The View From Here/Up For This Week

I just got home from day 1 of the Writing Workshop. Feeling pretty excited and stoked about it, although that long hike on Saturday was too much for my body and I awoke this morning with mind and spirit all ready, but my body just an aching mess - hamstrings tauter than any bowstring, lower back agony, guts knotted up. I stayed horizontal for as long as I could bear to, which meant having to hustle to get myself freshened up, dressed, fed (smoothie in bottle to go) and lunch packed.

Once I'm in class, I can often lift up above physical discomforts and ill feelings (although when my blood sugar gets too low, it's a pernicious distraction) and just focus on being enthusiastic. Which I am - we have three great teachers and the class is large and diverse, with participants ranging from high school students to grandparents. Many 'Fairbanksians,' as they call themselves, but a variety of others too and much different life experience canvassed within the group. Some interesting discussion of the ideal audience today, as well as a couple of great 'seeding' exercises for generating pieces of writing.

Thankfully, repetition has performed its usual shrinking act, and from some perspectives at least the walk home didn't seem as long this afternoon. I didn't have much of an appetite today, but my smoothie breakfast, wakame with sunflower seeds, spirulina, nutritional yeast, lettuce and jicama lunch, bark pieces for snacks, seems to have held me pretty well. 

I found some lambsquarters growing wild on the way home and picked a few. 

There are also wild raspberries on the path home - ripe -  I have picked one or two each time I pass. Didn't have the camera with me, but here's one right in the yard where I'm staying:

It's wildflower cornucopia here - and they're not entirely the same as the flowers in Homer. This one looks a lot like the bidens pilosa and bidens hawaiiensis species in Hawaii (kinehe and ko'oko'olau) that are touted as miracle antibacterials -

Lots of leguminous plants - clover and lupine for sure, as in Homer, but also this vetch (I think it is), which is just ubiquitous here.

Growing up tall...

Up For This Week

I'm not yet sure how I'm going to structure my posts this week - there's so much to take in and much of it won't come clear to write about until it's in hindsight. We have one-and-a-half hour lunch breaks, which are generously filled with a free concert! Today's was an excellent smorgasbord of opera arias, flute sonata, Cuban dance and some jazz piano. 

Have I mentioned how poignant it is for me to be taking a writing workshop that is part of a music and arts festival? Music geekdom used to be one of my most-frequented worlds.

Writing activities coming up this week include visits to the renowned museum on campus and also to the botanical garden, bring notebooks and write as moved to! I'm glad of all the variety expressed within the syllabus: it's not going to be a rigid, monotonic 9-4.30 every day.