saratoga springs, new york.
"no one should come to new york to live unless he is willing to be lucky." (e.b. white)
ok, so upwardly mobile captains of industry are joining the bohemian ranks...this morning i read a
friend's blog, she recommended if suddenly caught downsized one should indulge in a sleep-in...to 9 o'clock. even pollyannas have been heard spouting unlucky attitudes recently. my life-coach friend
gina mollicone-long threatened to climb into the telephone and restrict my breathing if she so much as sniffed a bad attitude. what was i to say? that art is JUST what the doctor ordered in such a panic-stricken moment in history?
thing is, i feel lucky. i was in a particularly good spot the other night. there was a wet nose nuzzled in my nook, milk bone breath, white eyelashes. i'd just made an orzo salad with new season asparagus. there had been a fat snowfall, a fuzzy half-moon, a declaration of love. it occurred to me that i don't often experience the sensation of
happiness without the accompanying sensation of
gratitude. it's as if the two are intricately intermingled, a cosmic double-whammy to keep it real.
real happiness,
real gratitude, an authentic acknowledgement of, for lack of a better word, very good luck.
i remember walking into my dad's studio when i was a little girl, looking around his tattered montessori for the millionth time, and exclaiming,
"you're so lucky." my dad looked up from his easel/reading/stamps/light table/bolex/manuscript. he said,
"is it luck?"there's no arguing that endeavouring to live my life in new york city is single-handedly the most challenging and humbling adventure. it's your pipiest pipe-dream ambition blocking your passage to your barker-lounger. when people ask me if i love it, my
yes bubbles up from a burning stove in my lower gut.
"it is as if i was a martian living on pluto, and i suddenly moved to mars." when asked what it feels like to be with my fellow martians, i can only try to explain about the other dreamers, and how if one does not believe, one cannot survive here.
and it's easy to get blue when the most basic necessities of life are such a chronic challenge to achieve, but it's also kind of glorious to live on love.
first century roman dramatist
seneca is credited with the familiar quotation,
"luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." (funny how even the romans were trying to get lucky.) sure, nice things happen to us from time to time to carry us a little forward in our creative, spiritual and professional pursuits. when they do, we feel gratified by our preparation, maybe even clever for situating ourselves in the path of opportunity. the world sees us gaining recognition and might even deem us lucky. today, i'm sitting in a cosy room in upstate new york while my paintings dry in the west village. i am materially without much. but i'm an artist and i live in new york, which is my dream, and so i'm grateful, and therefore happy, and thusly, really, really, really lucky.
