sidewalk-henge

at a certain time of day, the shadows that fall from the southeasterly sunrise across the somewhat-elevated sidewalk behind our house line up just exactly right with the angles of wide concrete pavement and granite-pebble landscaping and the gully on one side. and for however long the sun and earth match up that way, we get to watch a shadowy parade of me with the pugs, walking with perfect balance on the top of the shadow of the earth against itself. 

I suppose the conditions for this must happen at least twice in a day, whatever times those may be depending on the time of year and the slant of the earth's axis. in the mornings, lately somewhere near 8:00 a.m. or so, the shadows slant northwest. we don't often walk that path during the other half of the day, but I imagine in the early evenings the shadows must slant more to the northeast.   

so what? 

 

it is a thing to notice. a small event-thing among many other variously-shaped event-things. 

I haven't bothered photographing our shadows. it's nice enough to just notice it when we happen to be out walking at the right set of moments. 

the morning pug walks require more layers this month. hats, gloves, fluffier scarves. I crocheted a new puppy pug coat in red and beige for the skinny little Faramir. his old grey pug coat still barely-kindof fits, but it didn't look as warm all stretched out of his lanky body.

these photographed trees and their shadows are not trees near us (we are quite starved for trees in this neighborhood). but they are very autumnal, aren't they. I took these photographs some years ago, mostly in Chicagoland and perhaps a few in a town near the Wisconsin–Illinois border, October 2022. 

abundance

it didn't stay in its original sticky-tacked-to-the-wall position for very long, so now it is pinned to leaning corkboard instead-- a big white paper on which I've scribbled All The Things I want to spend time on this summer break.

there's not any order or timeline to it. some words and phrases have little orbiting sub-items around them. and by now, a few have little blobs of oil pastel crayon next to them. I decided that's how I'll keep track of it all. not just checkmarks or crossing-things-out when I've done them-- that's too basic and also presumes some sort of linear pathway to an ending. some inevitable finality. 

my giant scribbly page of summer activities is not really based around accomplishments. these aren't really goals to be working toward but rather ways of being and doing that I want to make space for. it will be okay if I don't finish most of the things. most of them aren't the finishable kind (though some, like the Matthew McConaughey movie marathon* I have planned, are).

{ not my pastels and not my photo. thank you creative commons licenses. }

there are only ten pastel crayons in my little handmedown box, and I've rotated through them a little bit so far, splashing my to-do page with colors. some items have collected two or three colored dots already, representing multiple segments of time I've spent reading or playing or making this or that.

as of today, the things that don't yet have any dots of color include...

camping
clothesline design + installation
bike rides
reupholster bench + ottoman
sunrises
homemade Italian food
third-year review prep
poolside reading

I will get to those things. I have more than 80 whole days of summer left. plenty of time for All The Things and probably a bunch not even on the list.

*for the record, I'm three movies in to this so far, with 15 more to go (...depending on if or how you count True Detective, which is a series and not a movie). will I blog mini-reviews of all the films? maybe. last night was Contact, which did leave me with plenty to think about.

waning crescent

this morning we woke up at first light, well enough rested, and after wrapping myself up in a fuzzy robe, I sat outside while the dogs sniffed around, watching the eastern edges of the sky turn colors.

I love seeing this happen. dawn. morning. sunrises. 

this time of year is especially great for it. the sun takes its time, the horizon for me today was obscured by the wall around our property, the tree on the left, more trees beyond that one.

but the sky is all still there, spread out behind everything, changing from dark to light under a mottled scrape of east-to-west cloud.

the cloud turned colors too-- from a grey smudge to grey-blue, then purple, before pink and flaming. I couldn't see the sun itself but I saw all the colors it was throwing around. 

my bare feet got cold. little Hamilton pawed at me to let him up on my lap. early hikers passed by on the trail behind our house. I noticed a mourning dove huddled on the edge of the back wall. a trio of crows swooped overhead. 

after a while, I stood up and walked a ways out from under our back-porch awning. up, up above the treeline and the blazing pink-gold clouds, the brilliant, bright white moon smiled down at us. it hung there tipped over on its side, a slim crescent against the blue morning. it surprised me, how solid and silvery and high it still was, with the sun right there on its tail.

I had to look this up to remind myself properly of the order of all the lunar phases, but as it happens, we're under a waning crescent moon today. at this point in her rhythm, she's pulling all her shine into her other half, turning and shrinking away, saving it for whoever is out on the other side. maybe it's just her, there with all the sunbeams-made-moonbeams. with no obligations to reflect it for anyone else at all. 

I've been thinking about that aspect of the moon for a while now. about how much value there is in that new moon phase-- how through all the never-ending cycles of waxing and waning and shining and spinning, there's plenty of time when the moon seems to keep her light to herself.

maybe that's a lesson I'm learning this year. this season. 

shining full-blast for everyone else all the time is a recipe for burnout and depression and resentment. and it's gotta be okay-- more than okay-- to use your talents just because you feel like it, even if nobody else will see or care or show up for it. my own reasons can be enough.

nature is pretty awesome, even if some portion of what we see as awesome in it is projected personifications and metaphors. so what? we are nature too. all of us and our stories have a place in the wild and shifting colors of the sky, clouds and moonlight and all.

I'm so grateful for cool, crisp morning sunrises and a tidy backyard to enjoy them in. so grateful for this space and time and everything I can learn from it.

not today's sunrise. just one sunrise of many

seasons, dark and light

sleeplessly wrapped myself in a fleece blanket and sat outside under the sunrise early today. I greeted this May Saturday in pajamas, without my glasses, before it was even fully day. 

the nights now are not quite cold. it is time for leaving the windows open while we sleep.

if we sleep. 

I might still need a few weeks more of semi-hibernation. early bedtimes to counterbalance the way the waking glow of dawn pulls on me at 5.45am. 

it feels like I'm getting old. 

summer means long days. sometimes that is glorious and sometimes it's exhausting. last night I opened my paper journal (this year's is pastel green, with a scripture about gratitude embossed in cheap, flaking faux-leather) and wrote the date, April 30, only to realize I had written the same date that morning, above a few lines scribbled about our indulgent and lovely anniversary datenight up in the mountains last Wednesday.  

and it's only barely mid-spring. the solstice is months away. 

longer days are coming. 

sleepless or not, I'm grateful for open windows and sunshine and time. may I use plenty of these days for rest and just enough of them for making things happen. 

from the air and from the sun

it was shady on the west face of Badger Mountain this morning. the inward corners between each ridge were especially cool. at the crests of each ridge I could look back north to see the whole town like a set of toy models, framed just so by Thumb Butte and Granite Mountain.

snippets of songs and past conversations and poems-to-be and a whole bunch of other ideas sewed themselves through my thoughts as I climbed. 

how to describe the sensation of one's body breaking spiderwebs. birds--I think it's a female bluejay but I'm not sure.

layers and layers of pine-scented Saturday. the striking, heavy-feeling color of smooth, dry, grey-white, dead trees.

oh how lovely was the morning. but what if there's no way of telling how virtuous or good-intentioned any historical figure truly was?

thinking of the outdoors as sacred. mountains and high places as extra sacred. the striking, smooth, dry, white-grey color of what once was a tree now feels like a symbol. persistence. potency. 

I give myself permission. or I take permission from the air and the sunshine like a plant takes oxygen and energy. permission to decide for myself and say what I want.

and what was the name of that book about forests? How Forests Think, by Eduardo Kohn. we read it for Thomas Rickert's class, almost five years ago. the most memorable thing about it to me now is the story the author tells about seeing a bird near a river and being suddenly, beautifully, drawn out of himself and his troubles.

conincidentally when I sat down to blog for today I found in one of my old drafts a copy of a paper I wrote for that class, mainly drawing on Kohn's book. much of the paper is semi-cringy, flippant grad school pretentiousness, connecting what Kohn writes with my own thoughts about food and food media. but even so, some of it might be worth remixing here.

it starts with food and eating, but then goes beyond that into where all the food comes from.

Kohn’s bit about “managing a variety of ecological assemblages” stood out to me most. at first glance, management has such a one-way connotation... but I want to pick that apart. ecosystems manage us back, after all, and have done for millions of years. we and world are meshworked together. one process.

James Gibson writes that “The possibilities of the environment and the way of life of the animal go together inseparably” (p. 143). my own management of eco-assemblages is pretty indirect these days, unless I’m home digging in my dad’s garden. as a non-hunting, non-fishing academic person, I take advantage of grocery stores and farmers' markets full of already-managed things to cook and eat—things that I will probably never need to learn to procure from the earth or the sea for myself. maybe that means my involvement with ecosystems is less intimate, but maybe not. the groceries I buy and cook and eat still matter, not only to my body and my kitchen but to the world I am a part of. every purchase makes marks and leaves traces in a hundred directions. the infrastructures that support grocery stores afford certain possibilities, and those are inseparable from my way of life, so far.

we could make a long list of specific ways non-human lives support our dietary habits. Ingold makes note of this mutual support in a broader way:

“Moreover, granted that not all producers are human, it is easy to turn the argument around and show how various non-humans contribute, in specific environments, not just to their own growth and development but also to that of human beings. … living beings of all kinds, in what they do, constitute each other’s conditions of existence, both for their own and for subsequent generations” (Ingold, p. 8).

A line before this lovely acknowledgement, Ingold writes rather simply (even naively? nostalgically?) that “The farmer’s work on the fields, for example, creates favourable conditions for the growth of crop plants, and the herdsman’s does the same for domestic animals” (8).

doesn't that just sound so symbiotic and peaceful. idyllic, even. but how exactly do we define favorable? whose favor are we most concerned about? Gibson’s observations on how much humans muck around with what our environments afford reinforce this tragic mess: “In making life easier for himself, of course, he has made life harder for most of the other animals” (p. 130). we don’t think about this very deeply very often. often we sometimes actively avoid thinking about it.

what one does or does not put into one’s body makes marks. dietary strictures may be religious, political, ethnic, personal, health-related, or any combination. the forbidden substances seem to make the deepest, most obvious marks: no dairy, no carbs, no pork, no coffee, no alcohol, because this is who we are.

or is it the other way around—this is who we are, because we can’t eat gluten or we won’t eat meat or we’d rather not support Chick-fil-A?

either way, as Ingold pulls from Marx and José Ortega, “what we are, or what we can be, does not come ready made. We have, perpetually and never-endingly, to be making ourselves” (p. 7). and for Thompson, these processes are about “I-ing,” but it seems just as important to think about “we-ing.” It matters who/what we tend to include in “we” and who/what we do not. our human management of eco-assemblages (and maybe of everything else) has been too shortsightedly human-centric for too long.

and then the paper quotes from Roy Scranton's “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” and I question his rhetorical dichotomization of nations and markets vs. "our sense of what it means to be human."

it's not so separable, I say. organisms and their environments can’t really live without each other. it's too connected.

none of us can deny our intimate interactions with things we eat, even if we don’t think about them very deeply all the time. even if we actively avoid thinking about them.

{ apologies for my incomplete citations throughout this refurbished text. if I get a chance I'll update them here to specify titles and other info that was taken for granted when I wrote this for Posthumanism in 2014. }

time collage duet

these are photos from the past. same season, more or less, but last year.



at least close enough.

autumn. such as autumn in Louisiana exists.

today it was 32° at 7:00 am.

in the eastern half of the backyard sky, way back behind the slatted chainlink and the neighbor's trees and their neighbors' neighbors' trees too, there was a luminous deep pink glow. I know it was there because some of it leaked through the curtains onto the wall across from the bed. such a warm orange-pink color--cotton-candy pink, but not so wispy as cotton candy--imagine if pink cotton candy was as thick and felted as the warmest wool blanket. it almost looked out of place on such a cold morning.

although I'm not used to it anymore, I do kind of relish all this chill in the air. it feels right. it feels energizing.

will the still-green cherry tomatoes out on their vines find it energizing? possibly not. I might need to bring those plants inside for the rest of the year.

or I might not. it may warm back up to 70° over the weekend. we'll see. 
 

these here are photos from several summers ago.



Michigan beaches. blue sky, blue lake, all layered like animated elemental paint swatches.

sun, sand, mist. campfires. ice cream.

this isn't a real collage. you'll have to pretend. clip a few images from now, from last year, from three years ago... see what they look like up next to each other. does the cold of today make those sunny June beaches look less warm than they were? or can the memory of the beach insulate this first day of November against all the risk of frost?

a day for not going on walks

I was going to get up just before sunrise today, and go for a walk, but it was snowing. and my waking self decided to think about dreams (they were, from what I remember, about deep blue love, yarn and instructions) instead.

the day has taken me other directions. podcasts. LibriVoxing. reading interesting snippets. writing out thoughts. watering plants.

it's still a bit too cold to go for a very enjoyable walk today. reading and writing are much more appropriate.



this was the xkcd on Wednesday. it resonated enormously, matching up with all my recent feelings of having too many screens in my face all the time. mostly it's work. but also twitter and email and youtube and endless vacillating between distractions and productivity and in-between.

I used to leave the house without my phone all the time. maybe I should do more of that. just every once in a while.

I also used to write in paper notebooks much more than I seem to do these days. I definitely should do more of that. just let me finish this blogpost first.

ps: this audio series is adorable and if you like music and adventure, you will probably like it.

two: yesterday

wore purple socks, black pinstriped trousers, plain grey t-shirt, and a red quarter-sleeved jacket that clever sister made and bequeathed to me once upon a time. walked out my front door to a blaring yellow morning.

hopped onto a few buses, that Weird Al song in my ears, and arrived on campus just before half past eight.

walked past this amusing combination of tree and bicycle.

stopped. tried to angle the photo halfway-decently.

used the proper key to unlock my office. (some mornings I try with my house key. it doesn't work.)

sat down in what has been known in the office as "the Seamus Haney chair." it's blue. the arms of it are leaking their upholstered guts out onto your sleeves.

looked for a moment into the camera-mirror, still on from the bike-in-the-tree memorialization. made faces. took a few photographs for no reason whatsoever.

I guess the reason was simply to look at myself. how often do you do that, really?

blogged. checked emails. read some, wrote some. met with students. printed a bunch of things. forgot to print a few other things.

sometimes I wonder if there's a way to get a real outside perspective on my own day-to-day everything. is there a way to access the secret recording of my life that the universe might be keeping in its memory banks somewhere? what file formats would I be able to download that in, do you think?

other times I realize that there is no such recording. I have to make my own. I have to cobble this picture together using camera-mirrors and words and scrapbooks and other people's reactions to whoever I am and whatever I do. maybe the universe isn't recording--it's not a camera--but it might be a mirror. reminds me of some of these musings.

yesterday's version of me is cool with how the day turned out, I hope. 

space rainbows

I should've been sleeping on that 5 a.m. flight from Boston to Charlotte. but it isn't often you get to see stars from a vantage point above the cloudline, or watch the sunlight tear holes in the dark sky while you're thousands of miles above the earth.

I didn't bother photographing Cassiopeia or her scattered entourage. at one point, though, it was as if all the planes and stars would stay floating, swimming together forever along in an unending soup of night. all around us were pinpricks of light, some twinkling, some moving, all of them too small and distant to seem thoroughly real.

every so often the ridges and cobbles of cloud cover would thin and I'd see orange smudges and sparkles of earthly civilizations. the larger cities, as they collectively woke, looked like squid, squashed and jewel-encrusted.

the sunrise began as nothing but a grey smudge. over the course of what felt like hours, the smudge turned steely blue, eventually brightening--as if layers of night's black curtain were being shaved very gradually away, leaving nothing but a transparent and barely-held-together fuzz.

the cold steel stripe spread slowly, stretching and rolling out from under the cloud cover, revealing first a muddy pink underbelly and then a soft, smooth grapefruit-colored streak.

I should've been sleeping, but I kept my head turned to watch that grapefruit color swell and intensify into mild red-orange. the blue spiked close to neon. hints of pale, pale green nestled shyly inbetween the two. a few razorlike slits of clouds tore open that rosy burning to start letting puddles of oozy red collect around them.

that little stripe of lighted sky became an almost neon rainbow, bounded on both sides by black.

I started wondering if every rainbow could be considered a sort of mini-sunrise--one where light creeps little by little around and through previously dark pockets of atmosphere.

or could it be that every sunrise is really a version of a rainbow? light being bent around various particles of dust and air and vapor?

either way, I should've been sleeping on this flight... but I wasn't. for whatever it's worth, I would pretty much always rather be watching sunrises than sleeping.

traffic

I still need to find a good sunrise watching space in this town. maybe I'll try the roof one of these days, (if I can get up there). several weeks ago, I walked downtown and watched from above the train platform as sleepy-looking Sunday morning travelers waited for their train. last week I wandered up on the bridge over the river, making my way against one-way traffic, wrapped up in a jacket and layers of soft music.

I'm starting to think everything is a matryoshka (some people say onion, but I think matryoshka dolls are prettier than onions, and right now I'm going to say they fit more nicely with my notion of a socially constructed reality), so it isn't surprising I've framed that morning as a bundle of serially enclosing sets of experiences. my little thoughts inside my little brain, housed in a sturdy skull, covered with fairly average skin and freckles--all of that--we could call it me--walked around inside the music. and all that sound, recorded into digital files and lined up in the software of my little ipod, was being fed into my ears to melt around the thoughts. beyond that thought-music hybrid of a person were the streets and sidewalks, dirt and moss and grass, the air and fuzzy predawn light all making space where I could stand and walk and breathe. even further away--standing on different ground and breathing different air, everyone and everything else, their own bodies and music, possessions and agendas went about in the middle of their own complex matryoshka. beetles, birds, and traffic. neighbors, pets,  these worldly, distant sounds from such distant, not-me things, nevertheless layered on to what made that morning what it was (and is) in my head.

{ photo courtesy friend Mel }

this photo is most unconnected to the above description, though it does include a snippet of a sunrise. friend Melanie took it months and months ago on a late summer morning. there are ponies just south of what was then our new neighborhood. on whichever morning this happened to be, we noticed this mother and foal shyly watching us jog through the dirt alley. newborn day. newborn pony.

having a record of that morning and these ponies and the light coming up so bright behind them somehow seems to loop time in on itself. I can't really reach backwards toward that summer, that neighborhood, the jogging or anything else. the photo isn't the moment. the moment is not there in that photo. my access to the moment is mediated much more from here. I have to reach back through a this screen to a photograph to a memory of a thousand-miles-away space and a thousand-hours-away time.

during my more recent but at the moment no less inaccessible experience walking around a new neighborhood at dawn, I looked through all my layers of self, sort-of-self, and non-self, trying to notice and soak in all the things I love about sunrises. do you remember? do I remember?

the waiting, pacing, wondering where the horizon will break open against the sharp light.

feeling a shift from stillness to rustling as the colors in the sky brighten, fade, and smooth into regular daytime blue.

letting the whole world pull itself out of the monochrome blandness of predawn grey and into a gradually more and more detailed light.

seeing your own shadow come loose from the shadow of the earth.

then, turning back, watching the shadows of everything snip themselves separate and scurry into the spaces west. I once wrote about reverse sunsets. if I ever have a nice west-facing office I'll do my best to take good notes on reverse sunrises.

"reverse," I expect, is a very wrong word for what I mean. maybe "mirrored" or something would be better. the earth and the sun and astrophysics and entropy make sunrises and sunsets both into irrevocably one-way affairs. do the sun and the earth get bored of this arrangement, I wonder? I can turn around to watch east and west, and north and south, too--but our lovely sun cannot. the earth spins the same way, steadily around and around, never backwards and only a tiny bit tilted.

we can turn around, walk across the street, go back the other direction, and watch all the shadows changing.

but when it comes to the fourth dimension, I'm just as stuck as the sun and earth on a one-way track. there is no reaching back to yesterday or last week. every newborn day has to keep going, sweeping the rest of us along with it toward another sunset.

sunsets are very nice too, of course. often even more visually striking--more dramatic somehow.

I prefer sunrises. they speak of more hope and more potential. more beginning.

delicate drawings

traditions change sometimes. is that sad? if you used to wake up every day to watch the sun meander over the horizon, but now you don't... that could be sad... unless it isn't, because after all you don't want to get hung up on mopey nostalgia. (but sometimes you might. a little.)

everything is always changing. even the most steady traditions probably morph a little bit, just like the phrases in a game of--what is it, chinese whispers, or telephone? whichever it's called. nothing we can do can keep change at bay.

all the things you've been handing down to your future self, no matter how precious or carefully handled, might just get lost or forgotten one day. that doesn't mean you're a bad person. it doesn't mean you have to regret the broken streak. it also doesn't mean you can't pick those things up again.

always is an elusive thing, possibly just as fragile if not more fragile than never. I might not always be a morning person. I might not always have access to all the information I do at the moment. I might not always have time to read and blog. I might not always be looking forward to a certain kind of future. I might not always be able to doodle during church or make my annual Christmas cards. I might not always have consistently comfortable and familiar spheres in which to play.

things change. today was the first sunrise I've been close to for months. I haven't redecorated anything during a holiday break for a few years. the whole do-some-yoga-every-day resolution faltered in April or May, if I remember correctly.

but none of this means I can't start waking up earlier again and writing out more yoga-filled agendas for myself.

a few notes for the record:
I am making Christmas cards this year. they are snipped and stacked and ready for the attention of my new gluesticks.
I don't plan to abandon my reading or my blogging.
the doodling during church has no reason to be abandoned that I can tell.

nothing is known of Saint Valentine

I've just been playing around with this little doodle, originally posted way back in July.

there are no love-related holidays in July, are there?

not that I can think of. there are tuesdays though. I love tuesdays.

love is an irrational thing, you know. I have no reason to love tuesdays, but I do anyway. even though they're not always the greatest. not always the most fun.

at least my irrational love of tuesdays is completely unconditional.

as is my love for ice cream (chocolate ice cream, of course).

and my love for plaid. goats. typography. sunrises.

unconditional, irrational love. today is all about celebrating that.

and, underneath all the sugary pink and candy-coated chocolate-ness, also about the real stuff, which can perhaps be just as irrational, but is nevertheless far more intense and profound and committed and transforming than a love of tuesdays (however genuine) ever could be. loving people is better. let's do more of that, shall we?

early to rise

it's been nearly three months since this glorious late-summer morning and I can very possibly count the number of sunrises I've seen on one hand. maybe two, if we're being generous.

I did succeed in some picture-taking, however. none of those pink roses by the wall, unfortunately.

for photographs far more plentiful and amazing than these few of mine, you can pretend you're watching the sun rise (or set) in any of these faraway places.

the sunrise this morning very patiently melted away a thick layer of lumpy purple clouds before coming up over the mountains. now all that's left of the clouds are white stringy bits, scattered across the sky. it's too cold for me to stand outside on top of the picnic table, but now that all the trees have given up their green, it's easier to peek through the living room window while I sit on the arm of the sofa, all wrapped up around one of the giant pillows. I'm sure I'll see a few more sunrises before they start happening too early...

a study in sunrises

if you stare at the sun too long, you can't see anything else even when you look away.

this morning I took up a rather conspicuous place on top of the dusty red picnic table in our back yard. I wished I could've climbed onto the roof (less conspicuous? perhaps not...) so I could see the jagged horizon and its great curving backdrop of heaven more clearly. as it was, from the picnic table I commanded a fair enough view beyond the bushes and trees. Venus was up there to my right, blinking lazily every so often. I guessed at the names of the broken constellations and waited, imagining the rush I might get if I could actually feel the earth spinning. a bright but delicate orange, like the petals of a june lily, was slowly pulling all of the dark out of the sky, fading with it into a smooth creamy peach. for a long stretch of morning the mountains were haloed with the deepest white gold and the rest of the sky flattened itself into a very sturdy pale blue. there was plenty of time for me to notice the carpet of dew on the grass, the dark pink of the roses against the wall, and the birds.

the light began to break the stark shadow of the mountains gently, diffusing the gray with soft shimmery fingers. at 7:28, in a sudden surge of sharp, brilliant white, an entire chunk of the horizon disappeared behind the cool flames of sunrise. those impossibly fine, intangible rays stretched and sparkled, coaxing shadows out of the trees. within moments our brightest, closest star was fully awake and staring out over the whole valley.

7:00 is not so dreadfully early to wake up. and the winter will keep pushing it later and later, anyway. there are one hundred and thirteen days left of the year and even more until springtime. so tomorrow I'll remember my camera and begin a ritual of recording to last a whole season of sunrises.