Hope Comes

Spring comes to New York City

This week I will see spring twice. Spring is hope, like snow is joy. I always crave both. There was scant, only wet, evanescent snow in New York City (NYC) this year and I missed snow on Vinalhaven Island, Maine. At least in Maine, I know snow is a likely certainty to return. Snow is no longer a certainty in NYC. Despite climate change, the joy of snow is still a promise in Maine, at least for now and spring is still a certainty everywhere, bringing promises of joy along with hope.

I am witnessing spring now in NYC. By this weekend, I will be in Maine and witness it again on Vinalhaven. I hear from Daisy, my assistant there, that the purple crocuses are up. The highlight of spring in my Maine garden is my yellow Magnolia tree, planted thirty years ago as a test of global warming. In the first years, it struggled vulnerably in the chill Atlantic winds of my Zone 3 microclimate. My garden is now a robust Zone 5, reliably certain to provide a replacement for its original indigenous southern American habitat and has gained confidence and comfort on my land. It is part of my life there to watch these small changes over time and contemplate the implications to the soundtrack of seagulls and waves.

Still, it is no easy thing for me to anticipate leaving NYC, where I was born and feel so embedded in the urban rhythms of this unique island, so different from the island I’m headed towards imminently.

I have been telling people that I’m leaving because my numbers don’t add up. This country, this city, loves art but not its artists, at least not enough for most of us to make our numbers add up affordably in this great city which is still art Mecca. It wasn’t always like this. As a young artist, it was perfectly manageable. Rent was modest, jobs were plentiful, and food was cheap. Yes, there was crime but somehow it was all just fine. Now the mentally ill have been released to the streets, a homeless person stares desperately from every street corner, rents are impossible except in the outer boroughs and entry level jobs pay slave wages only an emerging artist with a trust fund or at least indulgent parents can contemplate signing up for.  

Particularly since COVID, the world has gone virtual. Half the world’s population has a cell phone and can engage in a brave new world culture in the palms of our hands from anyplace on the planet. Going to Vinalhaven isn’t really the cultural exile I fear, but it still feels wrenching and traumatic.

I was so focused on my numbers and the logistics about leaving NYC, that I didn't identify exactly what is so traumatic to me about leaving NYC, much as I love Vinalhaven and my life there, and even as much as I trust our brave new virtual world. It is the urbane aspect of urban life for which NYC feels like it is still the big apple. Urbane means sophistication and refinement. That is what is embedded in the rhythm of this city and available at every street corner. That is the lifeblood I thrive on, which peaks in the peerless urbane cultural life here.

I realized that from two things, 1. walking down Broadway: the latent excitement on city streets here that is part of the very air we breathe. Yes, some of it is hysterical but it's also real about being in this cosmopolitan city, even now, even after all the decades of change since the sixties. 2. As I packed my clothing, contemplating that famous Marie Kondo question, "does it give me joy?" I realized almost everything I've saved gives me joy but little of that wardrobe is wearable on Vinalhaven more than, arguably, once a year.  The long white cashmere dress, the pique cotton skirt, none of it will be normal in a quick trip to the local market or even to sing in the church, not to mention my wardrobe of winter coats. On Vinalhaven, a down jacket and a yellow slicker are all I need.

Leaving NYC isn't just about numbers or lifestyle, it's about my identity and spiritual life as a part of this great city saturated in sophisticated refinement, regardless of income, despite crime. I love this place like a lover and think I will need to find a way back, even if it does come down to numbers and even if those numbers may come down to the fickle unpredictability of the art market today, the one we still inhabit, a mirror of the class divisions and gaping income divides the whole society is suffering.  The prospect of occasional visits just looks like an unsatisfying long-distance relationship not only in mileage but socially. There was a time when creativity could leap the tall buildings of class divisions with a single bound. Not so much now.

It’s like having a husband and a lover. I just don’t know which is which, which I need most or even which I've chosen. I suspect I'm married to NYC and taking the risk of leaving it for my beautiful lover. But they each inhabit radically different worlds. Or do they?

I think my move reflects tectonic socio-economic shifts that the whole world is experiencing. We don’t yet know where or how the dust will settle. Will virtuality truly homogenize our opportunities for cultural participation? How much is value of the physical sensation of standing before great art in real time? Of being in the audience for a new production of Tosca? I know standing in my garden and inhaling the fragrance of spring at seaside cannot be captured on a smart phone. Moving from place to place without a cratering carbon footprint is not yet an option.

So this week I will choose the island. I will stand in the paths I carved out from degraded land, devastated by sheepherding and granite quarrying thirty-two years ago, two years before my yellow magnolia took root as a tiny, hopeful sapling. I will continue to ponder these questions as I contemplate the sweet buds of spring. The island is facing change as much as anyplace on the Earth. Not only are seasons changing, but the fisheries that have defined the livelihoods of residents are floundering in the shoals of warming waters, over-fishing and pollution. The island is struggling on the throws of change as much as anyplace, even as much as NYC. I know I will still, however find certain familiar cornerstones of a life I cherish there: the incandescent light, the fragrances of each time of day in each season and in each kind of weather, the hypnotic movements of the tides.

Change is wrenching. Recently, a friend said to me that the thing about one door closes and another opens is that it’s hell in the hallway. Climate change is wrenching the whole world. But spring is still a door that opens on hope.

Even as spring heralds change that is perennial and reliable across the planet, the world is changing in new, unpredictable and often alarming ways. Life on the island is the frontline of a more subtle change than the one I’ve watched in NYC or even the one the whole world is watching in horrified transfixion in Ukraine. It is another facet of international change, nonetheless as inexorable as the changes we all began to inhabit that COVID presaged. Humans have changed the world and now the world is changing our experiences of being human. Spring in NYC or Vinalhaven or Ukraine are each framed by dramatically different experiences of life now, the flowers in each place adorn very different kinds of frontlines, with different loyalties and implications, different violence, griefs, and tragedies alongside the beauty of each single blossom. Odessa was where my father was born in Ukraine. Ukraine rarely leaves my awareness now, shadowing spring wherever I am. Away from NYC, my heart will always yearn for the visceral connection I feel to the city’s familiar cadences. from the frontlines of a remote fishing island off the coast of Maine where climate change is threatening the lifestyles of generations of fishing families. Despite my grief over leaving NYC, my heart beats faster as it anticipates my yellow Magnolias. Lover vs. husband, nature vs. culture, rural vs. urban, metaphor vs reality are all the paradoxical layers and complex connections between pieces of the mosaic of life now for me, for others where hope and grief can flow in the same river of life, flooding the hallways between doors of change. There will be more to be revealed. I suspect we will find a lot of virtual connectivity in those hallways. But we have all seen that virtuality can’t promise anything, least of all utopias of certainty and hope. Whether the future hallways we traverse will drown or nourishes us all is yet to be learned, perhaps, yet to be shaped.