nasturtium buds peeking from gorgeous nasturtium leaves
blooming cosmos, pink and gold
one hummingbird drinking at the cute clay feeder we have hanging in the backyard
many little quail scurrying across the road, grown-up quail pairs on either side to keep everyone in line
someone trimming public landscaping bushes into nice clean shapes
a tawny mutt balanced in a little wooden box strapped to the back of somebody's bicycle
I spent a week in California (mostly San Diego) earlier this month. we did lots of beautiful and silly and fun things.
twenty years later, Disneyland remains impressively thorough and dedicated to the task of using plastic fakery (and other material/media) to evoke entire worlds of stories. I will confess that walking through the Galaxy's Edge sections was pretty amazing. the novelty of it. the heat and dust and droids and alien-ness, not to mention the actual model of the Millennium Falcon. I'm not even that much of a Star Wars nerd, am I?
remember this gollum jade? he is expanded into a family of 5 separate plants now. the main one is doing so well, and hopefully the others will survive one way or another.
seasons of 90 days each. seems like plenty of time. one quarter of a full circle, fair time for each mood of the year.
what was I wanting to blog about?
paper and trees. loud noises and how to hear through them.
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I've been thinking a lot about my grandma. grandma Ashdown. she comes into my dreams
my coat pockets for the past two winters have held traces of that March funeral three years ago: a whole pecan my dad had given me. bottle of lotion from the hotel. baggage claim slips.
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this week the seasons tangibly tilted, almost all at once, one into the other. winter-spring chills are banished by the baking warmth of full-on spring. snow and freezing feel like the smallest of old memories from here.
there are new plants! phlox and day lilies and an easter cactus.
the last day of classes, yesterday. the whole semester at its boiling point, with only grading and emails left before it all simmers away.
for summer break? so many art plans.
and exercise plans.
reading and rereading,
writing and rewriting.
paints and puzzles and games. plenty of sunshine too.
I'd been thinking about all the roles from whatever Goffman theory of something or other... but I'd forgotten the words for it.
my other grandma was a teacher. she taught much younger humans than I get to teach, and I don't know how she had the patience. but if it weren't for her and others like her who somehow do, all the building blocks of reading and writing wouldn't be there for my students to use for anything more advanced.
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six years ago, riverside vows in the rain.
now? I must finish all this grading and work. then we'll go lay about in the sunshine. fix my bike. go camping at least 3 times. family reunion adventures in July. rent kayaks every week if we feel like it.
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I found this letter in the back of an old mostly-empty journal. it's a letter I never sent, for some reason. there isn't year with the date of Jan 22 in the corner-- but all evidence (the stationery, my careful handwriting and lack of capitalization, the turn of phrase and the doodles at the bottom) points to 2001 or thereabouts.
it is written to yet a different grandma-- step-grandma, if we need to be that specific. it conjures different memories. twenty-two years ago? when I was barely almost kindof a grown-up?
"grandma chesley:dear past self, it will not settle down. but you'll learn to settle yourself and settle into yourself. eternity may or may not exist in any meaningful way for these limited human brains of ours, but peace does, at least.
greetings! all the family says hi and wishes you well. i decided that i would write this whole letter just because. [hearts] life's been crazy as it always is. i wonder when it will all settle down. anyway meanwhile i go on through all these crazy experiences, thinking all sorts of crazy things while in so many different moods. it seems like everything changes, but never the way people expect. i really really hope my life turns out well. most of the time it seems like i have no clue and won't amount to anything special. the things i care about can be so ridiculous and yet so serious... that's just more proof that life is a paradox.
for all the wrong in the world, the truth seems extraordinarily unbelievable at times. it certainly is hard to concentrate on the good and the beautiful when so many trivial matters lie in the way. i think i would give anything for an eternity of peace, and i guess that is really what we are reaching for.
[smiley, heart, flower, star, leaf, raindrop, rainbow]"
it's been a while since I last blogged about my plant collection. so here's a small update.
above, there set that does best with partial sun. some of them might move out into sunnier parts of the patio once they acclimate a little more. we'll see how things go.
below, we have the set that needs all the sun it can get. when I have to bring them all inside for winter, these are the ones that struggle the most to get by on what they get from our south-facing windows.
I've added many new plant dudes (and many new pots, too) over the months, but that pair of zebra plants, the lanky gollum jade, and one seasonally depressed flapjack plant have been with me for at least six years or so by now. the flapjack and one of the zebras have had some babies, even!
the roses have also followed me around for a while-- at least from Louisiana to here. I was convinced I'd eventually kill them, but not yet. mini roses from a bygone Valentine's day have proved particularly sturdy. now if only I could keep the aphids off them, that would be nice...
I think this is a small shrubby redbud tree. not sure though.
it has a neighbor along our walking trail. the two trees are more like bushes, really, reaching not too far above my waist, spindly branches bent toward the road.
some months ago this spring, both trees burst into blossom--crowded little pink frothy blossoms all over--even though so many dried out seed pods still clung to all the branches.
it seemed like such a metaphor.
last year's efforts, thin and pointless, weighing down the future. new life and color pushing onwards anyway. old baggage, getting in the way of everything you might want to blossom into.
by the time I took this photo, the pink flowery frills had wilted and shriveled quite a bit. the desert sun has taken no vacations this season. but there are still rows of orange seed pods holding fast, refusing to be blown away.
maybe sometimes it feels like so much heaviness to keep hold of, to keep track of.
maybe it's simple. flowers leave behind seeds, and not all of those seeds go off to grow into anything.
the metaphor is very flawed, of course. the seeds are not the opposite of progress and beauty. just because convention paints pink flowers as more lovely does not mean that's truth.
I'm reminded of the best song from Encanto. things don't need to be perfect; they just need to be.
that's enough for the scrubby redbud trees, I guess. simply being. why do humans complicate it so?
thinking about going places. far away places.
nearby places have their charm... but running errands is mostly tiring; walking the dog is lovely but routine.
summer and travel go together most years. or they have in the past, anyway. lately it seems like so long since I've gone anywhere new just to see what's there and what it looks like.
as i reread some of my old journals, it seems astonishing how much I traveled even just five or six years ago. so much back and forth home for holidays, random cities for conferences or helping friends move, and a few weeks-long adventures for studying abroad. it seems like half my journal entries back then were prefaced with "notes from [insert name of airport here]."
there are many reasons for the relative lack of travel these days, of course. there's a pandemic still wandering around mutating and spreading. small, short, careful trips seem best. we also just bought a house, so it's everyone's turn to come visit us now, to see what's here.
here is pretty beautiful, I must say. we have an ancient volcano overlooking some very fine walking and biking trails. we have (unlike last year, during which this rainstorm was practically the only one) an almost-nightly pattern of refreshing monsoons feeding into a bunch of glorious greenery. we have cool mornings and a very serviceable set of patio furniture. and a fire pit too, for roasting things and for cozy evening ambiance.
last week Jeremiah's aunt and uncle stopped by for a night on their way from west to east. they brought a handsome dog named Herschel with them and we had a grand time showing them around, catching up on each others' lives, and playing a bit of mahjong.
who else wants to come visit? we can teach you mahjong if you like. or we can hike up to the top of Glassford Hill and have a picnic.
what else?
I've been teaching this summer. small sections of Technical Report Writing over two six-week terms. it's been mostly fun. but I'll be glad for a few weeks' break between summer and fall classes starting up. maybe we'll go camping. maybe we'll squeeze in one more tiny, careful roadtrip. or throw one or two more dinner parties. or just sleep in more and read all the books.
my other activities for summer have included daily morning walks with our restless little Hamilton pug, pulling weeds out of our rock-covered yard, potting and re-potting succulents (new and old), tending to a dying basil plant and a thriving tomato plant (many thanks to my dad), taking a few bike rides, committing to bits of yoga, baking too much for two people, and reading outside as often as I can get away with.
oh, and I'm running a little game of Dungeons and Dragons-- a pre-written adventure entitled Curse of Strahd. there haven't been any dragons in it yet, but there might be. it's proving quite interesting and entertaining. ostensibly, I am using this set of published ideas to create a backdrop of tension and danger mixed in with meaningful story and fun rewards for the players who roleplay in the foreground of it all. from the first few sessions though, I've felt like my role is equal parts creator and observer. the player characters are out there on a stage that I threw together, putting on fascinating and rich performances for us all. I hope I get better at it so I can keep doing it and find out what happens next.
in other news, I want to soon blog properly about Braiding Sweetgrass and all its lovely messages about paying attention to nature. I should also finish reading and taking some more organized notes on a few books about collaborative writing pedagogy. there is a conference talk to prepare in the next two months, and always more scholarly books to read. one on my mind this afternoon is Against the Romance of Community, the pdf of which is sitting around in at least three digital folders somewhere, waiting with its few scattered annotations for me to get back into it.
I know it's kind of cheesy to use books as a stand-in for travel, but ah well. if Scotland and Paris and Germany and London and Beijing are out of reach for the next long while, at least I can read and re-read about everywhere else. everyone else. all their connections and intricate influences on one another.
and because I needed an excuse to type it all out for myself here, I'm going to include these paragraphs from near the end of Kimmerer's book about indigenous wisdom. this chapter is called "People of Corn, People of Light," all about the marks we are leaving on the earth through our ways of being, our ways of knowing, and our stories.
"Many Indigenous peoples share the understanding that we are each endowed with a particular gift, a unique ability. Birds to sing and stars to glitter, for instance. It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. If the bird's gift is song, then it has a responsibility to greet the day with music. It is the duty of birds to sing and the rest of us receive the song as a gift. ....
"Other beings are known to be especially gifted, with attributes that humans lack. Other beings can fly, see at night, rip open trees with their claws, make maple syrup. What can humans do?
"We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words. Language is our gift and our responsibility. I've come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit back together to nurture our becoming people made of corn." (p. 347)
I promise I'll blog more about this lovely book one day soon, blog-all-dogeared-pages style. and if you've read it too, let's have an impromptu book club about it so I can hear all your thoughts. wouldn't that be fun?
not very long ago at all I actually stopped and read this poem, "Optimism" by Jane Hirschfield, posted ephemerally somewhere somehow by the instagram account Poetry is Not a Luxury.
it is a poem from a collection published in 2005. not very long ago at all. so it isn't in the public domain, or anywhere close, and so I haven't copied it in full for this post.
but I will write out a meandering ode to what I thought about when I read it + what I am still thinking about.
and what I want to remember about it.
it is difficult to explain what's lovely about a poem. is there a truly effective way to make you see or feel the same satisfying resonance or resonant satisfaction that I felt when I read it, or reread it? doubtful, given that even just recalling what it was like to catch myself reading this poem for the first time seems pretty impossible.
part of it is in the journey-- simple, with a first-person subject and her point of view in flux. her admiration evolving. and we get a collection of sturdy nouns as an anchor along the way: resilience, resistance, tenacity, intelligence, persistence.
I'm reminded of friend Trinity once talking with me about the merits of resilient as an alternative to the buzzier buzz-word sustainable. what's the point of something sustainable if it won't resist or withstand a few worst case scenarios? sustaining a system in good times isn't the same at all of sustaining it through a disaster. so we need some more words to talk about more possibilities.
speaking of contrasts, this poem gives us pillows vs. trees.
the stubbornness of a same shape over and over vs. the sinuous tenacity of remolding yourself to follow the brightest light, wherever you find it
these words. the journey of them.
you can see the pillow, its impermanent dents. perhaps that resistance is worth admiring sometimes too.
and you can see the tree, green and pliant, with branches reaching, shadows falling in its way.
some part of me, finding herself somehow pausing long enough, focused enough, to let these words in properly-- she relates to the tree, to the feeling of being forced to cast around for different light.
and then the beautiful ending. the contrasting conjunction that breaks down any fear we might have about our blindness preventing any growth.
"But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, / mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth."
these words. the tip tapping -ence, -ance, -acity of those nouns, and the -ome, -oam, -uous, -ose, -ous, and -able. the sounds of them and the feel of them.the words in this order like this evoke so much hope even without the title tying a neat bow around that authorial intent. the hope of small turns, motivated by whatever subtle senses we may or may not understand, leading steadily to so much wild and undeniable beauty.
it feels almost like I've just written some kind of literary analysis of this poem. maybe a third of one, or something. I did not grow up to be a literary scholar, so a third of an analysis is probably just fine.
in other news:
we painted some of the walls of our new house a few weeks ago.
oh yeah-- we bought a house. it feels so very grown-up of us to have done such a thing.
next exciting house project: patio furniture.
I am excited for the end of spring semester. for consistently warmer weather and more time to be outside, to sleep, and to read whatever I want. our new nearest public library looks awesome (though its fairly basic clunky website does not quite match, I must say). it has a little cafe, open 7am - 3pm, and I really hope I can arrange my life in a way that allows a few future mornings here and there sitting with books and notebooks and tea in a library cafe. what could be better than that?
yesterday, on a lark I looked at the date and trawled through my blogpost archive to find all the posts that just happened to be posted on February 7.
there are three:
an untitled Sunday scribbling from 2010.
reflections on who a person is or isn't after they run 5 whole kilometers for the first time (2012).
and these twice(now thrice?)-framed and re-framed ramblings about who a person is or isn't after dying their hair for the first time (2013/2004).
are there coincidences here? a theme of identity and the capacity for novel experience to encroach interestingly upon it.
while I meandered through this blog archive timewarp (knowing I wouldn't write the rest of this until Monday) I also checked for old posts from today's date, February 8:
a meditation on parts of ourselves that are unknown, occasioned by a book and one verse of a hymn (2011).
and this "nostalgic little rant" about how we store old media and what to do with old dreams (2007).
so?
present and past and future selves. all of them fluid, none of them ever fully left behind.
and who am I this week? the sixth full week of this sixteenth year of blogging here?
I am doing a little bit of yoga every day, pondering what it really means to have a good relationship with my own breath. the snow of late January is mostly melted. teaching and teaching prep are taking up the bulk of my days. our pugs still want to hibernate some mornings. we are soon to be buying a house, and the land under it, which seems both like a very weird, half-unthinkable but simultaneously perfectly logical, sensible life decision.
what will owning this sliver of earth with a house on it mean for the selves we become over the rest of the year?
I hope it means more time reading and writing outside on the back patio. I hope it means lovely neighbors and a quiet cul-de-sac. it will mean more responsibility and more space. more food storage, more crafts, more plants! more making. more stargazing. more driving for me but somewhat less for Jeremiah.
and a lovely ancient volcanic hill down the road for both long and short hikes.
can these miscellaneous photos become something else if I throw them together in a blogpost today? can they tell a real story or scaffold the lines of a poem?
for me there are wispy old memories inside each one. the past curls up, loose and wriggling, in little mental pockets marked with "autumn 2015" or "July 2016" or "that one conference in Rochester, NY."
but what are they for you?
evidence?
or art? or both? it probably depends on who you are.
plants in a garden. plants on a windowsill.
all in the middle of growing, dying.
or both.
all of it part of some cycle. up. down.
rainfall, rainbows,
showered on or sheltered from.
or both.
writing or drawing, or both. seeing or listening, or both
being or breathing.
but not or-- and.
always trying for and.
or failing.
or both.
along with the wispy memories, there are deep and unpredictable tides of emotion, too. a longing for the pieces of these pasts that have faded too far. a fear of losing all the people and connections that once felt so close and certain. amusement and nostalgia drizzling from clouds of wonder about why everything feels so impossible.
“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).
