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“For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”
Mary Oliver

When I return to the USA after spending time elsewhere, I’m often asked questions like: “Iceland, that must be a really different world! Do you get culture shock when you go there?” Well yes, it’s a different world. But the biggest culture shock usually hits when I return home.

When I recently came back to California after many weeks of living in Spain, the difference between Europe and here that struck me most was the American obsession with “winning.” Perhaps because it’s November, I thought. Somebody won the World Series, the elections are over, and now football commands attention. All opponents have been, or were being turned into, “losers.” Is there an insult more dreaded in our culture than “loser”?

So why, I wondered, did thoughts of winning and losing occur to me when I happened to be drawing flowers? I had bought them at a local market because their tall, slender shapes resembled trees. Also, I could see the roots! But they grew quickly and soon the stems would not support the weight of the flowers. Could I finish drawing before they began to droop?

How to pay homage to little, evanescent trees, to draw them accurately, not run a race with them? To pay attention is to search: Erasures, hesitations, mistakes are all part of the process. In this case, I “lost” the drawing. It’s only an echo. So here is the result of the process, the loss. The misdirections, uncertainties are all here, just as I made them.

And yet, the world is still full of doorways to temples, even ephemeral flowers that briefly resembled trees.

It is always a pleasure to arrive – anywhere – in Havana or Reykjavik, or Rome. It’s a special joy to arrive in Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. The city has welcomed me for more than 30 years. Of course, the opposite is also true; leaving is invariably sad. Especially when you say goodbye to friends.

What makes Valencia feel so open to foreigners like me? Diversity: every day in the streets and stores, you hear the languages of immigrants from China, Venezuela, Germany, Pakistan, Lithuania, Japan, Romania. And every day you encounter those immigrants while you are doing the most mundane things., like sharpening knives. For the past few days I have been saying goodbye to such friends, old and new, with the added sadness that these goodbyes might be the last. So farewell to:

Paco and Maye, my hosts for the last two months,
Álvaro, knife-sharpener without equal,
Chelo, expert herbalist, who also sells incense,
Jorge y Gustavo, brothers, in whose store I buy most of my brushes and colors,
Alen, who sells books, all in English,
Ibrahim, a clerk in my favorite bakery,
Elena, fellow artist, who owns the Black Light Gallery,
Soledad, another artist, and a kind, kind woman,
Esther, who makes photocopies when I need them, and
Victoria, the lady who plays her accordion on a windy corner in front of a bank.

There are more friends, but here space is short. I did not embrace and say goodbye to the person I most wanted to, Viviana. She’s an immigrant too, from Italy; Valencia is her new home. She and I never say goodbye.