At Sea, Back in England, Still a Writer?

In Israel, I learned that this baby's play area is called a "university."

And this "rose red city" encountered through a slot canyon (look deep into the picture) shows the indivisibility of "human" and "natural." 

Back to work today, I got so cold upstairs that I came down to sit in front of the electric heater and sat so close I scorched my cardigan! Even the temporary flush of a big dose of niacin didn't heat me enough.

Back from Israel, at my parents' house which is still the place I've lived in for the longest continuous time in my life, although my grandmother's apartment in Israel is the place that's been there for me my whole life, I'm still not home. I saw my last warm sunshine possibly for many months before entering the airport yesterday morning (although thankfully there's been some November sun in England too)...

...and with one foot in Israel, the other in England, and most of my material and emotional center of gravity in Alaska, I feel like the arches on that baby university. And at sea, actually--neither or none of my feet are on anything solid right now.

Nausea? It's from the Greek word for "ship", their chariots of the sea. And with so many seas between my feet, perhaps it's not surprising that I've been so continuously nauseous for such a great while now. Something has to shift.

I loved my friend Dawn's comment on my last post that inside-outness can often be a feature of travel. 
Who am I now? And where should my axis center? Axis center...accent...
By the time we left Israel yesterday, my accent in Hebrew was driving me nuts, and at the same time I was so tired that I was saying words with all the consonants reversed and forgetting basic words for things. I was very single minded about speaking Hebrew the whole time I was there, but since I'm not used to speaking it that was quite a workout, with so many features of language to juggle plus the intensity of communicating with real people about real things as opposed to doing exercises.
And that ferocity of linguistic focus, plus the almost-complete absence of downtime in this very social trip, begs the question of why Hebrew is so important to me (i.e. why am I practicing it instead of German or Spanish). It also left no energy or time for creative writing, with the clock ticking on my critical paper deadline and much still to do on my creative thesis. You wouldn't even know I was in an MFA program.

I am so confused. Every once in a while in the past week, I've read a poem and felt a moment of "ahhh" as a poem begins to surface from my own subconscious. Every once in a while I've eaten a date and felt a sweet spot of acceptance from my guts. But most of the time it's swirls of word sounds and grumbles of the self-contained ocean of my body. 

My mum's three brothers and their families are such awesome, admirable people. I see how direct some of their paths have been and how they have created their own success within that path through commitment, intelligence and perseverance...

...and I can't help but look at my own flounderings and fumblings and feel I don't belong/deserve/measure up. I'm too old to have so little to show for any of what I have to offer. And I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. Or where.

Now that I'm not focused on speaking my second language, and now I'm not in that intense, fresh-tasting country to which I feel such a connection, even anxious to catch up on work and get those book reviews sent out, I hereby commit to opening up some time just to sit with pen and paper, or a clean Word file and nothing else on the computer. 
I don't believe these waters upon which and surrounding which I'm a seasick sailor contain monsters or darkness. I believe there is so much that may come to the surface, and writing is the best way I know of to midwife that surfacing.
I have a feeling it'll have to be a process of surrender and innocence, and that I'll have to let go of any presumptions about what/who/where. I'll even have to let go of any expectations of my own success or even continuation as a writer. My writing might be the end of my writing. 
I am numbed by my unknowing, and yet willing to embrace this unknowing. 

my mum and her three brothers--album cover shot. how wonderful to still be
standing around in shirtsleeves in late November!

Letter from London--Gathering, Harvesting, First Haircut in Five Years...

Greetings again from London. I've been here a week now, and realize I need to come through on my promise, to myself and to you, to write here more. So far all aspects of my creative writing form the big missing piece in my being here.

As my dear friend Leslie pointed out, I've now been out of the home as long as I was in it--I left for college half my life ago! So, of course, it's a time for revisiting, and for noticing how much has changed while so much else has stayed the same. Same house, but as time wears it down, of course it's not the same house. Analogously for my parents, and for me.

But some delightful new additions, also. Just as my mom bloomed when she became a homeopath and started really helping people, the garden is blooming like it never was when I lived here. Aided by an English summer as unprecedentedly warm as ours was in Alaska, the vines are producing grapes...

 ...and the pear tree, young as it is, had lots of pears.

 Pears in pairs...something so peaceful and companionable about that image.

 Here's a sunny day's harvest of both. (It's mostly been raining while I've been here.)

 And they're really good! There are so many varieties of apple and pear one doesn't find over in the US. It's a delight to have Russet apples and Cox's orange pippin apples, and William pears, and Conference pears, which are what my mom's are. They're kind of like a bosc pear, although they're smaller--similar sweetness and bite.

There was another harvest that had to happen as well. Before I left for England, I mentioned to my mum over the phone that I'd be willing to go to her hairdresser's with her. My hair hadn't been cut since five years ago, when I shaved it completely. It had gotten pretty long--for me. Apparently everyone's hair has a certain length beyond which it won't grow; that's been my life experience. My hair wasn't super long up until last week, but it was about as long as I've ever been able to get it.

When I arrived, my mum was pretty horrified by the tangled mess of split ends that was my hair. It was like one big dreamcatcher, I confess. So my appointment at her hairdresser's was made urgently, and much hair was removed. 
She straightened and styled my hair as well, so I came away looking quite different.

I don't know if the above shot seems kind of contrived, but to bring it back down to earth, the top right is my mom's finger, and the bottom left was a desk lamp on the floor. Accidentally looked kind of neat.
It's been almost a week now, and of course my hair is back to its curly, unruly self.

I'm not willing to start a daily habit of straightening it as my mum does, and as she would like me to. Is that wrong of me? What I will undertake to do is brush it somewhat more regularly, to guard against the dreamcatcher tendency. If I let my dreams move freely from my head, perhaps they will travel where they need to go and plant themselves in some fertile ground or ether.

More soon! Lots of love.

Different in a Different Place, Ancestral Ways of Life (More Pictures)

It's interesting to experience myself in a place that is so familiar and yet so different in climate, atmosphere, environment and all the rest of the not-quite-synonymous flavors of "place."

In Alaska, I have a hat on my head about 70% of the time, my hair tied back out of the way. Here, with the humidity, my hair stands up like an afro (although the pic doesn't quite show it). Here, my mum is surprised that I seem tall, and hadn't realized my eyes are green.

I don't think I've gotten any taller, but I suppose my eyes could have changed color. Here, I'm known as my mother's daughter, or my grandmother's granddaughter--that's the connection, and everyone is connected to someone. The Hebrew for niece is simply "brother's (or sister's) daughter." I tell stories of Alaska as if it's a fairytale place, as if my life away from here is just story.

In many contexts, I'm the person who gets 'dibs' on precious avocados, because everyone knows I like them and don't eat all kinds of other 'substantial' foods. Here, I've noticed that the one food my grandmother is eating with any kind of enthusiasm is avocado, so I'm hunting for the best ones, have a ripening rotation, and am trying to make sure we have plenty for her.

And here, I'm even eating a little tahini! It's so ubiquitous, and we got a jar specially bread-crumb free for me, and all my ancestors and relatives have thrived on it for so long... I always have several jars of tahini at home but hardly ever use it, because I'm afraid of its high omega-6 content and its high omega-6-to-3 ratio. I have some chia seeds, flax meal and coconut powder here for fats, and the chia and flax at least should help to rectify the omega-6 hit of tiny films of tahini spread on apple or carrot slices.

It excites me to walk around the neighborhood and notice fruiting trees in a more thorough way than before. The many pomegranate trees are unmistakable this time of year, but there are others that are less obvious. These little pecans were all over the ground on one street...

...and the tree is so tall, it was hard to get a shot that showed any detail beyond its height, equal to the apartment buildings on both sides of the narrow streets.

 These topiary swans on a traffic circle are new since I was last here, and are quite graceful.

 When my plane was coming in to land, I saw huge solar arrays in many places, that looked like they were connected to irrigation systems for farming. The uncle who met me at the airport is an electrician, and I asked him about solar energy and how widespread it is. He told me they've been using it here for decades. I just hadn't paid attention--here are solar panels for water heaters on the roof of a building about as old as my grandmother's.

 I mentioned all the specialized stores here, and have a few more pictures of them. It's been so long since I've seen mannequins in store windows--reminds me of when I was little.

 In a place where modesty is quite a big deal, it's surprising to see even underwear mannequins and a whole display of lingerie in a store window--surprising, but common.

 Here's another of those stores with all kinds of bulk goods.

I stocked up on almonds, prunes, dates and pecans to make a spread for visitors. People come to visit any time and it's imperative to have food to offer them, and it has to be food that involves neither meat nor dairy, so as not to interfere with the kosher segregation of the two--guests might have eaten either for lunch, and should still be able to snack. Here's a typical spread--apples, pomegranate, persimmons, dates, prunes, dried cranberries, almonds, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, crackers (both sweet ("biscuits" in British and Hebrew) and savory), and a few wrapped candies. The dates really outshine the candies--it's the season here, and they are just delectable. I try to just enjoy and not worry about the fructose.

 It's interesting to me that the fruit and nuts are by far the most popular of these snacks--the crackers and candies are seldom eaten. My relatives aren't worried about omega-6 or fructose--they don't eat foods with added sugar much, but they eat plenty of fruit (fresh and dried) and lots of nuts and seeds. And really, they're in good shape.

Four of my grandmother's siblings and some other relatives came to visit yesterday. It's interesting to me how they've all changed and how they haven't changed. My grandmother is the oldest of nine, almost all of whom are still alive. They definitely look older, but still "feel" the same to me as when I was a little kid, and all the years in between. And really, they don't look very different. Sure, they've put on weight, lost weight, lost hair, grown hair in other places, and none of them are as tall as my childhood images of them. They must have been so young back then! It feels the same way when I walk around town--there are a lot of people my grandmother's age walking around, or being wheeled around, or driving little golf-cart things around, and there were a lot of people her age walking around when I was a little kid. Back then, I thought they were old people. Now, they really are old people. Many of the same faces.

Here are (left to right) my mom's cousin Aliza, my mom, my great-aunt Najiba, my great-aunt Salma.

 And here's my grandmother with my great-uncles Eli and Fouad.

 Here are Eli, Fouad and Najiba.

I've been hearing some fascinating stories of life back in the old country (Iraq), of the difficulties of moving here, of all that they went through--really, another kind of holocaust parallel to the one in Europe.

I'm glad to be learning more about my origins. Certain aspects of my grandmother's sufferings are scarily prophetic to me also...

In My Grandmother's Kitchen--Smoky Eggplant Salad, Beets, Kibbeh

We spent a good part of yesterday preparing food with my grandmother. This made me happy, because Friday (and often part of Thursday) was traditionally "war on the kitchen" in preparation for Shabbat, when no cooking can happen and when hordes of family would always descend to devour my grandmother's famously fabulous cooking. My grandmother would work up a storm in this tiny, sparsely equipped kitchen.

It's fascinating to notice all the things this kitchen lacks. Measuring cups, or any kind of measuring utensils, for prime example (I think she has an old scale stashed away somewhere for the rare cake-baking occasions). There's only one decent knife. Only one cutting board, about my age. Few work surfaces and very little pantry space. The latter is probably because it's a hot country, food spoils or gets worm-riddled quickly, and the stores are always well-stocked and just a short walk away. (In my next post, I'll share some pictures of town and some typical stores).

Our miniature "war on the kitchen" made me happy also, because my grandmother has experienced such an erosion of her abilities and loss of independence, and you don't need to be able to stand up to be able to cook wonderful food.

So here she is, just outside the kitchen, fully participating and very much in charge. She's preparing kibbeh, which I spell that way because that's how it's always spelled in English, but really the vowels are both wrong, and the right vowels don't exist in English... (I never normally put anything meat-based on this blog, but getting my grandmother to join in on making food was a big deal.) Just in case it wasn't clear, of course I didn't eat the kibbeh myself, never have in my life. It's meat and it's gluten--no go twice over. I handle meat and gluten on a daily basis back home preparing food for other people (I wear a dust mask when I'm handling gluten) but I simply choose not to mention it here. I made an exception for my grandmother's creation.

The kibbeh were steamed in a bed of shredded, seasoned beets, and we saved out a bunch of the beets before adding the meat, for a delicious vegetarian side-dish.

The beets were boiled whole until cooked but still firm. Then I slipped off the skins and grated them.
I saute'ed an onion with turmeric, black pepper a little oil, then added the beets. Let them cook for a while and added the juice of half a lemon and a little salt. It's interesting to me that my grandmother doesn't use a lot of salt--I don't have much of a taste for salt either, and in the US, many people I know add tons of salt. Genetic, or cultural, my feeling that a little salt goes a long way?

 This is the batter/outside part of the kibbeh.

It's semolina flour, oil and a little water. No measuring--my grandmother sat there and put it together, adding water by eye and by feel. Wetter than I would have guessed it needed to be.

Here she is combining the meat part with the batter part. That is quite a trick and I wish I'd watched her more closely. However, of course I was busy making something else at the time.

I was making what we call (approximately translated) "eggplant salad," which is really pretty much baba ghanoush. I thought this eggplant on the stove looked so funny!

It was a monster eggplant, and took quite a lot of my attention. I only burned myself once.

Did I mention that there's no food processor or anything like it in my grandmother's kitchen? There's a pretty good pestle and mortar, but not big enough for pulping the eggplant. Once I'd picked all the burnt skin off, I mashed it with a fork and then grated it.

I was going to add a couple cloves of garlic to the smoky eggplant, and look what my mom found!

I would never have guessed that worms could live in garlic--I thought garlic was antihelminthic...This worm was lively and happy, and probably had a great immune system.

Well, luckily we had plenty of garlic, really good garlic, too. The other important ingredient was tahini, and I ended up running out to the store to get some more, because the tahini that's already here was likely full of breadcrumbs from people's knives and I wanted to be able to eat the eggplant dish without getting sick! One interesting feature of Israeli supermarkets is that they have three big shelves of different kinds of tahini. So, mashed up smoky eggplant, two cloves garlic, a little salt, juice from one and a half lemons (added incrementally to taste) and a good pour of tahini. We wanted to add some cayenne pepper or curry powder but didn't have any (and hadn't realized that before my store-run), so we used black pepper, a pinch of cloves and some cinnamon. My mom was surprised by that choice of spices, but it really worked well.

I cut up carrots, cucumber and fennel to dip.

Right when we sat down to lunch, two of my uncles, one of my aunts and one of my cousins all showed up one after the other! They all claimed to have had lunch already, but they all enjoyed the eggplant dish, the beets and the kibbeh.

Hallowe'en Pics

Perhaps it was appropriate that I spent my first ever night as a blonde with such an intimate gathering of close friends--there were just seven of us (a magic number)?

The "witch's brew" in my left hand is dandelion wine I made two or three years ago, which was rough when I first poured it off, but has matured into something rather delicious.
Once again, as on so many holidays, David and Olga hosted us in their beautiful house--this time in their guise of "Pimp-daddy and Mini."

What? I'm riding my broomstick, and that's Ozzy Osbourne, aka "Oddly," aka Royce.

 Amy (Phil's daughter) and Leslie (her mom) are such a wonderful team.

And Amy as Audrey Hepburn was really just as stunning as she always is anyway.

 Meanwhile, "Joanne does Costa Rica," complete with lipstick on the teeth--Leslie has such a talent for taking an idea and taking it beyond.

 Phil was somewhat costume-shy: he whipped out some scarily gothic dentist tools and brandished them a bit (thankfully, I was getting my make-up done at that point), and he wore the flag for maybe 90 seconds: otherwise, he was innocuously white-shirted and black-trousered, but of course, he was the life and soul nonetheless.

 To use up the tomato slime from those eyeballs I shared yesterday, I made a slimy salad with "lice" converging to suck on the blood pool.

 Gosh, that sounds so gross! But it was really delicious, in fact. It's kelp noodles and shredded romaine lettuce and some avocado, with a pumpkin seed-spirulina-pesto dressing with lots of lemon zest and black pepper. Without the ghoulish decoration, it would be great any day.

I didn't manage to think up a ghoulish explanation for the hazelnut pear frangipane...

 ...although I'm sure I could make the pears out to be something gross if I used my imagination. This was adapted from the almond-pear frangipane in Everyday Raw Desserts by Matthew Kenney. I used hazelnuts Phil brought back from Oregon instead of almonds, and made a cashew-coconut crust instead of just cashews. I was really impressed with how pastry-like the crust turned out, and the overall effect was elegant and delicious.

Unfortunately, I had an upset stomach all yesterday and still do today. Perhaps that's what prevented me from being able to confirm that "blondes have more fun:" for me, the jury's still out.

Do blondes have more fun?
I hope you had a wonderful, fun Hallowe'en--Happy All Saints Day!

Note from Oregon--Wedding and Planting

Greetings from Oregon!

Phil's niece's wedding was a delightful occasion. I'm so glad that we got to meet her new husband more informally the night before, and to verify that he is a lovely man who is crazy about her--we think she is wonderful.

Much to catch up on here, and oddly discombobulated by the unfamiliar surroundings. I also still haven't figured out how to play with pictures in this little netbook, so all the upright pics I've taken are unrotated--guess I'll just take landscapes for a while. (Note later in the post--seems blogger rotated it automatically! Way to live and learn.)

I'm happy to be able to report that I've actually been writing during this trip! I've lamented on here many times before that traveling knocks me off my rhythm and then it takes time to find it again. This time, though, fresh from the Writers' Conference, while we were on the plane I applied several revision techniques we'd discussed to a poem I hadn't worked on for some time, and invented a couple more techniques myself. Since then, I've made all sorts of notes that can blossom into something more continuous with a little more time.

We've been putting plants out--a late, wet spring here in Oregon, and so a slow start. Lovely to have my hands in the soil, to be tucking plants into beds. Good visiting, good work, good time for reflection.

Eating mostly fruit, as I have been, has made being here so much more convenient. It's also a pleasant kind of 'sticker shock'--everything, especially produce, is much cheaper than in AK. I'm happy to find watermelon with seeds in it here. There have been some unscheduled treats too, though. Part of the wedding spread was a gorgeous array of fruit. There were trays and trays of cookies in lieu of a cake, including several trays of gluten free cookies! (Phil's niece's new mother in law is gluten free too.) Cautious as I usually am about eating something I haven't read the ingredients on, especially at the 'high reward' end of things, Phil's niece is such a sublime exponent of the cookie that I felt good about indulging in cookies at her wedding.

Phil's brother and sister-in-law and their gorgeous seven-year-old son (pictured with a snake we found on the farm and greatly enjoyed) are headed back East today.

I dropped them at the airport and am now at IKEA, hoping to get a few things for our kitchen project and that mailing them myself will go smoothly. Nice that they have wifi here too, but I'd better start shopping soon!

Back Home--Lessons (and Pictures) from the Trip

We're home! Not quite grounded yet, but the weather is beautiful here, we've been planting seeds and are gradually catching up on life.

First lesson: don't get caught empty-handed! This is a blogger lesson along with everything else: I'm disappointed to have blogged so little during the trip and to have been without my camera at so many picture-worthy moments. I should have made sure I was familiar with the camera-netbook interface before we left, had some posts up my sleeve for gap-times and generally been more prepared. And then, to arrive home and have blogger be out of action for the first day with this post _way_ overdue???

Finally, then--
I learned that rattlesnakes are well-camouflaged in the arid, tough soil of the desert, but can choose the trail itself as their lair.

 I learned how to paint ceilings, and perhaps how not to have an extremely painful neck by the end of it. How did I manage to miss out on painting pretty much my whole life up to now?

 I learned that you can hug a saguaro: you just have to wait for the right time in its life...

 ...and I wore shorts (or unzipped my zipoff pants) for the first time, I swear, in over two years! That's what happens when you live in AK...

I also learned that my exercise tolerance has improved markedly: I'm so happy and grateful for this. Plans definitely afoot for getting in shape (more on this soon) so that I can feel fit to be seen in shorts should the opportunity arise again.

I learned that I needed to be better prepared with food things. The baked yams and avocado held me mostly for our first two days of travel, but for our return journey, a similar strategy went bad. The dried goods went moldy because we hadn't had enough sun to dry them here--reinforcement of my recent decision to acquire a dehydrator...

...but I also learned that with a few requests and lateral thinking, I could get a very satisfying meal out after long hikes. (This was from La Salsa in Tucson--minus cheese and sour cream and plus their eponymous salsa, it was a hearty and nutritious bowl of veggies and black beans, with some brown rice that I didn't really get to.)

I learned that I love the topography and flora of Arizona--it feels so familiar and 'right' to me. It reminds me of Israel and that welcoming warmth and repelling prickliness, straight to my soul.

Heather leads the way

I learned that whilst good exercise is great preparation for a trip, I don't so much need very heavy, hard, muddy, grueling exercise at the very end of a long trip when there's unpacking and unloading to do too.
But that's what we got!
Our wonderful, gracious friend with whom we stayed in Anchorage when we flew home had an old apple tree that she wanted cut down. Phil decided to try to transplant it instead! With the root wad and all, the fully mature tree probably weighed several hundred pounds and it was all we could do to load it into the truck along with our luggage and Anchorage purchases.

Then, we had to roll it down our path, sitting on plywood with rollers (old pipe) under it that we had to keep switching out.

 Phil dug a big hole, and getting it into the hole and off the plywood, and getting the tarp out from around it, was challenging to say the least. The ground was mucky with decomposed kelp that we harvested (smells just like salty manure) and at one point, when tugging out the tarp, I slid all the way into the hole, under the tree!

 So, fingers crossed, the tree may survive. Phil put a cage around it so that the moose and bunnies don't dispatch it immediately. Oh, and you can't tell from the light, but this digging, tugging, heaving, mud-wrestling operation all took place around 10pm, at the end of a very long day of traveling. 

I don't mean to sound grumpy and I'm glad we got the tree moved. Just maybe next time we won't combine it with a long, tiring trip, OK?

The most important thing I learned, though, was how good it feels to spend time with friends and loved ones, to share their lives and what's important to them.

It was so good to see David and Heather...

 ...and David's brother John--and their other brother and sister-in-law (my bad no camera). We weren't the most skilled workforce but it felt so good to help with their house.

 I finally met one of Phil's oldest friends, who drove down from Montana to visit with us in Oregon. He's the same one whose wife is the potter who made us those beautiful bowls I pictured a while back and it was definitely past time that we should get to meet in person and that he and Phil should catch up.

 And of course, we had a great visit with Phil's mom.

So, now we're planting our gardens and I'm slowly catching up with work and writing. I'm so grateful that my writers' group met yesterday, our first day back: it felt grounding and familiar to be back among them. I'm hoping to feel more caught up by the end of the weekend.

How long does it take you to feel caught up after a trip? How do you implement the lessons that you learn from each trip?
much love