Don't you want to fix that wabi sabi?

Ah, the magic of rhyme: true blue  Holly Hobby, hari-kiri. No, that last one is a little too grim, though it is Japanese, which is where we're going. How about mu shu? Oops, that's Chinese. Anyway, wabi sabi dances off the tongue like A tisket a tasket and it may be the best idea to come out of Japan since sushi.

Wabi sabi is sometimes presented as the opposite of feng shui. The Chinese tradition of placement is about arranging humanly created spaces so they  reflect the balance and harmony of the natural world and foster the easy flow of life energy. There is nothing in that mission statement, though, that mandates a search for perfection or control. A wilderness, with its only seeming riot of color, texture, line is a marvel of feng shui and completely at odds with human ideas of perfection and control.

As is wabi sabi, which is all about Buddhist nurtured ideas of impermanence, asymmetry, simplicity, imperfection. It's Japanese tea ceremony Hagi Ware pottery, cherished for its asymmetries, nicks, cracks  It's nature's fleeting, flowing disorder/order as captured in this haiku:

It falls, the peony-

   and upon each other lie

         petals, two or three

Wabi sabi is  the opposite of Faberge eggs, Rolex watches, English gardens, plastic surgery . It's about giving up control, letting go and living loose, which is also why this blog posting appears in both www.living loose.com and www.energyby design.net. Respect for graceful imperfections, asymmetries, natural materials is celebrated at both sites and the cyberboundary between the duo is another illusion. Disrespecting that illusory boundary is but one more testament to wabi sabi.

Loose is a nice word

 Loose is a wonderful but, like so many , a complicated word. Going back to the 12th century and with roots in the Scandinavian and Teutonic family of languages, the verb loose is centrally:To let loose, set free; to release (a person, an animal, or their limbs) from bonds or physical restraint. That's the thrust of Jo and Di when they talk about Living Loose.The phrase also importantly connotes undoing, untying, unfastening - all those uns, which yield a positive: being free, To live loose is the 180 degree opposite of living tight, being uptight, being buttoned up, being stressed, having a broomstick up your derriere, being clenched, worried, suffering, depressed.

Living loose has to do with flying like the creatures of the sky and flowing like creatures in water. Though righty/tighty-lefty/loosey does apply when you're tightening a screw or a lid, Jo and Di have no political or ideological connotations in mind when they suggest that LivingLoose is the way they would like to go. As we suggest in the title of this blog as well as in many individual entries, the operative synonym for LivingLoose is most likely play: Allee-allee-in-free on a balmy summer night when it will be ages before the street lights come on and you have to worry about your mom expecting you to come in; being on your bike all day and having enough coins in your pocket to pay for a cone, a drink and a bag of chips; waking up to 18 inches of snow, feeling your soul glisten like the sunlight on the crystals and just itching to try out the new sled... Like that, but updated and age appropriate.

Loose is also famously "loose women." There is a popular Brit show on the telly with that title, one more way of capitalizing on females who  may not be utterly and forever straitlaced, uptight, life denying and boarded up. "Loose" in relation to women's behavior came in at the end of the 15th century. Seems like after six hundred years or so we ought, collectively, to be a little further along in accepting that females have bodies, don't like to be buttoned up and penned in and sometimes like to, appropriately, play. But some males, in particular, have a hard time not acting stupid, as Jo accused her brother Frank and his buddies of doing about four and counting decades ago.

But no, joyous celebration of the sexuality of all of us is only part of the human goodness under the LivingLoosely  umbrella. A little more prominently evident under that umbrella is the contrast between the corseted females of back in the day and those who flow and jitterbug and slither (when they feel like slithering) in the course of living free and being playful. But always remember that LivingLoosely is gender neutral and those humans who characteristically possess X &Y chromosomes are, we know, just as able and just as desirous of LivingLoosely, as are their sisters, and they are certainly most welcome to be consumers of our utterly gender neutral garments.

We'd love to hear from others as to what LivingLoosely means for you.

How loose do the Winter Olympians live?

 I became a little unnerved the other night over all the measuring and judgment  imposed on the Winter Olympians up there in Vancouver. They absolutely volunteered for the job, in most cases I gather with the eagerness of a bird released to chase the sky. Watching the skating compulsories, I also forgot it wasn't all compulsory; there was free skate.

Moreover, I understand there is a zen to performing inside the box, and as we say in our "Story" it's hard to be able to play with the rules until you're comfortable abiding by them.

Even so, some of the commentators and the judging they reflected seemed fearsomely niggling. And my heart flew to Lindsey Jacobellis when we were told over and over and over again there would be no redemption for the athlete who lost a gold when she allegedly hot-dogged it at the finish in Torino four years ago and then, given the chance to redeem her sorry silver soul, went and fell in the Vancouver snowboard cross event.

Yes, it is about excellence, winning and chasing medals, but that endlessly repeated word redemption seems a mite heavy. Snowboard crossing Jacobellis was so crucified by the media that it must be hard to live loose inside her skin at the moment. As for the media, my late mother-in-law said of people in general; "They have to say something." They no doubt feel they do, especially, with the pressures of the 24-hour cable news cycle. But redemption seems a word people ought to be a little careful with.

I'm grateful for Shaun White and his freestyle colleagues. True,  he has his own half pipe rig in Utah where he practices until he wears his snowboard to a nub. But he also possesses that joyous skateboarder spirit, which, with his shoulder length red hair and his luminous beam, announces  he's having fun and is living as loose as a Winter Olympian is going to live while carting home a treasure of gold.

 A day in the park                 

   Frank got our bikes out of the garage and wiped them off with a rag. I took the PB&J sandwiches mom had made, got out two small bottles of Coke and took four cookies from the cookie jar in the shape of a fat nun in a habit. I put the same provisions in each paper bag and went quickly to where Frank was wiping the bikes to a gleam.

"Here." He took his  bag and said, " You better not go off with Nadine and Patty and leave me by myself like the last time."

"I'll be nice."

We were off to the corner of E. 168th and Grovewood where Nadine and brother Mike were waiting for us with Patty T.

Patty had a new racer and she thought she was hot stuff. Nadine and Mike's family didn't have much money and their bikes were ratty. Mine was a boy's bike someone had given us. I spray painted it yellow and had it for three years. Frank inherited it and totaled it within days. It was a pretty good bike and where I lived on summer days.

Nottingham was bumpy and full of traffic but we stayed on the sidewalk and crossed Euclid carefully. The opening into the park was like coming out of the hot asphalty city and into a secret garden. Sure there were cars on the two-lane road through the park, but that ribbon of pavement was pretty much lost in the green jungle of the big old trees hanging over the road and, fifty feet to the left, the trees green-shrouded the fast running and winding  Euclid Creek.

We parked our bikes (we didn't need to lock 'em) and ran over the dry, crumbly, light brown dirt bank that was all veiny with tree roots. You grabbed hold of a root and carefully led yourself down onto the shale that rimmed the fast-running creek. The creek was only about a foot deep but it ran hard and you had to be careful when you moved from step-stone to step-stone and worked your way to the other shale rim. You felt like an explorer while you were doing it. If you weren't careful or stepped on a moss covered stone like Nadine did, you could spill into the water and, like Nadine, be pulled twenty or so feet downstream before you were able to get up on your knees and clamber like a drenched dog to solid shale.

But Nadine dried in the July heat and the rest of us found roots and pulled ourselves up over the dirt bank and into the rich green woods that stretched from the creek to the high hill rising up about a quarter of a mile away.

We played cowboys and Indians. First we made Frankie and Mike (they were littler) be the indians and we chased them through the woods whooping and shooting at them with imaginary rifles. Then we made Frankie and Mike be the cowboys and we chased them through the woods, whooping and shaking the imaginary hatchets we were going to use to scalp them. Because they were little brothers they had to be who we wanted them to be. It's easy for girls to be boss if you're dealing with little brothers.

Though sometime that breaks down too. Frankie picked up a stink bug and dropped it down the back of Nadine's shirt ( I think he liked her) and then when I was sitting up against a tree he snuck up behind me and pinged me in the back of the head with the second finger of his right hand. He still does this. Little brothers!

But, though the food and pop were gone before noon, being in the park was an all-day deal. And one of the best parts of the day was in the middle of the afternoon when the boys were running around and we girls just lay on the ground and rested our heads on logs and had green thoughts in a green shade.

All day in the park in summer and I don't think we thought about our moms, and I don't think they thought much or worried about us. And those bikes never got taken, even though they weren't locked. Those were nice summer days and they're part of what I mean when I think about living loose.

            With his tractor my dad sculpted a big irrigation pond, bigger than the largest Shaker Lake. We called it a dam. A series of smaller "spreader dams" distributed the water below the pond. There was a dock with a speedboat and rowboat. Then Dad took a WWII Army surplus truck and made it a convincing-blazing-red-fire-engine-wannabe, fixing long cloth fire hoses on roller wheels and fastening them to the side of the truck, which sat  immobile on the dock. He put a pump in the truck and that's how we watered our big garden in the dry plain. But in winter the pond would freeze and skating would happen. Only problem was the wind was so fierce it would ruffle the freezing pond surface, so in order to get a smooth surface we'd have to frequently get a fresh layer of water.

We'd chop huge holes in  the ice, put an intake hose in the holes and  pump water out the other end onto the dam. In customary winter below zero South Dakota weather, we had refreshed ice in no time. All the kids in the neighborhood would come to skate. Of course the closest kids were three miles away; those were the Niederworders: Karen and Sharon, Garry and Larry, Marie and Mary and...Charlie - Charlie was a single.

We lived and skated loose on that pond. My brother Barry and I would  quietly slip a bed sheet out of my mother's linen closet. She'd have said no if she'd seen us; there were rules, but they were a little more LOOSE than in the city. This is a place where when I was 12 I routinely drove four miles to the Prairie Queen one-room school.

Back to the sheet: we'd hold both ends and sail fast along the width of the  lake. I didn't know from figure skating; it was about speed. My dad also took truck bumpers from a 30s pick-up and made us a sled. It was so heavy it took four of us to drag the sucker up the hill and it went down lickety-split; I'm amazed we didn't seriously bust ourselves up. But we didn't and I knew I had the coolest dad, and I today I carry some nice memories of living loose in a far away and very different place.

All is well

                                   I'm at the Ritz on Central Park West. I'm there with my friend and client on my Manhattan interior design job. (www. energybydesign.com). She is elsewhere and will meet me at Tout-va-bien (All is well), which the French-native concierge at the Ritz tells me is a good down-home, family type French  bistro, where French sailors dine when they hit the Apple.

It's dinner time and it's raining cats, dogs and maybe ferrets. I go under the Ritz canopy to ask the giant Jamaican doorman in tails, top hat and the world's biggest smile if he will be so kind as to call me a cab.

He beams and says, "But no, madame. The weather is far too extreme for a cab. I will get you the Ritz car."

Two minutes later a Bentley looking to be as large as a yacht pulls up in front of the hotel and the doorman opens the rear door, ushers me in and gives the driver his orders.

Five minutes later, the rain has subsided a bit. We are at the entrance to Tout-va-bien and my friend/client is waiting and watching from the shelter of the restaurant's covered doorway. Feeling like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, I exit gaily and join my companion. Her mouth is still open. She says, "Where did you get the Bentley?"

It made a nice story. It was only a few moments, but they were moments when I surrendered to the joy of living loose under the direction of the lovely gentleman from the Ritz and remembered that some of the best times are when you're in nosweat mode and you just let it all happen.

Bernie A. is 83 going on eight

My dad Bernard A. was a South Dakota wheat farmer out of Big Springs, Nebraska. Four decades ago, he, with my mom and brothers, morphed into an Australian farmer on a spread west of Toowomba. Bernie, 83 going on eight, still sculpts the red Australian earth with his tractor, but now he mostly paints landscapes.

We're in his jeep heading west into the Queensland wine country. At the Felsberg Winery, he brakes hard on a hill, pushes open the vehicle's door and slides his octogenarian bones out of the driver's seat, as if into second base for the Big Springs High ball team. He reaches back, pulls a camera from behind the seat, centers himself and carefully composes a photo of the vines. The shutter whirs and Bernie announces: "I'm going to paint a picture of the vineyard and come back and sell it to 'em." His grin is worthy of the gambler who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.

That night, we're back in Toowoomba watching the news on the telly. Bernie leaps to his feet, fetches a torch and declares, "There's wildlife out there." My mom and I follow the flashlight wielding patriarch outdoors and see him shine the red eyes of a goanna (rhymes with Johanna) that must be four feet long. The lizard scampers into the bush but Bernie has moved to a gum tree, where he illuminates two startled Australian possums. He delivers a mini-lecture on the difference between Aussie and American possums and then walks briskly toward another "eucalypt," where he shines his light onto a squadron of fruit bats busily munching flowering foliage from the tall top. Show over, we return indoors for Bernie's homemade kettle corn and TV coverage of the catastrophic rains near the Great Barrier Reef.

As far as I know, Bernie has been living loose for all of his 83 years. Back in the day when he flew his Cessna over South Dakota to track his cattle, and on into now, he has worked his skinny butt off, but it was never really work and nothing to sweat or fret. It was always play, marching to his own drummer, being free and joyous at the marvel of life and the wonder of being a farmer, an artist and a perpetual boy. There's wildlife in there. Di

Meryl Streep is living loose

Toronto based film critic Johanna (good name) Schneller noted a new or at least intensified quality in Meryl Streep's film work, a quality the critic identified as a "looseness or what I would call a glee." Schneller asked Streep if she was having more fun. Streep didn't answer directly but said, "I think what you're referring to is something that only happens now because there are women in decision-making positions who are able to green light movies."

Asked about Streep's perceived exuberance in Vanity Fair, the film director Mike Nichols, said, "The joy of working with her is that she truly thinks, 'Oh, boy - I get to do this one more day,' and working with her you certainly feel that."

Another knowledgeable source, photographer Brigitte Lacombe, who has photographed Streep for three decades, said in VF, "When I saw Julie & Julia, I just laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a great performance of her playing an enchanting character, but it was also the joy she was having doing it. It was enchanting to watch."  

The Primacy of Play:

Birds Do It

The sky was clear, the air balmy with a gentle, steady breeze that whispered quietly of autumn. We sat on the edge of a small thicket of trees for a while looking some 1500 feet down at the line of breakers tracing the long, gracious curve of Stinson Beach. It was getting late, so we started back to where we had parked our car, about two miles away. The trail took us out over a large area of rounded slopes covered with grasses turned golden by the heat of summer, now burnished to a deeper gold by the setting sun. To the north, the land sloped down from us all the way to the Pacific. To the east, it sloped upward about 500 feet, undulating like the haunches of some enormous living thing. In all this vastness, there was not a human being in sight. Ahead of us, the trail swerved around a small knoll. As we approached the knoll, we were brought to a halt by an amazing sight.

Diva and the pit bull 

The Word Fairy(WF) is walking the beautiful Diva on a dark December night. They proceed around the block and turn left to return home. The WF's idle thoughts run to the large pit bull (PB) who lives at south end of the street. As they move in front of that house, the WF is startled to see the PB outside its fence and moving slowly but steadily toward them. The monster is eight feet away and closing fast, with a low growl.

The WF tells himself there is no time for thought, no time to be Hamlet. There is only time for ACTION. He also says (quickly): "I am not going to let that pit bull deliver a killing bite to Diva's neck. With the big dog dialing up his growl and moving within a few feet of Diva, the WF gathers his 73 inches into an imitation of a spring and leaps into the air, and onto the back of the PB. Later, the WF will tell himself this was his finest moment of LivingLoose. The WF was loose, otherwise he would not have been able to pitch himself onto the suddenly pinned body of the probably 90-pound PB. If the WF hadn't been loose, he would have been Hamlet, stuck in thought and unable to act to save (he thought) his little dog.

Throw himself on the PB is just what the WF did. Now, let's face it, this particular PB must not have been a killer. But the WF had no experience of this PB and no way of knowing that pinning this particular bull to the turf was not going to result in the WF losing a face or a jugular vein. That's not the way it turned out. The way it turned out was that the WF pinned and held the PB to the turf and the adversary was so startled by the assault on his person that he or she proceeded to defecate - the WF's nose provided that information. By that point, the WF had moved beyond the LivingLoose phase of his interaction. It took the WF about as long to move into the LivingTight phase as it took the PB to empty bowels. Almost instantly the WF imitated Hamlet and became "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

Which is when he began to scream, "Help me," though there seemed to be no one around to hear him. As he screamed, the WF noticed that the lights had suddenly been turned out inside the PB's home. The WF quickly inferred that the PB's family turned off the lights thinking that would make the  fairy and Diva go away. Actually, the lights were probably turned off so the PB's family could better see what was going on outside. By this time, though, the WF was into LivingTight and was quite paranoid.

Be that as it may, the front door of the PB's home was suddenly opened and the WF watched as a young woman came outside and proceeded to the grouping on the lawn. As the young woman walked over the lawn, the WF screamed, "Your dog attacked us."The young woman replied, "He didn't attack anyone." In truth she was correct. This was a clear case of a man assaulting a dog. Regardless of who was victim and who perpetrator, the critical information is that the young woman advanced to the grouping on the lawn and firmly grasped the collar of the PB. The WF rolled off the bull and the young woman pulled her doggie to its feet and walked back toward and into the house. Simultaneously, a quivering WF unsteadily got to his feet and, still holding the leash of the beautiful Diva, shakily moved down the street to their house and a bottle of wine in the refrigerator.

Diva and the WF went out walking the next morning, but they took a different route and they would do so until four months later when the WF noticed a moving van in front of the PB's house. The onetime threat  and his or her family were soon gone forever and the coast was clear, and the WF had a story of how he had lived loose and then lived tight when he had time to think about the consequence of living loose. He thought about the boundary between LivingLoose and LivingTight and how sometimes you start off loose but then get tight, and how you usually don't start tight and get loose, though it is cool when you move from tight to loose.

The WF vowed to keep working on the tight to loose maneuver, but in the meantime he had a story, and he had the beautiful Diva, who is something well worth jumping on a PB for.