Bernoulli's Principle and Weinstein's Wake

Dear Mr. Bernoulli

Bless you and your principle that allows us humans to crawl into the belly of a huge metal bird that doesn't even flap about it, but glides smoothly upwards beyond the clouds, beyond the haze and fray of walk-around grounded earth life, delivering us from coast to coast, from country to country, and most of the middle parts in between - free as birds! Well, maybe not quite so free as birds but rather packed like sardines as airlines struggle to make more money per wingita (capita?) than their competitors, but hey, Mr. Bernoulli, I'm sure you could not have foreseen the stir your principle would create.

Fast moving air exerts less (downward) pressure. 

Lift off happens when the big bird caging us reaches the right speed. No matter the weight, the bird lifts! I always get a thrill on take-off and landing. Principles be damned, it feels like magic to me, Mr. Bernoulli! 

On arrival at our destination, we humans disembowel the bird as we disembark. (Sorry, Birdie. Your tummy will be full again soon. A pilot of experience will sit at your head to guide you toward a safe landing some distance from where you took off for the heavenly vault.)  Grateful humans and those ignorant or oblivious of the magic will go about their business far afield from where they started.

Thank you for being a principled man, Mr. Bernoulli, and for lending us this refinement of Sir Isaac Newton's principles of physics.

Sincerely,

A grateful and awed-by-the-magic human

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We are all sexual beings hard-wired to seek-out that orgasmic sensation of incredible lightness of being that makes it feel as if we have communed with the All. What we do with that hard-wiring must be tempered by our response-ability. Do we act on our strong urges despite them sometimes being at odds with cultural norms, mores, or our own principles that hopefully include the Golden Rule?

Harvey Weinstein was cuffed, finger-printed and booked as a criminal for following his hard-wiring without thoughtful consideration of what that would do to his victims.

Your freedom to do as you please ends when your acts infringe upon my freedom to choose my own fate, safety or comfort.

There will always be the caveman mentality of bop 'em (cavewomen) over the head and drag them by the hair to bed. Knowing that requires that modern women assess the situation of power differentials and take care not to put ourselves in danger, exacerbating the discrepancy in strength and speed by becoming inebriated or incapable of running in the other direction should the feeling arise in the pit of our stomach that something is not right and our safety is at stake.

I cannot understand, at my current age, the allure of hobbling high-heeled shoes. It's impossible to run in them. I remember wearing the torture devices on my feet as a working woman of twenty to twenty-five. Insanity. My poor tootsies would look up at me and ask, "You want us to what?" The same was true when I donned toe shoes. Poor feet. At least I could run in the latter. 

When alcohol (or drugs) are introduced, all bets are off as to the safety of a woman in the presence of a man or men. The biological imperative to procreate is among the strongest urges in all creation. Our frontal cortex is supposed to modulate that urge. Alcohol and many drugs take the executive function of our brains off-line. When consent to sex is upfront, that can be fun. When there is no consent, substances can increase the power differential to the point of harm to her/him who is victim.

Harvey Weinstein is alleged to have harmed many. Bill Cosby too. Priests, Cardinals, Bishops and other clergy harmed thousands of victims. 

Sexuality is a birthright. Acting out on children, the voiceless, and less powerful (than the perpetrators) for the sake of feeling that incredible lightness of being, or for any reason, is a crime. 

The momentary pleasure is just that: Momentary. Addiction to any pleasure can be a huge burden to the addicted and to society. It can also be healed.  

Sexual predation can be a misguided attempt to show how powerful a being is over another being. Rape of women is happening on a grand scale in wars. Rape of Mother Earth is happening every day. Powerful men (mostly) who form powerful companies rape and degrade the planet systematically. Where's the safety in that?

Your freedom to plunder and poison ends when it endangers my right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live in a non-toxic environment. It's time to call out all perpetrators and use Bernoulli's principle to fly them to the moon. 

One way tickets only.

House Concert in San Francisco.

Layla is cousin to one of our Los Angeles friends and has been living in Nashville the past year trying to make a go of her music. She came West to visit a friend she met at camp twelve years ago and to perform for a gathering of thirty-two pot-luck-bearing folk at the home of her friend's parents. 

Our friend and her husband flew to Oakland and stayed with us the weekend in order to visit with us, have lunch with the cousin on Saturday, and to support Layla in her music career by attending the event and bringing guests.

For my honey and me, it was an opportunity to see San Francisco with old friends, hear some inspiring music, and meet new friends.

We spend far too little time getting to know our new digs. San Francisco and Oakland both have so MANY different and charming neighborhoods! I wish I knew the name given to the area where the house concert was held, but I was paying attention to the road while driving the four of us around, and not paying much attention to the nuanced changes between the ups and downs of passing neighborhoods. Topographically and economically, I assume that up is up by both measures. The  concert house was on a very very steep hill and had a phenomenal view looking roughly West. Golden light suffused green hills that merged with the foggy gray-blue of the Pacific. 

Before the concert, we met Layla for a tapas lunch at Cha Cha Cha and walked around the not-much-changed-since-1967-Haight/Ashbury district. Then Layla Frankel went her way by Lyft to prepare for her 6:30 concert while my honey and our two friends drove forth to Golden Gate Park to take in the beauty of the Conservatory of Flowers until we were due at Layla's friend's parent's home. 

San Francisco's Conservatory is iconic. The filigreed central white dome houses rainforest plants and is replete with recorded birdsong and frog croaks, while the two lower ceilinged side rooms each house lowland or highland tropical flora. I don't think there were real animals (other than what may have been caught by the Venus Flytraps) in the mix, just realistic sounds of damp-digs critters. What a world apart, to be able to visit with friends in the warm and humid orchid bedecked beauty.

Several prom couples were gathered outside the Conservatory for photos. I had to wonder how, on this 52 degree afternoon with brisk winds tugging at satin and chiffon dresses and tousling hair-dos, the photographer was going to edit the photos so the girls' exposed flesh didn't look frankly blue - no matter their natural hue.  Guys seem luckier in these scenarios...  long-sleeved shirts and tuxedo jackets and slacks, even cummerbunds provide a modicum of warmth. Poor gals with strapless, side-slit, or backless gowns with silvery sequins and icicle crystal beads adding mercilessly to the cold! Brrrrrr! The awkwardness of high-schoolers is just delicious - or heart-breaking - depending on how  we view it. My observing was tinged with both - relishing how dear they are and feeling empathetically sorry for them.

OK... House Concert was delightful! Layla's singing voice is rich and rangy from solid low notes to ethereal highs. Her steel-string mastery is impressive, and her subject matter from You're a Heart Steamroller to I'll Be Your Creature of Habit was delicious in a different way from those petrified prom people. 

Her images: "can you hear the wind colliding with the stars?" and, telling of desert travelers, "all they could feel was the dust in their veins" stuck to my heart's ribs. 

After her set of about a dozen songs, and urgent audience requests for another couple, I bought a copy of her only CD and schmoozed with the dessert crowd until it was time to drive us all back over the Bay Bridge to our own dear neighborhood and be reminded, as we passed our daughter and granddaughter's neighborhood, that we moved here because theirs and our 'hoods put the OK in Oakland for us! 

Middle Seat Airplane Yoga... On Account of Follow Through

Coming home from NYC, my window seat- mate was a musician. Eric had missed his flight heading to San Lucia a few days earlier due to weather, was bussed an hour and a half to another airport to catch a different connecting flight, played a weekend jazz festival on the island, and like the rest of flight 168 got stuck on the ground at JFK in NYC while Jet Blue awaited another plane which was delayed on account of weather. Our departure time of 8:58 Saturday night was moved to 10:20 due to rain and slick runways. Eric was plumb tuckered and slept the whole way back to Oakland. 

My amazing husband had the aisle seat. He  did not close his eyes on either flight - coming or going. Watching Saturday Night Live on his little screen imbedded in the back of our daughter’s seat just in front of him, he laughed out loud several times. When I heard him, I looked over from my middle seat and he’d explain the funny bit very loudly on account of not being able to hear how loudly he was speaking because he still had the TV noise coming into his ears. 

In my middle seat, I kept knitting. Middle of the airplane, middle of the sky, middle of the night, I did middle seat airplane yoga. With knitting. This is the second hat I’ve attempted with what are called circular needles. Hand work of any kind is a lulling, meditative craft for me.

Lucky grandie and her mama, our daughter, had a no-show in their window seat, so the eight-year-old got to stretch out and she slept at least four hours of the six hour flight home. 

Lucky me to have seen a life-hack trick in Westways Magazine involving beach balls. My beloved, of course had three. With three pillow slips packed in my carry-on, we three females inflated our balls to the desired poofiness which enabled us to sleep a wee bit by putting our heads down on the tray tables covered by bouncy buoyancy  or, in the granddaughter's case, on the empty seat.

Exhausted musician Eric slept through three rounds of turbulence and all the water and snack-attacks from the overworked stewards. I nabbed him one water and stuck it in his seat pocket for which he was grateful on awakening 2:00 a.m. just before we landed in Oakland. 

On the red-eye to NYC Thursday night, I was able to meditate a wee bit and sleep some. Mercifully, we got a couple hours sleep in the hotel room before the festivities began for our grand niece's bat mitzvah late Friday afternoon. The whole affair was held at an upscale nightclub on Tenth Avenue on the Upper Westside. 

While the ceremony was lovely, and our niece even lovelier, memories of the after party make my ears hurt all over again on account of the decibel level, so I won't go there... other than to say, I never thought I'd see scantily clad women serving drinks to children while hanging upside down in full splits from the ceiling with the entire venue shaking in time to the thrum of the bass, all the while, the screeching of the DJ was encouraging the children to yell even more loudly. When he hollered, LET ME HEAR YOU, I held my ears tightly and thought, YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING.

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What I love about middle seat airplane yoga is how sneaky it is. All I need to do is arrange my limbs, bend forward and breathe while the angles of my legs reach into the tight parts of my spine and release the tension there. No one knows I'm doing yoga! 

Knitting becomes meditation on account of adding mantra to every stitch. So! Check off having done my spiritual practices even while in transit between coasts. Ah, the portability of intention and practice. Accountability to self... on account of I hate to miss my commitment to keep up the practices.

When Opposables Become Oppositional

Tuesday's task oriented completion, (rather than body awareness oriented completion) of a long weeding fest left me with such sore thumbs that I think they conspired to give me a bad cold so I wouldn't go outside again for a few days. 

Saturday, we had a professional weeder work magic with the thigh-high wild oats, fox-tails, and thistles that overtook the entire lower portion of the garden. All weeds LOVED the winter rains and begrew themselves with such beauty (if you like the look of them billowing and prickling in the wind), and pride (yes, weeds look proud... and smug too. I can't wait for the summer goat fest eating them all down to the ground in the park just across the road! Why, I even saw one wild grass thumb its nose at me!) 

My thumbs, if they had their way, would luxuriate in hot epsom soaks and deep rest each day and stay as far away from garden gloves as they could. They're begging for a paraffin soak they saw in some fancy catalog, but have never tried. I said, maybe.

I promised them that this morning all we needed to do was some straight digging. No pincer grasp required. We're simply putting in earth the Iris rhizomes a friend gave me. And hey, I reminded them, it wasn't so bad breaking up the clay with the pitchfork yesterday, was it?  (Grudging shrug from the impossible opposable duo.) And the Dogwood tree looks happy there in the corner of the front yard near Sir Mergatroid Redwood, I reminded them. Maybe YOU can come up with a name for the Dogwood? I encourage my grand digits. Naw, they remind me, when it comes to spoken word, we're all thumbs.

Sigh... What shall we name the Dogwood... Maybe Sir Marvin, after our last fine and noble four-legged friend, Marvin Gardens?