From "precious" to "previous," and triggers to epiphany

If you're local and would like something of mine, knowing my tastes, contact me! I'll bet there's something I'd love to give you that you'd love to have.
Ah, dear Homer--raining and snowing at the same time! 

We've been spared so much of that this winter, but I think being forced to drive in deep, wet, heavy snow on slick pavement with high winds and lots of airborne slush has been great trip preparation, as well as good memory-building of quintessential Homer.

On Sunday night, I realized the time had come whereat I could either let things slide along and have a very very dramatic last forty-eight hours in Homer next week, or I could make some lists and schedule time and plot slots, and make a calm, self-assured exit. I'm pleased to say I made the latter decision--I didn't get out of bed on Monday morning until I'd made a few pages of lists. Boxes are being taped, packages consolidated, emptied, passed on, used up. There have been some lovely serendipities as I've sought new homes for things that have been precious to me (and now, through an easy typo, are previous to me) :)
If you're local and would like something of mine, knowing my tastes, contact me! I'll bet there's something I'd love to give you that you'd love to have.

An unexpected abundance: two minutes after taking this photo, I'd found another half dozen paperclips and two more rubber bands. I never have enough clips and bands--until now!

This darling garden will have to come down soon. Since I'll be driving through Canada to get to the ferry I don't think I'll be able to carry dirt, but I'm thinking of sprouting clover in a mesh bag.

 Did I even talk about my birthday in my previous blog post? That post was maybe a bit too abstract, wasn't it? ;)
My birthday, plus the need to consolidate all kinds of ingredients, was my opportunity to play with this, which is danger zone for me...

 ...and to re-verify that this is a far far far superior alternative for me.

Five photos, five triggers. In the last couple days, I've been having some massive epiphanies around my relationship with food.
The need to drive in challenging conditions, the need to pack up and clean house, the practice of making treats for others, for myself, and seeing whether/what the differences between these are, have been tremendously instrumental in these realizations, and I'm feeling so grateful for the learning opportunity.

Do you want to hear more? It's an opening up I'm considering for my writing. Big changes are happening, and simply the fact that I can verbalize any of it is exciting to me.
Big love--local folks please hit me up soon if you'd like something of mine; anyone anywhere, if you'd like a postcard from the road please send me your address and I'll send you one!

Ephemeral Art

I've been writing about beginnings and endings, that perhaps they're imaginary, they're just little steristrips of continuity. And as a blogger, I've always wanted my posts to follow one another in some sort of satisfying sequence, one evolving into the next. Continuity of time really helps with that, and lately I haven't had that. So I guess I'm proceeding in a more fragmentary vein--which has its own "fit", in that I've been writing about my work translating the dictionary, and thinking about how fragmented an experience of words and life a dictionary offers.
I've also been thinking about Ephemeral Art. This last Sunday was the Burning Basket celebration at Homer: a homegrown local festival celebrating all that grows here, creating a thing of beauty, an art object, from it, inviting people to write and tuck in notes listing what they want to let go of, what they want to celebrate...

Inviting the community to be present and witness, and celebrate with drumming and flowers and shared food...

 And then letting it burn to nothing, exploding with hidden sparklers, mimicked by poi-spinners and the caverns of drums.

So often when we make art, we are concerned that it should be lasting--last forever, even--and that it should affect or impact people in meaningful ways. But we often practice obscure arts, indoors, concealed inside pages, lasting only because it sits on a shelf or inside a hard drive or in "the cloud'. But this piece of ephemeral art gets the whole town out, practically, and people of all ages are just so into it. This is art that makes of itself an event. Even people who don't have any thoughts about art, or of fire as cleansing, or of praise for the plants that grew themselves and have been woven into this beautiful structure, are having an experience generated by the art.

As the leaves turned this week, as the temperatures are mostly below 50 degrees, as seeds sink and the harvest dwindles, I've been thinking how everything is ephemeral and everything is art.

Every year the oddly shaped roots for us to interpret as it strikes us.
The fireweed webbed in seeds, which seems impossible since the air has been filled with fireweed seeds for a month. Each cotton-candy spire a work of art.

Even a sample pack of two gluten-free chocolate chip cookies.

I ate one, a 60-calorie sub-in part of lunch. The chocolate chips, firm, spreading, stimulating. The matrix of
flours and gums and sugar and palm oil and natural flavors crunchy and evanescent, the snap of the crunch melting away as soon as it passes the teeth--a mirage, shimmering and waning. Pure art. Pure ephemeral art. For sixty calories you could have nine almonds or a small apple, or several carrots, or many other things that would be far more hunger suppressant. So why would I ever choose the cookie?
How many calories should one allow for art?
I don't know the answer.

In the Flux

I apologize for having left things hanging in a scary place!
Since I last wrote, I have returned to Homer.
I have moved from far in the beautiful back of beyond down to town, house-sitting for dear friends, getting around temporarily without my car.
I'm not running sprints yet, but my energy does seem to be steadily increasing.
I have been harvesting what others planted.

Feeling grateful for the abundance, warding myself off from the disappointment and self pity at not having planted a whole lot myself this year.

In this intense and poignant time, giving humor its space, narrow though its berth tends to be in my psychic space--thanks always to the carrots.

I don't yet know what room or apartment, and what fellow-dwellers, will be in my life this winter (if you have the room I'm meant to live in, please let me know!) and, as with everything else right now, I interpret that it's my job to be okay with that uncertainty.

Kidneys are all about water, flux, fluidity and shifting; in the Chinese cosmology they're associated with winter, the season into which we're moving now. I suppose it might be ideal if that energy were balanced with a rock of security in my life now--of warmth, comfort and safety--but perhaps the lesson and blessing here will be to sink down and find that security and comfort in each moment that I live from boxes, packed and ready to move, each time I throw out freezer burned veggies that have moved with me three times now, each time I release my habits of buying in bulk and storing as neither appropriate to my lifestyle nor actually providing of any real comfort or safety. Each time I let go another specious tie to safety, each time I invite the universe to show me real safety. Sinking means finding depth. The water bloat from the IV that troubled me so much when I left the hospital barely able to do up my jeans dissipated in less than a week--a little flag that told me to have faith (and not freak out over engorged body). But yesterday I got stung by a bumblebee (first time for that) when working in the garden, so I have a little reminding reservoir of fluid on my right wrist. Ebb and flow.

On a good day, this makes sense! What is also there for security is the writing and translating. The writing which has gotten all serious and intent and goal-oriented and "thesis year of the MFA program" titled. How did that happen so fast? And why don't I feel any less of a novice as a writer? And now I must make time to write as never before, and yet not feel that I'm up to the ankles in time's spilled milk when I sit a whole evening and morning, as I did recently, trying to 'catch' a poem and get barely a pair of consecutive words down. My dictionary translating job is marching toward its completion, and in order to stay on track, I must translate a certain number of words each day, an intended lemma on which to close the day. As time bound and time sensitive as the MFA completion is, I somehow have to admit the space for the 'get nowhere' times, the times when the blank page stays obstinately blank, the times when the scribbles stay obstinately obtuse and uninspired.

As for this blog, I intend to continue updating, more frequently than of late but not more than three times a week. I'll be musing mostly about writerly things, I suspect, but also some on sustenance of other kinds.
Thank you for letting me share my voice.
With love.

Bouncing, Committal-- => Committed?

I still have Georgia On My Mind, and backed up in my backed up mental list of posts. Back in Alaska; back in Homer, moving, and tonight, back in a certain Homer institution in which I've spent quite a bit of time this year, most probably headed back up the road to spend some more time in another. 

After the lushness of Georgia, to contemplate the excitement of first nettles is a sharp transition. The pushkis (cow parsnip) are innocuous-looking little umbellifers now--but try pulling one up and see the enormous root wad undergirding even just a little dicot; and they'll already give you a skin rash, too, as they'll be even gladder to do when they're eight feet high and legion. The moose, poor gaunt twig-browsers, on their knees tearing up mouthfuls of green grass, grazing in gratitude, praying.

That this scrubby green is so amazing, Rite of Spring, pushing, teeming, will be rife and rank and over-all and rapidly soon. Despite the fact it's another crappy spring, rainy, gray, cold, and everyone's gasping for summer to come. It snowed last weekend, for goodness sake! That said, higher up the hill, like where I'm living now, the snow lingers. Here's a shot of the property where I have a room in the owner's house.

See that little pole in the foreground? Bird houses. She feeds birds and they come. They sing and they show themselves, their bright bodies, their feathers. My room is in the downstairs part of the house, unfortunately dark, but the one window gives out to ground level, its bottom just below my eye level, and there are often small song sparrows grubbing about down there on the ground; I think I saw a boreal chickadee too.

So. Transition. And apparently I don't deal with it entirely well. So look at me getting myself committed again, and on a holiday weekend again (last time was over Christmas/New Years) although this time I wasn't even aware it was Memorial Day Weekend. I'm not feeling good physically either--out of it and dangerous. When I come around, I'll be putting serious thoughts and intentions into how to manage all this better. To live with transition as I live in transition and to find stability within that wobble.

Any advice?

"Big Game Hunting" on our Beach--Exciting Find

Phil's recent appearance in the local newspaper was actually his second time in the papers this fall. Last time was in September, when the Redoubt Reporter interviewed him about the 37,000-year-old mammoth tusk piece he found about a decade ago up in Deep Creek, 40 miles north of here.

With the length of day and the weather so salient right now, I sometimes feel like I'm brought closer to other times, as if we're riding a spiral. Every Solstice, we get to revisit the previous Solstice on the previous round of the spiral. If we celebrate or think about traditional festivals, we're also invited to look deep into our collective past. One of the reasons I love collecting rocks so much is for this reminder of the depth of time beneath our feet. And this post is about a very special find from the past.

I've alluded before to the fact that Phil's always "shopping" when hiking out in the wilderness, and he has found some incredible treasures on his travels, which he shares as unique gifts for people he cares about. Well, on our Monday beach hike with our friend Sue, we made a very special find. I'll explain why I say "we" in a moment.

It was the first time in several days that we were hiking without constant, intense wind in our faces in one direction, accompanied by stinging sleet. Although it was cold, the absence of wind made it feel luxurious and pleasant. We were hiking a little slower than our usual pace, stopping frequently and admiring all the new erosion. That's an admiration tinged with apprehension, mind you!

I was tending to hike slightly ahead: I run cold, so our slower pace was putting me at risk for chilling. But I was "scouting." I would point or call out anything that looked interesting. As I passed one pinch-point where a whole chunk of bluff had spewed down to the beach, leaving an apron of new gravel gabling toward the shore, I noticed a very interesting-looking piece of something. I pointed at it, and walked on. Phil, just behind me, picked it up, took a close look, and said, "This is part of a mammoth's tooth!"

 It's about the size of my palm. Weathered and layered--petrified, you could almost say.

 Its top and bottom surfaces are so smooth.

This is majorly exciting: there's been a recent upswing in interest in fossils from Pleistocene fauna (hence the interview about Phil's mammoth tusk). Geologists used to think that there were no mammoths in this area in the Pleistocene. Phil's mammoth tusk, because of where it was found (an inland location, so it couldn't have been washed ashore from elsewhere) had a big part in proving that there were mammoths here back then. Now, people are out on the beaches looking for more "evidence!" The local Geologist found another tusk fragment on the beach this fall, and Phil goes several times a week just to look. Well, he looks for other things too, like cedar logs, but he likes to say he's going "big game hunting."

This is his mammoth tusk--from a different mammoth than the owner of the tooth, but probably similar vintage.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to imagine how this world would have looked when those creatures were alive. How different from now. And yet, part of them coexists with us in this world. It makes my lifetime seem very small...

Happy Solstice, Happy Chanukah, and watch the days begin to get longer!