Reorganization--of Bluff and Home

Small announcement: If you're in Homer, come on down to the Library at 6pm this evening to hear Twelve Local Writers read their work. No, I'm not one of them, but I know just about all of them and will certainly be there in support.

It's been a while since I've shared pictures of the stunning edge on which we live, so I'm going to put that right today, having remembered my camera when I hiked yesterday. Phil gets back tomorrow afternoon, and will find himself accelerating seasons from the mid-harvest Fall of Oregon to nigh-winter here. It's been freezing hard every night, and the grasses at the bottom of the bluff just above beach gravel are autumn-colored and falling over.

Isn't it all a big process of rearrangement? A different side of the earth's face is kissed by the sun, different currents become prominent here.

I've been thinking of this "rearranging," speaking of how we're all connected, as I start preparing to teach the Linguistics course next term. When I look to see how others do it, many of the best sites online belong to people who were my classmates in grad school. They did what they were 'supposed to do' with their education, and have been excellent professors at prominent schools for some years already. Meanwhile, I muddle along--but here I am, rearranging some of the same material in a different place, with different goals, for different students.

And rearranging has been on my brain in a more literal sense too: I've been trying to get as many organizational projects as possible straightened out and sustainable during Phil's absence.

So, yesterday morning, our bed looked like this (after I'd wriggled out of it, of course!)

The bookshelf along my side of the bed in the loft had been overloaded in haphazard and book-breaking fashion...

...and when our incredibly kind and generous friend Tom made us these cubes to be footstools/storage space to go with our armchairs...

...it liberated these IKEA cubes that we'd been using for that purpose (not ideal, as they're not very stable)...

...which had in turn been liberated from pantry duty, because they're really not much good for that, either.

Well, they're also not ideal bookshelves, but by sunrise yesterday morning, my bedside area looked so much more sane!

It is a great lesson for me that having stuff organized can make such a difference, can be a weight off the ambient energy, can help me see things anew. This has been on my mind ever since we were house-sitting a couple months ago. I feel like a bit of a retard for being so slow to come to it: seems like most people know it by second nature. How about you?

Meanwhile, outside, the bluff keeps on rearranging itself...

 More land falls down toward the ocean, more headlong trees, more tussocks of grass hanging on to clumps of displaced earth.

This runoff has only looked like this for about the past month. It's a funny hourglass effect--the beach has piled up around the trickling water, while the land from above falls down and silts in the stream.

Even the bedrock calves off in chunks, and even in this photo, you can see how friable the bluff's edge is. The spruce tree at the top didn't used to be at that angle!

I feel grateful to live in a place where change and reorganization are so constant and literal. Grateful that sometimes I can learn to put them into practice, again literally, in my own existence.

Are philosophical posts like this tedious for you? There are so many things I could choose to write about, and I've really been thinking about which ones are most interesting for readers. Any feedback is hugely appreciated.

And I do have a beet-bean stew to share, but I'll do so tomorrow in order to keep this short and sweet. Much love!