Things have been quiet on this blog for the last few days. That's only because I've been busy spending time with a very special visitor with whom I have all too little time in person. My mum is a self-proclaimed nervous traveler. If you look at her actions, however, she is intrepid. Not to mention her earliest years in Iraq and her formative years in Israel before settling with my dad in London, she's been as far as India during her studies to become a homeopath. She's been to visit me in California twice. She's been to visit me in Hawai'i. Now, she ventured all the way to the subarctic to spend time with me. I mentioned recently how having a guest can remind a person of the extraordinariness of her surroundings which have come to seem normal. Having my eyes reopened by my mum has been a tremendous privilege. Her constant openness, her constant awe, her observant nature, her plucky willingness to be exposed to new experiences from clam chowder to wearing booties indoors to raking up seaweed on the beach for garden beds has been a joy to be around. And of course, I've learned a lot about my own self and where some of my habits and pieces originate.
I give you Rachel Harrison.
Like you guys, I have been reading this blog now and then and marveling at it.
The content of the blog is often so unusual and exciting, I wanted to see what it's really like to live where Ela lives.
So I have been here for 10 days now, and I am still awestruck.
Ela's cabin is about 20 ft away from the edge of a 400ft sheer cliff with breathtaking views.
If the tide is out and the beach visible, walking people down below look the size of dolls.
Here is a unique panoramic view of the vast Pacific Ocean which is always changing.
This is a kind of paradise on earth and yes, it may be too cold for my liking later on in winter, but right now it is fine.
It is luscious green, and autumnal colors are just appearing.
Things grow in abundance and are everywhere.
Phil and Ela's garden yields mammoth size cabbages, lettuces, rhubarb, potatoes, chives, many herbs and chard, we eat them all!
Can you imagine getting Alaskan salmon for free from the ocean? People do here.
They get to hunt bear and moose and eat it (not I, or Ela).
You can pick coal from the beach for free for your stove, a kind of paradise in the cold.
I picked blueberries with Phil 45 miles away in Ninilchik. For me this was an experience in itself.
I have failed to grow blueberries in my garden (in London). I have tried giving the plants acid soil and sunshine as advised, but I only got 10 berries at the most.
Wild blueberries in Alaska grow on mounds of sphagnum moss which is soft and moist with beautiful autumnal colors.The berries are hidden, tiny, dark blue, and their juice is dark red with special tangy flavor, this speaks for their high antioxidant and bioflavonoid value. I watched Ela turn them into raw blueberry jam. Phil loves it. I did too!
Yesterday she made rhubarb bread, donning a mask so as not inhale gluten from the flour, she looked funny, but the bread was delicious and was quickly devoured!!
We sit to a breakfast of bright red gently stewed cranberries, blueberries, all picked from the wild by us, and some filberts from Phil's family's farm in Oregon. We have this with porridge, or toast.
Enjoying this fresh delicious food while watching drama unfold on the ocean waves. It begins with a dull blue sky touching the far horizon creating a thin silver line with the ocean. Then the clouds clear gradually and a golden sunshine pours on to the ocean, the light is very powerfully bright and it gets warm! Contrary to what people told me, it is not cold here right now, but really pleasantly bearable to a coldie like me.
Yesterday as we sat to another delicious lunch (salmon caught from the ocean and vegetables from the garden (and Ela's smoothie)) there was suddenly a rainbow, as if rising out of the Ocean, it seemed to be standing perpendicular to it and shimmering in its bright 7 colors.
This was mesmerizing, as we looked it started decomposing and vanishing right in our gaze, the lower part of it reappeared and disappeared few more times and then the magic ceased. That was a great experience, we are the lucky bystanders.
Nowhere on earth could you enjoy such an expansive, dramatic and beautiful view while eating a fresh, live, tasty meal. This is the best Oceanside Cafe on earth, in my view.
Ela and Phil's cabin is a neat, small and well designed structure. I sleep in the loft on a very comfortable bed and can see the ocean lapping from this perch.
Almost each night I have to reassure myself that I will not be tipped into the ocean when the stormy winds shake the cabin and the rain beats at the windows and wakes me.
This place is peaceful and silent, if no wind storms and rain, you hear the ocean's hum, it contemplates its own existence.
The people in Alaska live a different pace, they have space and time to talk and be friendly.
They are kind and generous, thoughtful and artistic yet enterprising.
It has been great to visit a wonderful place on this planet and to meet these good people.
Update first: we are having a great time here! It is a delight to have my wonder at this place renewed through my mom's marveling eyes. We have hiked beaches in rain and wind and fleeting sunshine, stopping to pick up rocks, exclaim over clam shells, slipping up on mats of kelp. Phil and mom took the truck while I stayed home and did some work. They returned with our season's second load of kelp to layer over our gardens as we start to put them to bed. We have experienced the adventure of The Washboard and taking showers there. We have picked low bush cranberries and have been enjoying them cooked down with a little sugar/erythritol and some freeze-dried raspberries added at the last minute to thicken things up and add some redlicious flavor.
I'm getting lots of feedback from two people who know me very well. Despite all the work I did on communication and boundaries over the summer, I'm astonished anew by my lack of self-awareness.
Jewelry-wearing
This is something I've been wanting to write about for ages--two months at least.
Before I left at the beginning of the summer, I shared this wooden diamond pendant Phil got me as a parting gift.
I adored it, I wore it every day at the Foie Gras Farm at least, I fingered it around my neck, I proudly explained its provenance to admirers; I couldn't believe something so beautiful could be mine.
The truth is, a big part of my appreciation of it was its uniqueness; also, its connection to Phil and home. Another part was the sheer novelty of wearing jewelry. Ordinarily, I hardly ever do. I'll put on a necklace for a while, wear it non-stop, be aggravated by the extra effort of taking it off for showers or bed, over and above taking off all my layers...;) and finally (soon) settle back into necklace-less-ness(!)
Putting this one on and taking it off gave an intentionality to the act of wearing it that was so new to me. Juxtaposed with the fact that all the other girls with whom I was in such close quarters had elaborate grooming and dressing routines, whole cases of jewelry and make-up to choose from every day, never mind the clothes, this awareness invited me to think about the act of wearing jewelry--what it says and does for and about a person.
Any ideas?
I know some of the girls there said that it was one way to feel ok about themselves--to pay a lot of attention to their make-up/hair/jewelry. Now I'd always not-wanted to draw attention to my appearance, not-cared whether I felt ok about myself from that external perspective, but it all comes back to what you think of as normal. Being around it so much, I started to think that maybe paying more attention to appearance was normal, that maybe I should consider it.
I ended up with another necklace I liked a lot while at the Sandwich Academy, and a friend sent me a friendship bracelet, which I was so incredibly glad to get. I realized I'd always wanted a friendship bracelet and had never had one. Perhaps I'll learn to make them soon. But here's another thing I got so beautiful I can't believe it's mine.
I found this wonderful stall at the Arts Fair that happened toward the end of my time in Bellevue. The artist called her work 'copper lace' or 'silver lace'--she worked fine strands of those metals into bracelets and pendants, sometimes studded with gemstones or worked glass. She also reminded me of one of my most beloved poetry professors in her energy and spirit. We tried on lots of bracelets and I found one that I loved even more than the others, studded with citrine and garnet. It needed resizing, so she kept it overnight and I came back for my bracelet, made to measure for me, next morning!
Yes, isn't the juxtaposition with the friendship bracelet just wonderful?
You'd think I never wanted to wear a bracelet again, after all the identification bracelets at Foie Gras Farm and the privilege levels they connoted.
But what I realized with this beautiful copper on my wrist was that whereas I never really see a pendant, I can see a bracelet myself whenever I choose to look. A call to remind myself of..what?
My own worthiness?
To pay attention to my appearance/to appearances?
That there is beauty in the world?
That this too shall pass?
What does jewelry tell you?
Coming up: a guest post, from Mum!
I'm grateful for the tug of normality--normalcy, even, though I find that suffix ugly. People are polite: people are willing to countenance without comment changes in their friends' hair length, dress habits (ok that's a tautology, since a habit is a kind of dress), weight. Oh yes of course, everyone has a friend, sometimes a mere acquaintance, who will unabashedly ask about the obvious. But for the most part, people are willing to allow changes to be subsumed under normal, to assume this is how things are supposed to be. You could even say that normalcy/normality is a conspiracy we all agree to maintain.
Good job, Ela, you just retold The Story of the Emperor's New Clothes, complete with dress/habit elision! And you thought you had something new and interesting here.
Hear me just a moment more! But we each inhabit several worlds. It's only when these worlds unravel into one another that the fiction of normal starts to come undone. Right now I look more like I looked all my adult life than at any time in the past four years, but so many other things have changed. My friends in dirt-hippie days were astonished when my visiting mom mentioned my hothouse academic background. I don't know that anyone now could imagine me as an almost-professional musician, with the lifestyle and time commitment involved, and my present life is mysterious to my friends from that time. Where would normal lie in these intersections?
I started out saying I was grateful for the capacious countenancing of normal: a squint of the eye here, a double take there. It's useful to me as I re-enter normal life from a very abnormal few months. People acquiesce in how I seem, generally. Accept as normal how/what I eat. I spent the last few months being told I had to be 'abnormal' going forth in my faithfulness to 'the meal plan' or else it would be all downhill. My faithfulness to the meal plan is about analogous to Phil's faithfulness to resting his surgeried left arm, and in both cases what we're doing steers clear of outright damage. Our friends would recognize it as normal for each of us. But if someone from the treatment centers saw either of us in action, there would be a rupturing of the veil of normal right there. On the other hand, I am never a person who breaks a contract or pulls out at short notice, and, having thought I'd tough it through teaching this term, I ended up pulling out at very short notice on my therapist's nigh insistence. I'm glad I'm not teaching this term, I have plenty of other work. And I'm even more glad that the Campus Director was so kind about it; that, in a sense, it was allowed to be part of normal.
And now my mom is coming to visit again! We're driving up to Anchorage to meet her tomorrow. I'm writing this amid cleaning and dusting and generally trying to get our tiny place presentable. I've been home two weeks and after three months gone, that's been a very short time to get things lined up. Of course, my mom is one of my closest connections, in a shared psychic love bond, together with lots of instinctive cultural knowledge, together with shared memories my whole life long. All that said, we've inhabited different worlds for the most part for many years now. Start with the fact that I've lived in the US for twelve years. But even aside from the tiny cabin, with its precarious position, lack of shower, scenic outhouse; what is she going to find totally other than normal in her unspooling into this world?
Already, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I discovered the joy of having strangers visit: the overlapping of their worlds with my normal allowed me to see over again the visible magic of my surroundings (of course, the not-visible had never fallen off my radar). A step away, and normal can become luminous.
For the conspiracy of normal to work among friends, we assume that we'll each do our part to keep normalcy tidy, picked up, watered, arranged in an aesthetically pleasing manner. I broke that responsibility last spring with my manic swan dive toward destruction. Although someone from the treatment center might see some of my choices as 'not normal', be it known I'm taking the actions that prevent me from being dangerous, or at least unpleasant, to be around (taking meds, keeping regular hours); that other intakes are firmly steered away from downward spirals; that my science with the scale is impartial evidence of maintenance.
I hope to be able to check in here during my mom's visit, but we'll see how that goes. Much love.
(No Triggering Material Here--if I'm wrong, please let me know)
Weighing myself has never been a big part of my 'eating disorder', as it is for many, perhaps because there wasn't a scale in the house growing up and they always seemed scary and masochistic to me. There have been years I didn't own a scale and years I had one but seldom used it. Getting on once every couple weeks was more my m.o.
Since I got home, however, which has now been two whole weeks, I've been doing some science.
I've been weighing myself every morning. No matter what.
Any time I've felt trepidatious about it, I've reminded myself, Science! I've also paid attention to what time I got on the scale, whether first thing or after I'd been up a couple hours (always pretty early and before breakfast). I don't intend to weigh every single day forever after, and my naturopath doesn't want me to either. But this has been a pretty eye-opening experiment.
You Guys...I'll never believe you again if you say "I lost a pound!" "I gained a pound overnight!"
Listen: over the past two weeks, there have only been two consecutive days that my weight has been identical. Between every other pair of days there's been a change of anything up to almost three pounds.
Listen: the total range has been five pounds! Even the most scaredy part of myself is not going to believe that I gained and lost and gained and lost that much.
Listen: the obvious anxiety for my doctors is that I'll start analyzing and ruling out the foods preceding a higher number. But per my very casual observation, there have been days I ate more and the number was lower the next day, and vice versa, as well as the excretion factor not playing in nearly as much as I would have guessed.
Listen: It happened twice that I weighed myself, sat around writing for an hour, got back on the scale again, and was two pounds lighter! Where did it go?
Now obviously, people do lose weight and do gain weight--otherwise I wouldn't have had to leave this summer, and wouldn't have gotten to come back either. And I'm all the more baffled that before I went away, my weight would be exactly the same one Monday and the next, and would then change abruptly by a lot the next time, then stay there a couple weeks, except who knows what fluctuations would have happened all the days in between. Had I been weighing every day it probably wouldn't have looked nearly so clear-cut.
My adrenal issues may lead to slightly greater fluctuation than average. But the 'being a woman' issue leads to its being quite normal for weight to fluctuate significantly (whether or not you have a menstrual cycle, apparently).
And of course, I've left out the obvious: the scale is not infallible.
So, don't panic, don't necessarily believe the first thing you see; ask yourself how much is you and how much is just contents for which you are being the vessel.
This is a picture of wind. Although it's impossible to show motion with a still shot, you can see how the mountain ashes are moving, you can see whitecaps on the ocean below. Believe me, our cabin is shaking, and we're this close to the edge.
Sometimes what can't be seen is the prime mover. What can't be seen, what happens behind the scene...
First, though: my gratitude for your comments on my previous post is deep-unto-the-heart. That feeling of connection through words is meaningful sustenance. That, and my own joyful and intimate resumed connection to pen and paper. The dusting isn't yet done; there are still objects that have not found their proper spots in this small place; but most of the framework is unearthed and dusted, and now that there are scraps and fragments of semi-membered poems like lego pieces all over my notebooks, I feel arrived.
Another piece of inspiration I must share is this collection I'm reading for my first packet of my second year in the MFA program: Alice Fulton's Felt.
I confess I hadn't even heard of Fulton before my mentor and I discussed what I might read. And I'm blown away like the wind. The writing is forceful, beautiful, vulnerable--and the voice is so strong. She engages with some quite intellectual questions, as I often tend to in my writing, but she never descends to dryness, as I struggle not to do: the engagement and emotional intensity is always there. I don't want to write what she writes--no one should want to carbon copy another, but I wish I could write like that.
Go read her!
As for my own writing, and what I choose to put down here, I'm working to find the balance between sharing what I wish to share and avoiding that sharing give a message other than intended.
For example, I had a big food-fixing day on Saturday, where I made, among others, these energy bars, and these, and these; and baked beans somewhat like these; and a big Thai curry for Phil made up out of my head, and pickled beets from our garden...and I got a whole lot else done that day too!
Now to me, the fact that I made those energy bars pretty much per the recipes, rather than basically removing all the fat and sweetener like I used to, and that I have the honest intention of eating them, is offered as a good sign of healthy behaviors. But apparently, especially if I talk about it at all, it can be taken as evidence of obsession with food. As I learn to navigate these waters, I'll start posting recipes again sometimes.
Believe me, much continues to happen behind the scenes.
In my next post, I'll explore some more of the contrasts between being away and being here. For starters, two:
It's that time of year again. The potato people are here!
My point is the importance of found objects in our life here.
Second: everyone who knows me is uncomfortably aware of my nervous habits, like pulling the skin off my fingers, which can intensify when I'm focusing and writing a lot.
While I was at the treatment center in Bellevue, I made worry beads to fiddle with; an idea I picked up in Greece, although my appropriation is kind of like a woman smoking in the 1920s: every man I saw had a set of worry beads that he twirled around, but no woman did. My set from Greece are probably in a box at my parents' somewhere. The set I made in Bellevue was beautiful and delicate, with beads of glass and filigree; metallic accents.
I used them a lot; they were more effective than my other hand-distractors...until the string broke and they exploded all over the stone floor of the little market at PLU during the MFA residency.
My hideously scabbed fingers sent me to the bead store in Homer--yes, there is one! I asked for some strong cord, which, of course, required beads with bigger holes. The copper and small goldish ones from my old string fit, so my new string has some continuity with the former one.
Maybe it's not quite so beautiful; maybe beautiful in a different way. It feels good in my hands in a different way. Stronger than skin.
Perhaps if I jump on the rebounder awhile, it won't feel like this whole cabin is about to be blown away.
