SONOS fills the home with music
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SONOS fills the home with music

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Over the course of what felt like a particularly dreary and inelegant winter, I fell in love: with Mozart.

The gifted and lovely psychic Mary T. Browne advised me to listen to Mozart. Classical music had been only a distant interest, sparked mostly by watching dance performances. But, trusting the ineluctable Ms. Browne, I played Mozart.
The more I listened, the more I was entranced. The music has a balancing, peaceful effect, a sweet joy that’s a welcome surcease from the heartache of watching a 15 year old go off the rails, and listening to the self-righteous rantings of an ungrateful 19 year old. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” wrote Shakespeare, in King Lear. And how right that master of human psychology was, whether the Bard really was Anne Hathaway’s husband, or he was Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe.
The point isn’t that everything important or meaningful about the human condition is found in Shakespeare, though that is true. The point is that the Andante in C major for Flute and Orchestra, K 315, makes my life better.
So I experimented with ways to imbue my home with music. The Apple wireless system with Airport worked well, and the app REMOTE on my iPhone controlled the system nicely. But I decided I wanted a more integrated look, feel, and sound, rather than having a Bose speaker in the dining room and a Sony speaker in the bedroom.
Ecco, SONOS. The Bridge plugs into my airport extreme and transmits to all the S5 players throughout the apartment. The speakers have good quality sound. The SONOS controller downloaded perfectly to my iMac, and the Sonos app to my iPhone, so I can DJ the music even from the bathroom. As for volume: it cranks!
We’ve discovered Pandora radio and Rhapsody. My husband Sabin, whose grandfather was a concert pianist and whose musical taste is more complex than mine, has his three favorite stations: Spanish Guitar radio, AC/DC, and Dvorak. My wild thing 15 year old daughter plays Glee Cast and Sexy Bitch radio. For my little one, there’s the Magic Kingdoms and Small Worlds station on Rhapsody. I have, okay, no scoffing, Rod Stewart radio, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart radio, and my Yoga playlist which includes Krishna Das, Cynthia Snodgrass, Deva Premal, a rockin’ Halleluya by Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, and some lush renditions of mantras like the great Om Tryambakam.
The Sonos system isn’t cheap, but it works well. There are a few glitches. Occasionally the music drops. Usually that’s a quick fix by switching channels in the control panel. I initially ordered four S5 units from the company; three arrived, and one showed up in Memphis as an empty box. Sonos was nice enough about it, but they wanted me to wait for the investigation to unfold. They weren’t altogether pleased when I articulated my belief that the empty box wasn’t my problem and I wanted another unit shipped to me pronto. To their credit, they did ship the replacement unit pronto, at great effort to themselves.
So “if music be the food of love, play on,” and fill my home with love!
AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS by Martin Seligman
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AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS by Martin Seligman

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Recently a wonderful opportunity came my way: I was able to tell a well-respected, practicing psychologist my objections to psychotherapy as it is currently practiced, and he listened carefully, and he responded with both clarity and respect. I have a chance to rethink my position with new insight.
Fine critical analysis is not always a gift. For those who follow Vedic astrology, I have Mars in Virgo rising. Astrology is descriptive, not causative. In my case it rather beautifully describes my forward movement (Mars) with critical discernment (Virgo) and how it pisses off people (energetic, non-diplomatic Mars, in the first house).
And to those who scoff at astrology: “I use astrology for the same reason I use the multiplication table, because it works.” This is a quote from Grant Lewi (1902-1951), an English professor at Dartmouth.
Astrology is a multi-faceted art and my chart yields a further description. Jupiter the great benefic sits in the 7th house, facing my rising sign. In Vedic astrology, Jupiter is in Pisces, its own sign, which creates a Hamsa Yoga, the swan yoga, for good luck and evolutionary progress. Jupiter aspects that rasty Mars of mine. It is surprising how often something good comes out of my forward movement.
In this case, the gift was twofold: one, the psychologist received and validated my careful observations (ever notice how few therapists can listen to anyone, or hear criticism?) and two, this thoughtful man responded with ideas that hadn’t occurred to me. His willingness to engage me intellectually gave me a new insights, new awareness. I enjoy that. I am grateful.
My beautiful step-daughter at Johns Hopkins is aware of my on-going debate about psychotherapy, and told me about a class she took at Hopkins called “Positive Psychology.” She sent her professor’s book to her dad for his birthday. Naturally, I pounced on the book.
And the book is fascinating. Dr. Martin Seligman makes the point that most current psychology is negative psychology: the study of despair, depression, organic illness, failure, self-sabotage, e.g., “discovering deficits and repairing damage.” What about the study of positive mental and emotional traits, like peace, joy, hope, faith, and optimism? Don’t we all want more of those in our lives? But those don’t get funded by grants so they tend not to be studied.
In my opinion, ‘positive psychology’ has largely been left in the hands of New Age self-help gurus and “The Secret” purveyors, which is mixed. Some of those people are selling snake oil, some of them are on to something. (No, there is no irony in a follower of astrology stating this truth.)
Seligman points out, rightly, I think, that people stand to benefit from studying “positive institutions that promote strengths and virtues,” that lead to “lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose.”
Seligman admits to being agnostic and I am always surprised at the lengths to which ethical humanists go to avoid acknowledging a divine presence. What is the big deal about accepting the infinite field of all-consciousness in which we live and have our beings? Still, his well-written book builds toward an explanation of how to achieve meaning and purpose, and true happiness, in life. I recommend the book. It’s good reading. It’s a rich feast for thought.
Why I love Apple & Its Products
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Why I love Apple & Its Products

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My husband Sabin claims that I am a gadget person. It’s not how I think of myself, but his view makes sense. I do enjoy gizmos that make my life easier. A recently purchased Krups water kettle boils the water for my morning tea lickety split fast. Considering that the dog (yellow, 55 lbs) and the 5 year old (also blond, 48 lbs) have both already jumped on my fetal-position, bed-hugging person by 7 am at the latest, and usually earlier, I worship that first steaming cup of Earl Grey. It goes down like amrita, the divine milk of immortality. Once the dog hairs are out of my mouth.

Before 2006, I was a PC person. I liked its functionality, its no frills business mien. All the programs were written for PC. My relationship with PC’s began in the late 1980’s, when I put myself through grad school in creative writing by building billing databases for a small accounting firm. I was also teaching Freshman Composition. Teaching was often less fulfilling. Those rasty undergrads were not as easily programmed as Dbase.
Cut to more than a decade later. My kids got Macbooks. They were learning on Apple computers at school. They knew more about computers and the internet than I did. My technologically illiterate husband got a Macbook. He was soon proficient at it. Worse, he got better and faster results than I did! Insult with a dash of injury. There was no help for it, my days as a PC person were numbered.
So in 2006 I betook myself to the Apple Store at 57th street in Manhattan, and I stocked up. iMac and Macbook, Applecare for both, Microsoft office, procare for myself. I took the computers home. I set them up. They worked.
No joke: right out of the box, with no fussing and no bs, the iMac and the Macbook worked. I had budgeted a solid week out of my writing to learn to use them; I only needed a few hours. And part of that time was spent gawking at a machine that was so insanely easy to use. I installed Microsoft Office and word processing was up and running. MacLink Pro translated my old Word Perfect files into Word docs. It was all very disconcerting. What was the catch?
Ah, yes, this is an imperfect world, a vale of tears and sea of illusion, and there are always problems, issues, and obstacles. The airport card on my iMac was a tad flakey. Sometimes, after a restart, the card just wasn’t recognized as installed. I’d have to restart several times before it showed up.
Dutifully I lugged the iMac in to the Apple Store and had my first talk with a genius. A polite young man, for whom my iMac worked perfectly. But since I insisted, he kept the computer to run diagnostics on it. A day later they called and it was still working perfectly.
OK, understandable. I picked it up and lugged it back home. Mostly it worked great. Sometimes that naughty airport card played hide-and-seek. Twice more I lugged it into the store to be checked out. Patiently, one mannerly genius or another, and one was a women, ran diagnostics. My iMac refused to show its dark side. This was not the geniuses’ fault; they ran a lot of diagnostics. They truly wanted me to be delighted with my iMac.
Finally, a few months before my applecare ran out, it happened again. I called applecare in despair. “I’ve brought it in to the store three times!” I wailed. “Do you know how heavy this thing is? I’m not a computer idiot, I’m telling you, the airport card only works intermittently!”
So they sent a tech to my home. Voila, the airport card played dead! Yay! Immediately, the airport card was replaced. Perfection.
There have been other issues these past 4 years, usually with my kids’ computers, twice with my macbook. Applecare has been unfailingly polite, supportive, and helpful. Other Apple stores have opened in Manhattan; I’ve been to the ones on 14th street, and lately, the Upper West Side store. Never had a bad experience. Some weird stuff happens in these NYC stores, all kinds of folks wander in, some with chips on their shoulders. I’ve witnessed customer explosions. Never once have I seen an Apple employee lose his or her cool.
I’ve ordered online from the Apple online store, and it’s the same deal: exemplary, respectful customer service. An attempt to figure out what the customer needs and provide it quickly, with a minimum of hassle.
It’s not just the customer service, though. Apple products work well. I was an early iPhone user, and I remember vividly bringing it home and using it. It did everything it said it would. The iPhone was one of those few things in life that lived up to its hype. What else can say that? Even sex is hit-or-miss, especially after you’ve been married for a bunch of years, and there are kids in the next room, just waiting to run in and launch themselves at you.
So, yes, I’m now a diehard Apple devotee. Do I have suggestions for them? Sure do. I’m just that person; if God Herself came down to stand next to me, I’d thank and praise and then pull out my punch list: “Merciful Deity, Can You do something about war, poverty, and illness?”
Also, I’m waiting for the iPad to multitask before I shell out the $ for one. But it’s just a matter of time. Probably after my husband or one of my kids demonstrates their obvious superiority by possessing one.
C. Stephen Baldwin’s SHADOWS OVER SUNDIALS
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C. Stephen Baldwin’s SHADOWS OVER SUNDIALS

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C. Stephen Baldwin’s SHADOWS OVER SUNDIALS

I love New York. People here are fascinating. I start a discussion with someone and he or she turns out to have a dazzling, heart-palpitating personal story of love and loss, victory and humiliation, exalted communion and dark nights of the soul. Is there no one in this glorious, feral, bursting city who is ordinary?

Many of my neighbors in my apartment building are like this: possessed of extraordinary life histories. A decade ago in Steamboat Springs, my former husband and I and our two children got trapped on the top of a mountain in a white out. We made it into the restaurant near the peak and sat at a table with hot cocoa. Our downstairs neighbor Stephen Baldwin skiied in, looking for the same warm respite. He’d been the one to recommend Steamboat to us, and he was there with some of his teenage kids and his wife.

The three of us–Stephen, my former husband, and I–fell to yakking, sharing anecdotes to pass the time. At one point I looked across the table and asked, “What is it you do at the United Nations, Stephen? I don’t think you ever told us.”

Stephen grinned and started to talk. His dad was JFK’s ambassador to Malaysia. Stephen himself, as a boy, was lost in the jungles of Peru and tattooed by head-hunters in Borneo; as a young man, he wrestled a Bengal tiger and ran with the bulls; as an adult, he set up an underground railroad for Bengali revolutionary leaders to escape a brutal Pakistani regime…. What unfolded was the tale of a brilliant and peripatetic soul who held a vision of the world as a community, and who was committed to world service. My former husband and I were spellbound. It wasn’t just the adventures, it was also the keen and wondering sense of curiosity, of observation, with which Stephen so deeply engaged his life.

“There’s a book here, Stephen,” I said finally. And he took me at my word, and wrote the book. SHADOWS OVER SUNDIALS Dark and Light: Life in a Large Outside World has arrived. I recommend it to everyone.

see Stephen’s website at www.cstephenbaldwin.com

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Yoga & Love

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Yoga & Love

I came to yoga, the ancient physical system for opening the heart, by way of heart break.

It was a bleak February years ago during the bleakest part of my divorce. The end of a twenty year relationship, of which twelve were spent in marriage, doesn’t qualify as easy. I found it fraught, a spiky tangle of anger, relief, grief, and confusion. I couldn’t integrate the double vision I experienced when I interacted with my former husband. There were now two of him: the sweet man I’d married, whom I’d always love, even if we couldn’t make a happy life together, and the difficult stranger who did not mean me well, when things came up to negotiate. It was painful. I was a mess.

I wasn’t alone during this time. I had a boyfriend. He looked like the reason I had left my former husband. But the higher calculus of the heart metabolizes change with infinitely more complexity than that, and no one ever leaves one mate for another. You leave a union for yourself, for the person you hope to be. “She left one man for another” was simply the judgment people made, uninformed people who hadn’t lived the emotional poverty of my marriage.

This boyfriend had a lot of patience for my desolation, but at a certain point, the change in my feelings over the elapsed time wasn’t an impressive differential. He’s a practical man. “Time for you to fix yourself,” he said. “I’m calling the Ashtanga place downtown to send you a teacher.”

So I began a practice of yoga. My teacher Laura arrived with her mat and didn’t want to hear any sad tales about my divorce. She wanted me to practice mountain pose and standing forward bend. She kept adjusting my sacrum. She kept telling me to drop my shoulders down from my neck, where they were squeezing my cervical spine in a relentless grip that would do any pit-bull proud. In retrospect, it’s amazing that any blood was getting up to my brain at all.

The first few weeks were a haze of twisty pain. I didn’t notice it at first, but I wasn’t as obsessed with the cycle of stories that had been playing in an endless loop in my head. It wasn’t until after a month of lessons that something clicked. I was watching Laura demonstrate trikonasana, triangle pose. Gracefully, consciously, she let her straight back leg pull her front body forward until she was clasping her big toe. She rotated her torso while extending evenly through it. She reached up in harmony with her breath while looking up, and it was such an expression of balance, strength, openness, and ease that the light-bulb flicked on over my head. I got it: there was a better way. A better way to move. A better way to feel. A better way to live.

I started to pay close attention to yoga. I asked questions: “How do I get an angle closer to 90 degrees in my leg in warrior two? “How do I better feel the relationship between my breath and my pelvis?” “What does my focus point mean to my mind?” Most of the time, the answer was, “Keep practicing.” Laura told me that all poses are led by the heart, and I took that seriously. Something inside me began to heal. The scars would remain but I was moving forward with my life. After a while Laura told me it was time for me to move on from her as well. She said I needed to attend a variety of classes and to pursue the practice of yoga in the way that I was led to, from within my own heart. It was a gracious example of setting someone free.

So I continue to practice and pursue yoga. It spills over into the time off my mat. When I stand at a street corner and wait for the light to change, I tune into my body. I drop my shoulders and check my pelvis and let my body flow softly into mountain pose. The subtle changes in position open up my breathing, and I remember that all movement is led by the heart.

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NEW REVIEW OF IMMORTAL, COMING IN JULY TO RENAISSANCE MAGAZINE

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NEW REVIEW OF IMMORTAL, COMING IN JULY TO RENAISSANCE MAGAZINE

In a recent National Public Radio spot on Dugald Steer’s Dragonology: The Complete Book of Dragons and other books in the Myth(ologies) series, an enthusiastic fourth-grade fan of those books remarked, “There’s sorta like a fiction way to learn real stuff.”  How true—and for adult readers wishing to plumb renaissance Italy while being thoroughly entertained, there is Immortal, Traci L. Slatton’s stunning debut novel set primarily in the majestic heart of Florence. Immortal sweeps across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as it follows the tumultuous life of Luca Bastardo, a beautiful blond-haired orphan boy who is kidnapped from a wretched life on the streets and plunged into an even worse existence as a prostitute by a murderous brothel-owner who surely ranks as one of the most vile characters in literature.

   Blessed with unnaturally keen senses, Luca’s salvation is his ability to free his mind and soar to calming places while he is forced to “work.” As time passes, others age, but not Luca Bastardo, who at twenty-seven still looks about thirteen.  Inventive and lush in the manner of author Anne Rice, Immortal explores the dividing line between the real and unreal, following Luca’s journey across time as he struggles to unravel the mystery of his birth and his ageless beauty while facing a difficult choice: immortality or the chance to find his one true love.

   Along the way, Luca survives the Black Death and the Inquisition and becomes intimates with such giants of the Renaissance as artists Giotto di Bondone and Leonardo da Vinci—150 years apart—not to mention Savonarola and Sandro Botticelli. A mix of art, religion, alchemy, and historical intrigue, Immortal is original and beautifully written, a true gift to the senses and an uncommonly good read.

Alana White