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Make Caridad Great Again!!!

Thank you for visiting www.talkinggrid.com! After a long silence, a long hiatus, a more mature, seasoned, understanding of reality is set to grace this rendezvous space, this on-line location, which you have come to cherish as you would an open home where celebrating life is the priority and a buoyant voice forever welcomes you.

Hello, Old Friend!  So much has happened since we last met.  Sit down.  Kick back.  There is a feast about to be served.  I’m cooking up new stories for you. I wanna nourish your soul and feed your mind with what is possible, probable, and sustainable.  Let’s eat up healthy ideas and look to build a world where love rules our actions and defines our conduct.  We decide, the quality of our lives, daily we dictate the direction our lives will take with the way in which we approach living.  Never shrug off the responsibility you have to create the world that you aspire to living in.  We must shoulder creation, since we are the ones informed and blessed by the capacity and responsibility to make of the world we inherit into a garden of earthly delights.  The culinary arts, agriculture, theater, fashion, and film all flow from creative souls who sculpt the edifices of culture which will house the findings of future seekers.  We must continue our studies, enhance our experiments, combine our wits to make a world we can all find a place, a point, a parcel, and an acreage of love.

I am part of a circle of creatives, artists, that are ever ready to expand your world, with their fascinating insights into Art, Music, Spirituality, and Political Healing, taking you to the edges where the art world and reality kiss each other and keep moving.  I come to you with mastery of “The Vacation Approach,” my way of making it from one day to the next, making the most of my time, and resources.  I have living insights from, “Cancer with Style,” my second unpublished private handbook for getting on with the business of life, despite setbacks, obstacles, which I will share with you from time to time. (I might even publish some of my new poems and art works here.  Image that!)

The staggering health challenges and the blessings that come with suffering have proven to be a portal to my higher self.  Death almost ended my musings on art and culture, living and loving, my travel plans, and the perpetual discovery mission I’ve embarked upon, a year ago.  It has been one year since my last post.  Only today, did I feel strong enough to write to you again and reinstate my wish to inform and entertain.

Mr. Skip Snow, a full time art machine, promises to write to us about the shifting models of the museum level art gallery scene, in Los Angeles, a city we know too well, but eludes comprehension. The  Talking grid’s Music Specialist, Joe Rez, promises to take us to the Guns and Roses concert and show us why Axel, ain’t dead yet.  The Music Specialist, is also an expert on Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture Master, so don’t be surprised as Talkinggrid becomes, even more reliably, a source of healing for your wounds, aches, and pains. Since this is one with our intention, to heal you with love, laughter, music, art, travel, thereby reminding you of all that makes life a delight.

The Muse, New Mexico based, inspiring beauty and travel guru, Ms. Crane and Mr. Finehouse, concert pianist living in Boston, are sure to chime in from time to time with reports from the frontiers of Food, Art, Social issues, and Music. The Scientist (my husband) Dr. Hartmuth Kolb, may feel compelled to share his latest recipe for bread or holographic 3-D printer projects.  We all want to learn from him, since he is so very knowledgeable.   I plan to venture to an art show or two, including a group show in New York, sometime in October.  Adventures beckon, creativity calls, and you are invited to take a seat at this long and commodious table, laden with possibilities.

 

So  much may happen yet some of it depends on you.  You have donated to this open mission before, do so again.  Thank you so much for your previous donations, don’t forget that without your donations, comments, and general interest this show won’t shine.  The plea is that you put your money into activities and individual projects, ours and others, that mean the world to you.  Endorse with your attention and time, that which puts a smile on your mouth, in your eyes, and in your heart.

Thus:

Make Caridad Great Again

by Donating to Talkinggrid.

So simple!

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Nude Women in Hot Water

 

You walk down a long hall, that until recently was decorated with small golden lacquer plates sporting swirling calligraphy on scrolls, on which Chinese characters proclaim: LOVE, Friendship, and Happiness.  Yesterday, the plates were not up on the long narrow hall.  The wall was freshly painted, but not wet, with tape indicating that a transformation is in progress.

At the Olympic Spa, they are forever improving the facilities, expanding and refining their vision yet retaining the same staff, the same treatments, and best-of-all the same affordable pricing.  I have visited this Spa for over five years, almost six…  The first time I visited, I had a small lump in my breast, which I did not yet know was cancer. As I discovered that I had a serious medical obstacle before me, the nurturing, meditative bathing, and social silence of the spa became a haven for my battered body.

The location was less sleek, smaller, just the core rooms of wet tubs, treatments.  No big salt sauna, or fancy bathrooms… just a little restaurant that looked like communist era, in a far away land… it was a trip, from the first dip, to another world.

Lucky Number 23, photo ©Frau Kolb, 2012, at Olympic Spa in Los Angeles
Lucky Number 23, photo ©Frau Kolb, 2012, at Olympic Spa in Los Angeles

The front desk is manned by two or three pretty Korean women.  They smile as you approach and inquire if it is your first time.  If you nod, “yes.” They will explain to you what is to be expected and walk you through the basic etiquette, which ensures that Olympic Spa is a pleasure for everyone that visits.  Unless, perhaps, you are Frau Kolb, they know YOU from a half decade of faithfully enthusiastic patronage of the well run business.  You pay your fee, sign the liability waiver, and you can come in and use all of the facility for a mere $15.00, that is an outstanding value.  Sure the outside of the building is beat-up, the neighborhood is ethnic funky, which I LOVE, and it is NOT Santa Monica.  Nope.

You enter, past the thick double doors which represent the outside world of stress, obligations, and competition, into a structured world of self care, reflection, wet meditation, sweat therapy, and enforced gentle voices… AH!  You put your street shoes in a locker and then proceed in your socks or bare feet to the larger lockers for clothing.  You put away your things and put on a green Olympic Spa robe and then you walk over to the big scale, take your weight, maybe… or you get yourself a cup of barely tea from the urn, and eye the Korean women laying languidly on the jade floor, next to the equally lovely Scandinavian Blonds that speak gently among themselves.  Now it is time for the baths!

Selfie in The Mirror at the Olympic Spa in Los Angeles.
Selfie in The Mirror at the Olympic Spa in Los Angeles.

Pull open the door and take off your robe.  No robes are worn in the bath.  Now you must clean your body before you get into any of the pools, steams, or saunas.  YOU wash.  I like to squat on the little plastic seats and douce myself with water from the traditional long tub of hot water.  I use the little mitts, I purchased for a couple dollars at at the front desk and scrub myself.  Around me women are quietly letting go of burdens, pain, anger… negativity is scrubbed off and washed down the drain. Others shower, before going into the bubbling warm tub, or the healing medicinal Mug Wort Tea, bath in which up to four or five women, quietly group.

Frau Kolb after a super hot soak and scrub!
Frau Kolb, feeling rejuvenated, after a super hot soak and scrub!

I always get the same treatment, The Milk and Honey Smoothie, which begins with having milk, which exfoliates the skin, poured onto one’s horizontal body on a padded table made specially for SPLASH and SCRUBBING. The treatment includes a fresh cucumber face mask and peppermint hair shampoo. Toward the end honey, which nourishes the skin is applied and rinsed off with bails of hot HOT water.  The scrubbing is intense and when I first experienced it, I was overwhelmed and surprised, never having been scrubbed so fiercely or felt so babied since… well… EVER!

I always request this head to toe, Milk and Honey Treatment from the same woman, one among perhaps twenty that work giving bath treatments, she is my favorite.  We connect.  She cares for me, and was/is part of my self care routine and even though she speaks little English I know she has an adult son of whom she is very proud and that she has worked at the Olympic Spa for almost thirty years.  She looks so young, fit, and content in her black bra and panty set, which is the uniform of the women that work, scrubbing and massaging tired mothers, sisters, wives, waitresses, lawyers, and doctors… all the women require nurturing and carving out time to take care of the self is essential to preserving mental equilibrium and personal power.

Once, I went alone to the spa, and my Korean friend was there on her day off, bathing.  We scrubbed each other’s backs, like old friends, laughing.  Another time, I visited with The Muse.  As usual I had the Milk and Honey Treatment and we soaked together in the Mug Wort tea pool, which is the smallest of the three in ground pools which are at the heart of the complex.  The Muse, quickly found her own favorite treatment, she swears by the facials given at the spa.  After our treatments we lounged on the heated jade floor, whispering to each other… before we roused ourselves to lunch, the restaurant being pretty delicious! Look here:

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The Olympic  Spa is traditional in the best sense of the word in that it upholds the tradition of Asian communal bathing and presents it in a way that is accessible to the savvy women of Los Angeles.  The Olympic spa is for women only.  You are welcome to come and relax and women of all types, ages, shapes, and sizes share space and bathe, together.  One avoids starring at others but it is comforting to see the variety of physical forms femininity manifests itself.  Women are universally beautiful if you look at them through a cloud of steam and from the vantage of your own unclothed vulnerability.