So many people have helped me find my way through this website. If not one person ever reads it, the website has brought me closer to a lot of people, helped me to articulate my thoughts and cultivated new beginnings in my life.

I’d like to thank Maxina for designing the website. Sometimes she surely must have pulled her hair out with my revisions and all those pictures, but she always seemed to know what I was trying to express and used her technical and artistic skills to make these thoughts a reality. She has become a new friend.

A sure sense of support has been Kate, my writing teacher in Spain. Kate is who came before the website. She and the group of writers, The Write Thing, have nurtured my writing when I’ve passed through that lovely place at the side of the sea. Special thanks to Brenda, who has always had the “write” word about the “write” thing when she has made comments on what I have written… and has these same ‘write” words when she writes deeply and with such honesty herself. The only regret I have is that I haven’t met more often with them in that trailing old cortijo with the gorgeous azulejos… the blue wine bottles in the corner of the porch and class around the old wine cellar table when it’s cold out. Each writer has a story to tell… and I have learned much about commonality and difference… style. Our experiences togther have been far too short, but they empowered me to share what I’ve written and encouraged the will to create.

I’d also like to thank my friend, Danna. On bone rattling, teeth chattering days, she took pictures of me for the website. What kept us both warm was our laughter at such an icy task, but one reflective of the lovely nature of winter and also of the choices we make. She also provided pictures of the dervishes for the “The Fragrance of Laurel Section.” These watercolors reflect Danna’s love of creative movement and spiritual grace. I had no desire to take pictures in Istanbul when I traveled through there. Her drawings took me back to the tekke where the dervishes kissed the neck of their capes before laying them down… and then, the fragrance of laurel enveloped me and the whirling transported me into the Sema and the Sufi world of Rumi.

I have always been conflicted about travel pictures. Does one really experience new cultures through the lens of a camera? Or is it just better to understand what is seen with word pictures? Who wants to see someone else’s travel pictures? I didn’t take pictures for years. Then, XiaYun insisted on buying me a camera when she got her first job. I had a fit!!! Didn’t want a camera… scandalized by the money she spent!! But, I started using it and have found that it has lead to many memories. Not all of those memories have been happy ones… some have been a cautionary tale… but all are bookmarks of observation and change and opened my heart to the beauty of the world, its creations and, above all the honoring of the people we meet and receiving their regard, if allowed only in the instant, when the camera is pointed and the shutter clicks.

Taking pictures resulted in my going through family albums and a mountain of old slides. I spent hours scanning pictures at the drug store and drove Andrew crazy with a mountain of slides from the past that he scanned between stocking the shelves and waiting on customers. Some pictures in the site have made their way through a half dozen damp basements. They have been nomads… just as I. And, just like me, they have begun to denote a small history. They have aged and sometimes became grainy. The slide of the two little Uzbek girls, transformed itself into magenta. Others reflected the gray world of winter’s Uzbekistan just as it was before its own nationhood was a glimmer in anyone’s eye. A Russian father stands in front of the Aurora with his tiny son on a sled. There are faded holes in the picture. The world changed since they were taken and so have I. Those who loved me best in the world, all gone now, are memorialized in these pictures and, some who influenced my life appear not at all. What I have found is that memory only serves to enrich the present moment. The memory of each moment can only take one into an enriched present moment as it passes… and then, that memory fades away, too. We are transformed by this other moment pregnant with who we are becoming that resides between our joys at living them and our sorrows in their passing… but only if we allow that vision to see them just as simply as they are… one exquisitely fragile moment passing into another… a way we can become all of a piece… a recognition of how we can become whole.

That thought further developed into a thanks to my parents, Dorothy (Louise) and Ed…  and some realizations. Some of the pictures they took are sprinkled throughout the website. I’ve better understood the chaotic relationship that was their marriage by sifting through all of these pictures. I owe all of “Land of Dubious Borders” to them, except for the picture of me with the sheep. My Swiss friend, Helen, took that picture in China. When I saw it, all I could think was, “You can take the Romanian out of Romania, but you can’t take Romania out of the Romanian”…  and so I used that picture to acknowledge who I am… what was given to me… what is in the deepest part of me… that spiritual part…  that part that knows only solitude and an imprinted memory of isolation that comes down through the years from those who tended flocks of sheep on silent hillsides in the pitch black of night… dark humor… love of life… a sense of being so a part of nature… the sound of the flute… mamaliga… a glass of tsuica… and some dark national memories as well. From all of those old Romanians who went before, I inherited the understanding that it is not necessary to be seen… not necessary to be wanted… a sense that in nothingness and indefensibility lies a transcendence of joy and sorrow that allows us to live in what is found instead between the two.

Thank you to all of those who contributed.

Chapters

Garden of the Moonflowers, Leaving Things ~ Guo Ya Ru

You Will Live in the East ~ Backwards and Forwards ~  Sometime After the Beginning, Xu Beihong’s Magpies; Blank Space ~ Qi Bai Shi’s Leaf and Insects; Zhang Daqian’s Birds, www.chinaonlinemuseum.com. Photos ~ Xia Yun, Gail (Great picture of the “fei tian” and the desert sunset and tons and tons of laughter in that Western China place, Louise,  Mike the Moomin ( for all those “Lovely Dishes” pictures; Mike, you are just a mensch); Even Earlier Before ~ To  Helen for lending me the book China Road by Rob Gifford that got me to thinking about my own experiences living with the Hundred Old Names of China.

The Fragrance of Laurel, Salvation ~  Original Artwork, “Dervishes,” Danna. Original Artwork, “For Zoa” Brenda Ferguson (the vibrant, pink cyclamen that looks lke a “little soul ascending.”

Red Ribbon, Pine Tree ~ Jay, Ed, Louise

Love ~ Louise, He Jin (Little Baby He Jin) Gao Li, Guo Jian Qing

Finding Louise ~ Sondra, Ed

Catana the Gypsy ~ Winter Solstice, The Wind, Sycamore ~ Louise

Humility ~ Capucine, Axel, Ed, Louise

calm wide blue ~ change ~ Ed, Louise; a fish ~ Ed; Semana Santa ~ Guo Ya Ru; creation ~ Guo Ya Ru; Louise, Ed

Journal ~ Samsara ~ Bar’bra Carter; Mary Fitzhugh Parra (pictures of Hermione in the pool and with paella)

 

Photo Gallery

Lives ~ Louise, Ed, Xia Yun, Yin Hai Ning

Intimate ~ Gao Li, Guo Jian Qing, Guo Ya Ru, Louise, Juan and Isabel, LiuNa, Ariel

Paths ~ Gail, Louise, MaryAnn

Revealed ~ Xin Li Hua

A Land of Dubious Borders ~ Louise, Ed, Helen