Heart's Destiny: How a Painting Changed My Life

In 1983 I was the sales director of a large, rather commercial gallery at Union Square in San Francisco. We sold lots of slick limited-edition serigraphs by famous artists. Every evening when I got off work, I’d walk by the Academy of Art College. I enjoyed looking in the windows, which displayed the work of the students. Often the work was a little raw and unfinished. It was usually on canvas, and I loved looking at the surfaces of the paintings, which revealed, as they say, “the hand of the artist.” There were visible brushstrokes and little mounds of dried paint. So unlike the perfect, museum-mounted products under glass that I sold all day.

One day a large grayish canvas depicting some kind of canine creatures made me stop. What were these? Dogs? Although there was some blue pigment here and there, the overall impression was muddy gray. The perspective was odd. One of the dogs had its rear in the air. One of my mother's terms popped into my mind. Engagingly ugly. Something about this painting held my attention. Every day I found myself stopping and looking at this canvas. The head of the dog with its rear in the air disappeared into... what? A kind of gray rectangle, which suggested a subterranean passage. Were these prairie dogs?

Then one day the painting disappeared from the window. Oh well, I thought, it was odd while it lasted. For the next few days I found myself walking on the opposite side of the street from the art college. I was trying to avoid the window, now devoid of the gray dogs. Despite myself, I would look longingly across the street, expecting the dog painting to come back. A cable car, crammed with tourists, ground its way up Powell Street, its bell ringing in my ears. That celebratory sound always lifted my spirits, but today I was sad. I trudged up Powell, feeling foolish for being sad and nostalgic over a painting I hadn't even seen up close. My common sense said...There will be other, better paintings...

I nevertheless found myself calling the college gallery one afternoon. What had happened to the large gray painting of canines? I inquired.

“Ohhh!” an enthusiastic female voice responded, “You’re talking about Cindy’s ‘Blue Wolves.'"

Blue? Wolves?

“So what happened? Did somebody buy the gray dogs? I mean...the blue wolves?"

“Oh no, it was part of our B.F.A. exhibition, which came down last week, and Cindy took it home with her. Why don’t I give you her phone number?”

“Sure.”

Well, that was easy.

And so I purchased my first original work of art. I went to Cindy’s apartment in Bernal Heights and paid her the asking price of $300--even in those days that was pretty reasonable, but hefty enough to carry a certain significance for both of us. Even Cindy's art professor husband regarded this as a significant transaction. He helped me strap the six-foot canvas to the top of a friend’s Datsun and we drove it across town, where I would hang it in my tiny efficiency apartment overlooking the financial district. It gave my space what the decorators call “scale.” My apartment grew visually. What had been a twenty-by-fifteen-foot rectangle dominated by a view of the apartment building across the street, became a twenty-by-fifteen-foot space commanded by an expanse of textured canvas. Thanks to the abundant natural light provided by the windows, the blue surrounding the wolves jumped out from the shadows and gave the entire room a dreamy, soft-tinted, blue aspect. What I didn’t know was that this little purchase was already beginning to give my life a kind of “scale.”

I didn’t know that, even as my friend and I gingerly transported “Blue Wolves” up and down the hills of the San Francisco neighborhoods between Cindy’s home and mine, my administrative assistant at the gallery was looking dreamily into the eyes of her boyfriend and deciding to travel to Europe with him. The next morning she resigned from her job. On an impulse I called the young artist Cindy and asked her if she would like a part-time job. She already had a job but suggested her friend Leslie, a graduate student. Leslie took the job and was great. Leslie introduced me to her friend Bennie.

“You’ll like him,” she said. “He eats that offbeat Southern food, just like you do."

Bennie visited me in my efficiency apartment, and we sat under the painting "Blue Wolves." I looked into Bennie’s blue eyes. I was falling in love. He liked my poetry and he liked my black-eyed peas. Ours was a karmic connection set in motion by our Southern ancestors. Like a big pot of turnip greens that had been simmering for generations in some invisible, cosmic kitchen. It was time to eat. Bennie looked into my eyes and said he saw “the wolf." He too was falling in love. Together we watched the sunset reflected in the windows of the apartment building across the street.

I started going to punk clubs with names like The Sound of Music to hear Bennie’s band play. Bennie went to Macy’s to buy some ties. He got a job in a competing gallery. He too had a knack for selling art and became the sales director of his gallery. We saved our sales commissions. We opened our own gallery on Union Street, an elegant shopping district sandwiched between Pacific Heights and the Marina. It was high-rent but not staggering-rent as was Union Square. We discovered there was a market for paintings that revealed “the hand of the artist." We married...Ten months later our daughter was born...

27 months after that we had a son...


And so on...

...We now sell paintings in New Mexico. Through the years our customers have shared their own stories with us, stories of how the paintings they've bought have altered the scale of their lives, changing them in surprising ways. What's more, I took up painting several years ago. My latest painting, "Heart's Destiny," at the top of this post, is my painted acknowledgment of the way our destinies seem to be altered for the better when we listen to the urgings of our heart. And "Blue Wolves"? It still hangs in a place of honor in our home. People visit us and sometimes they comment on the painting.



“Hey, those gray coyotes are cool,” they say.

A Higher Flower Power

I wrote this almost seven years ago. Don't know about you, but sometimes I learn something by reading old words I'd almost forgotten I wrote. It's like recovering a little piece of self I'd almost lost:

Spring, 2001

Hey, this meditation thing works!

I mean I’m getting flowers once a week from a husband who hasn’t given me flowers in fifteen years of marriage. Oh, there were the two times I gave birth. But even the velvety red blossoms of long-stemmed roses pale in the aftermath of that kind of excruciation. I’ve always longed for posies outside of a hospital room, and on an ordinary day, a day on which my cervix hasn’t just taken a quantum leap in the possibilities of expansion. A surprise bunch of daffodils arriving at my desk on, say, a Tuesday afternoon in late September, would be heartening. Maybe, on a lackluster winter morning, a single iris appearing atop the breakfast bar, along with a double espresso. Such flowery gestures didn’t happen once in fifteen years. Not so much as one lousy carnation. Not even on my birthday. That is, not until a few months ago, when I began a meditation practice.

No, I haven’t been praying to the Powers-That-Be for bouquets of hot pink dendrobium, purple snapdragons, morning-glories, and birds-of-paradise. It’s the peace of mind I’ve been after. I’ve gotten a measure of that, and, at this point, I’d say the blossoms are more of a perk. You see, last fall I climbed unscathed out of a totaled Buick. I did have a touch of what they call “cervical strain,” and while waiting for the emergency room physician to prescribe muscle relaxers, I learned my blood pressure was topping off in the red zone. Like an overinflated truck tire, I was on the verge of blowing. They call high blood pressure the Silent Killer, and although I know that sooner or later my own killer will arrive, whether silently, like a cat burglar, or preceded by a fanfare and drum roll, I’m in no hurry whatsoever to meet him.

And I remembered reading a book about those Tibetan monks who, by simply retreating into the vast expanses of Oneness, can modulate their vital signs with the finesse of John Coltrane on saxophone. Such things have been measured scientifically by Harvard medical professors, who huffed and puffed their way up a steep Himalayan trail, hauling stethoscopes, spygnomanometers, and rectal thermometers. The monks actually allowed themselves to be hooked up to such instruments before, during, and after their taking that quiet, interior leap into Oneness known as deep meditation. What the docs learned is that when it comes to such internal variables as blood pressure, body temperature, and pulse rate, those Himalayan monks have got their chops down. They are to diastolic readings what Sarah Vaughan was to vocal chords.

What’s their secret? A kind of temporary amnesia when it comes to “the smalls.” Not only do they not “sweat the smalls,” they don’t allow them to enter their mind at all. At least not during the meditative state. And just like the pop psych book says, when it comes to thoughts, they’re all “smalls.”

SO at 7 a.m. I’ve been getting the kids off to school, then climbing our little spiral staircase to the landing. There’s a window facing east up there and that’s where I sit, not in any lotus position, but simply in a chair, my palms opened upwards, in the direction of the smoke detector and the heavens beyond. I start by clearing my mind with om chanting. The cool thing is this often sets the metal stair rail to vibrating. Sometimes it sounds like a pipe organ, sometimes like a small set of wind chimes set tinkling by a soft afternoon breeze. All I know is that, from time to time, my mind does empty, in tiny but deep lapses. For a moment I forget that my husband, who prides himself on his unerring sense of direction, wouldn’t know his way into a florist’s shop if my life depended on it. I forget about florists altogether. I release any expectations I have of showy blossoms appearing out of the blue. There’s just the blue and whatever it brings. My opened palms tingle. The stair rail rumbles a deep, satisfying chord. Peace. Emptiness. Good vibes.

Later, when I’ve had my fill of this calm emptying, this Love Supreme, I like to hold my tingling palms out in the direction of others I care about. My spouse, for example. The palms are little energy centers, and after mine have soaked up all those good vibes, I turn them outwards, towards the garage, where Bennie is busy packaging art we sold at our gallery, paintings and pots which will be picked up by UPS. I turn my palms in the direction of my husband's hands, which so deftly wield a tape gun and bubble wrap. I send my love in wave after wave to my husband. I send my gratitude for his finesse with packing tape and corrugated cardboard, his ability to send five oversize terracotta pots packing, safely, over three thousand miles of land and sea, to a customer in Thailand. I gather all my love and likewise send it packing, in a sure trajectory, across the roof, across the tops of the junipers, over the winding stone path and into the garage, towards the wrapping table, where my husband wraps Kraft paper around a work on canvas. I aim for his heart.

Later, I am in the kitchen, brewing espresso. The back door opens, my husband walks in, takes me in his arms, and, out of the blue, kisses me. The lips too are energy centers. A Love Supreme. Ask Coltrane.

Post Script, 2008: A couple of days after that out-of-the-blue kiss, Bennie brought me the first of countless bouquets. And I am happy to report they are still arriving. Go ahead. Give meditation a whirl. How could it hurt?

22 years ago today...

...a 20-something, pushing-30 couple stood in front of a magistrate judge in San Francisco's City Hall. They were there to pledge their loyalty to one another "until death us do part."

They had opened a gallery less than three months ago. The start-up costs had sucked their savings dry and so they had no money for wedding bands. In one month, they would discover they were pregnant with no maternity benefits. He would take a job selling Volkswagens. She would work the gallery with the most debilitating morning sickness in the history of the world. One day soon, overcome by nausea and fatigue, she would retreat to the gallery's back room to lie on the sofa. Hearing footsteps in the gallery, she would rush back in, only to discover the phone had been stolen. She would discover she had high blood pressure, that her pregnancy was considered "complicated" and so she would have to close the gallery three times a week, squeeze her colossal girth behind the wheel of their Ford Courier, and negotiate the hills between Convergence Gallery and UC Med Center. The doctor would inevitably be late for their appointments. When he would appear, his would be the same stale joke: "No wonder you have high blood pressure--you closed your store to come see me, you're thinking about the sale you're missing out on, and here I am, always running late." San would feel like she was trapped in a never-ending cycle of financial stress, nausea, malaise, and abject terror.

That day 22 years ago, had San seen what lay in her immediate future, there's a very good chance she would have run to the nearest taxi, grabbed a ride to the airport, and flown to any destination that might be readily available. Some place safe like Poughkeepsie. Or Antarctica. Or Saturn.

San, however, was not clairvoyant. Business was picking up a bit. She, with the untested optimism of the very young, assumed the real difficulties were a thing of the past. So she married Bennie. Anyone with any "common sense" would have told this young couple they were behaving in a perfectly irrational manner, that they were headed towards disaster. But no one with common sense was around that day, so they headed, blindfolded, right into the disaster of their life together.


Things turned out remarkably well. Flannery was born 10 months later. The labor went so swiftly and uneventfully, San didn't even make it to the delivery room. The doctor who'd declared her pregnancy "complicated" now declared San a woman who was "born to breed." Apparently, this was the case. Oakley arrived 26 months later. He actually arrived before the doctor arrived. Bennie had a vasectomy. Then he had another one, since the first one didn't take. Seems that San wasn't the only one in this couple who was "born to breed."

Bennie and San had not planned on being parents, and they were simply amazed to discover they LOVED being parents. Flannery and Oakley were these huge gifts from out of the blue--unasked for, unanticipated, and absolutely awe-inspiring.

The arrival of my children taught me the biggest lesson that my life has ever offered up: You don't always know what you want. Life, or The Universe, or God--whatever term you use for whatever's beyond your power--often has much bigger things in mind for your life. Things that are much more profoundly satisfying than any goals you might have imagined in your very limited perspective. 22 years ago, I never would have been able to conjure such incredible young adults as the two I just shared Christmas with.



I would never have fathomed that, 22 years later, I would be living in the stunning high desert landscape of New Mexico in a cozy little home looking out on the mountains, that I would actually be making paintings myself and sending them to wonderful homes around the country.

Life is an unfolding surprise, a feast.


And I am filled with gratitude that I am sharing it with the love of my life.

Happy Anniversary, love!