Maybe this is a clue:

Recurrent dream of familiar house with so many unfamiliar rooms! Astounded by so many unknown possibilities. The original house was reminiscent of Knollbrook Way home when I was a teenager.

Was this the storehouse of who I am, who we are?

Who do I think I am vs who I can or could be? Or am simultaneously?

A friend asked how would I define intuition. I think it draws from this “house” full of experience/possibilities. When I go back to recreate past experiences, they shed light on the past or my memory of the past. When I share with my sister, she doesn’t remember it like that. When discussing intimate thoughts with another friend, she says she could never go there. Maybe in other words she could not enter that house. Her pain is too deep and she refuses to go there? So can we only intuit if we allow ourselves to go there. We know some people have extensive intuition. Is that what they are born with or where they allow themselves to go? Women are sometimes credited with greater intuition. This is sometimes seen in our favor and sometimes used against us by those who want to just stick with the facts.

The ability to move from reality/the visible or that which can be proven by acceptable knowledge, to let’s say dreamlike sensibility, is that related to gender, dna, culture? Pessoa probably had a strong feminine side as do many poets I suppose but let’s not go too far astray at this moment.

I know I have always been fascinated by the notion of simultaneous realities and as in Alice in Wonderland, the potential to travel between them. (Wind Up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami?) I imagine a thick fog obliterating the lines between simultaneous worlds. I feel this aligns a bit with Jung’s travel to the unconscious and many ideas of dream reality. There was also that dream of entering a room and tripping on a rug, plunging into a dark hole. I repeated that dream numerous times., same door, same hole. I remember my repeated dream of the Hotel Imperial on the Reforma of Mexico City (before I ever saw it in real life) in search of my ex husband (the past) and the University (knowledge?) always in vain. Many other dreams that seemed so real I wondered if the people involved remembered them as well. They were meaningful and transforming. 

So what is the reality of this moment? Of last night’s dreams?
Where does intuition come from? We say I feel like… is true. Maybe it’s all true.


Countless lives inhabit us.
I don't know, when I think or feel, 
Who it is that thinks and feels. 
I am merely the place
Where things are thought and felt. 


Fernando Pessoa

Image of Empire of Lights by René Magritte—Rene Magritte painted this house over 30 times, each slightly different. Did he have the same dream I had? And is this his mystery house?

National Autonomous University of Mexico that was in my dream

Hotel Imperial on Reforma in Mexico City that I dreamed before ever seeing it. Attempting  to understand my past and pursue knowledge?

After a nice pre-Christmas visit, my son and his family, who live in Sebastopol, took advantage of being in the Oakland–Berkeley area to visit one of their favorite pizza places. While there, he sent me a photo of a picture displayed at Zachary’s Pizza on College Avenue near the Rockridge BART station.

“Look who is here,” he wrote.

He had mistaken the figure in the picture for Fernando Pessoa, and when I saw it, I understood why. The resemblance was striking. But tipped off by the bowler hat (Pessoa always wore a fedora) and the red tie (far too extravagant for Fernando), I recognized the man as René Magritte — another favorite of mine.

Magritte famously questioned the nature of what we see reproduced versus the real object itself: the reality of what we think we see versus the thing’s own reality. His best-known example is the painting of a pipe accompanied by the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe — “This is not a pipe.”

As the curator of an SFMOMA exhibition explained, “the canvas highlights the fact that the viewer isn’t looking at a pipe, but a picture of a pipe. Far from a petty provocation, the distinction gets at the difference between art and reality.”

That idea reappears elsewhere in Magritte’s work, particularly in paintings that show scenery framed by a window. I’m reminded of something similar in the paintings of Antonio Costa Pinheiro, especially those depicting Fernando Pessoa. In both cases, I find myself wondering whether the act of framing a subject — a statue, a ship, a person — subtly removes it from reality. Does a frame announce: this is not the thing itself, but your interpretation of it?

Magritte was influenced by the Surrealists in Paris and moved from Brussels for a time to immerse himself in the movement. Yet a certain rigidity within Surrealism eventually sent him back to Belgium. He was also deeply affected by the stark, minimalist works of Giorgio de Chirico. That economy of detail, along with their shared metaphysical concerns about reality, is evident in much of Magritte’s work.

So Fernando Pessoa and René Magritte, de Chirico and, most likely, Antonio Costa Pinheiro — without conspiring — were drawn to the same question: reality versus the ways our interpretations shape it. For all of them, I suspect, the answers lay within the mind, and they remained in constant pursuit of some ultimate truth.

As curator Caitlin Haskell writes in the SFMOMA catalogue, Magritte “asks viewers to reevaluate their acceptance of what they see… and as rapidly improving technology amplifies our ability to realistically distort images, it’s more important than ever to consider what is a pipe, and what’s not.”

I find myself agreeing with Magritte’s doubts — that the world as we see it differs from what we are told we see through replication. Is that too strange a thought? I remember once asking my mother whether the reflection we see in a mirror is the same as how others see us. She didn’t want to deal with that question. I still raise it from time to time, though not too often — largely in the interest of keeping the peace.

It may be true that you can never go back to a place because the past is the people and the experiences more than the physical landscape. 

When it all changes, what is left? Only the memories interpreted by our current minds? 

I write to remember those illusive passages of time only to find they may exist only inside me. The one who experienced them. 

Maybe life is not what we live but what we imagine we have lived.

People we knew either don’t exist or exist without any recognition or memory of us. Is that why we can never find them? 

Perhaps you have to write about them to find them. Then maybe they will remember. Kind of like putting out photos on Day of the Dead but they may not be dead, just missing.

I do indeed look for people I think about from the past but as the world has become almost entirely digital, many people seem to have disappeared from view. 

I did find someone who I thought of yesterday. I was encouraged by a line and link from an article I wrote a few years ago titled My Love Affair with Mexico wherein I mentioned a trip my first husband and I took with his brother and sister in law to Mexico. 

Completely out of the blue we hooked up with two young men from the east coast who agreed to travel with us to Mexico City sharing expenses. One of them, Tony Kahn, made a huge impression on me and at the time I wrote the article I looked him up and found him. I had included a link to his website in my article. 

Tony who had been working on his doctoral thesis on Trotsky in Mexico at Harvard when I met him, documented his and his screen writer family’s experiences during the McCarthy era in the United States. His fathers name was Gordon Kahn. He was a very highly regarded and popular screen writer until the House of Un-American Activities got very busy on their mission to “so-called” cleanse the film industry of supposed communist elements. By the way, we are talking such subversive films as Tarzan! 

I revisited the program Blacklisted by Tony Kahn yesterday and was so impressed both by the family’s resilience and Tony’s detailed and personal  telling of the story that I highly recommend your following this link to discover what destruction so many people experienced due to the relentless persecution of innocent people during the anti Communist scare of the 50’s. Many of us read and heard of what was going on as children and were frightened by the propaganda spread on the radio during the period however the detailed personal suffering of the victims was not presented nor understood by us.

https://www.tonykahn.org/blacklisted

Tony addresses the ostracism and fear experienced by his family in school or anywhere in public as well as the economic hardship suffered due to not being allowed to work once targeted by the McCarthy war of terror on members of the film industry and later universities and other influential  organizations. Once a happy, comfortable family of four, they became hated “commies” in the US and unwanted “Gringos” in  their adopted home in Mexico. That is a lot for a family to endure.

The story is eye opening and tragic and yet told without bitterness.

Gordon Kahn was loyal and committed to truth and to revealing the truth throughout his short life. His only goal was to provide for his family and uphold his values even when faced with such adversity. Five foot two and 120 pounds, no bigger than I am, he was a giant in his support of democracy and freedom of thought and expression.

Today I read in the news that the FBI under the Trump regime is making a list of all left “extremists” in the United States. I guess that means anyone who has participated in an anti war protest, rally to raise wages, against unwarranted police brutality, etc.
Well I guess that is me and I am quite proud of it.
Is this here we go again?


Quote of praise of the project:

With an all-star cast including Stockard Channing, Eli Wallach, Ron Leibman, Carroll O‘Connor, Jerry Stiller, and Julie Harris, "Blacklisted" used the power of radio to immerse listeners in the experience of the political and personal dramas of the time.  Featured in articles by Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post, “Blacklisted”was also praised by many listeners as one of the most riveting radio dramas they had ever heard.

In 1973, when Guadalajara still had spacious edges and room for dreams, we discovered a little paradise taking shape just beyond its northern limits. Bosques de San Isidro was not yet the sprawling suburb it would eventually become. Back then, it was a family-guided vision — the work of the gracious and imaginative Ramírez family — and those of us who joined it felt as though we had stepped inside a small, private world.


My husband was Mexican, and through our circle of friends we came to know the Ramírez family well. They were warm, cultured people who welcomed everyone with a natural ease. Señora Ramírez herself shaped much of the landscape of the golf course — eighteen beautifully sculpted holes that followed the natural lay of the land, woven into the hills and creeks. She created something more like a garden than a golf course: elegant, quiet, and profoundly human.


When our daughter was born in 1973, we often drove out to San Isidro with her — a tiny baby nestled beside us — and each time the place felt a little more alive. A modest house for Bing Crosby was being built then: simple, tasteful, nothing ostentatious. Behind it, an amphitheater was taking shape, intended for the music of Pablo Casals. It sounds almost mythic now, but at the time it fit perfectly with the spirit of the place — a community where art, friendship, and landscape all intertwined.


Crosby’s involvement, I later came to understand, may have helped secure the financing that allowed the early years to flourish. After his death in 1977, the strain on the bank loan created troubles that eventually pushed the Ramírez family to relocate to Tijuana. But during those bright early years, none of us knew that. We were simply living our days in a joyful rhythm.


And what days they were.


The men often disappeared onto the golf course for hours, following the curves of those eighteen lovingly designed holes. The clay tennis courts were always alive with motion, the soft sound of play punctuated by young boys darting across the surface to chase down stray balls. The moms and children gathered around the pretty round pool encircled by bougainvillea and bright flowers — a ring of color that seemed to glow in the warm Guadalajara light. It was a safe, happy world where children were free and laughter came easily.


After long afternoons of sun, play, and visiting, we all drifted toward the little clubhouse. It was not grand — just comfortable and full of charm — and it became our evening gathering place. Meals were shared, music flowed, and sometimes someone would start dancing. It didn’t need planning; it was simply how the evenings unfolded, naturally and warmly, among friends who felt like family.


We continued to visit Crosby’s house even after he passed away, because a member of the Ramírez family lived there. It remained exactly what it had been planned to be: a simple, graceful place that fit the land and the spirit of San Isidro.


By 1978, our time at Bosques de San Isidro was coming to a close. Many things had changed — the Ramírez family was relocating, and the wider world was encroaching on the quiet paradise we had loved.


But in my heart — and in the memories of all who lived it — Bosques de San Isidro remains what it once was: a brief, shimmering paradise. A place shaped by good people, good will, beauty, and possibility. A place where families gathered, children thrived, music played, and friendships deepened under the bougainvillea and the warm evening lights.


And perhaps what shines brightest now, all these years later, are the evenings we spent with our Mexican friends — the warmth of their welcome, the easy humor, the tacos passed around with laughter, and the music that always found its way into the night. Sometimes a small band would appear, and often our architect friend brought out his guitar. He would coax us to sing, and I, who was not inclined to put myself forward, somehow found my courage there. I would sing Yesterday — the one song I trusted myself to remember and I guess an appropriate one for my memories — and they received it with such affection and delight that I felt not like a visitor, but like one of their own.


That is the heart I carry from those years: not only the beauty of the place, but the generosity of the people who opened their circle to us. For five unforgettable years, it was our refuge, our joy, and our little paradise on the edge of a changing city — made luminous by landscape, friendship, and the gentle gift of belonging.