REFRESH PART III

Pilot Mountain, NC

Part of keeping a balanced life, refreshing ourselves from, at least in America, the unhappiness that the current regime takes pleasure in spreading, is taking care of our bodies, minds and souls. We all do this.  We might grieve the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, and Betty Ford held sway.  We might protest the extra-judicial killing of Venezuelans who may or may not be transporting drugs. We make daily acts of resistance.  But we also take care.  

Mr. Airy, NC

  I can't write about our simple trip to a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, only 2 hours from home, without first acknowledging that.  We're under stress, but we take care.  All of us.  

This week after the joy of NO KINGS DAY on October 18, with the eloquent Rev. William Barber exhorting us, I chose a mountain overnight to celebrate my birthday.  We drove past Pilot Mountain with its knob on top, to the town of Mt. Airy, which was called Mayberry on the old Andy Griffith show.   Small town North Carolina at its best.  Just about everyone in our region has been here. 

  Then we headed up and down the mountain to the even smaller town of Fancy Gap, year-round population under 300.   We stayed in the cabin pictured below, perfect with a fire pit outdoors and a lovely view of the property.  It was just cold enough. 

Cozy Cabin, Fancy Gap, VA

Of course, Bluegrass is the specialty of the region and we were excited that jam night at the Country Store in Fancy Gap is Thursday, the night we were there.  So barbecue and music was the evening.  Musicians wandered in and joined the circle.  Someone named a song and a key and strummin' and singin' began. 

 

Country Store, Fancy Gab, VA

The next day because it was my birthday I got to browse pottery and arts and crafts at my leisure.  I felt completely lucky the whole time, with such a fun experience and change from our ordinary day only 2 hours away.  It felt like a big trip, just the one overnight, and left me totally refreshed.  These kinds of good things, all good things in fact, are reminders of what we are holding the line for, why we resist, and why we won't give up and let our country become Turkey or China or Russia or any place with a billionaire tin-horn dictator. 

 

In peace, Nina Naomi 

 

  

 

PEOPLE AND PLANTS--A POWER COUPLE

 

Plants sustain all life on earth.  They provide the oxygen we breathe, the food we eat and the trees we use for shelter.  We devour them with relish, berry, flower, fruit, leaf, stem and root. Red Raspberries, crisp radishes, fragrant plums and peaches.  Plants feed the sheep whose wool warms us, the cattle whose milk sustains us, and the goats whose Goat-milk soap washes our bodies.  Our barns and beds are of wood, our bodies clothed in cotton and flax. 

Plants regulate the climate, prevent erosion and store carbon. They connect us to the land and to each other. They shelter the birds and mammals that wait near our bird feeder.  They inspire artists, from Vincent Van Gogh's SUNFLOWERS to Monet's WATERLILIES  to Georgia O'Keeffe's Poppies, lilacs, and petunias.  Each month is represented by its own flower, carnations for January, violets for February, daffodils for March and so on.  Flowers speak our hearts.  Nothing says "I'm sorry" or "I love you" or "Get well soon" like a bouquet of fresh flowers. 

Flowers feed the insects who in turn pollinate the flowers.  Walking and sitting among, or even just looking at plants and trees, soothes our souls and lifts our spirits.  Nature mends us.  Aloe vera relieves our skin. Trailing ivy absorbs formaldehyde and other toxins.  Bamboo Palms humidify a dry room. The forest is a pharmacy of phytoncides that reduce inflammation and protect our neurons just by breathing.  Like a human kidney, sea grasses filter and clean water and feed and protect manatees.  It's hard to be depressed outdoors on a beautiful day. Or to stand beneath a giant sequoia, 3,000 years old, and not feel the breadth of the Universe. 

I am glad we have this daily gift.  Nina Naomi

 

 

REFRESH PART II

 This is a different kind of refresh.  Over the years I've written about museum days, those days when you can join any century mid-stream and hang out with Dutch Masters, French Impressionists, whomever you want.  What about today taking a break with Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986).

Earlier this spring we were in Santa Fe, New Mexico and visited the O'Keeffe museum and sights.  On assignment for LOOK magazine (anyone remember LOOK?), photographer Tony Vaccaro took this picture of O'Keeffe in 1960 in her Abiquiú house.

Most of us think of O'Keeffe as the person who painted large flowers.  The artist disputed male critics who saw the blooms as depictions of female genitalia. They're flowers, she said.  I make them large so you can see them.  We must agree.  What great female artist wants Freud as her muse?  An interpretation that is gendered and outdated.  Although for me as a woman, the idea of our bodies flowering can also be quite lovely. No contradiction, I think. 

Red Canna, 1919

Untitled Abstraction, 1970s

But her range is much wider.  This abstraction was painted when O'Keeffe was in her 90s and apparently reveals small hand tremors in the movement of the brush.  Then, years before, Geranium Leaves in a Pink Dish, 1938, so clear and round where the other shapes in Abstraction add curves and verticality.  

Oil on Wood Panel

Today we went to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and found another O'Keeffe.  Art, poetry, music, the wind in the trees, orange and yellow leaves covering my back patio, chili in the crock pot, family coming to dinner--so many ways to refresh ourselves.  

 

Yesterday was NO KINGS and 7,000,000 people across America protested the authoritarian policies of Donald Trump.  Our demonstration in Durham was a wonder.  We were 7,000 marchers--one out of every 1000 demonstrators was right here in my city.

 

Thank you world.  I am refreshed.       Nina Naomi 

 

REFRESH

Brock Basin, Pine Knoll Shores, NC

OK, if you're an American who is well-informed, you are likely existing under the weight of serious day-to-day stress.  Obvious, right? The stress that comes not from personal crises (though those too), but from newly coping with and trying to defeat an authoritarian regime. I'm ready for the next big NO KINGS DAY, OCTOBER 18.  I'm watching the lower courts hold the line.  I'm listening to AOC and Bernie Sanders and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and hoping that the news about a cease-fire in Gaza brings lasting peace.  I admire the governors who protect their citizens. 

So why lead with a picture of canoes?  Because we also need to keep our balance and take breaks.  What more appropriate symbol of balance than a canoe.   Plus, following my own advice, I thought that picking some special photos, posting and writing about them would give all of our minds a refresh.  

So I chose this snap of colorful canoes just waiting to cut through the water with someone's strong strokes.   I love the way their random shelving ends up looking artistically pleasing. My first ever post was about canoes, Feb 2, 2017.

 

Then I located in my library this otherwise regal alpaca whose silly mop-top belies her distinction.  She lives with her family at the Museum of Life and Science here in Durham.  Alpacas are docile animals, but you wouldn't know that from their bray.  They hum too! 

Is there a farm near you?  Do you raise farm animals yourself?  My granddaughter and I have a date for Goat-Pumpkin Carving; can't wait to see how that works out.  

                                   A picture of healthy birch trees shedding their bark in sheets, caught my attention next.  We saw these paper birch on a visit to New Jersey.  So my break includes remembering times of small pleasures. Our woods has beech trees, which also have white bark, but it is smooth.  Their brown leaves stay on all winter until spring buds force them to fall. 

Here's another cute alpaca from the herd.  Can't resist.  The Museum is just 30 minutes or so away; I don't know why I don't run over more. There's a butterfly house there too, and lemurs and rescue bears.  The picture is a reminder to be more child-like once-in-a-while and ooh and aah at these unique species. 

 This snap I just took yesterday.  The fungi are sprouting in the leaf-mold as the air cools and nights lengthen. This tiny red-cap is a beauty.  There's a cluster of them just out my door south of a patch of moss. Here's another view.  

The deer eat them, we've noticed, so they don't last long.  The best break today was of course, searching the woods for what to photo, keeping my literal balance in our rocky terrain and inspecting the mossy trail I've maintained for over twenty years now.  I call it a fitness trail only because it keeps me fit (ha!).

Finally, let's end this refresh with upside-down reflections in pools.  I wrote about this too back in 2017, September, an early post.  We were taking a slow journey from North Carolina to the Eastern Shore and back.  The Dismal Swamp is on the Virginia-North Carolina border, 113,000 acres of wetland forest and coastal plain swamp. Again, so close to where I live, we should visit more.  

The water is only 6 feet deep but brackish, and reflections of tree and cloud make it look much deeper, don't you think?   

 

Last treat:  

I hope you enjoyed your break.  Thank you for being here.  Nina Naomi

 

OUTDOORS IS OUR MINDFUL PLACE

 

"Come to the woods, for here is rest," John Muir

Why did John Muir say this? Because each tree emits phytoncides, necessary to the well-being of the tree but also found in the scents that calm us, that take us past our hurts into healing.  Think cedar, Scots pine, birch, oak and sandalwood, any fresh woody fragrance distilled from tree resins and encountered during every walk in the forest.  Those who have studied trees and forests for many years suggest that without forest bathing, forest immersion, lying on a quilt under a cedar tree, or climbing one and perching there--i.e. without microdoses of phytoncides, we would all suffer far greater bacterial and viral infections. "Forest Pharmacy," BREATHE, June 2025.

I believe this.  Don't you?  Haven't moms and grand moms always told the children to play outside?  And not just to get them out of the way.  They come in calmer.  There has to be a scientific, biological reason that a walk outdoors does us good, even more so amongst the trees.  When we're anxious or depressed, the sight of leaves turning red and yellow, the smell of fresh cedar, the feel of chestnuts underfoot, can trigger an absolute neuronal sigh of relief.  Partly it's "The world goes on.  I'm part of something bigger."  But much is our sensory responses, feeling carpets of moss or shaggy-bark hickories, grass underfoot and, sadly, the smell of oxygenated hydrocarbons that fresh cut grass emits as a distress signal when its cells are cut or damaged.  

Fall is such a time for this.  Where we live, the woods are buggy and chiggery in the hot months, cool and welcoming now.  I am lucky enough to live in the woods, but that was not always so.  As a child I was taken to parks and gardens and zoos (different smells there).  But I did have a tree-house, and we have one now in our woods for the grandchildren. 

I'm not saying anything new.  The world is full of nature lovers.  We may be the largest group around.  We delight in wildlife and rainbow flower gardens.  We strip down in summer and bundle up in winter just to spend one more hour outside. We plant and trim and clear and do it again.  We are present to the environment--a breeze, the temperature, raindrops on our shoulders or sun on our back.  Often, outdoors is our mindful place.  Even storms help us see the bigger picture.  Safely under the eaves, I love to take in the rain.  As a child we had a sleeping porch, second floor with mattresses on the old wood floor.  We would be dragged in when it thundered.  

I read that a study in the UK at the University of Exeter showed that spending just two hours a week in nature led to better health. I know that the October air coming in my wide open sliding door next to my computer, birds settling in for the evening, is affecting my mood.  

Much of what I think and do now is about the maelstrom of strife in America.  I don't have to name any of it now.  But a reminder of our place in the universe and the continuity of nature is sure to help.  It's our medicine.   Let's take it.  

Taking our havens when we find them, Nina Naomi 

 

  

 

  

A PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING

 

Thank you God for my Book Club 

Where we discussed Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt 

About Jews who, like frogs in boiling water,

Were sent to gas chambers after years unaware of the tightening noose.

Thank you for my fellow knitters, not one under sixty,

who remember the protests that toppled a President and changed the course of a war.

Thank you for friends and family who demonstrate against and boycott

the totalitarian regime that now rules America. 

Thank you for our church, that ignores the prohibition on DEI,

Recognizing that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Is just another name for Civil Rights and Christian love.

Thank you for a Bible class that provides a safe place

For discussions of White Nationalism and brown persecution. 

Thank you for white people who protest when brown people can't. 

Thank you God for your word that helps us walk the line--

the line of resistance, the line of compassion, the line of fearlessness.

Help us protect the weak with our strength, 

Defeat the evil with our greater number, 

And keep us dedicated to your word and the world you want us to preserve.

AMEN 

 

 

 

ETERNAL THOUGHTS COME

 

North Carolina Shore

We have spent so much time at the beach this year that I am not sure how to feel:  lucky or guilty.  Lucky because the autumnal air, now cool, the rhythmic waves and the glistening night skies are restorative. I await tonight's moon, always sparkling across the water. Who can be depressed surrounded by eternity?  We crossed over the causeway, low tide and the Sound dotted with sandbars. We carted our goods upstairs and looked out on, for today, a calm sea.  We threw open the doors and windows.  Does anyone deserve this life? Could we, possibly?  

Maybe you sometimes feel the same about your life however you live it, in town or country, alone or surrounded, cobbled together or smooth sailing. It's your life and you feel lucky.  More:  it's your life and you are lucky. 

Guilty because bad things happen all around.  Gazans are being exterminated. Ukrainians have held off the Soviets for how many years now?  Those poor Israeli hostages haven't a hope. America is rising to the challenge of a fascist government led by billionaires. 

Do you feel like this?  Grateful for your family, your life, your job, but worried about all those who have less?  Or is it your family that has less right now?  Less hope, less promise?  We got a call this morning from friends whose son lost his wife last night to cancer, the mother of his young daughter.  We are meeting a friend this week here at the beach, whose husband died just months ago.    

I don't have any answers, any wisdom. That's for someone else. You could read this and think, "Yes, I know this."   I have written before about the "andness" of life. The almost whiplash between joy and sadness, hope and fear.  I just mention it today because here at the beach with the ocean at my feet and the stars above (it is now night) eternal thoughts come.  

Nina Naomi