Sommerträume – Summer Dreams

Out of nowhere, my brother Matthias announces that he is sending a package from Germany. Mid-year, not for my birthday. What will arrive? Mail across the ocean is not dependable anymore and postage has become very expensive. Arbitrary tolls have to be paid in Germany and here, so with the huge postage increases I had to give up sending presents to my family in Germany. What a loss. When his parcel arrives two weeks later, a colorful woven textile emerges. Marvelous. So much joy. Freude. His hands spin the wool with a spindle, the threads get died, then he weaves. The beautifully crafted gift brings consolation – a piece of him in my home. I drape it on the couch, admiring it daily. Times of pandemic, my own health issue, and now, for the past year and half, it is too dangerous for me to fly. Having not seen my siblings and family for seven years, I feel most bereft this summer. Dreaming of magic carpets. Yes, my old childhood habit of traveling on a magic carpet to distant lands – Persia, Algeria, Lebanon, Brazil – is back. Danke, Matthias, danke. I sail to old towns with cobble stone streets, outdoor cafés, sheets of Obstkuchen, bronze sculptures and Denkmälern, with old men on benches under chestnut trees, kids at fountains, mothers in swinging colorful dresses. Summer pleasures, verwoben, interwoven, interweaving…

 

For me, all culture is fascinating – it has a Gestalt. Whether beautiful or ugly, ravaged by fear, revenge, or by extreme sunshine. Alive, amorphous, constantly shifting. Culture, like nature, is an undeniable force. We all shape it, and in return are influenced by it. Like threads in a cloth, we are verwoben. This mutuality becomes a mirror.  Who are we? Norms, habits, traditions, Bräuche, cars, museums, music festivals, street performers, parks, gardens, sports, court houses, markets, birthday celebrations, groceries, hospitals, airports, prisons, the digital world with news, podcasts, books, movies, and more. We participate, contribute, consume, appreciate. When these public spheres are heavily dominated by money, by selling, advertising, brainwashing, the choices become limited, our true diversity shrinks. Sameness and dullness set in. Inevitable numbness, apathy, and loss of imagination seep into the culture. We gladly outsource our own choices, opinions, preferences. The onslaught of fakeness and superficiality on screens is unhealthy, disturbing, nightmarish. A form of violence in disguise.

The fabric of culture. I want to name what is. Here in America, our public spaces, the Commons, are for many fellow humans not safe anymore. Racial profiling. Government agencies pounce on brown working people with completely out of proportion and unnecessary brutality. The massive deporting and disappearing of family members in jails and concentration camps. Unimaginable. There is no logic, no humanity, no merci. The suffering is enormous, traumatic for generations to come. The culture might be shiny, but terror lurks beneath. Unnamed anxiety trembling in stale air. Our hearts in pain, or malnourished, deserted, squeezed. Faces and gestures empty.

However inevitably, irrepressibly, human glow appears. The smile on the wonderfully wrinkled face of the elderly woman in the park is an oasis. I live for it. Beauty of all sorts keeps finding me. Staying in the habit of naming things. Being a witness. Not wanting to get used to the quiet onslaught of fakeness, fear and conformity. I refuse to be kidnapped. This effort makes me feel lucky amidst the chaos. I am privileged in some regards, and not in others. To my surprise, I am sheltered by my discernment and delight, listening to the eternal yearning beneath it all.

At the farmer’s market, Charlie keeps adding extra morsels to my bag of mushrooms, inquiring about my week, finally accepting only four of my one-dollar bills. The daughter of Eduardo, on her summer break from college, exuberantly greets faithful customers lining up for her father’s famous exquisite bread. To Sam, I offer three Meyer lemons from my tree; he gives me a scoopful of roasted almonds. Kindness abounds. From Bernie I pick up a bottle of apple juice. He hands me a single beautiful pear: “Wait two days and then try it, come back and tell me how it tastes.” Touching me gently on the shoulder, a twinkle in his eyes. The farmer’s market is music – a cultural phenomenon, a source of beauty. Growing and sowing trust. Community. And yet, most people prefer super markets, wandering the cold aisles in loneliness. This way no need to look into anybody’s eyes, share a smile, or receive a gift – how convenient, how cheap.

Discussing with my favorite vendors and farmers why their business is declining. Naming things as they are, avoiding illusions. Knowing leads to caring. Quietly insisting on aliveness, awareness, declining to follow blindly. Holding fast to the radiant truth of wrinkled-ness. Consciously, I might choose to be entranced by the resonate sound of a double bass, or the inventive skilled fingers on the loom. Or act on my impulse to bounce and hum like the bee in softly swaying flower bells. Some mornings, I prefer to be transformed into the fast-beating wings of hummingbird. Fluttering, vibrating with summer dreams. The air thick with natural beauty, conjured up by spider webs, cicadas, seeds, hands – wrinkled, winged, delicious… belonging…

my magic carpet

(43”x15”)

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Shakespeare