Describe the path to a favorite place of yours to walk in 2012. What’s
meaningful about the place or the journey?
The path I will share with you lead to my most heart moving view of 2012. They are like bookends: I walked it in early January, 2012 and I walked it in December 2012. In the months in between I held its memory close and dear.
Some background: I am deeply passionate about women writers, poets and artists in history. I am especially fond of women who were firsts or who changed things or who were eccentric and loved, sometimes beyond belief.
I can’t remember when exactly I discovered Ina Coolbrith, but it was
profound love at first read. She has been dead for many years, after all, so I
haven’t ever met her in person, but I have walked some of her paths. The most
stirring view comes from a tiny slice of a park in San Francisco’s Nob Hill.
In January 2012 when my children and a couple friends of mine were visiting the bay area, it was my most important goal: to be at Ina Coolbrith park at sunset. When I made that goal I didn’t realize the park faces the East Bay so away from the actual sunset, but what I love seeing about this time of day is the light, anyway. The sun itself is cool, but the way it casts light is what gets my heart all stirred up.
My traveling companions somehow didn’t hear my repeated quest to “be at Ina
Coolbrith Park at sunset” so when we arrived and they plopped me out of the car
at Taylor and Vallejo, an almost inhuman crest of one of many hills in San
Francisco, I was so thrilled I let them leave to ostensibly find a parking
spot.
I walked contemplatively through the park. I sat with my notebook and wrote. When I got a call about fifteen minutes later from my daughter saying, “We got some pizza, we’re ready now!” it flicked a switch in me I didn’t know was there.
I was not budging from my perch and no one was going to make me. Chinese
food in the East Bay be damned, this was a place honoring my beloved and I
would not leave until after sunset!
I wrote about it in early January, if you would like to “hear” more and read the pictures.
Just last weekend I returned, this time alone with my notebook in a gentle rain. It was forty degrees. I was more than a little chilled as I sat on the same bench and wrote in my notebook. This time I arrived on foot, managing the ridiculously steep path one slippery step at a time.
I would’ve written in the rain if it was a monsoon. Again, no one could get me to budge from this spot of my beloved. Not Jack Frost, not rain, not dogwalkers or thoughts of “Hurry to make it in time for the concert at Grace Cathedral!”
I moved at my time and I picked some lavender on the way out, so I could
continue to be accompanied by my dear friend, Ina, throughout the day.
It is a most lovely, most transformational path I can’t stop talking about
with both dear ones of mine and complete strangers, especially those who live
in the neighborhood and have no idea who Ina Coolbrith was: the first poet
Laureate of California – in the Country, actually. The first anglo child to
arrive in the state of California (in a covered wagon!). She attended the first
schoolhouse in Los Angeles and was friends with the likes of a young Mark Twain
and Bret Harte. Her influence on a young Jack London was so great, that he wrote
of her praise of him as a child and told how it impacted him even years later
when he was a successful writer. The dancer Isadora Duncan knew her, too, and
she was great friends with another beloved woman writer of her day, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman. Together they did
a lot of work on behalf of women in the early
twentieth century.
I love this path so much that I completely lost track of time and have written many more words than I expected to write.
That’s how it is with especially wondrous paths. You just don’t want to stop walking or writing them, bringing those footsteps and views to life again.
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