Clearing

Clearing away clutter in our study this morning, I came across a packet of old photographs and report cards my mother had given me some time ago, and discovered one of my favorites among them.






















The excitement I felt as a brave four-year-old climbing atop a pony for the first time I can feel even now, fifty-one years later. How many suburban children of my generation knew this pleasure, made more real in its photographic commemoration?

Seeing our yard in Baton Rouge also brings back vivid memories of going outside to play in the morning, returning at lunch for fuel, and eagerly zipping back outside to play some more, digging with a spoon in dirt, making mudpies, exploring the ditches for tadpoles and frogs, stirring the street's hot asphalt bubbles with a stick, running back to the house to plead for a nickel to buy ice cream from the passing musical truck, tagging along with my older brother, observing his games with his friends. We didn't have television yet.

My mother sometimes caught me after lunch, made me lie down to nap, and I can remember measuring my breath against hers, watching her fingers tap out (seemingly unconsciously) piano tunes on the bedspread, her eyes shut, wondering how I could possibly sleep, with Mother saying "Just be still for a while," and then finally taking her advice and falling into a slumber, riding into the sunset on my painted pony.

Sinkyone Wilderness

A friend and I drove down to the Sinkyone Wilderness, about four hours from here, in Mendicino County, California, a lovely place to hike, with elk roaming about but no bears, only marauding chipmunks that chewed up part of a peach we left out on our picnic table. The herd is seen here at dusk, bedding down. After clicking on the photo to enlarge it, notice the nursery of small ears in a grouping, and then some adolescent ones in another huddle.






This is the vast view beyond the herd.













And here's a proud male, looking quite ridiculous to me, but clearly feeling powerful and bold in his leafy headdress, which he hopes will catch some strong female's eye. . .














The visitors' center there, where friends are hosts for a while this summer, is named for Needle Rock.

















Part of me likes to see nature consuming industrial remains, another part feels this poor tree must have indigestion.

Movie-Watching Again

MRS. PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT is a rich, beautiful film, full of the sadness of a life lived fully yet coming to its end, in contrast with that of a young person trying to find a way to live. (It's based on a novel by British author Elizabeth Taylor, which I've not read but plan to.)

I'm at the odd mid-point in life ("odd" only because I'm in it and if we pretend for a moment to view it linearly with an assumed quota of years), a tipping point of sorts, moments of youthful yearnings juxtaposed with longer periods of dealing with my own demise, and so this movie made me tearful as I considered the poignancy of the unexpected and undeserved generosity of relative strangers.

Who ever thinks of strangers as generous. Instead, people tend to fear those they don't know, ever believing the weird media accounts to be indicative of the entirety of humanity (except ourselves, of course). When a kindness is shown, it's inspiring to us all.

Addicts of Ideas

To continue my thinking on When enough is enough, I'm aware that our consumer-culture encourages, first, our identification with THINGS in order to keep us buying them, of course, but it also has commodified ideas, so that people identify with their collections of ideas, of how much they perceive they know, of how many diplomas they have displayed on their office walls, of the lists of books they've read, music they know. . . all of which is ego-driven behavior, designed to have us identify with this fiction we create called "I." And, of course, the creation must be ongoing, so that one NEVER has "enough" of anything, and the comparisons and competition are neverending. Perhaps this is one reason the proliferation of easily-accessed information via the Internet is so popular. One feels powerful to be in control of so much knowledge, as if the person who accesses it has somehow internalized it, has become this wealth of information, and thus is also powerful.

How good it feels to step outside of this ever-striving behavior, to simply BE and enjoy our lives.

And how much better life could be if more people would step outside of their little self-creations they tend so carefully and take long walks in the woods, wearing paths of care and observation into the thickets, clearing their minds of the brambles and briars of ego, taking adventures into the unknown moment.

A Daily Dose of Beauty

In Wolf Hardin's latest essay, Nonsensical Economy & Champion Greenbacks, he states that

I believe I’d really have enjoyed being alive at an earlier date when both words and money were spent carefully, when meaningful conversation was of more importance than accumulation, when free time for having fun was seen as more valuable than owning more toys, when a good friend was considered worth more than a thousand investors, love more precious than gold and one’s word more bankable than a lawyer-penned contract.

Some of us try to live our lives honoring these values today, but it's true that our culture in general doesn't encourage our doing so, instead pressuring us on all sides to live our lives as shallowly and fleetingly as possible, paying more attention to things than to our loved ones or our own welfare or the source of all we are, Earth and Spirit. Yet people like to rebel against the expected, no matter their age, so maybe in such a spirit more and more will begin to raise their fists against this kind of wasteful, thoughtless living, to take time to connect with others beyond the surface, and to create meaning and beauty in their daily lives. Though it may not change the world, it will make our own lives more pleasant, and it can't hurt!

Enough

We modern folk often create goals as merely shiny gold stars to mark our "progress" in life, when all we are really doing is collecting marks on a page, forgetting to notice the day-to-day beauty and meaning in our lives, and instead continually focusing on what's next.

As a young child, I remember loving the unexpected, but I didn't think I always needed to orchestrate it, I simply needed to be open to it. I played outside, poking around with a stick, turning over leaves, digging in dirt, discovering delight in what some might call the ordinary.

After starting school and becoming more enculturated, I came to realize that this sort of piddling play isn't valued much. To make "progress," I had to have something to show for it. Thus, the question formed and has been repeated over and over again in my life and in ripples throughout our culture: When is enough, ENOUGH?

Such a Relief

All this hoopla about my health has been suddenly released by one telephone call from my doctor, telling me to celebrate; I'm fine.

So now these pains I have are just that, not some indication of impending doom, but merely the aches and pains of a woman who is aging normally, dying slowly, as we all are.

I took our two dogs for a long walk to the ocean this morning, sat to watch the waves, listen to the sea lions barking, hitch my sight on soaring sea gulls. Later, Jon and I picnicked in our back yard and I took a nap in the hammock while he worked on a redwood carving of a whale.

I'm no longer waiting.

Waiting Again

No number of lists can make someone who is depressed care a whit whether anything is ticked off or not.

At the small hospital yesterday where a radiologist did a needle location procedure on my breast, inserting a long needle with a wire into it, then taking two mammograms, looking at them, and coming back four times to readjust the needle and take two more mammograms (and then, because my head was in the way for one and the technician forgot to put in film for another, re-take two of those eight (?) mammograms----I began to lose count), I finally was wheeled in to have the incisional biopsy done, which at that point, I looked forward to because I felt absolutely traumatized by all that squeezing and needling. Think of it. Just a mammogram is bad enough (especially if your breast is tender, anyway), but with a needle poking out in addition to that? Torture. The only way I could deal with it was to keep focused away from what was happening, to basically give up my body to the two nurses and the doctor who came in and out after studying the location of the needle on the film. His aim was finally perfect, as he showed me the image of the needle just touching the little wire marker that'd been left there from an earlier procedure, and he then injected some blue dye to guide the surgeon's blade. At no time did I dwell on the fact that this is MY BREAST with a needle in it they're looking at. I actually told the doctor that it looked perfect. It all seemed rather absurd.

In the times I've been anaesthetized, I always like to try to anticipate when I'll "go under" before the weird waking up (which seems like moments later) in the recovery room. It never fails that I think it's not going to work, that they'll begin cutting on me and I'll still be awake, but then----I'm gone. All I remembered this time after that initial doubt is my thought (upon being rudly awakened by a nurse calling my name) that I was in a huge blue field.

The dreaded procedure is behind me, so now I'm waiting for the results, which I should know sometime next week.

Don't Worry; Have a Cup of Tea

In the novel INTO THE FOREST by Jean Hegland, two young sisters who are the primary characters finally begin to explore, collect, and use wild foods after civilization has collapsed. Depressed at her accurate depictions of human nature, I'd put the novel down for a while. Hegland portrays a world not very different from the one where we live, and when the sisters had finally used their last tea bag and began drinking merely hot water with the dust of tea leaves from the bottom of a box, I'm internally screaming at them to go outside and pick some blackberry leaves for tea, until finally, which is what kept me reading, they begin to open up to the wealth of what nature can offer. They didn't hear me screaming, though; it was a book of their mother's that saved them.

The more I learn about how much industrialization has poisoned our food and air and water, the more sad I become. I watched a PBS piece recently on honey bees' demise, and learned that if the current trend continues, in only 25 years or so there will be NO bees. . . no pollination of over half of the flowers that produce the wealth of fruits and vegetables we enjoy. . . no honey. . . no beautiful bees.

Bruce Cockburn expresses my sadness in the most poignant song, "The Beautiful Creatures Are Going Away." I cry every time I listen to it and feel absolutely powerless.

Indian Pipe

Our dear friends who were here visiting with us last week after having driven all the way from Atlanta, Georgia, hiked with us in the forest, and Tom spotted and identified this little native wildflower, Indian Pipe (also known as Corpse Plant), which doesn't contain chlorophyll, as you can see, but is instead a parasite. I may not have noticed it on my own, even though it's one of the many wildflowers pictured on the poster hanging near me now, "Wildflowers of the Redwood Forest," because most of the ones we saw were beneath the redwood sorrel, hiding their little piped bodies in the cool darkness like tiny plant-vampires, pale and fragile-looking.

Having moved here from my native South a year ago now, I realized how much more grounded I felt when our friends were here with us, and how often I've felt as if I'm floating here. But more and more, Jon and I are sending our own shoots out and down, stabilizing ourselves in the forests and on the Pacific beaches here, in our little gardens by our house, getting to know the names of our neighbors and plants, weaving our own webs of stability we call home.