Still Moving: a memoir

Still Moving

Still Moving is based not only on memory but also on decades of journals filled with stories of real events, real places, and real people whose names have not been changed. The author has made every effort to tell stories truthfully and to contact living persons mentioned.

All references in this memoir to various ethnic and cultural groups are made with the highest respect for the dignity and plurality of peoples of all races, genders, and creeds. Where the author relates childhood stereotypical perceptions about the ethnic group that self-identifies as Gypsy, she references positive attributes that she admired and to which she was attracted. Childhood views gave way to adult awareness of the cruelty of racial and social injustice and deepened the author’s commitment to value all life and to serve as an advocate for the environment, peace, and justice. The author and publisher welcome any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Copyright © 2020 Linda Durham

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any manner, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the copyright owner, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review and other uses permitted by copyright law.

Paperback: ISBN 978-0-578-72293-1

E-book: ISBN 978-0-578-75748-3

LCCN: 2020916707

First paperback printing October 2020

Printed and bound in the United States of America

Front cover original cast-glass sculpture copyright © 2004 Christine Cathie, Auckland, NZ, reproduced by permission

Back cover photograph copyright © 2014 Jennifer Esperanza

Book design: Janine Lehmann Design, Santa Fe, NM

Mobius Pathways Press

Santa Fe, NM 87506

info@MobiusPathwaysPress.com

MobiusPathwaysPress.com

For my father, who encouraged me to think

outside the box and color outside the lines.

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old [wo]men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise.

In my end is my beginning.

–T. S. Eliot, extract from Four Quartets: East Coker

Contents

Introduction: Memoir as Mountain

Linda Durham, Girl Art Dealer, Is Dead

Where Far Becomes Near and Near Becomes Far

An Internship

New Mexico in Toronto

Scotland and My Private Brigadoon

Pay Attention!

The Piper Must Be Paid

Myanmar, the Golden Land

Retreat Furthers

Life’s Purpose

Still Naked After All These Years

Around the Fucking World

Rendezvous with Death

Death Be Not Cowed or Cowardly

Destination: Paris (At Last!)

Lie Lady Lie

Hanging Out with Ishmael

Go East, Old Woman!

Mission in the Accomplishing Stage

South Africa—Together Apart, Apartheid Together

The Kingdom of the Sky

To See the Baobabs

Mount Kilimanjaro

My Inner Portugal

Remembering

When Acid Reigned

Little Annie Fanny and the Ma-nipple-ated Bunny

Wreck-trospect (Beginnings, Middles, and Endings)

Iraq: Been There, Undone by That

Oh, My Gaza!

The Other Audacity of Hope

I Make My Way to Southeast Asia

Part 1: Vietnam Views

Part 2: Khmer Chimera

The Bottom of the Top of the Bottom

Driven by a Word—Patagonia

Pacific Ghost of a Chance

Another Escape and Escapade

My Brother: Seeds and Pollen of a Priest

Tropical Reflections

Carousel and Carousels of Courage

Bunny Clouds

Limitlessness

My Opposite Twin

Lessons for the Duration / for the Journey

A Whiff of Princeton

The Incredible Rightness of Forgiveness

Lucinda Rabbit

Relativity Comes of Age, or Age is Relative

My Life in the (Inevitable) Denouement Lane

Revolutionary Travel

Love in the Age of Wrinkles

My One and Only Physical Circumnavigation of the Earth (So Far)

Reveries Revive Me

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.

–JACK KEROUAC, THE DHARMA BUMS

Introduction: Memoir As Mountain

Get the newspaper, scissors, tape, and a pencil, Everett Graves gently ordered his little chatterbox, who had bounded down the stairs to greet him from the seemingly endless confinement to her room. Behind its closed door, she had felt rejected and confused by her mother’s harsh banishment. That was until an extraordinary thing happened, and she nearly jumped out of her Mary Janes in her eagerness to reveal it to the most-trusted soul she knew.

In the living room of their cramped Philadelphia row house, this intuitive father—like Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, magic, and wisdom—translated his four-year-old daughter’s afternoon insights into a tangible object. He snipped a long, thin strip from the evening paper. With one end in his left hand and the other in his right, he made a quick and twisty abracadabra motion, brought the ends together, and secured them with tape. Then he drew tiny dashes along the endless length of that floppy loop until his last dash met the first, and the dashes began again to travel the one-sided path.

The Mobius strip my father made for me more than seven decades ago became the magical and moving symbol of the opposing forces in my never-static, unorientable life. It beckoned me forward—and back—tapped my shoulder into wakefulness and turned me upside down and inside out. Like a constant companion, that simple form guided me to those exquisite experiential intersections where disparate energies met, collided, battled, and were resolved, or dissolved.

When I was young, I had no idea how to transform the pre-shaped narratives of who others wanted me to be into authentic manifestations of my ever-unfolding self. It took trial and error and time to acquire the knowledge, skills, and courage to push back against the psychological, professional, cultural, and gender labels that attached to me.

Who would we be if the world never gave us a label? Labels attach early and follow us like shadows. Narcissism is my shadow. But wait. We are all far more than our shadows. We are complex, conscious, multidimensional beings whose stories reflect our fears, foibles, failures, and fractured lives.

For me, the deep symbolism of the Mobius strip is expressed clearly and exquisitely in its kinship to the dichotomous yin yang. Personalities are never all this or all that, all light or all shadow. We find ourselves somewhere along the continuum of creativity that defies naming. Labels imply boundaries. They distance us from ourselves and others.

Like the harsh clinical definition of a narcissist, I have (sometimes) exaggerated my abilities, talents, and accomplishments. Indeed, I’ve feigned confidence and given others room to assume that I could do something before I knew how to do it. Yet, it has been those displays of optimism that offered me a road map to follow so I could step and stumble into my true life personally and professionally. The eager explorer says, Onward, followed by, Oh, my God, how?

If I hold that I am the center of my own universe, then I must further acknowledge that the center is always shifting. Do I strive to conquer, excel, and rise above? Yes, I have lived with a dread of being ordinary. I remain protective of my own uniqueness and successes. Ironically, whatever admiration I’ve earned has turned to embarrassment. Bigger and more powerful than those narcissistic traits to which I seemed attached, however, was the connection to my early childhood be-wild-er-ment.

Never-ending wonder filled me with admiration and deep empathy for the people I’ve encountered in the far and near cultural corners of our shared world. Especially artists. Not only those who make art as their profession or obsession but also those who lead creative, artful lives. We have shared our profound truths with one another as friends, acquaintances, and strangers who, in varied physical or emotional circumstances, found the strength to glean meaning from despair.

As I pulled the elements of Still Moving from fifty or sixty journals, scribbled notes, favorite quotes, photographs, and yellowing newspaper and magazine clippings, the map of interconnected themes took on definition. When I extended my hand to bridge the distance between other and me, lonely streets became only streets. Strangers became friends. Taking longer and shorter detours in my quest to reach There from Here, I lost and found myself over and again. In tame and wild places on five continents, I recorded coordinates and signposts of the sacred, mundane, magical, and profane—reminiscences that called out to be reclaimed across time.

We may think our past is behind us. Yet, sometimes it’s blatantly in our face. Moments, seemingly lost, become inextricably intertwined with consciousness in the Here and Now. That’s why the incorrigible habits of my unstructured life defied storytelling in chronological order, disordering my memory’s Nows and Thens. Spiritual and psychological growth is not like an architectural structure that builds on a foundation. Sometimes we erect walls where they shouldn’t be or needn’t be when they bear no load. And, sometimes, the most forward-thinking course is to tear them down, leaving us nowhere to hide.

Once I overcame the fear of disrobing in plain sight, I stripped down to the barest emotions—revealing, behind the scars from clashes between dreams and perceived reality, a core of naked courage. Falling to bouts of abject loneliness, I succumbed to the need for forgiveness—of myself and others. All along, my constant comfort was Wonder. Through continuous exploration, I pulled threads from the tapestry of history—the world’s and mine—and wove them, twisted them, braided them into my own story.

In the unfolding, each story became a step in my journey through daring encounters with self-revelation. Always searching, I learned that imagination—creating something that doesn’t exist—and perception—acknowledging something that does exist—are linked. Like the two ends of the magical Mobius strip, turned and brought together, the brain’s seemingly disparate parts share territory that triggers both processes. A neuroscientist described it this way: imagination is like running perception in reverse. I wonder if the opposite is also true: perception is like running imagination in reverse.

In my failures, have I succeeded? In my successes, have I—still and somehow— failed? Success and failure: How is it that one becomes the other? Paradox: lost and found!

For many years, my speeding train of thought, vision, desire, and intention barely slowed at the usual stations of wifehood, motherhood, and careerhood. It raced headlong toward a global platform where my emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual leanings and directions shifted. There, I disembarked and merged with my surroundings. The men, women, and children I met in Myanmar, Cambodia, Iraq, Gaza, Haiti, Madagascar, and other parts of the world where our global families live, work, struggle, create, and dream, brought me to tears of joy and sadness. Again and again, I carried home the gifts and burdens of my worldwide family. Their memory adorns my surroundings. They live in my work, in my heart, and in the nearly seven decades of dialogues in my journals with my self.

Still Moving is not a travelogue of exotic places and beautiful faces and information on where to catch a bus to Lesotho or how to slay the handless monkeys under the jungle bed. It explores the most elusive question of all—the why of our interconnectedness.

While laboring through the pains and joys of birthing Still Moving, I discovered that this memoir birthed me and revealed me to myself. I have whitewashed nothing. I trust that I have assembled meaningful stories to entertain, inform, soothe, or inspire you. Heady, existential questions still linger. What are the big lessons winnowed from life in the fast lane, the loner and lonely lanes, the curiosity lane? What did the detours, off-ramps, and even the twilight zone contribute to an understanding of my journey? How do we come to terms with the difference between who we are now and who we would become if we cut whatever ties, cords, and reins constrain us? Answers evolve—depending upon prevailing winds. Unseasonable storms. Persistent drought. Heat waves.

Those answers are subtle. I don’t pretend to tell you how to respond to the inevitable or how to find alternate routes around roadblocks and rock slides. But I share with you my atlas-in-progress and invite you to discover your own map and to imagine and create your unique itinerary.

Banishment to my room by my mother those many years ago both affirmed my active inner life and portended an outer life suitable to my imaginings—a wild, unorthodox, adventuresome journey as a mystic gypsy, an accidental angel, and a peripatetic pilgrim.

In all of my manifestations—from worst to best—I recognized my revealed self as a microcosm in the macrocosm, a veritable manifestival, full of opportunities to go out and out and then return. Time after time, I ventured out looking for something, only to return with something else, something I didn’t initially seek or know existed. Always, I sense that I have not gone far enough or that I have come back too soon. Much too soon.

Each planned or spontaneous sojourn contributed detail and color to my personal map, painting it with empathy, awe, and connection: connection to the Madagascar baobabs via a rough, eighteen-hour odyssey with everyday people who made room for an out-of-her-element foreigner; connection to a shriveled old woman in the dark, rainy wetness behind a remote truck stop with whom I shared the urgency to pee; connection to a private driver and interpreter—a soul brother from another mother, country, and culture—but from the same heart of God; and connection to the heartsick old man in a plaid bathrobe and slippers who was slowly, painfully losing his beauty queen wife to Alzheimer’s.

Stop. Look. Listen. Pay attention. Notice, feel, see, hear, sense, discover. Witness the Universe sharing its messages of truth and comfort with you. Life’s signposts are everywhere.

This once starry-eyed, theatre-crazed teenager and former New York Playboy Bunny, who had abandoned the addictive glamour of Manhattan, the intoxication of the counter-culture, and the false comforts of conventional family life in pursuit of the unknown, even found direction in the manufacturer’s label Anchor in the sink in a nameless hotel in a forgotten town on my way back to forward.

Across borders, beyond so-called language, social, cultural, and political barriers, I have always found connection. Other is us: we are inseparable. Always, we can see opposites becoming one as we travel along a Mobius strip. We can seek those alchemical moments of accidental or purposeful encounters in which to discover new worlds, fresh ideas, and love after loss.

An essential first step may be reconnecting to ourselves. Let’s not believe that the image in the mirror is us. When that mirror breaks and our flawed perception of the real crashes in sharp splinters on the floor, we can be cut deeply while picking up the pieces of our shattered lives. When shattered, I choose to survey the landscapes of my experiences and examine them through the transit of my remembrances.

Who are we when we’ve lost those things that we thought defined us? For years, I accepted the composed person I saw in the mirror—the one reflected by friends, associates, and even strangers. I became intoxicated by the power, intrigue, beauty, and energy of the art world. Collaboratively with my talented staff, I earned a place in the league of prominent and respected fine-art galleries in one of the nation’s leading art centers. The future looked bright. Morning after morning, I awoke bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to embrace whatever task or opportunity greeted me. My optimistic self-belief seemed unwavering. It never occurred to me that what went up and up could come tumbling down. Up seemed limitless. When those gallery doors shuttered once and for all in 2011, I found myself trapped inside a vanished dream, alone, in the shadows. Forever. I faced an unexpected and unacceptable reality: I was a failure.

The dark sea of perplexity and fear into which I had plunged seemed fathomless. Where were the rafts I had always climbed aboard? How could I rescue myself this time? Would I remain paralyzed, lost in a nebulous nowhere? Or could I drown my fears and chart my course by the stars?

Sail with me on this journey to places where time is irrelevant. We’ll encounter the spaces between predilection and disinclination, where the ordinary meets the extraordinary, where fear may be the embryo of courage that, when hatched, is destined to become a magnificent bird of paradise.

Every day, our miraculous bodies conduct a freshly composed symphony: destruction and re-creation orchestrate in harmony. Daily, I build upon the one great journey that is mine in this lifetime, as I make tracks along the Mobius strip where, now and then, as the I Ching reveals, retreat furthers.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

–Jack Kerouac, On the Road

With my children, Rocky and Daisy, and Toronto, the cat, at the Canyon Road Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, 1985 (Painting by Richard Hogan)

COURTESY OF VALERIE SANTAGTO

Linda Durham, Girl Art Dealer, Is Dead

My photograph, in profile, filled the cover of the March 2–8, 2011, issue of the Santa Fe Reporter.

SANTA FE LOSES LINDA DURHAM CONTEMPORARY ART— BUT NOT LINDA DURHAM

There it was. In eleven words and fifty-six characters. Inside, a lengthy interview and thirteen full-color illustrations summed up the beginning, middle, and end of Linda Durham, Girl Art Dealer, and her Creative Life. This unanticipated and unwelcome turn of events carved out my heart and stripped me naked in front of my community.

Durham and her gallery have been a force in Santa Fe’s creative community since she first happened on her career and developed a habit of representing New Mexico and its artists locally and internationally. Now, after 33 years in business, Durham will close her gallery on March 4.

That Durham’s enterprise has survived for so long, but is coming to an end now, is a testament both to her talent and commitment, as well as the reach of the nation’s shifting economic sands.

I never made a great deal of money, but I made enough to keep the gallery going and growing. I invested all the profits into advertising, art fairs, PR, design—because the gallery was my passion.

It’s over! It’s definitely over. My gallery, my obsession, my alter ego is now history. I have run out of steam, money, and time. I have lost my platform, my disguise, my raison d’être. I don’t know where I will go from here.

—Journal, April 2011

More than a passion and more than a job, the gallery became my primary vehicle for communication. It was a full-time preoccupation. The art, artists, staff, and creative program made it a stellar place to experience original, authentic work. Everyone was welcome. On opening nights, friends rendezvoused, collectors collected, ideas percolated, and lively dialogues reverberated around the space. Through the decades, gallery-goers of all stripes attended elegant, innovative, and provocative events at one or more of our seven locations.

I birthed that improbable gallery in 1978. I raised it, day by day, year by year. I fed it with dynamic art, high energy, spontaneity, and optimism—my seat-of-the-pants formula for growth and success.

And it did succeed. It was groundbreaking. Linda Durham Contemporary Art helped launch an innovative contemporary art market in Santa Fe. Not only was it the first gallery to focus almost exclusively on abstract and non-representational art, but it also opened doors of opportunity and recognition for the vital New Mexico art scene through our participation in top-tier international art fairs.

For decades the gallery exhibited the paintings, photography, and sculpture of scores of accomplished New Mexico-based artists at respected expositions in Spain, Germany, and Scotland, as well as art fairs in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Miami. Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Newsweek, and The New York Times touted its bravado. Influencers in the art world took notice.

I thought my splendor in the grass would last forever. I never imagined the death of my dream. The gallery and I were a continuum. Yin and yang. Interconnected and interdependent. We exemplified polarity and paradox— the complementary nature of opposites. Clearly, I had miscalculated. The art market had changed. It was time to remove my rose-colored glasses and take a bare-faced look in the mirror.

My father worked for RCA Victor for thirty-five years. At retirement, management gave him a watch. My thirty-three-year gallery tenure was almost as long. But no one gave me a watch—at least not a timepiece. As I was sweeping out the final gallery detritus and preparing to surrender my keys, artist friend Matthew Chase-Daniel stopped by and gave me an antique gold pocket watch. In place of the working mechanism were hundreds of tiny seeds. Seeds of timelessness.

Linda Durham Contemporary Art closed, with finality, on March 4th. It will march forth no more.

—Journal, April 2011

Where Far Becomes Near and Near Becomes Far

Maybe it’s not possible to start over. Perhaps one can only start again. And again. I had been living in a self-imposed dead zone, where my energy for continuing— let alone completing—had been captured in a snare of self-doubt, fear, indecision, and plain old ennui. Was I bored with my life? Unsure of direction? Was I afraid of ridicule, pity, dismissal, ordinariness? Did I doubt my ability to live up to my expectations?

Who am I? Who am I, really? Cut it out, Linda. Who am I?

I have countless answers to the question of who am I. Woman. Storyteller. Artist. Friend. Explorer. Writer. Mother. Wanderer. Abandoner.

Abandoner? Sadly, yes. Not just of relationships, ideas, passions, responsibilities, projects, and locations—but also of myself.

I claim to others—and to myself—that I long to start over. Go back to school. Study music and mathematics. Finish my book. Start a new business. Nurture plants and animals. Run away. Discard, sell, give away, leave everything behind. Leave everyone behind.

Why does the start over, begin again idea trail me and lead me?

It’s the Mobius Strip Tease! And it’s my father’s fault.

As a rambunctious, willful, and chatterbox child, I was much too much for my stay-at-home and chronically depressed mother, whose mind always seemed elsewhere and who frequently wanted me to be elsewhere.

In 1947, in our small row house in Philadelphia, after lunch on an otherwise ordinary day, my mother ushered me upstairs to my bedroom. She pointed her finger at me and, with her you-better-do-what-I-tell you-or-else look, she commanded, Stay in your room. Take a nap or play quietly. Do not come downstairs until your father comes home.

I don’t know why she was so gruff with me. Maybe I ate the last banana without permission. Having delivered her instructions, she closed the door on her four-year-old daughter and went downstairs.

Feeling rejected, bored, and confused, but not tired, I sat on the floor with my Raggedy Ann doll and a puzzle box and scattered pieces on the braided rag rug. I undressed and dressed Raggedy Ann. I pouted. I looked around the room. Minutes dissolved.

Something strange is happening. Things look blurry. My room is moving. I hug Raggedy Ann, rub my eyes, and blink. The edges and corners of the room are vanishing. The walls and door curve inward. My bed is tipping, and the bureau is leaning toward me. The room is now round—like a big see-through ball or bubble. I am sitting very still on the inside bottom of the bubble. I only move my eyes. The walls of the bubble begin to peel away, like giant flower petals. Opening. I am dizzy, but not scared. Now, without moving, I am sitting on the outside top of the round room. I don’t want to let go of Raggedy Ann….

When my father came home from work,