Saturday with Art and Horses

More gray-rainy (grainy?) days, but it is also getting densely green. Green beginning to close in overhead as the leaves come out, green underfoot in the yards, already ahead of us grass cutters.

This has been a wide ranging day. Andy and I went up to Montclair to the art show to see the pottery work by young Ethical Culture member Christopher Geissler, and ran into an artist whose work we have on the wall downstairs, Linda Adato -- the sweet "umber" colored "Morning Mail" with a radiator and a chair. Her new work is in color, and reminds me, when she does cityscapes, of Ella Yang , but Adato's are smaller, not oils, some she does now are monoprints, but also etchings. So that was nice, and Chris got interviewed for TV, and Andy bought a cup and a small pitcher. We ate, also in Montclair, at an interesting Turkish restaurant, Lalezar that I enjoyed a lot, drove up to Eagle Rock reservation, looked at the 9/11 memorial with its rather awkward old fashioned art, but a great view-- of fog mostly, today. Then to Garden of Eden, Andy's first visit, and he liked the cheese. And home, and we watched the Kentucky Derby and the Place horse, the only filly in the race, ran her heart out and broke her two front ankles and had to be destroyed. That was a really sad moment--you get excited for an hour because it's the Derby, and then there's this.

Sometimes your feelings are displaced-- or is it that you are caught by the surprise of the one poor horse dying for doing what it was bred and trained to do? The animal is easier to feel than the 3000 names in polished granite. 3000 families' pain is much, much too much?

Someone on the radio earlier this week, was it WBAI's Armand Dimele's show? Anyhow, yes, I think it was, trying to distinguish between Buddhist style compassion where you feel for another's suffering and the kind of empathy where people feel someone else's pain to the point that the empathizer's suffering becomes the real point. That was so interesting to me--when we are young, we often suffer horribly over the terrible things in the world we are just learning about-- we literally ache with the other. But when you are suffering physically, or, say, mourning, it isn't necessarily someone who is groaning in concert with you that you want, is it? The program is here.

Boy, this blog entry sure has a lot of links-- I spend my time now combining writing and looking things up on the web, and then linking to them-- the new world.