Arol Wulf-Zendik

My Birthday

My birthday is always bittersweet. Wulf 's birthday was October 7, mine the 14th.  We celebrated both on my birthday, which he preferred.  So he and I, in so many ways, bound to each other, were also bound when it came to our birthdays!

Also, 8 years ago, on my birthday, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  I asked my doctor when  he called at 6:00 that evening, with the news, what my chance of survival was, he said, "very slim" .  When the woman in the lab  who took my blood that day realized it was my birthday, she said, "Oh, I'm so sorry, my dear".  Clearly, she felt it was an awful time to be tested for cancer.

On October 22, a week later, I was in surgery - 5 hours, successful, the surgeon felt, said he got everything. A few days later, the nurse came and told me that he was going to throw the book at me; as strong chemo as possible.  I thought, no way, and went to Mexico for post-op treatment and so far I'm alive!

My birthday is loaded with so much; love, loss, fear, terror, curiosity, pain and fun with my family and friends.  There's a tension in me till the day passes.  But on my birthday, this year, last week, I heard a rendition of the song, 'Autumn Leaves', by Eric Clapton that made me sob.  It was one of Wulf and my favorite love songs and I usually unconsiously start to sing it to myself around October.  We would also fool around with the song, for the kids' entertainment, singing it dramatically out loud to each other.

 

Thanks to Eric Clapton for a lovely rendition and beautiful guitar.  And thanks to my friend, Diane, on station WVMR for playing it that morning, not knowing what it meant to me.  I hadn't requested it!  So strange, but not;  she and I had shared so much when she lost her 17 year old son.  It was a long time for me to recover from her loss and she will never.  She'll learn to live with it, but never get over it.  I know a loss of a child will never be gotten over, but somehow one has to learn to live and go on for everyone and everything one loves and those who love you.

When I was diagnosed with cancer all I could think of was that it wouldn't be right for me to die, because my daughter had just lost her father a few years before and it would be too unfair, too cruel for her to lose both of us. 
That was my prayer, my focus, my meditation -- my will.  I went to Mexico for treatments that were not available to me here in the States.  I knew the doctor who had moved to Mexico in order to be able to freely use those treatments.  He has a 50% rate of success rather than the horrible low percentage here.  In Mexico I was treated like the sickness could be beaten. I wasn't sent into a cancer industry.

Yes, I eat organically; have for 50 years, garden organically; yes, I've lived a different life-style than most and, yes, I got cancer.  The organics and lifestyle helped protect me and pulled me through.  I'd be dead otherwise.  Not so strange, but research shows women get ovarian cancer after the loss of their husband and I am part of that statistic.

Shortly before the diagnosis, I had visited doctors and alternative healers, not feeling well, but no one caught it.  I had begun feeling sick and not right the last few months of Wulf's life, but I didn't go to get checked out, because I couldn't deal with anything wrong with me, when his life was soon to end and tending him was all I could handle.  I wanted my total focus on him.

After his death, I sought help, but again, no one caught it.  It's a tough one to find, buried deep in a woman's body.  It had been brewing a while and with his oncoming death, my mind/body went haywire and they removed a 2 lb. tumor, which luckily had not metastized, in other words, wasn't in my lymph.  The surgeon said it was "clean" and I attribute that to organics and lifestyle as a barrier against our poisoned enivornment, which kills so many. The poisons tend to store in the fatty internal tissues of our body, which means breasts, ovaries, liver, testes.etc.  In other countries, the medics try anything that might work, here there is chemo and radiation as the treatment of choice, which can kill in itself.

When this happened good friends told me to seek any treatment I believed in, whatever it was and I did and I am grateful to them for their encouragement.  I would say the same to anyone seeking help.  Do what  you believe will work -- listen to your heart, to your gut and it will lead you right.  It doesn't matter if it's chemo, radio-waves, listening to music, anything you feel good about.  A very good friend referred to the cancer as a phase, an interlude, and that also gave me hope to survive.

I understand that scientific researchers are beginning to feel the heart has as much to do with our reasoning as the brain, and we all know the gut does.  Strange, but not; when I was seeking help, a macrobiotic teacher I knew, read my palm and told me that I was lucky.  I had had that reading from other psychics in the past.  He showed me a break in my life-line, but that it picked up again and when cancer came, I hoped the readings were right and later I knew they were right.

I have so much to give thanks for, so many people -- from the fantastic surgeon, his great nurse, the doctors and nurses in Mexico, friends and family who helped me survive.  So much love I've been blessed with.  The poem that follows was written by my daughter, Fawn, for me on one of my birthdays.  I'm sharing it not because it's about me, but so you'll know about my daughter's love and she's just such a damn good poet!

                     a deep yellow center

                silver radiating out to black tips

         where stars dance and form fires of gold.

   Across these folds of color a sweet wind blows.

               Out of this land steps a princess,

                                 a warrior,

                                  a queen.

                    She holds the sun in her heart

                        and the wind in her hands.

           She shimmers with the colors of her land

                         and smells sweet of life.

                           I am lifted by the wind,

                              cradled by her arms

                          and warmed by her heart.

           Gently I am set down in that deep yellow center

                                   the fire sears my feet

                               there's fire in my heart.

                               I turn to run, to escape

                       and there washing over me are her eyes

                                               pure, clear

                                             cool blue eyes.

                                      Within me life balances

                                 and I no longer fear the colors.

                                     I hold the sun in my heart

                                     and the wind in my hands

                                                 and we turn

                                         and we walk her lands

                                                     of color

                                                      and fire

                                                      and wind

                                                        and life

                                       and she is my queen, my warrior,

                                                          my mother.

                                                                                  Fawn Wulf

                 

 

Vets Cry When Foals Die

 

Legacy died yesterday, October 11, 2010.

  Our little colt died yesterday and even vets cry when foals die.  He was 5 weeks old and his mother and we adored him.  To watch him run, play and little-horse prance up to you to be petted and loved was one of the joys of life.

Horses...... I've lost ones I've loved so much.  In over 50 years of raising and caring and burying beloved creatures, I'm still not used to it.  Instead of getting "realistic" and hardening towards the facts of sickness and death, I seem to grow more vulnerable.  I thought I'd never recover from the death of our draft horse, Martha and her little foal, or my dog Simba or cat Playa.  And I don't think I ever have.  They are part of me now, their Spirit lives on inside my body, soul and mind.  I've sung and written about them and I thought yesterday I wouldn't write about Legacy's death; but at 6:00 a.m. today there's nothing else to think or write about.  Tears fall, this morning, tears of loss.

Our vet, Dr. McHale, came out, said he didn't think there was a chance, but we felt to take him to one of the best equine hospitals in the world, the one in Blacksburg, Va, just in case there was a chance.  Arrangements were made and we transported him and his mommy 3 hours away for whatever slim chance there might be.  I watched him being loaded -- leg splint on his wounded leg, took 2 strong men to hold him for his shots, loaded fine -- alive and strong, not in bad pain yet  --  strong and beautiful and I knew there was a good chance I'd never see him alive again.  Surreal, but true.

 

"Less than 1% chance of survival", the vet said, there at Blacksburg, tears in her eyes at what the x-rays found.  Found what she hoped not to see, she said.  I can't help feeling again, as I write this, that some of the greatest people I've ever known are vets and pediatric surgeons.

They put him to "sleep""  --  he was already sleeping for the x-rays and to prevent the pain and suffering and eventual dying of the little one, if we didn't; we agreed it was best.

Oh, how many have I cried over -- I thought the tears were gone, but they started last night and I am still crying this morning and as soon as its' light, I'll go see his mother and hope that on the ride home with her dead little one, she processed that  he's gone.  11 months she was pregnant, 5 weeks she had him -- I've seen horse mothers cry for their babies, their little lost ones, whinnying and whickering and sighing for their baby for days and I've felt the pain all through me and do again.

Horses --  they mean so much to us.  Anyone who's grown close to a horse knows the peculiar way they get into your heart - different than dogs or cats, but the same intensity of love and pleasure and sometimes exasperation.  My daughter, Fawn, loves to train them, she finds so much pleasure in the connection between her and the horses. Watching her on her horse, Nipper and the dressage moves they do together is like hearing great music.  As far as myself, I've loved taming wild ones, without ever needing to be harsh, but communicate until the fear of humans is gone and the day they nuzzle me, I feel an emotion  that is a mix of love, respect and awe.  Honored that I'm being trusted by this now, once-wild creature.

Yes, General Robert E. Lee, loved his horse, Traveler.  The beautiful white horse brought him through a brutal war and I like that he got Traveler from a ranch in Lewisburg, West Virginia, a little ways from where I live.  And the story of Man-O-War, who ran when I was a child and the love so many felt for him, 'Big Red'; so much that when he retired, throusands of people turned out to cheer as he walked the track by himself -- his last hurrah!

The book, "King of the Wind", my most favorite as a young girl in New York, the big beautiful book my dad bought for me, which I pressed roses into and read to my children and granchildren and the James Herriot books (All Creatures Great and Small), a series about a vet and his experiences; the books beloved by my daughter and one of my grandsons.  The books of Maguerite Henry, Misty of Chincoteague, etc., which I read to my grandson last year.  These indelible stories and more about the creatures we share our lives with.

Yesterday was a sad day and today sadness and grief intermingle in the incredible dance of Life.

 

"Every moment is made glorious by the Light of Love."

Love-Making.......

"The way you make love is the way God will be with you."      - Rumi

 

I have been wanting to write this entry for quite a while and was reminded of that the other day while sitting in an office waiting for an appointment.  There was the magazine, Cosmopolitan, which I guess I really despise.  I feel it's a horrible rag that targets women and teaches them to be barely this side of hookers.     I remember when Helen Gurley Brown started the magazine after her book was a best seller.  She wanted to set women free from a certain sexual repression and bondage we had all been subjected to.  I thought at the time that was an admirable goal.  I never used to read it and still don't, just glanced through it most times.

Now I must admit, I cannot stand it.  It's pop, "fun" attitude is kind of sickening.  The pop emphasis on technique, using it to escape from the art of loving, leaves sex cold and frightening -- scary the next day or week or lifetime, wondering who you are and what you've been doing anyway.  And these magazines are being selected by our young women to learn what the "right" moves are and imitate it. 

I remember reading a teen magazine religiously when I was a teen-ager.  I agonized over having the right haircut, the right clothes, the right look.  Now our young girls have to agonize over the "right moves" as well.  What they cannot understand at such a tender age, is that under all the "fun" and "right moves" is rampant repression and fear  --  unresolved and untended --- ruining lives and destroying Souls.  What they cannot understand, is that in a culture where free sexuality is feared, there is a disgust with the sexual act and that leads to an absolutely shallow view of what sexuality really is.

I have much more respect for the fashion magazines and even the hard-core pornography magazines, which are what they are, without pretense at anything else.  Funny how modeling has turned into a soft-porn industry.  All the photo-shopping to fix up everyone, all the sexual attitudes to sell.  Of course, as they've always known in the advertising world, sex sells. 

Making Love is an art and like any artform where you are attempting to express your feelings. There are techniques that can make the experience more pleasurable, easier for you to express yourself.

 
But techniques can be learned through loving, just like the doing of any art.  You have to work in it, coming from your Soul, from your Need, from your feelings of Love and you, with a loving partner, will learn the techniques.  You'll learn them truly.  They will not be an overlay, they will not contain preconception.  You may have studied technique, but you can never achieve greatness without Love.  Love is the dynamic driving Force and it will bring you to any technique you may need.

'"Only love can Heal", Wulf wrote once, and only Love can bring us into the presence of the God-Force... the Divine Power that drives the Universe. 
And Love has no boundaries, no rules, no "right moves". Whether you love for an hour, a minute, a day, a week, a life time or forever, there is nothing to follow except your own drive for giving and receiving Love.

I guess what I'm trying to say, is the preoccupation of these women's pop magazines with sex are offensive to me, because they portray sexuality as merely actions and attitudes to do and do not bother with the holistic reality; which is that sex, love making, is part of Love  and one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful way, we can transcend ourselves and be with another human that is unavailable any other way.

We need to respect that, savor it, treasure it and not make light of the potential to understand and feel our religious Self.

 

"Sex is Love, or it's nothing.  It's not conquest, it's not achievement, it's not a contest.  It's Love, an exchange.  And love is a progressive thing, if you love something and you give it all your creativity, intellectual and emotional-sensual creativity, it expands, it keeps growing -- and so will your sexual pleasure."         Wulf Zendik          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Art and Sex Part 1

"I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty everyday, and if you can source your life from God's presence."   -   Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Thinking - at 3:00 a.m. should I publish this, is it anyone's business, what will they think of me and then finally, Miles Davis song "So What" takes away the fears.  Woke writing, writing in my mind, writing about my life in Art And Sex.

I was a virgin when I married at 18.  No one believed I was, but I was.  I always had a "look" they said, in my family and in the neighborhood and when I did a screen test in Hollywood years later, the producer, who ordered the test, had them do it again, cause,  he said, the cameraman hadn't caught my "look".  They did it again, and the "look" was there and I got the part in a hit series, but I met Wulf at the same time and ran off with him to his studio in the desert - to poverty and Love and great Art and away from fame and travel and money and I think my mother never forgave me and the big producer got pissed and told me I was an idiot.  But, you know, it was the greatest choice I ever made.  It saved my life.  At the crossroads, as the poet Robert Frost said, I chose the road less traveled and I'm told now in my 70's that I still have the "look":

What is the "look'?  Maybe it was called sexy, but I never played that game, have never "come-on".  I either was attracted or not.  I think the look is of a girl-child loved by her father and a girl/teen loved by her uncles and I think it's the look of a girl/woman who is at her ease with men and actually became great friends with her mate.  A woman who likes men and finds them odd and funny and exasperating and sometimes, scary and altogether lovely -- like gentle summer rain or a roaring, raging storm.  They are capable of both and I love them for it.  Except, let's face it, they shouldn't run the world without real women by their sides with equal say.  They've proven they are abysmal failures at that!

I was a tomboy when I was a kid, playing stickball and handball on the streets of New York City.  I was a nut baseball fan and can still tell you about the day the Brooklyn Dodgers lost to the Giants in the World Series when Bobby Thompson hit the home run in the ninth inning.  I cried for days and gave up baseball!  I was captain of the girls basketball team and loved playing soccer and when I dropped my teen-age grandkids off at the local football game the other night and saw that the whole town had turned out to cheer the team  on, I was so thrilled at everyone's support, you didn't get much of that as a kid in Brooklyn.

When I went to the Village in New York City, (Greenwich Village), the home to artists for generations, I was 19 and entered the world of artists (beatniks, they were called then) and really, I've never left.  I was with a man who was the inspiration of a character in Kerouac's "Dharma Bums".  It was he who introduced me to foreign films, jazz clubs, other artists, the famous beatniks, and the Village bars, the artist bars and the late night food  joints and we could drink and eat till 4:00 a.m. in New York City, go through the tunnel to Jersey City, keep drinking till 6:00 a.m. when those bars stayed opened, then head back to the city to continue.  Always with a gang of  writers, painters, musicians  and the women with them.  It was fun and kind of a haze and painful all at once.  I was learning to act at the same time, landing roles in off-Broadway plays learning to be an artist.

We were on a search with each other and the world and how to express what we were experiencing and feeling about the world and ourselves through Art and Sex.  Even the barfights, and they were real and crazy, were that frustration and longing for expression, though I, myself always hid in the phone booth or under the table when they happened!  My friend, then left for the west coast and friends he had out there.

It was shortly after this, I flipped out over my own sorrow, nothing to do with  him, but a serious flip.  The kind that found me laying on the sidewalks crying, the kind that found me brought home by various men, to sleep safe in their homes and sex was not sought from me, just protection and haven given to me, the kind of flip where I would walk into a restaurant and the women working there would feed me without charge, and the men who sold flowers would give them to me for my hair.  I wandered my city, unable to sleep, just feel.  And finally my friend's Mafia father and his friends came to my apartment, told me that my friend wanted me to come to San Francisco and get well and so they packed up my stuff and we drove through the city to the airport. 

i cried all the way through the city, saying farewell to the city of my birth, my family, who'd given up on me.  I was too scared to get on the enormous jet, so I got drunk and the guys, laughing, took out insurance on me (practical!) and off I went to a new life on the west coast.  To west coast jazz,, to cool, to wide beautiful skies; still crazy talking out loud to myself, wondering who's voice it was and discovering it was mine! To artists in North Beach and the Haight and the performances in theatres and eventually the National Theatre in Mexico City and to the plays of Garcia Lorca, then to New York City to a scholarship at the Actors Studio, living with a famous stage actress.  Art got me well, acting saved my life.  But flipping came back stronger and it was back to Los Angeles and there, in that insane barren land, of all places, met Wulf.

And now I hear from a wonderful young man - an artist who has been labeled, either by  himself or others, as a loser. And all artists and maybe all men, who aren't CEO's or movie or rock or sport stars, think they're losers.  And living in a competitive, immoral, hypocritical society are always going to feel bad if they haven't the ruthlessness, the lack of soul, the sublimation of the need for personal love, to fight for their small stardom.  And in the end, I must ask, what kind of human being are you, my friend, what kind of man - not winner or loser, but human being - what are you made of - who are you really in your heart, mind and soul, how do you help, how do you love.

There are no winners or losers in the Universe or on this planet we share - there is only the grand scheme of Love drive by eleMental energy, the energy that expresses who you are and  how you express that great energy;  expand and grow with the Divinity of Life or let Life shrivel and die in your competitive grasp.  I would say to my new friend, your pursuit of excellence is all there is and ultimately your pursuit should lead you to a Life of Excellence.  Art won't let you down if you let its' process take you, expand you and let  you become a Lover and Giver.  That is what great art does to you.  The work itself demands that of you.

A 'loser' is a morality judgment made upon yourself by an unloving, ungiving, culture.  A culture of war, greed, economic slavery, lies and pain and no winning for anyone.  Your relationships contain your Hope, that is your Soul-saving, that is the legacy you leave.  Don 't judge yourself by untrue standards.  Those standards keep you in distraction and bondage.  Go free of all that. One of the last things, my great love, Wulf ,told me a few days before he died, was, "have fun, baby, don't be bored."  It took a while to take the advice, but in it is the Great Loving Adventure of Life -  the Loving Force of what is known as God.

 

 

"I believe the practice of Art is a religious expression --- Art is Creativity; Aesthetics superimposed upon Imagination, powered by Will."              Wulf Zendik            

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

My "Office" During Harvest Season