This morning I set up a new wireless network for Gracie Rosmansion. My Internet had been acting funky and after protracted wrangling with Time Warner Spectrum Whatever, it became apparent my router had punked out for good. Setting up a new one is the easiest thing in the world, but I confess I still felt a nutty sense of accomplishment. It wasn’t until middle age that I became a woman who did home repair and solved her own tech problems. Continue Reading →
I’m on Day 3 of Marina Abramović immersion for a piece I’m writing about her new memoir, Walk Through Walls. She is a thorny, intriguing subject, and I feel both stuck and manic as I write and write and delete and delete. To ground out the fever the Artist has conjured in me –the Liser-sized warp in the time-space continuum– I keep scooping up poor Grace, who is cowering in her special rocking chair. While she protests with her newly acquired “Noooooo” meow, I say: “THE PERMAKITTEN IS PRESENT.” There is only one amused member of my household today.
A friend once told me she walked in the woods every day because the woods were her church, and why wouldn’t you pray every day when your church was so beautiful? Today I spent Yom Kippur in such a church–a temple, really–and really did find prayer and fasting and atonement so much easier. Guided by lower and upper case grace, I walked the paths of my friend’s beautiful land–pink, amber, ochre, grey. I prayed to my ancestors for forgiveness for how I failed their line, asked G-d to help me be a better vessel in the second half of my life, talked aloud to the highest spirits of those with whom I am blocked. Light-headed and clear-hearted, that’s how I felt when the sun disappeared again. Good. G’mar Tov, beautiful people. You are my temple.