are 22 percent water, and muscle is 75 percent water."

***

Either way, I find this epiphany about my/my body's need to be by the water beautiful.

Sunday. Beach.

I'll bring in the new year right.