You Have One Life!
Live Now In Technicolor!

Olá, meus caros amigos! // Hi dear friends! Ufa! Há muito tempo. // Whew! It has been a long time. Eu sei! E sinto-me bastante mal por isso. // I know! And I feel pretty badly about it. But right out of the starting gate, I need to say one thing. I, just like you, have only one life. “WOW! REALLY?” Eu sei... that’s the reaction I’d expect. It’s no big revelation, now is it?

The big revelation? Well, I finally realized that my whole life has been filmed in TECHNICOLOR™. That’s right, I have had my own starring role in a Doris Day-esque 1950s classic movie. And, yes! With all those amazing Edith Head costume changes and the glorious Richard Riedel sets. But the bigger revelation? The reels are still rolling, baby.

That is just one more important lesson that I am learning here in the school of Santa Luzia. Who needs “hard knocks”¹. My true tutor? The feature film of daily life continuously rolling outside our front door.

So first, let me catch you up on our last six months. But I will just hit the highlights. And not touch the marginalia that’s sometimes writ in agita, drama or tension. Then we can segue to today’s post. And segue we will because the updates definitely hit on today’s theme. How does that sound to you; I hope it is okay?

Just One Life: An Update

Family and Friends

At the end of July we had 11 of my (Will’s) family visit us here in Santa Luzia. They were with us for a week. And what fun we had together! João of Maria’s Tuk Tuk lead us on a fantastic, incredibly informative tour of the salt pans in and around Santa Luzia and Tavira. Arturo of SupAdventours took us exploring for a day on the Ria Formosa with stand-up paddle-boards (younger folk) and kayaks (older folk). Guillaume of Tchin-Cheese in Tavira hosted us for an eye-opening soirée replete with amazing, little-known Portuguese wines and incredible French cheeses.

In addition, there was plenty of time spent doing absolutely nothing on one of Portugal’s most storied beaches, Praia do Barril, right here in Santa Luzia. Then also tooling around the countryside on our rented Abilio bikes. We ate well, made magic moments, laughed a lot, and argued a little. In other words, we were family.

In August we spent a week in Taormina, Sicily as guests of cherished, dear friends. We had great fun visiting the ancient city of Siracusa and scaling the volcanic hills of Mount Etna. At a terraced vineyard we tasted incredible wines that have been produced on Etna’s slopes for more than a 1000 years. But the absolute best moments were sitting for long hours around the dinner table while renewing these treasured and enduring friendships.

September was equally special. We flew back to our native New York City for two weeks. One of our dearest friends, King Lear of the Taxi, turned 70. We celebrated his birthday in grand style as well as fêted the incredible good news that his cancer was now in full remission. Every minute was a joyous blessing.

Big Milestones

In October we closed on the purchase of a petit (32m², or about, 340sf²) apartment in a lovely early-19th century building in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. It is near the Cimetiere Pere Lachaise, Le Marais and the Opéra Bastille. We spent just about two weeks in Paris exploring our new neighborhood and making delightful new friends from among our neighbors. I will share more on this in future posts.

December saw us back in New York City for the entire month. We wanted to spend the holidays with family and friends, of course. But we also had work to do. For one, tying up loose ends on Joseph’s dad’s estate (Blackie passed away in December 2021). But second, also readying our New York City apartment for sale.

December was emotionally fraught and physically draining. It was about closure and moving on. Never easy. The death of your last parent changes a family forever. Keeping family now becomes a personal rather than a parental responsibility. Lots of decisions, choices and unwanted emotions (e.g. anger, guilt and regret) weigh with and on you.

And then selling our home, which is always wrenching, is made more difficult when laden with finality. Our entire lives together, 33 years, have been spent in New York City. Letting go of our last physical connection to our beloved city, the memories it holds and the friends it still embraces has been so hard. It feels raw and open. It will likely remain a scab that we will scratch at for quite some time to come.

Life Transitions and The Transition

At some point, sometime during those prior months, we are high in the air (again!). We are between somewhere else and Santa Luzia. It is late in the day. The sun is just beginning to set on the other side of the plane. I glance out the window on our side. A thick band of sunset-light is refracted red within the clouds. It divides the arriving evening violet below from the still day blue above.

At this moment, we are at the inflection point between today and tomorrow, in both and in neither simultaneously. It appears, to me, the place and the time of magic. Caught in-between here and there (“algures entre aqui e ali” ). Now vulnerable to magic.

The death of a parent, the packing up of one home for another, a significant birthday, the welcoming of a new life into your life, a grave illness, etc. These and so many points in time have proven to be cracks in my world. Magic has then intruded into my life. Magic that is both wondrously beautiful and jarringly harsh.

The cracks that leak magic are far more ordinary, that is everyday, than I have ever imagined. Perhaps I am more attentive now than previously? Perhaps Santa Luzia is a better tutor than I have had before? No matter which and likely some combination of both. But I continue to discover lots of magic here.

For example, aging, which I have been thinking about a great deal lately. Is it one of those cracks that leak magic? Bare with me. No trite romanticism allowed here. It is not easy getting older and to be older. Especially to join the oldest old. But is there some wondrous beauty that conjoins with the obviously harsh realities?

Becoming Old: More of Life’s Magic?

Yes, things hurt, lots of things. Things that neither you nor I even knew existed, say twenty years earlier or even ten. But there’s more than aches and pains. Aren’t there?

There’s rusty memory. Creaking thoughts. Not that I didn’t carry these before but now my bucket is a bit fuller. Then, as well, the gumption, that get-up-and-go I held in spades once. Has it got up and gone? Somewhat more, yes.

But I find that the worst is that I have begun to disappear. Not for real. But I notice that I am less and less noticed. Or so I think I am. Perhaps I allow myself to be. But aging can seem the greatest of the Great Houdini’s disappearing acts. Not magic so much as a slight of life rather than of hand.

But here, in Portugal, aging does seem different. Yes, there are still aches, just like everywhere else. The slings and arrows are not less. Sure Portugal holds much magic, which I aspire to share in these posts. But, alas, the Fountain of Youth is not one of them. But the Great Houdini’s disappearing act is not as well. Here the elders stand out. Take charge. Garner admiration and respect. Deference is their just due. For example…

Former Glory, But Glory Nonetheless

Santa Luzia was a fishing village. It still is, although a pale shadow of its storied past. The residents, men at least, in their seventies and beyond went to sea for BIG tuna. They caught multiples each day. Most of these bluefin weighed more than 500 pounds (250 kilograms). The last was caught in 1972. Warm waters driven by climate change sent the tuna elsewhere. Overfishing did not help, of course. The great bluefin is now endangered. So is our whole planet. But that is another subject.

Some of the elderly gents of the village² still make their way to as cabanas each morning. These are the rugged but picturesque fishing huts on the edge of our village. I think it’s their sons and grandsons who now do the fishing. But these elder gents help load the boats at the start of the day. And help unload at the day’s end. In-between the start and the end they mend nets and traps as well as tidy up as cabanas. But they also do even more important work.

They pull chairs into a circle. Sure, they reminisce past exploits. Recounting their personal “big one” stories. But as far as I can tell from my discreet eavesdropping — the few words I catch — more is going on. More than the telling and re-telling of their tall-tales.

There’s a lot of “gossiping” but it’s not quite gossip. It is really sharing news. Who is doing what. Where the best prices are. Who has the best oranges, almonds, pears and apples this season. Who is sick and who needs some help. What a câmara (the city council) is doing, or, more likely, not doing. And so on.

Wisdom and Grace Like Water

When these elders sit down to dinner in the evening they share this news, these connections and all the insights. All flowing from the circle. Sons, daughters and grandchildren absorb it all. And tomorrow it will flow out to others. Then a torrent to more and more others. Wisdom. Like water.

I always stand a fair distance from the edge of this circle. I try not to be noticed or, at least, so obvious. But I am close enough to notice. At my distance I see and I feel something more. It’s some additive to the wisdom. There is more magic. This gathering has an aura, an energy. Call it whatever you like… chi, karma, èlan, chakra… I will call it Grace but it’s all the same. It’s simply magic.

The gathering of these gents generates Grace. This Grace is a potent lifeforce. It flows out from their circle into the world. It blesses all, magnifies goodness, amplifies kindnesses, raises up peace and fortifies justice… little by little it undoes our selfishness, society’s commercialism, and capitalism’s greediness. This Grace contends with our culture of destruction³. Without these elder gents who knows where we’d be. Without we old folk doing our jobs of just being old folk where would the world be?

These elders are what the social media networks are supposed to be. The so-called media-moguls should but could never-ever replicate this magic. Mark Zuckerberg salivates at the thought. How to virtualize these old folk? But the minds of these truly wise elders have no room for monetizing ads. So Zuckerberg shrugs and grumbles, “why bother”.

So awesome beauty (that wisdom and grace) and harsh realty (those aches and death’s nearness), both together, forever conjoined. Magic! Leaking through! It is happening everywhere, all the time.

The Big House

This next vignette is incredibly difficult to get right. I’ll try. Joseph and I are on our daily walk. It is September 2020. We meet a young ram wandering alone in the road. He is injured. Limping, bloodied on his back left leg and bellowing loudly. His flock is on the other side of a tall chain-link fence. He is frantically trying to rejoin them.

We had often seen a shepherd moving this flock from field to field. But we have no idea where he lives. I stop a passing car. “Big house.” “Ruin.” That’s the response I receive. Along with a pointing finger. But I knew where the driver meant. Many mornings I had run past that “big house”. And I guess it was the sheepdogs that had always chased after me.

The young shepherd is making his lunch when we arrive at the “big house”. We trade back and forth in his limited English and my (then) dreadful Portuguese. I show a photograph of the injured little ram. And I point in the direction of his flock. He thanks me — obrigado — then the shepherd himself limps, like the ram, to his motor scooter and takes off towards the flock.

Life Can Be So Hard

I have encountered the shepherd since. But for whatever reasons I always forget to trade personal introductions. So I do not know his name. We have had stilted conversations, nonetheless. The “big house” was abandoned, that is available. So he had moved in. The owner moved him out, too dangerous. He was offered a spot in a field nearby, for him, his dogs and his sheep.

His field might just be the most spectacular real estate in all of Santa Luzia. It sits at the top of a steep hill, facing southeast. Orange trees cascade down the hill. So your vista: a sea of verdant green, sweet perfume and punches of brilliant orange. Then the wide expanse of ocean onto Africa. Spectacular!

Well, yes, the location is indeed spectacular. The accommodations not so much. Over two plus years this shepherd has built a rustic polyvinyl covered lean-to. Gradually adding water and (absconded, is that a good word?) electric. Then came the wreck of a camper van. It is a roughshod existence. The barest of bare necessities. Even the famously mild Portuguese winters are still damp and chilly.

“Danger, Will Robinson, Danger”

Now comes the dangerous bit. Avoiding both romanticism and miserabilism. Suspending any judgement involving either noble shepherd or pathetic soul. This guy’s life is no doubt hard. But he has made a choice. How much of a choice, given limited options? I do not know.

Still he told me his life is good. And he made this home himself, with obvious pride. And he likes to sit “there”. He pointed to a rickety wooden chair facing the ocean. “The sun in the morning changes the color of everything.” The colors move over the sky to the water to as laranjeiras (the orange trees) and then onto the fleece of the sheep. He does not say but I think it: life in TECHNICOLOR™. He says, “It is beautiful”, that is, belo. But admitting, he says simultaneously, “it is difficult, a struggle,” that is, uma luta, “everyday”. Beauty and struggle. Like our elder gents in their circle.

Here at the top of this hill. In this primitive lean-to. Strong smells meld: wet wool and excrement, orange blossoms and salty breezes. He is alone, not in a human circle. His life is within another circle. A communion of elements, sheep, dogs, trees, the ocean, moon, stars and sun. I believe the same Grace rises up from this lean-to as it does from the elder gents’ circle. It is the same potent lifeforce. It changes us and our world for the better.

Life Without The TECHNICOLOR™

Okay. Are you now thinking to yourselves, “Huh? What is he trying to say?” I guess what I am trying to say is: both of these encounters have taught me the same lesson. While watching and eavesdropping on the circle as well as while standing beside the lean-to, I find beauty and harshness.⁴ And I understand that they are indistinguishable. This indistinguishability is the potent lifeforce that can save me from myself (us from ourselves).

The consumerist and capitalistic culture, which we create and then contort ourselves to, wants us to split beauty from its attendant harshness. Our culture would like us to believe that life’s harshness — its aches, pains, every sort of unpleasantness — can be solved. With the right car. Using that certain skin treatment. With the most up-to-date fashion. Following the correct diet. Life’s harshness can be purchased or medicated away.

It cannot be. To be alive, I observe, is to endure beauty along with harshness and struggle. Once endurance was the greatest of human virtues. For the ancient Greeks⁵ it was “ῠ̔πομονή” or “hupomonḗ”. That is, the ability to live harmoniously with beauty and harsh reality. Endurance contained no passivity, however. It required standing against that which savaged beauty or severed the connection between beauty and harshness. Tyranny and oppression were not tolerated. Nor injustice, nor inequity. Nor want, nor suffering.

We have degraded the virtue of endurance. It is to be avoided, if one can so afford. In the process we have falsified beauty. Beauty is no longer the appreciation of creation and the inextricable subsequent act of creating. Mere acquisition and hoarding substitute unsatisfyingly for creation. Simultaneously we have also sought to bury harshness six-feet under this same selfish consumerism. Often, if not always, we misname this burial “progress”.

The Lightness of Life

So the take-away from my tutors in the circle and by the polyvinyl lean-to? Live with ease, with a lightness not unlike “fluff” on a mature dandelion. It carries new life aloft on the barest breeze. Simultaneously it marks the death with its past.

Hereinafter, I preach to myself. Listen if you wish but understand that this sermon is self-directed.

Live with ease. Live with lightness. Take what I need, no more.⁶ Share what I have. Be generous to a fault. Be kind to the point of annoyance, if that’s even possible. Live gently on the Earth causing as little damage as possible. Show respect and empathy to all other humans and every other being, that is, recognize my own face in theirs. Be grateful to and praise the plants and the beings who are my help and my sustantenance.

To live with ease is not easy. To live with lightness is to bear a heavy burden. Counterintuitive indeed. But that bit of fluff floating effortlessly on the wisp of a breeze carries life and beauty elsewhere, dispersing it broadly if haplessly. To carry these gifts — life and beauty — is awesome responsibility.

Live with ease. Live with lightness. Stand with the poor and the oppressed. Stand-up to the tyrant and the demagogue. Do not acquiesce to injustice, intolerance, and hate in all their manifestations. Share my food with the hungry, my home with homeless, my clothes with the naked, my strength with the sick, my time with the lonely. Do what I can now. But as time passes, be open and willing to allow the burden of lightness to fatten and widen.

Accept with joy and gratitude the harsh beauty that is my life.

Até à próxima, meus caros amigos!

_____

¹In American English we have a saying, “I attended the school of hard knocks”. It means that I learned whatever I know on my own and the hard way, that is, through making mistakes or being pushed around or in spite of whatever difficulties. It is an education in counter-distinction to a formal education or an apprenticeship. It’s emblematic of American rugged individualism, which personally, I do not prize myself.

²I have also noticed here a small group of elder-women who meet everyday for a long walk together. They too chit-chat and share stories of their grand exploits and now those of their children and grandchildren. As well, they catch up on the local comings and goings. At the end of their walk there is a table and a bica (an expresso) at O Xalavar. It’s time to leisurely enjoy the last of the day’s warm sunshine. Among and from these elder-women a font of wisdom and grace also bubbles up and flows out.

³An idea developed in the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, especially in her most recent book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. We can choose to step outside of the everyday commerce of our limited human perspective. And we can choose to ignore the price tags indiscriminately attached to people, other beings, relationships, etc. We can value all these differently, genuinely, justly. It it is a beautiful book with an enlightening and transformative worldview.

⁴Oscar Wilde spoke of the same “harsh beauty”, calling it out, I think, in his novel, “The Portrait of Dorian Gray”. Dorothy Day, channeling Fyodor Dostoevsky, prophesied that “beauty will save the world”. These three persons sync together, understanding that beauty and struggle entwine as one. Understanding as well that cleaving them from one another destroys our souls. Ultimately we then destroy the world.

⁵As well as in the many religions influenced by Hellenism, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

⁶“Taking what I need” involves as well paring down what I already have to match my need. This obviously is more difficult. It is certainly easier for me to take less when I already have so much. Equally there is so much cognitive and spiritual dissonance in purchasing another home (in Paris) when we have one already (in Santa Luzia). We are earnestly trying to make the dissonance less and less, day by day.