Movin On

 Temecula Freeway View

Temecula Gas Prices, 8/22/11

We were looking for a different place to live.


Temecula, where we live now, is a new town designed for working-class people with kids. Lots of schools, little league teams and like that--not bad, but not us.

 Front Street, Old Temecula

Maybe back to San Diego?


Driving down I-15 is not a pleasant experience and there is no other way to go. Sometimes fourteen lanes of traffic all jammed with daily commuters--no, this is not a good way for human beings to live.


We visited some addresses of the apartments we could afford in the city. Disaster zones!


Other places? 


Rents so high two adults working full time at good jobs could barely cover the expense and the insane commuting is expected--it's part (or most!) of your southern California experience.


We have looked at all the coastal towns from San Diego to San Francisco. Nothing.


So we are going to leave the sunny southland for a while.

Temecula Morning

Lets go live where it's cool, foggy and rains.


It is time.

Beach Path, Trinidad, CA

...

46. Pilgrimage End

 "You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy."


I never went back to Italy or Il Poggio and have never communicated with Thielo or his sister except to acknowledge their letter and express my feelings about our loss-- their mother, my friend. 

Elisabetta was my strong connecting link with that phase of my life and I believe to try to continue or pursue that life would amount to the grasping some wise Buddhists caution us against.

 I have never been able to work with clay again somewhat to my regret. The essential space, materials, kiln, time--these things have never come together in my life again. (Though I am not finished with life in this body yet by any means.) Papier mache is my current substitute for clay. It's temporary (just like everything else) and cheap--flour, water and recycled cardboard and newspaper with magazine illustrations for color.

Well then, what does a pilgrim do when the pilgrimage is done?


This particular American pilgrim went to Russia, found a teaching job at a university, met his mate, returned to America and waited until it was possible to marry her, and as a married man needing an income  has worked as a substitute teacher in California until the unpleasant children disgusted him away from teaching, worked as a sales clerk until the huge retail store closed down, worked the twelve-hour night shift in a bunny suit in a factory clean room until the heat and noise became unbearable, learned the copy and shipping business until he asked for a month off for a spiritual retreat and the company decided to give him a permanent spiritual retreat and has tried without much success to be an artist and writer.

But the hidden pilgrim inside continues to live and even thrive! 

Good for him and Good for you! 

TW

.....

45. A Name

The name my parents gave me, Thomas, suits me to a "T" (for Thomas, of course!).


Thomas Jefferson comes to mind--Thomas the Doubter, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Tom, Tom the Piper's son and Tommy the Drummer!




I was named after Tommy Morgan--an old German piano player friend of my father--and I like that.


I like that Morgan means "morning" in German.

There is something about names and the sound of them that sometimes seems awfully meaningful important. 

The very sound of them. 


"Aum"-- THE sound to so many people. Vajra guru Padmasambhava--such a power name. Jesus Christ--name of a name--as they say. YHVH. Jehovah. El. There is something about a name.

In my life "Elisabeth" is a name that seems important to me personally.


Elisabeth-- my mother's middle name-- I was with her when I was born and I was with her when she died. 

Elisabeth English, the young woman I was so crazy about that died in that tragic plane wreck in Hawaii so many years ago. 


And Elisabetta Studer at Il Poggio, Italy.


Sitting on her stool by the table-high cooking fireplace at the dark end of the big kitchen behind the big wooden work table which was like a magnet to all of us--guests and workers. Usually smiling. Seldom talking except when it was necessary. Just being herself. Moving slowly, methodically--getting everything done beautifully without the slightest fuss.


I waved goodbye to her and the rest of the staff when I rode my bike away to continue my pilgrimage to Holy Mountain--now many years ago--and when I left Europe I took a northern route through Germany and never returned to Il Poggio.


Back then I intended to go back and work on more ceramics some day but first I wanted to see my parents and stay a while in California.


But one day, just a few weeks after my return to California, a letter came from Elisabetta's son Thielo--Elisabetta was dead.


Such a shock.


She was such a presence I could hardly believe that she was gone.


When I was working on the clay at Il Poggio I sometimes imagined that I was preserving some words for the future--like on the burned clay tablets discovered at the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro--so I incised a classic Zen remark on some clay tablets and fired them for future generations: "Before illumination--cutting wood, carrying water. After illumination--cutting wood, carrying water."

In his letter, Thielo had used these words to describe his mother. 

Yes.

Years after the events I have been telling about in Italy, I was driving in Plumas County, California--driving the windy highway through the beautiful mountains and enjoying the scenery--when I had the feeling that I was missing something--that I should stop and look around--so I pulled over to the side of the highway, got out and walked down the road a way.


Almost covered by bushes and leaves to the side of the highway there was a small, faded sign: "Former Location of Elisabethville".

Wasn't it?

...

44. Woman in Black

The Medici family had built another huge mansion on a hilltop about 200 yards from Il Poggio.

This mansion was not as large as Il Poggio but was a good sized stone chalet.

A dark-haired woman of about my age lived alone in this mansion whom I met several times walking in the fields, Sometimes she visited Elisabetta as a neighbor.

Married to a very wealthy Italian who was never around, she spoke English with a British accent was obviously well educated. She was always dressed entirely in black and on cold days wore a theatrical long black cape which made her look kind of spooky when she was out "on the moors".
She invited me to visit her to view the house and it was quite an interesting old place. As a nice historic touch, the old Medici family crest--an arrangement of balls in bas relief  like the Olympic Games circles, decorated the main dining-room mantelpiece.

She was  obsessed with death--her own --and had purchased a nice grave site  in a cemetery she could see from an upper floor window of her grand house.


"My life is over." She told me several times--and obviously believed it though she was in good health and, as I said, was about my age--and I personally never believed MY life was over--and in fact I have lived several lives since then!


But she had definitely decided that she, mournful soul, WAS the woman in black.

...

43. Another Winter

I got to remembering another winter I had spent at Il Poggio-- and this was the winter there was a frost in these Tuscan hills that sadly killed groves of old olive trees.

It was new year's eve but I had gone to bed early as was my habit in those days.


The bed and breakfast hotel rooms were full of paying guests so Elisabetta had moved me into the drying room of the ceramica. That evening she was firing some pieces in her big walk-in gas kiln.


Of course there was a new year celebration party in the main dining room, but I planned to sleep through.


A little after midnight some tipsy part-goers erupted into the room where I was sleeping to wish me a happy new year. I had made my bed up very comfortably near the ceiling on top of some wide drying shelves.

The guests had expected to find me me freezing in some dank cellar and instead found me in the snuggest, warmest situation in the whole medieval stone place.

...

42. Winter Quarters

During this visit, I spent the winter months at Il Poggio enjoying the friendly people, the healthy outdoor work, the excellent food and a warm little private room across a tiny lane paved in broken pottery from the main buildings.

Pete had restored this little room for his own use before he moved to Switzerland with Dora and he had built in some unusual and creative touches of his own.

He had set some colored wine bottles into one of the the stone walls which provided some beautiful colored lighting when the sun shone through them and he had cantilevered some flat stones into an opposite wall to provide a few steps up to the nest-like sleeping loft he had built.

He had also made a large central fireplace which was very welcome because the winter nights were cold--though it was very seldom cold enough for a frost in this part of sunny Tuscany.  

This little stone living-room was adjacent to other simple rooms used for storage and other maintenance work and the whole were covered with the heavy antique thick pink clay tiles I have described before. 

Was this not a perfectly snug place for an artistic, romantic sort of pilgrim with poetry in his soul like me to winter in?

...

41. Talking Pilgrimage

When the week-end yoga session arrived, I was there and ready to learn and talk.

I had learned a little about hatha yoga in Honolulu some years before and was practicing a few of Yogananda Paramahamsa's yoga ideas during my pilgrimage--in fact, what little I knew of pilgrimage was influenced by the sanyasin ideas of the yogis I had read about--so I guess I was OK for the evening talk.

The Italians were very interested in the presentation of the two German yoga teachers and we all practiced asanas and breathing techniques all afternoon and most of the evening. We ate a nicely prepared vegetarian dinner and then,after a question-and-answer period by the Germans, I was asked to talk


Which I did.


My voice is naturally sort of soft and soothing so most of the listeners--who were tired out from the day's activities--seemed to me to kind of drift away into revery--or maybe dreamland--but I spun my yarns anyway for about half an hour and then we all went off to the beds provided and I, at least, slept very soundly.


The next morning Wolfgang met me in the hallway and congratulated me on a very interesting talk. I said that it seemed to me that most of the participants simply went to sleep, but he assured me that that was not the case--that they enjoyed my stories very much.


Then he handed me a can full of money. "We are taking up a collection." he said. 


"Oh?" I said, "How much should I put in?"


"As much as you want!" he laughed, "It's for you!"


That little can-full of money--Deutschmarks, Lire, French and Swiss franks-- carried me through Turkey, to Holy Mountain in Greece and back to Germany months later!

...

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