what we learned about mist

What We Learned About Mist (Chasing the Mist)  sept 12- oct 8 2016

Every morning for a week or more there was a season of mists on the lake across the street.  An autumn season, of mist and wild birds.  The kids are on their 6:45am bus and we head down  to stand-up paddle (SUP).  We discovered last year the boards are stable enough and we're balanced enough that we can take them on the lake in fall off-season before it freezes; with coats and shoes on, a camera in my pocket, a new season on the lake.  These mornings were amazing with mists--and we had a way into them.  In mist everything looks different, the very familiar became unfamiliar, which gave us a new look at things.

And we learned:   As much as it is of humidity and temperature, mist is a phenomenon of light.  When the water is still warm and cool pockets of air sit between the hills.

We found that as we approached the swirling mist, it disappeared.  It was always elsewhere.  

We could only see it when there was a certain, very low angle of light going through it, our eyes had likewise to be at a low angle to see the enlightened (or as the kids would say, lit) mist.  So it disappears as you approach and the angle increases…but it is really gone?  Depends how you define mist.   

(The FAA defines mist as humidity you can see through for one kilometer or more, anything thicker is officially fog.)

Mists are air currents made visible.   It appears to our eyes when the light is right (and the humidity is right).  Humidity, like waves, is an interaction of air and water, where they overlap, interchange.  (All the great outdoor water sports take place at this interface, including skiing, surfing and sailing.)   The cool morning air laying low over the lake, the warmer water evaporating, and the light at a low angle to our line of sight.  Like the dust in the living room air that's momentarily visible in afternoon light, it's always there whether we see it or not.  Mist: Humidity in the air made visible by very low angled light.   

The first morning, Julie paddled off and seemed to be in the midst of it, but she could not see it around her as I could taking pictures from a distance.  "Chasing the Mist," she said when I caught up to her:   Julie's new title and metaphor.   One lesson: whatever we're chasing, it is all around us whether we see it or not.  

And what you could see of the mist in the morning light: a  swirling beauty, constant flows and funnels, astoundingly beautiful, like a moving stream of art.  When you can't see it, you can still feel it...but barely, the soft coolness of the air around your legs and arms.  

It is an inherently temporary phenomenon: as the earth rotates towards the sun two thing happen: the angle of light becomes more acute, and the air warms--both decrease visibility.  As there are limited wavelengths of light that we can perceive, there is a brief and close limit to when we perceive mist.  And as with light, there are no doubt other creatures out there who can see flows of air that are invisible to us.  Our sharp distance vision would be interrupted which would hinder our survival.

If we could see the air all the time, as some creatures surely must, it would be too much, too much distracting beauty would interfere with our survival.  We need to see through it. 

 The "invisibility" of air may be part of our sense of separation from the world: it makes us think that there is only "empty space" between here and there, rather than an active fluid medium that connects and sustains an interplay between here and there, us and them.

Where we find clues to the dynamics of nature.  At the interfaces of the great fields of water and air, where the constant invisible interaction become visible--waves, mist, clouds, sunset and sunrise.  Weather.  Hurricanes and thunderstorms and drought. 

The visible air reminds us of the swirling beauty of finger-painting and Van Gogh and psychedelic art.  These arts often depicts what's there but not visible.  What is always between us, the fluid we live in, like the line about Being to us is like water is to fish.  What's water to a fish that's never been out of it?  Seen by children or the insane and the stoned.

Huxley's idea of the mind as a reducing valve that filters out what we don't need to see; with Blake's idea that “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite." 

But more than beautiful, what I saw on the lake those "misty mystie mornings"--as my father called them when we were kids--was that what we were moving through has a quality of animation; that is, of aliveness--a spirit, as in the breath of the land.    Ghosts--spirits--are associated with mists.   Mists are the breath of the earth, the visible exhale on a frosty morning.  In its complexity and subtlety you see it's aliveness--its spirit.  

This is a "spiritual" experience, seeing the breath of the world, of nature, a feeling a connection with it.  If we could see it all the time it would be a trip--beautiful, confusing, distracting, ultimately profound to see this complex flowing spirit that we are being in.   A trip without psychedelics.  

Genesis 1:2:  Darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

Gen. 1 is a description of a sunrise.  Next?   And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.  Not creation, but re-creation: the process of what you can see or re-discover at sunrise--darkness, water, mist, light, sky, land, vegetation, sun, moon and stars,  animals, man and woman.

Bialowieza

Jeremy Wolff

Just now

Travel & Leisure April 1994

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Press enter or click to view image in full size

 

Our 2020 Family New Decade Letter

Can you believe it’s already been 10 years since our last letter?  Where does the time go.  This look back makes it seem like we travel a lot, and I guess we do.  We grew up that way, and inflict it on our kids.  

2010 I became co-owner of the Front Street Gallery, a non-profit, unintentionally, but a great source for community.  Surprising all, it lasted till 2018.  History of the gallery. The best opening parties and family music nights including Dylan, Neil Young, Beatles, and Bowie. 

     San Jose for a MAPS psychedelic conference with the kids, then up the north coast crossing between the Lost Coast and Redwoods where Joe turned 6. 

      Molly is a great 4th grade Helena in Midsummer Night's Dream.  The Pot Book was published, Julie edited, and Jeremy has an essay in.

In 2011 we went to DR for the third time, to the famous windsurfing spot Cabarete.  A beautiful place, but where I almost died sailing over my head on my birthday.   My uncle Henry, my “summer father,” eye surgeon and champion sailor who taught me to love wind and water, dies.  My homage.

   NBC/Universal shoots a TV pilot based on the Julie's book Weekends at Bellevue.  They spent 8M on it, but alas it was not picked up.  But really fun hanging out on the set, the kids got to yell "Action!" 

   Family Mojo, our family band, performs at COSM. 

In 2012 a cannabis conference took us to Tucson, and from there we took the kids back to our favorites places from 4 previous trips to the desert SW: Buckskin Gulch, Toroweap, kayak camping in Lake Powell.  

Another MAPS conference in Oakland.  I broke my left ring finger in an elevator door an hour before Julie and I had to perform on guitars.  Wherever will I find painkillers?

     We make our theatrical debut in ‘Love Letters.’ 

2013  Another pot conference, another Caribbean island.  We spoke to government leaders and movement organizers in Aruba—and 6 years later they legalized medical.  And there was Eagle Beach. Beatles family music night at the gallery, 50 years 50 songs.  “Must Be Santa” - Merry Christmas 2013 from Family Mojo.

2014  Family vacation Yucatan, our first all-inclusive.  We travelled this coast together in 1997, and it has changed. We climbed the pyramid at Coba, again, the last one you can still climb. Joe’s 10th birthday.  

    Molly performs in Much Ado About Nothing in 8th grade.  Julie meets Stevie Nicks in the green room at the Today Show.

2015  Molly is Wednesday in ‘Addams Family’, as freshman in high school.

       Costa Rica, to ride horses with Julie’s publisher in the mountains.  Then to the beach where it was way too hot.  Our last night there, there were fires burning over the hillsides that fortunately never made it to our hotel.

    Julie’s “Moody Bitches” is published.  For the Dutch release (it would be translated into 11 languages), we went to Amsterdam.  Airbnb and rental bikes.

      Molly age 15 spoke on the “Partying and the Search for Identity” panel at the DPA conference in DC.  

        For the first time we travel at Christmas-New Years.  Another Airbnb in Venice, then across to Tuscany for New Year’s in Lucca.  And of course Pisa for leaning tower shots. 

2016 Julie and Jeremy speak at a medical cannabis conference in Marin.  Later back to visit the in-laws in Palm Springs—a place of desert, drought and ever-watered golf grass. (As symbolic of the US as Vegas.) Two weeks without water or Mexican labor this place would die. Fortunately it’s hard by Joshua Tree.  Last time tent camping with the kids, so far. It was so loud with wind in the rocks they ended up sleeping in the car.

   Bowie tribute show at the gallery.   First Shed show, Prince tribute.   Molly in ‘Spelling Bee’ musical. Building the community sauna at Jay and KR’s. 

2017 Songs of the Rivals (J & J) at the Shed, an over-ambitious 18 of the 21 originals we rehearsed. The Shed, our local semi-private music club, becomes the place of community gigs since the closing of Front Street.  Prince, the Stones, the Dead, Townes Van Zandt, Protest Songs, Shedstock, among others.  

    Another drug conference, Breaking Convention in London, we stay in Greenwich and revisit the place I lived in 64-65. Stopped in Iceland on the way home, 4 days driving to places I wanted to photograph. The money you save taking IcelandAir you lose having lunch in Reykjavik.  

     My father died at the end of 2016, a few days before the election of DT.  My mother had died almost exactly 4 years before.  She lived to vote for and see Obama re-elected.  This year we end up traveling to their homelands, London and Nashville.  Nashville to look for my mother’s home, and to see a total eclipse, which is all about magical alignment.  Down to Memphis and up to Kentucky—a ribs tour of the South is how we sold it to Joe. The eclipse was my 4th, Julie’s 3rd, the kids first, and they got it. 

2018  Built a cabin in the woods, Molly started CCNY, Joe started high school. Yucatan again.  Took the kids to see Jethro Tull in NYC (not so great) and Squeeze (amazing) at the Cape the next summer. 

      At Molly’s basketball Senior Night she sings the National Anthem with her mother.  Molly in "Anything Goes”.  Joe on drums in 9th grade, already the best drummer in the high school band.

    Final shows at Front Street, featuring the original founders, and the music of Leonard Cohen. 

2019  Joe plays drums in the pit with the pros for the high school musical.  The Pawling Bread Co, we invested in, finally miraculously opens in the village, which will never be the same again.  Bucketlist conference trip to Esalen in Big Sur, CA, with Michael Pollan, Paul Stamets and others.  Home for a few days, then off to 10 days in Morocco with Joe.   Took Joe to Julie’s camp Coniston, then toured Maine (most mellow cannabis state) and NH. Saw Molly perform in Dry Land and Urinetown, and knock ‘em dead at the Shed, again. 

      Birth of Sahar Roni Silverwolff to Zaro and Asher, first child of that generation, our first niece’s first son.

A lot of other stuff happened, I’m sure, but I didn’t take pictures of it all, which is how I remember things.  But seriously: travel, music, the kids, nature, and our community.

Have a great decade. Talk to you again in 2030!  Insh'allah.

Jeremy Julie Molly and Joe

The Nashville House

Besides the chance of clear skies, one of the reasons we went to Nashville for the total eclipse was that it was my mother's hometown. 

My great-grandfather Joseph Starr emigrated to Memphis with his brother, and they "peddled their way to Nashville," eventually bringing their wives and other brothers over.  Since 1916, when he was just 21,

my grandfather and his brothers owned and managed the Bijou Theater downtown "one of the finest theaters operated exclusively for colored patronage in the entire United States." Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters performed regularly.  It was torn down in the Fifties--an eminent domain case fought and lost: urban renewal, and it was in a "Negro" or slum part of town. 

My great-uncle, Alfred Starr, brought a lawsuit against the Nashville Housing Authority in January 1954.  He died of a heart attack at his desk in the Bijou, on October 15, 1956--exactly one week after the US District Court decided against the Bijou. He was 58. Among his pallbearers were Senators Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr. The Supreme Court upheld the decision in June, 1957, and the building was levelled a few days before Christmas. 

A few blocks away, the Spruce Street Baptist Church, the first and largest all-black church in Nashville, suffered the same fate, the building fell and the congregation was forced to move.

 My grandfather came to own the largest chain of "colored" theaters in the South. My sister texted us an address from one of my mother's notebooks--her father's home:  511 N. 20th Ave. These blocks are now huge corporate gullies, a hospital complex with parking and concrete out-buildings, and #511 is long gone. Unlike Memphis, Nashville has buried most of its historic downtown, which turned out to be the blacker parts of town. 

But that night I googled it, and it showed the house at a different address: 511 Spruce St, the a name for the continuation of 20th Ave. Real estate records show it was built in 1911. 

The next day we drove back and found a lone old house, surrounded by vacant lots. There was a camper nearby, junk on the porch, and around it new brick developments: a church, low-income housing, and a magnet school. I was pessimistic this was the place, but we parked to take pictures...and my camera battery died.  I managed just two pictures, one straight on, on from the side. 

Back home, my aunt Ann Leslie sent me three old photos of the house. I took my two photos, and a few Photoshop tricks later I'd proved it to myself: this was the place.  My great-grandfather Joseph Starr's house, the first home of my grandfather, Milton Starr, and his first daughter Sara, born on August 8, 1930.  

It was magic, overlaying the past upon the present, revealing the myth of time.  The bricks that are there,  and the earth, where, 80 years before, a proud grandfather crouched with an infant girl.  They are gone, save for these few images and the meaning attached.  But 80 years later is all but simultaneous, an instant in geological or astronomical time.  But in this picture I can see they are still here.  Their vibrations, the waves they started are still moving across the lake. Ghosts are tricks of time. And DNA is even more mysterious.  You circle back, and the echo is still there.

Across the street from my great-grandfather's house is the Spruce St. Baptist Church, which carried its name here from downtown.  It was not here in my grandfather's time. That was another trick of time.  But it is the reason we couldn't find the 500-block of 20th Ave. N: by city ordinance, it was renamed in 2006 to honor the church that stood on Spruce St. downtown: "WHEREAS: The community deems it appropriate that said name be changed...." 

Cassini, Saturn & the World's Most Expensive Art Project

Cassini is the longest running, most expensive and far-flung art project in the history of the planet.  Now Cassini is about to take its final plunge, almost exactly 20 years after it took off.  Sure it's teaching us about gasses and moons and particles and all, but what it mainly brought back was art: images, close and precise, of formal bodies in space.  Something we've been glimpsing and imagining since Galileo.  Saturn's colors, shapes and rings turn out to be more formally perfect than we could imagine, and more sublimely beautiful. 

Formality and beauty are also the lessons of the Eclipse: that the macrocosmos, glimpsed at its most formal and refined, is the definition of awe,  and the definition of beauty.  The intersection of human consciousness and the working of the universe-refined is awe.  It forces our attention beyond the flat earth and the mundane to the larger scales we are operating under whether we notice or not.

I lived on the edge of SoHo for almost 20 years, and I was forever bugged and disappointed by the obsessiveness and meaningless expense of so much conceptual art presented in the galleries there.  But consider this:

Conceived in the early-80s, Cassini cost almost $4 billion.  It launched in 1997 and took 7 years to get to Saturn traveling at 42,000 mph.  2 billion miles, slingshotting around Venus, the Earth and Jupiter: 10 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. Around 80 light-minutes away: more than an hour for signals to get here, travelling at the speed of light.  Entered Saturn orbit in 2004--expected to last 4 years, it's going on 13.   All to send back a bunch of pretty pictures.  The remarkable thing is that it's been worth it.

I was back at Cornell in 2008 and by chance saw these photos at the Johnson Art Museum.

"Spectacular Saturn: Images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission," the exhibition was called.  An art museum, not a science museum.  I had never seen anything like it.  To me it was like pictures confirming a UFO, or life on other planets.  The detail and the beauty, the technological accomplishment of sending a craft a billion miles to take perfectly clear photos and beam them back hi-def.  They show Saturn to be perfect beyond our imagination:  a platonic form, an ideal form.  

The roundness of the planet.  The flatness of the rings: they are actually two-dimensional by any earthly standards.  Out there, in true space, something real can be this thin, this ethereal. Their actual thickness is about 30 feet, and the width of the rings is like the distance to the moon.  If they were the thickness of paper they would be almost 2 miles around.  The farther out you look, the more formal things become.  Edge-on, they are virtually invisible.

These images changed my view of space, the way whale-watching changed my view of the earth.  I bought the $40 book at the museum, and as soon as I got home I sent copies to my parents, my sisters, and my best friend:  I thought it was that important.  And now the book isn't even on Amazon? 

When Cassini departed in 1997, the iPhone did not exist.  Now the camera it carries is dwarfed by smartphones.  Yet behold the magnificence.  To the religious and the psychedelic communities I say: behold the mind of God.  Made more magnificent when you consider the act of human ingenuity that obtained this secret distant beauty. Yet we ignore the message of space.  And that's the definition of mundane.

Galileo was the first to see the planet was more than just round in 1620 when he invented the telescope.  Cassini, the namesake of the satellite, with better optics 20 years later, perceived them to be rings.  Could he have imagined this precise beauty?  Four hundred years on, this we have accomplished.  But can we imagine, in our world now, this commitment to science and art, and the best of mankind, untainted by greed or violence?  What has changed since the 90s when 19 countries came together to embark on this project?

History (or perhaps archeology) will see this as one of mankind's greatest achievements.  The best example of what humans can do.  Publicly funded, collectively owned.  An accomplishment of our species: for mystery, magnificence, knowledge and beauty.  What else is there?  Survival?  Sure.  Cash and greed?  Why not.

The technologies that carried Cassini to Saturn for art-as-science are the same that created ICBMs, drones and Smart bombs--rockets of death.  Here are two aspects of the world expressed.  Pessimism v. optimism; fear and killing v. exploration and beauty.  Out there, in the solar system, at the macro level, there is no one to fear or kill or menace.  Look to Cassini, before it falls, for an exploration of what we are, what we can do, what's inside of us.

Heading to Nashville for my 4th eclipse

(August 14, 2017)

Eclipses are about fortuity. I got my parents to drive me to my first one when I was 13. We happened to wander to Malignant Cove in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Sandra Blakeslee, legendary science writer, was there too and the next day I was in the Times (next to Colonel Sanders, link below):

http://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/11/archives/for-2-minutes-there-wasnt-any-sun-for-1500-visitors-at-nova-scotian.html?_r=1

Thirteen‐year‐old Jeremy Wolff persuaded his parents to take him to see this eclipse. His father, Michael Wolff, who teaches English at the University of Massachusetts, said: “Jeremy kept saying in an oedipal way it's the last eclipse in your lifetime, so what could we do?”

An astronomical alignment of precision, beauty and complexity, and you are on the spot. The sun 93 million miles away is precisely covered by the moon 230,000 miles away, casting a shadow 65 miles wide through the midline of our country. The size/distance ratio required for this is miraculous, or coincidental. Take your pick. It's a glimpse at the scale God works at.

Julie and I, during our golden pre-marriage years, travelled to two eclipses: Colombia, in February 1998; and northern France in 1999.

Stories and photos (from early days of html) here:
http://already.com/colo/colombia.html
http://already.com/eclipse2/11.htm

Eclipse Chasers are generally astronomy nerds, but it's as good an excuse to travel as any. We've know since '99, the year we were married, that the next realistic one to see was in 2017, which seemed a truly unimaginable distant future. Tomorrow I take my wife and 2 kids to Nashville, the largest city completely within the totality; both because the clear-weather odds are decent, and because it was my mother and grandfather's hometown. We've been on the coasts plenty,  but a long time since we've seen America. We'll be 50 miles west for the event, an Airbnb just over the Kentucky border. I booked early.

These are magical, sacred events, changed by our ability to predict them, but still awesome: to witness larger forces drawing on the face of our planet. Prophesy-wise, calamity-wise, this one, this line, seems particularly easy to read into. I'll give you the facts: see what you come up with. It starts in Portland, OR, and ends in Charleston, SC.

At this time of division, the path cuts through the guts of our country from the Northwest to the Southeast. Coming first through Salem, capital of privileged, "progressive," pot-legal Oregon--just 20 miles south of Portland. There could be disaster, 600,000 ironic stoned kids all decide to hop on I-5 at the same time.

The shadow leaves the continent in Charleston, historic heart the slave trade, the business of racism. Charleston has the only slave market building that is still standing, now a museum where you can see the whips and pistols and iron shackles that enforced human bondage. Superficially at least, the other end of the spectrum from Portlandia.

In the Times story, Blakeslee calls solar eclipses and the precise diameter/distance ratio that makes them possible "a fortuitous freak of nature." Maybe, but no more than any of the mysteries that allow life in this warm brief bubble of atmosphere. No, not a freak of nature: but God apparent in the universe, the magic and mystery, the natural beauty and perfection of things. Einstein said:

"There are only two ways to look at the universe: That nothing is a miracle or that everything is."