A Year and a Day, Litha Park

corazón azul

Heidi Utz

Lithia Park, Ashland, Oregon, April 2011

Photo of the Day

Lithia Park
Ashland, OR
November 2010

Ashland Graffiti - Artists in the Alley

Shot in Ashland, OR, in September '10. I like the idea of bringing the natural world into graffiti art.


See the rest of my graffiti shots @ http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2090184&id=1438677225&fbid=1610576111150&ref=mf

Aw, man, I've been spotted!

Ashland, Oregon
August 2010

Lithia Park

Lithia Park

Ashland, OR

August 2010

Photo of the Day

"Theremin Player"

Ashland, OR

December 28, 2009

Photo of the Day

"Wave"

Ashland, Oregon

December 28, 2009

Inspired by the Patti Smith song of the same name

Photo of the Day

Ashland Springs Hotel

Ashland, OR

December 27, 2009

Photo of the Day

"Giving Sunyata"

Tashi Choling Center for Buddhist Studies

Ashland, OR

10/26/09

This year on my birthday, I returned to the Tashi Chöling Buddhist Center, in the Colestine Valley, nestled in the Siskyou mountain range. Unfortunately, the day brought rain and my visit to the Mandala Garden was abbreviated, though I did manage to sneak in a few shots.

These statues, White Tara melding into Green Tara, are 20 feet tall. Green Tara is dedicated to enlightened activity, protection from fear, and the pacification of obstacles. White Tara counteracts illness, representing long life, maternal compassion, and healing. Tara is also known as a saviouress, a heavenly deity who hears the cries of beings experiencing misery in samsara.

Buddhists in Russia believe that Russian president Dmitry Medvedev is the White Tara.

Homeless Meal

It is a damp, frigid evening in Oregon, the kind that generally makes me pray for the warmth and protection of the homeless people I cook for every Tuesday night at Ashland’s Methodist Church. I worry about them on a regular basis, yet sometimes I think I should not, as they are a hardy, resourceful, and seemingly resilient lot. Survivors though they appear, I know their lives are often incredibly difficult, especially in the colder months, when any romanticized notions of  “camping,” or “sleeping under the stars” get quickly subsumed by subfreezing temperatures and constant precipitation.

Last Tuesday seemed a dividing line, as folks walked in heads down, dirty clothes tucked under big worn parkas, greasy-haired, scowling, in no mood. As I tried to catch their eyes--eyes that too often don’t get met—most appeared lost in a world far away. And while this crowd is generally happy, grateful, even animated, that night it seemed that the reality of the long, cold, dark days ahead had settled into their bones.

Oftentimes, the lines between me and them blur. When I’m done serving, I stand on line with my plate and we sit together at big tables in the church hall and eat our meal. Last week I sat with a 6-year-old girl named Lotus, her parents and surrogate family. Homeless kids always slay me. I watched as people urged her to eat her meal, goaded her on, teased her, smiled at her. And I thought to myself, She may be OK. This is a damn sight better than some kids with homes are getting.

Last year, a social worker paid us all a visit as we were eating, and as I was seated at the table, she interviewed me as a homeless person. She was a youngster, really. A kid just out of grad school, mid-20s soaking wet. Before she got to me, I watched her quizzing my tablemates. Asking questions with great diligence, she worked hard to try and get it right. But there was a difference, very real as she perceived it, between herself and us. And, nice as she was, that made her hold her body stiff and away. Play with her hair and wiggle her glasses a lot.

I picked up a hard-boiled egg and began to peel it, bit by bit, sometimes popping it in my mouth and edging the shell with the tip of my tooth. Then pulling it out and flaying more skin, till just the soft white underbelly was exposed. I could see her watching me from the corner of her eye as she spoke with the man to my right, a 60ish fellow with a grey dreadlocked beard and knocked-out teeth who looked like he’d just walked away from Captain Ahab on a whaling boat. He said to her, “I can’t stand the feeling of being in an enclosed building. I’ve tried it, and I can’t do it. The only time I feel at home is when I’m sleeping outside. So does that make me homeless—or suitably housed?” He broke into gales of laughter. She tried to laugh along in a forced, choked, scared sort of way that sounded like she was attempting to be both politely amused and genuinely amused but not really laughing at him but then again not exactly getting what he meant. I guess, when designing her survey, she hadn’t bargained for a street-smart Plato.

She then turned to me and pushed a questionnaire about quality of life for the Ashland homeless population in my general direction. Then she began quizzing me about my life. I glanced down at my old T-shirt and faded jeans with the hole in the knee, and realized I looked the part. I had become one of the faces of homelessness in her study. A specimen. Someone whose life she seemed both frightened of and trying to improve.

I picked up the egg again and continued to work it. Because I wanted to seem a little more threatening than I was. I wanted her to know that I was, perhaps, a little bit crazy, and that’s what had landed me on the streets to begin with. That I wasn’t particularly concerned with food-handling manners...and might just smash this hard-soft object into her cranium should she provoke me by asking the wrong question.

I was rather hard-boiled in my soft-boiled plot. But the way she was fidgeting as she spoke with me, I knew I’d made my point.

“How often have you been homeless in the last 18 months?” “Do you generally make use of the local shelters, when available?” “Do you receive public assistance or food stamps?” As her questions mounted, I felt myself begin to feel more and more identified with my toughness and resiliency as a homeless person...and see her increasingly as a tan windbreaker-clad nelly who was merely dabbling in the field of social work to introduce vicarious thrills into her tedious life. Maybe to have something to go home and talk about with her banker fiancé, Herbert. When I asked her a question about one of the items on her survey, the tone in her perhaps-25-year-old voice became almost singsong, like a 4th-grade teacher enlightening a student. Somewhere in the space between us hung a pile of judgment—if I was homeless, I must somehow be stupid. If she wasn’t, she must know more.

Condescension. She wasn’t trying to be condescending, but there it was. Inherent in the difference between she and me in that moment. Draped into the folds of her skirt, into the rope of her pearls, into the band of her Seiko.

I had just about stripped the egg bare and considered mashing it between my fingers and smearing it on the wall, on the table, across the front of my T-shirt, branding me as rotten. Instead, when she turned her back, I shoved it whole in the pocket of her windbreaker.

Suddenly feeling like I had a little tiny bit of power, I strode confidently to the front of the hall--and asked for a second helping.

My New Favorite Sacred Site

The Colestine Valley, in the Siskiyou Mountains south of Ashland, is home to the Tashi Chöling Center for Buddhist Studies. When you first encounter this beautiful Buddhist temple and garden, with a 35-foot-high statue of Vajrasattva, as well as two 20-foot statues of Green Tara and White Tara, you feel fairly certain that you've left Oregon and entered the Himalayas.

Adding to the illusion, you're greeted by primitive-looking woolly creatures, which it's quite possible to mistake for yaks, but are actually alpacas.

Then llamas--the double-L kind. Then deer--lots of babies and their moms.

On October 25, my birthday eve, we drove down to Mt. Ashland and through about 6 miles of gorgeous forest road until we came to a clearing with huge poles of prayer flags flapping in the wind. A 4-story traditional Tibetan temple loomed on the hill in the distance...and a 35-foot Vajrasattva is...well, hard to miss. We walked through the gate into the gardens, then later made our way up to the hilltop, from which we watched a beautiful fall sunset, toured the interior of the temple, and snapped about 500 photos between us.

As visitors, we were in exceptional company. Over the course of the years, many great living masters of Vajrayana Buddhism have visited and taught at Tashi Chöling, including H.H. Penor Rinpoche, Dodrup Chen Rinpoche, Yangthang Rinpoche, and Yeshe Dorje Rinpoche. Currently the center is under the guidance of Gyatrul Rinpoche, a delightful lama whom I met at a Tibetan cultural festival last month.

In 1980, the great master His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche came to bless the land where Tashi Chöling now stands, saying, “Those who practice here sincerely will have the opportunity to obtain the rainbow body.” The temple's scriptural library is said to house more Tibetan sacred materials than anywhere else in the US.

In the photo above are a large grouping of prayer wheels. Tibetans use these chokhor to spread spiritual blessings to all sentient beings and invoke good karma in their next life. I had never before (in this lifetime) turned a prayer wheel, so it means a lot to me to have them in the town where I find myself for now. Until I reach the land of many prayer wheels, a bit north and east of Ashland. I have this slated for sometime after Alaska.

(Though I am ever so hopeful that when I go to Alaska, I'll be able to see Tibet from my house!)

Back to the Beach

Today, I am back on the central Oregon coast, to revisit the Sylvia Beach Hotel, where Margot and I stayed several weeks ago, then to make my way south by camping on the coast. The weather here is cold and stormy, and reminds me a bit of the old saying, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” which Snopes.com assures me Mark Twain never uttered. (Still, I like to imagine him, pipe in hand, shivering on the Golden Gate Bridge.)

A few little things have happened since my last entry.

One is a PO box and an accompanying physical address in Oregon.

A week ago, I found a wonderful home to sublet just north of Ashland. This area has so inspired me that I have decided to pause in my travels and rest here for a while, perhaps even permanently. I have very much fallen for Oregon, and the Ashland area is particularly wonderful. It reminds me a bit of Santa Fe back in the early ’90s, when it still felt like a small-town community, everyone knew each other, and a certain congeniality still existed.

Chuck Palahniuk has written a fun little volume called Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, OR, about his hometown that pretty much sums up how eccentric folks up this way can be. And Ashland has lots of wild, radical hippie energy, mixed with “rugged individualists,” hardcore Fundamentalists (don’t spin that radio dial too fast), Pacific Crest Trail thru-hikers, pagans, musicians of absolutely every stripe, people who don’t mind living in isolated cabins for 6 months at a clip, brazen jaywalking deer, environmentalists, rednecks, militia, women walking down the street holding hands and singing, religious cult members, mountain-climbers, punked-out students, shrieking thespians…all of whom seem to turn up at its awesome co-op at once, quaffing kombucha and tossing organic Rainier cherries into their backpacks. It’s people-watching at its finest, and if you stop for a few minutes and eat your lunch outside on the ledge, the gestalt of the place reveals itself, somewhere between the doddering toddlers in tie-dyed onesies and the bearded hippies standing in for Dumbledore.

People seem very happy here, and the week I’ve just spent (several nights of yurt camping and others in the dorm at the Ashland Hostel) has been extremely pleasant. It feels much like a spiritual/creative/musical playground, with so many things happening at one time that it can be hard to choose. On Friday, I stumbled onto the First Friday Artwalk, near the railyard, where several galleries have shows and musicians give impromptu concerts on the streets. Terribly cool. Another night, I sat next to the creek in 99-acre Lithia Park, had a sandwich, and enjoyed a young band jamming on some blues and prog rock tunes.

I feel like I’ve discovered the place I thought Santa Fe would always be. It’s rough around the edges, sincere, friendly, deep, playful, spirited, and kind. I’m ready for this.

Gnome Home on the Rogue

My home tonight is Valley of the Rogue State Park, where I've got another yurt for the evening. The park sits nestled beside the Rogue River, which makes for a highly pleasant walk, especially when the moon is full. As you pull up to the tiny little town (about 30 miles from Ashland), the first thing that greets you is one of Oregon's famous CCC-constructed steel bridges, the magnitude of which sometimes greatly overpowers the scale of the places in which they find themselves.  Above is the Rogue's majestic bridge, a great place to watch the river flow, anglers angle, and the sun glisten on the water. 

Yurts, by the way, make a fantasic dwelling space. There's something very lovely about laying on your bunk in the center of a circle and staring up through the roof into the trees and open sky. The rounded edges feel much softer than a cabin or tent (although mine has become sort of the Claes Oldenburg model...).

Back in Ashland

When I look back to my last post, I feel like I've traveled hundreds of miles, both physically and mentally. I've been in Oregon for 3 weeks now, weaving a web back and forth and sideways across this gorgeous, often magical (and I use that word sparingly) place. I've never seen so much sheer physical beauty in one square on a map. Oregon dazzles me on an hourly basis.

Today I sit wi-fing in Ashland's Lithia Park on a picnic table in front of a creek with lots of old trees and rocks strewn along the banks. Children, and often adults, wade in the waters. To my right is a Japanese garden with a lovely reflecting pond. To my left, an open field where moms feed babies, teens play Frisbee, hippies get some sun on their dreads, and it's all a big happy mishmosh of recreating humanity, much as I imagine Golden Gate Park of the 60s might have been. Last night I stumbled onto a labyrinth, walked it, then headed toward the main drag, where I saw a young woman pedaling down the street on a bicycle completely naked. What a fine place to be.

I drove up here yesterday afternoon, after spending the day yesterday in my favorite Mt. Shasta-area town, Dunsmuir. No Cal is still extremely smoke-choked, and Shasta seems a bit down-at-the-heels with all those rings of brown dust obscuring her. But it was great to be back in the funky little town I love and see it still standing, like a hamlet straight out of the 1930s, beautifully preserved, but not prettied up by developers' notions of gentrification.

I was, admittedly, running on a major case of sleep deprivation. Someone could have told me that there was a black bear in a lavendar tutu ready to chauffeur me around town, and I would have said, "Fabulous." The night before, I'd camped at Lake Siskyou camping city, for which the words "unqualified disaster" spring to mind. (Or is it "unmitigated"?) Truly the worst camping experience I've ever had...enough to send me crawling back to another cheap motel. I've never seen such a massive campground in my entire life. Not unlike a massive heart attack. They had an onsite movie theater, arcade, pizzeria, grocery store...need I go on? It was a circus in the wilderness.

Unfortunately, my tent site seemed to be right at the epicenter of the action--and sound travels like quicksilver in the wild. So, just as the bambini and babies stopped screaming, the preadolescents started up, and when they were through, the young adults decided to have campfire chats about their philosophical views on such deep subjects as truck wheel rims...this at 1:30 in the morning. Then there were the young women who began blow-drying their hair at 1:45 am... Meanwhile, I'm in my tent doing all I can to practice acceptance...trying to realize that they're just engaging in age-appropriate behaviors...and quickly losing my equanimity with the passing hours of insomnia.

Finally, a deep, primitive sound began rumbling in my gut, and I was powerless to stop its exodus. "QUIET!!!" I bellowed through my tent. And, by some over miracle, I was heard, and a stillness fell over the entire campground. It was the sound of peace, of children not doing anything remotely childlike, that I hadn't heard in, oh, 3 weeks. I admit, it was among the loveliest sounds I have heard all summer. It left me to my own sweet reverie and a new meditative state: my back against the hard earth.

At 4 a.m., I slept.

At 6 a.m., they woke.

For all the skeptics out there, it truly is possible to break camp alone on 2 hours sleep with 5 little kids watching you in 20 minutes.

Bend

The previous 2 days--which I know have names...but I've been traveling too long to remember what they are--I spent driving down from Mt. Hood, into the fun town of Hood River, through some blazing views of Mt. Hood, into forests so deep that the cell goes away, over high mountains, then down into desert that greatly resembles the New Mexican landscape, then into farmland, and finally into Bend, which seems to be the Cuisinart version of all of that. I spent two days there trying to avoid getting hit by mountain bikes, marveling at testosterone in all of its variegated manifestations, and chastising myself for not having the proper footwear for anything more than the stairclimb to my hotel room. My former compatriots at Outside magazine would be shocked at the disrepair I've fallen into. Bend, it seems, shares much in common with SLO: lots of active young people, some historical buildings, a liking for good clean fun, lots of athletic possibilities, a downtown with plenty of upscale shops and restaurants, a nice body of water running through downtown. It's sort of a remote hotspot in Central Oregon--the only place you'll find for many miles with a Target, a Home Depot, and a Trader Joe's. Oregon has not embraced the big box with the same fervor that other places have, thankfully. However, it was nice to find somewhere I could buy a can opener.

Greetings from Western Oregon

I guess I've been on the road a week now. Time does funny things when you're in funny places. I've been in funny places. Not funny ha-ha. But sehr interessant, as my favorite German teacher used to say. My departure from SLO commenced with a drive through hell, beginning in Livermore, CA, where it had been 109 degrees at 6:00 in the evening, and up Route 5 North, through a landscape that looked like any good Fundamentalist’s idea of Apocalypse (sans Jesus). Hours and hours of thick smoke blankets (2000+ fires burning in CA, most in the northern third of the state) conspired against even keeping my car vents open. Just at the point when the oxygen had completely exited my body, the sun came out, the sky turned blue, and Mt. Shasta exerted its presence like a barroom hussy. Ah, so this is what all the fuss is about. Northern CA mecca.

After a very cool few hours in the town of Mt. Shasta, where I dined at the Billy Goat Tavern and had an extremely fun conversation about the state of the artist with the proprietor of the Velvet Elephant art supply store, I stumbled around the corner to Dunsmuir, possibly one of the funkiest towns I’ve ever been to. Ever, ever. Part of the State of Jefferson, once a historical district comprising northern CA’s Mt. Shasta area and southern Oregon. The funky folk who live there still retain a certain hardcore segregationist mentality, much like what I imagine Southerners hanging on to the Confederacy continue to propound. I’d never been to the Pacific Northwest before, so excuse my wide-eyed oohing and ahhing. I really thought Northern Exposure was simply FICTION. Then I bump into Dunsmuir, a former logging village…and Yreka, an old mining town, very much retired, and now I feel like I’ve been to Alaska without ever having had a trip in a bush plane. (more about my imminent trip to Alaska to come) I spent hours taking photos, which I'll post soon, in this area, and that night, met two folks named Danielle and Kit, who encouraged me to come see the band at the local bar. A few hours later, everyone in the bar was dancing to this German blues band--I guess that's not an oxymoron ( in fact, some days, I'd say it's utterly redundant).

Next, I headed to Ashland, OR, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and scene of the crime for 5 plays/day, and lots and lots of thespian types, earnestly creative kids, cultural tourists, people tossing on vaguely Shakespearean garb...and...to my English-majoring despair...one young man who was typing a letter home and couldn't figure out how to spell Shakespeare. Ah, well...Spell check ate the spelling-bee star... I liked Ashland a lot. Passed a nice evening at the Black Sheep Pub, as authentic a British pub as you're likely to find in North America, then wandered around and drooled at some of the historical buildings. Ashland has an excellent health food co-op, many potential Obama voters, metaphysical stores (the kind that don't exist in SLO), and my new favorite bumper sticker: "One Nation Under Canada."

After 2 sweet nights, I decided to fulfill a lifelong dream, and stayed in a yurt. It was the perfect "gnome home," right on the Rogue River in southern OR, and I took several hikes along the river and explored nearby Grants Pass, which may well be the kids-on-meth capital of southeastern Oregon, otherwise undistinguished.

The next day, I decided to continue the places with kids on bad drugs theme, and headed for urban Eugene, OR, where I stayed at a "guy drinking Bud on the bed"-type motel right on Broadway and got accosted approximately every 45 seconds by the progeny of the Grunge generation, who apparently are majoring in panhandling at Southern Oregon University. I don't think I've ever encountered a city I've despised more than Eugene--and I've been to some good ones in my day, let me tell you. I hated it more than Newark and Clifton, NJ, combined. I walked around for 3 hours looking for photo ops and took all of 3 pictures! Couldn't wait to get the heck out of there.

Going for the study-in-contrasts effect, I then proceeded north and west to Silver Falls State Park, where I've rented a cabin for 3 nights in the midst of total paradise: incredible old-growth forest with trees higher than you've ever seen and a trail with 10 different waterfalls. It's in farm country (aka, the middle of nowhere), about 25 miles from Salem, not too far from Corvallis, and close to the teeny-tiny town of Silverton, where you can plunk a dime in the meter and get 2 hours of parking time. Yesterday I stopped in to an old-fashioned coffee house right on the river, where I felt like a total geek for pulling out my laptop and wi-fi-ing. (The realization that the alternative would be no Internet or cell access for 3 nights helped me bag the Thoreau trip.) The guy behind the bar was talking about going swimming in the swimming hole after work. It's a different world here. The kids who aren't on crystal meth are just so...dare I say it?...seemingly innocent. Incredibly refreshing.

Today, I did my camp chores, then drove into Salem, which is a completely different town from Eugene--very civilized and fun, with good photo potential, which we LOVE. Here, I've purchased my Alaska Milepost, helping me start planning my trip WAYYY up north. (I told you I was traveling!!)

On Friday, I head to Portland, to explore the big city that everyone tells me is just perfect for me, with Margot, who is being a hugely good sport and meeting me there for 6 days of Oregon travel.