Summer Updates :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
In this newsletter:
Visiting Los Angeles this week — appointments available!
Poems by Salah Faik
Happy Solstice, Juneteenth, and Pride month to you all (belated, as usual!) My spring newsletter was a bit indulgent, so I'm keeping this one relatively concise. I hope you all are well and relishing for once not being the part of the country that has to endure oppressive toxic wildfire haze. Let's hope that the shared experience out east inspires some empathy and action on climate change. Meanwhile, enjoy the clear skies while we have them.
Read on for info about upcoming availability in my old home of Los Angeles, as well as this season's literary offering.
Schedule your next session here.
A Visit to the Southland
I'm including my old Los Angeles folks on this month's newsletter because — surprise! — I will be in town this week and am taking a few appointments. I am scheduling via email only, so please, if you would like to arrange a session, let me know your preferred times by replying to this message, and I'll try to get you in. First come first served... I wish I had a little more time to see you all, but such is life.
I will be taking appointments in-office at two locations: my old Silverlake office on Riverside Drive, and just over the bridge in Atwater Village on Glendale Boulevard.
Available in-office times are: Wednesday morning, July 5th (Silverlake), and Sunday morning/early afternoon, July 9th (Atwater).
I will be making a few home visits from Wednesday to Sunday, the 5th to the 9th. I will only be doing west side appointments if I can line up a couple on the same day. So please do let me know if you would like to schedule a visit, but flexibility is appreciated, and I apologize in advance if I can't accommodate.
I will be charging my Bay Area rates, since I am paying Bay Area rents, sadly. But sliding scale is available if this puts my work out of reach for you. Please feel free to ask.
The above photo is from this spring near my Oakland office.
Poems by Salah Faik
Once upon an earlier time in my life, I refused to buy anything new, opting instead for second hand and salvage. Thrifting and scavenging occupied an admittedly inordinate amount of my time, but helped to keep my budget under control, and introduced me to a chaotic assortment of elements that would shape my aesthetic orientation and way of moving about the world. Many of these habits are still with me, but for the sake of this story, let's call this time period the past.
The name Salah Faik, then, entered my life by chance. A somewhat sterile, visually unappealing paperback found its way onto a thrift store shelf at the right moment for our trajectories to intersect, in a moment when my curiosity was tuned to the correct frequency. I might have found him eventually — it turns out a poet friend of mine later took on the task of translating his work into English. But the glimmer of a chance encounter nevertheless adheres to his name in my mind.
Salah Faik is an Iraqi poet from Kirkuk, a political exile since the mid-seventies. After participating in the guerrilla struggle for Kurdish independence in the 1960s, Faik fled Iraq for Syria, later emigrating to the UK and eventually the Philippines. His perspective as a writer carries the weight of political and aesthetic commitments whose constituencies have been scattered by time, circumstance, and unimaginable repression. There is rebellion in Faik's verses, but also a world-weariness that channels his vision into a specific arena of poetic intervention. His is not a dejected writing — he writes with a charmed, incisive sensibility that strives for nothing less than the subversion of all authority. If he was a cartoon, he would be Bugs Bunny; if he was a Kung fu style, he would be Drunken Master. He mobilizes absurdity, transformation, humor, unexpected sincerity, and a keen eye for cracks in the facade of commonsense order. Faik's position is firmly rooted in the everyday, while at the same time offering a capacious welcome to the poetic fugue, the imaginative or inscrutable gesture. In the words of poet and translator Maged Zaher, “Salah is against all authorities, including his own: he reinvents himself incessantly.”
The selections below come from a 2014 collection, On The Milky Way, translated by Haider Al-Kabi.
Music emanates from everywhere:
from the window
from the driveway of a public park
from a store that sells animal bones
from a man approaching me who wears a blood-stained shirt
from a woman moving away carrying a book in her right hand
and from where I sit in a coffee shop.
—
Dear Orhan Wali,
I am writing to you
although I don't know your address.
You have appeared in my dreams,
you wanted me to come see you in Istanbul.
I am in Istanbul already.
I have been here for several days now,
I hoped to see you in Kadikoy
because I know you love its stretching beach
as you once wrote in one of your poems
but you did not come.
I asked a rock
it told me it had seen you with a beautiful lady.
I asked a wave
it said it had seen you staggering near a bench.
"And where is that bench?" I asked.
"Right behind you."
I turned and found your scattered poems
along with a letter to me that said:
"Sorry, I cannot meet you,
I have been dead for seventy years."
—
Keep a raven on the shelves of your bookcase,
perched on Edgar Allen Poe's works
and watch what happens.
It's better than listening to the scream of prisoners
or fishermen's cries for help as they are
hunted by whales
"It serves them right," I tell myself.
"They emptied the fish of the oceans,
they starved the whales, the dolphins, the sharks."
Or you may burst out laughing in a cathedral
listed for sale
and hear your echo sound like someone else's.
Things like this are daily occurrences,
things I hate to stick my nose into
but now I enjoy—
watching a man poking the street lights
with the tip of his umbrella,
it is midnight,
time for trees to visit each other.
—
My instincts are spotlessly clean,
each morning I wipe them with napkins until they sparkle
as I watch a flock of crows flap their wings
and hover around a group of men
who iron their clothes in a barracks.
Then, as I sit down and eat my breakfast
an elephant passes me by
waving its trunk in greeting,
and I answer by raising my spoon.
As usual, it all ends in such interesting stories
about workers carrying books to brothels
and about collecting my old thoughts
as if they were scattered pebbles.
With care,
Wilson