Cure-Ations from the Far Away

Off the Grid Books and Memories from my Cabin. Loving Georgia O'Keefe.

Stephen, my sister, Valerie, and I went north to the “family cabin.” Have no illusion about it. It is partly loved because it is a wreck of a thing. Made from recycled bits of Trinity County more than 50 years ago by a man who had no business building anything but did so anyway.  My grandfather lost part of his brain and most of his back at Delco Electronics in Indiana while working on something high up. He got electrocuted and fell.

We love the cabin because it is “far away.” Off the grid, though, we always wonder how to get internet or a phone line. We don’t pursue it because the few times we get there don’t warrant it. So we go into the quiet with our books and rituals and take time out. 

This time, we did call on Jonas, someone new to us, who brought Michael and cleared the downed tree that fell in the winter storms next to the back door. They loaded the old pile of boards and rotted firewood from the front of the cabin. At 68 and 74, Stephen and I don’t have gum-shun to do more than the raking we did the first morning we arrived.

My sister made it all the way through The Art of Ensoulment in two days. Unbelievable. I think of it as dense material. Ha! She says she is ready for the Fall class and that the book is easy to read and well-written. This is great news. Last year she took early retirement after being a VP/manager of accounting for several companies. She’s a tabular thinker. Love to see things in tables and promised to show me how to make a proper spreadsheet and how to sort things. I look forward to it. 

Stephen read two books- Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke and Sun House by David James Duncan, an epic comedy about love, spirit, and the quest for transcendence in an anything-but-transcendent America, from the author of the perennial cult bestsellers The River Why. He recommends both. Valerie moved on to Little Weirds, a hilarious memoir by comedienne Jenny Slate.

I went to sleep reading Loren Eisley’s Immense Journey and each morning immersed myself in Georgia O’Keefe Art and Letters with Jack Cowart and Juan Hamilton. Letters were selected and edited by Sarah Greenough.

I love things written in the first person. Direct personal experience feels like being in a room with a person, seeing the way they see and sense the world. I think I love Georgia O’Keefe’s letters the same way I love May Sarton’s or Thomas Merton's journals. It doesn’t matter that they are writers, and she would call herself the opposite. She didn’t care to think about punctuation marks or to worry too much about the order of words. It’s reassuring. As a dancer, I’ve always struggled with getting words right. Unlike O’Keefe, I feel a need to get things down in writing. While I enjoy the wordplay required, it was a little embarrassing to face the endless edits that were needed in Art of Ensoulment. That process went on and on.

When the O’Keefe book was recommended by another Substack author, I immediately ordered a used copy. I was surprised when it came as a 3-pound art book from the National Gallery. Painting is a new avocation, though I have none of the talent or training needed to be any good. I wish I’d learned to draw, at least. So similar to dance. What people take away from my art is my love for it. I love entering, playing, learning, seeing, not seeing, squirming around, and struggling to understand what I am doing. I love it when a gestural abstraction turns into something fun to look at. I oscillate between styles willy-nilly. I always enjoy slowing down and rendering the face of someone I love. I must continue to paint icons somehow. 

I thank Georgia O’Keefe for her ease with letters and for not caring how it comes out. A good reminder after publishing a book.

She called her Abiqui, New Mexico home “The Far-Away” and lived there into her 90’s.

The more far out I get, the more I love “The Far Away.”

Put a picture or sentence about where your Far Away is in the comments, if you like.

Love Cynthia

Quotes I kept from Georgia O’Keefe Arts and Letters “Her genius was her oneness with herself”- Juan Hamilton

Politzer Columbia SC 11 Oct 1915

went for a walk with about eight of the girls––it was supposed to be a run––and they were all very much astonished that none of them could keep up with me––––I can run a jog trot almost as easily as I can walk––and most girls can’t you know. To Anita

Anita- what is Art anyway? When I think of how hopelessly unable I am to answer that question I cannot help feeling like a farce—I won’t be able to keep at it long Anita—or I’ll lose what little self respect I have —unless I can in some way solve the problem a little—give myself some little answer to it—What are we trying to do—what is the excuse for it all—If you could sit down and do exactly what you wanted right now for a year—what in the dickens would you do–––

It is our theory of life that stunts us–––Most of us are not even respectable warts on the face of the earth—Anita I’m feeling fine and feel as if I’m just having time to get my breath and stand still and look at the world—It is great sport and I am really enjoying it.

The sky is just dripping today and it seems I have never seen or felt anything more perfectly quiet.

Dec 13 1915

Dear Anita—did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side of the wall wouldn’t be big enough to say it and then sit down on the floor and try to get it on a sheet of charcoal paper–––and when you had put it down look at it and try to put into what you have been trying to say with just marks–––and then––––wonder what it all is anyway–––

Jan 1916

___something––––that I don’t want to hurry seems to be growing in my brain–––heart–––all of me–––whatever it is that makes me –––I don’t know Anita–––I can’t explain it even to myself but Im terribly afraid the bubble will break–––and all the time feel so ridiculously secure it makes me laugh

I was made to work hard–––and I’m not working half hard enough–––Nobody here has energy like I have–––no one else can keep up

Texas June 1917, To Paul Strand

I want––––just to reach put my hand to you and let you hold it––Can you understand that–––its different from telling you in words what they say to me–––in a way it is much more real–––maybe that’s why I want to touch people so often–––Its only another way of talking 

The little ones are merely songs and the man I have come to know is singing.

Page 196 The summer had brought me to a state of mind where I felt as grateful for my largest hurts as I did for my largest happiness–––in spite of all my tearing about many things that had been accumulating inside of me for years were arranging themselves–––and rearranging themselves––

“Man thinks about life–––Life thinks in woman” A Remembered Life by Dorothy Brett

P 217 My center does not come from my mind–––it feels in me like a plot of warm moist well-tilled earth with the sun shining hot on it–––nothing with a spark of possibility of growth seems seeded at the moment.

If the past year or two or three has taught me anything its that that plot of earth myst be tended with absurd c

are–––By myself first–––and if by someone else it must be with absolute trust––their thinking carefully and knowing what they do–––It seems it would be very difficult for me to live if it were wrecked again just now 

(after Rockefeller? radio City Bathroom mural?) 1952 Abiqui

I’ve had a priest–Catholic–visiting me for a week–it was very pleasant but when he is gone I realize how uncatholic–in his sense–my soul is–as I read a little book he left me– “the Cloud of Unknowing” by an unknown monk of the 14th century– I am startled to realize my lack for the need of the comfort of the Church– 

When I stand alone with the earth and sky a feeling of something in me going off in every direction into the unknown of infinity means more to me than anything any organized religion gives me. 

The church, to me, seems to assume a fear of death– and after–and I think I have no fear