Art and Truth and their Part in Self-Care, Smoothies, Shopping

We had some time off this afternoon, as our profs are going to be doing a public reading this evening. This seems a good moment to take stock. In brief, I'm having a great time and feel like I'm managing really well. In fact, I feel pretty embarrassed to have bleated on so much to the ND, and everyone else, about my anxieties before coming here. When you really care deeply about something, that's the best motivation to keep yourself in good shape for it. And I'm starting to understand what the ND meant when he said that it's a good thing that I can't run myself down like I used to: if I walk too much or skip a snack, I'm in trouble instantly, which also makes it easier to correct. And thinking again about the whole relationship between 'art' and 'truth,' if I really work on the art of being at my best, then the face that I can present to the workshop as an excited, attentive, interested, motivated participant is true and unimpeded, and (although some conversations have been fractured as we walk up stairs and I get left behind) no one needs to know about my health problems! It feels good to think about this as both truth and art. 

Other elements of self-care have included asking for help more, and just bathing in the kindness and generosity of so many people. This afternoon, I got stranded by a bus, asked where to go to get picked up, and a woman gave me a ride to my next stop! I felt totally comfortable accepting, and just so grateful. It feels kind to myself too not to think so much about the huge volume of things that I 'used' to be able to do with a given amount of time - it's ok that riding the buses and doing a little shopping took all afternoon; it's ok that I'm not going to finish writing this before I have to go out to the faculty reading. 

As for energy in class, I can almost always be sure that my enthusiasm for the subject will carry me through - but that's partly because I want so much to be fully 'present' that I rest a lot in between times and do less of everything else. But I have the phosphatidylserine at the ready at all times too, and the rescue remedy. 

I have more experience than anybody at smiling through a sick stomach, but no matter how my guts are feeling, I have to have my smoothie in the morning. And there are some things I can do to make sure that they do better. Generally, traveling and being in a strange place upsets my stomach even more than usual, so I try to eat as close to what I normally eat as the circumstances allow - no weird surprises! I put a bunch of ginger powder in my smoothie too, which helps with the nausea. As I've said here before, ideally I prefer to mix my own superfoods and protein powders for smoothies. However, in this 'away from home' context, it's useful to have a composite powder with a bunch of enzymes, green powder and probiotics. I have 'Life's Basics Green' and Vega Shake'n'Go (the latter in chocolate flavor, so used with caution). But I still add the ginger powder, some flax meal, some freeze-dried acai powder (recommended by the ND as an energy boost without slamming my adrenals), and a little coconut oil. I've been sprouting lentils too, and having lots of algae. I also adjust my Magnesium and Vitamin C intake as necessary. And take all my supplements, hormones, etc.

My 'blender bottle,' with its ball whisk inside, has been very handy for shaking up the smoothies. And here it is later, being a carry-case for the two avocados I bought this afternoon! You can see the little ball whisk at the bottom, agreeably concertina-ing itself to accommodate them. I was pleased to get them home without mishap. It feels good to make use of all the space you've got when schlepping groceries carless!

I found these little superfood juices on sale at the supermarket this afternoon. 

Goji's great, and acai is on my 'helper' list right now, so I decided to get them to try, although being basically fruit juice (albeit no added sugar), they're way too much sugar for me. But I figured a couple tablespoons at a time wouldn't be a problem: the ND keeps telling me to relax about taking in a little sugar for the moment, as we can't really eradicate the yeast until the mercury is taken care of. 

Well, I had a little taste of each and they just taste incredibly sweet to me (I have very sensitive tastebuds anyway, but since I haven't been eating sugar for so long, anything concentrated like fruit juice is just over the top). So a tiny bit in a smoothie is probably the way to go.

I actually bought a pair of black 'converse' hi-tops today too! Weird thing to buy while grocery shopping, but since I was buying a bike lock to open up the 'biking' option, I needed some footwear to suit. Normally, I always wear my big, thick winter boots, every day, and of course that's the only footwear I brought here. And they really don't sit well on bike pedals!

If I wear regular shoes, my ankles will just drop me on the floor at any moment. (I gave up trying to go out wearing sneakers the day I almost hit my head on a toilet after an unpredictable and unprovoked ankle antic.)  The supermarket had converse on offer, and although it's nothing like the ankle support of my boots, I think it's enough that I could ride a bike somewhere and then walk around and not fall over. It's ironic (but very typical of me) that when I was in my teens, I always wanted a pair of converse hi-tops, and now when I finally buy a pair, it's entirely a practical motivation. 

But here's the silly thing: at checkout, the clerk forgot to take the security tag off (and I forgot to remind her), and I can't get it off! I dulled my pocket knife pretty good trying, right when I was needing to get out of here and go to the reading! Oh, the excitement! These little things really get me going.  So I guess I need to ask someone in class to loan me a hacksaw. Or go back to the store next free session (Saturday?) and get them to remove it. But now I can't find the receipt...

Nostalgic For Eagles, Writing Workshop Notes and Blog, Blogging Comments

Day 3 - I underdressed today - trusted the weather report and the pattern of the last two days, expected the morning rain to burn off to a sultry, humid afternoon. It rained all day, and at this latitude, without the sun shining it gets chilly quickly.

I'm staying on campus to attend the 8pm concert - a string quartet and a double reed group - did I mention how poignant it is being here amidst a big musicians' gathering? I chatted with the husband and wife at the core of the double reed group, called 'Obohio,' a couple days ago, and very friendly and welcoming they were too, but I told them I'd probably cry when I came to their concert. It's such a strange feeling, abutting my current self against the self that lived and breathed oboe and english horn all those years. More grist to my musing about natural habitat - this campus is so comfortable! I could get out of the rain, get some hot water for my tea, find a comfortable chair in the lounge of the student center, and an internet connection! 

Or I could go for a walk in the birch forest all around and feel the rain on my skin.

(this pic was taken yesterday, when it was sunny).

Rosehips everywhere - they intertwine very prettily with that vetch I showed yesterday:

I haven't seen a bald eagle for almost a week  - back home, they're our closest neighbors! There were some immense ravens flying to roost on the eaves of the building our classroom is in this afternoon, arrowing toward the building and then uplifting at the last minute, so it seemed, before piercing right through our windows. By the third time, I was sure they were ravens, but at first I wondered if they were juvenile eagles - never seen such big ravens before!

I'm so grateful for the energy, kindness and sincerity of our three professors for this course - Peggy Shumaker, David Crouse and Jeanne Clark. They manage to be simultaneously challenging and nurturing, and raise good questions as well as answering ours. 

This afternoon, they were joined by a local writer, Theresa Bakker, who offered insights from the inside of an MFA process and a moving meditation on the value of walking as part of the creative process. I've found her blog and look forward to following it henceforth!

Speaking of blogs, two things! First, thanks to Sue Ann Bowling, a Geophysicist emerita and newly-published science fiction writer, our workshop has its own blog! They're going to put up the day's exercises and are encouraging us to post our drafts in response. I may just do that too. The blog is at http://homecomingbook.wordpress.com/  (and I'm sorry, but I don't think I'd have recognized David Crouse from that photo!)  

Second, I want to try to say something that's been on my mind, coming out of a comment on my blog post of Monday. Averie wrote that she appreciates the comments I make on her blog and hadn't been as good about responding. I just want to say that while I really want people to read my blog and am really delighted and flattered and pleased and overjoyed when I get comments, I write comments on other people's blogs because I feel moved to do so, because I admire or otherwise feel moved to respond to what they say. I don't want this to constitute an obligation on them to comment back to me. I think it's too easy to end up in an all-consuming cycle of blog-hopping and reciprocity and would prefer not to have anyone feeling obligated. I write this blog because I love to do it, I write comments on other people's blogs for the same reason. When I have enough online time, I will do more than my 'fair share' of commenting, but that's just how I am - and sometimes I'm offline completely! When I get comments, I'm happy and grateful to know that someone has felt moved to respond.

Thanks so much, Averie and everyone else.

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. 

Postcard from Fairbanks - Generosity of Strangers, Long Drive, Long Hike

Here I am in Fairbanks! I'm in the 'Great Hall' of the Fine Arts Department of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks: it's been a long time since I've been in a school building like this one and certainly long since I've been in an arts complex that seems so well-endowed. This hall opens into a concert hall on one side, with a corridor connecting to the rest of the building, and a theater on the other, the third is open to the outdoors, and the fourth is that back entrance/loading zone that one always finds around the side of a theater. I've been told I'm a bit early for them to answer my questions or find me the promised bus pass, so I'm cooling it off to the side. Someone is practicing an accordion in the middle of the room with various commentators around her. There's a general hubbub of activity-in-potential, coy squawks of woodwind instruments backstairs, kids asking incredulous questions, people walking around with bulky keychains around their necks, cameras, instrument cases squashing them asymmetrical. 

And now registration is underway in full swing, officials are fast-walking around balancing laptops on palms and looking harried, an epidemic of name-tag necklaces is going around, the space is filling up and the impression is generally one of a lot of people who are very enthusiastic to be here, to immerse themselves in their music or art and in all the outward stuff that goes with it - a variety of partnered poses are struck.

When I got here last night, it rained in torrents! I took a hike to the Fred Meyer three miles away from where I'm staying, partly to get a look around, partly to get essentials like 'Bengal Spice' tea, jicama, lettuce. I got absolutely soaked - my boots still aren't quite dry - but I also got to see an amazing double rainbow 

and several other things I'm glad not to have missed. A full-blown garden outside a university building, with cole crops, mint, bolted basil, the sunflower-looking plant looks like Jerusalem artichoke to me -

The Chena River, swollen with the heavy rain, gilded with green -

And this intrepid little fireweed, flowering in the gutter at the roadside, right next to the trash!

That was a big hike, 6 miles round trip, for a chronic-fatigued person! I was proud of myself for having done it, taken care of supplies, and shown myself that the walk to the campus, which is about a third that distance, should be quite doable. At the same time, I was nervous that such a strenuous mission right at the start might leave me more tired than I'd want to be. I'd say I was right both to be proud and to be concerned - I am very sore and fatigued today, but I'm also taking it easy. After the more-than-six-hour drive to Fairbanks, a long walk seemed indicated!

I had a ride to Fairbanks from an extremely interesting person - an amazing storyteller: I spent a few hours last night just getting as much as I could of what he'd said and told written down. I'm so grateful for that connection, and for having undergone the extra stress of getting a ride on Craigslist for the eventual opportunity to get a ride and meet someone really interesting whom I never would have met otherwise. Great company for a long ride. And when I got in from that long hike around town, I got to meet the guy whose cabin I'm crashing in. He's one of the festival directors and extremely busy, but he's a totally kind, awesome, interesting and very welcoming person too - and once again I feel doubly lucky in my choices.

Today, it rained in the morning but now the sun is out and the air is warm in that spongy, post-rain way. Walking up to campus, feeling my apprehension at not knowing where I was going coupled with the certainty, soon-validated, that I would see a map and find my destination very quickly, I could feel the warm vapor coming up at me from all the fumey plants beside the path: the air seemed constantly on the verge of sending a gently cooling breeze but never quite blowing.

The library is a welcome refuge from the registration hubbub, but the orientation is soon-to-begin. I'm not yet sure how much I'll be posting during this intense course - my internet access should be good enough to make regular posting possible but we'll see what the other constraints are...

Much love and happy weekend!

Notes from the Road, Cities, Kay Ryan, Was it Really You? Supplements

On the Road

When I used to go on the road, I used to travel with almost nothing - a small backpack/bookbag for weeks and weeks, by the skin of my teeth, not knowing what my next connection would be… Anxiety would be through the roof, I'd always be underfed - and somehow I got there in the end. This time, I have a laptop, cellphone, camera (although I forgot to bring its charger) and a cooler full of food, supplements and a couple changes of clothes. Anxiety has still been high, but it's definitely much easier. The contrast, as well as the journey itself, has forced me to reflect on how deeply ingrained 'civilization' is within us, how far it is true that a human's 'natural environment' to some large degree today is 'the city,' where buildings dominate lives and in better cities are full of and surrounded by greenery, where food is purchased and money is earned and spent. A pretty intense conclusion for someone who has tried to 'go back to the wild' so much.

Here are some snapshots of the journey so far, with some reflections on the whole concept of the 'Art of Truth' that I was grappling with this time last week - what an enormous picture is contained in every moment, how to speak its truth, how to interpellate it without interrupting and altering it.

First, though, the poles of my journey: I'll be in Fairbanks for tomorrow evening, for two weeks of focusing on the art and craft of writing - delectable! I'm in Anchorage tonight, where the MFA Residency is taking place, together with a wonderful series of public readings, which I'm missing! And I left Homer, where earlier this week I might have had an intense 'near miss' in the 'making connections' world, or just to express some intense admiration.

Kay Ryan, Was it Really You?

On Tuesday evening, we went to a poetry reading at home in Homer, at a little gallery that holds music and spoken word events too. It's a beautiful little space with some amazing artwork. These baskets are for our wonderful friend Lynn, who is learning how to make them - they're made from kelp harvested from our beaches!

We had to leave early for a dinner engagement, but were there for most of the reading by Mary Mullen, a resident of Ireland for the past 15 years or so who was raised on a homestead in Soldotna (72 miles north of Homer).Her Alaskan roots, her Irish now, and her daughter, who has Downs Syndrome, were the anchoring themes of her writings, which were limpid and heartfelt. 

But - I was distracted: I couldn't take my eyes off a lady in the audience who looked so much like Kay Ryan (as I've seen her in photographs at least) that I was blushing and sweating agonizing between wanting to go and talk to her, realizing that I couldn't possibly do such a thing, and what if she wasn't Kay Ryan at all? Kay Ryan, by the way, has just gotten through being the Poet Laureate. In terms of poets that I'm reading at the moment, she's my current obsession. And the reason for this made the agony of wondering if this was her even more acute, because one of the things that I'm venerating and also using to think with so much about her work is the distance she interposes between intense feelings and their poetic expression. She herself has said something like that she didn't want to spill body fluids all over her poetry! So, listening to this very honest woman's very personal and confessional poetry whilst wondering whether this other, older woman in the audience was my current idol who is teaching me how not to write confessional poetry (or how to write non-confessional poetry) was especially excruciating.

I left, wondering. Agreed with Phil that probably it wasn't her - she lives in Marin County, what would she be doing in the pouring rain in Homer?

But that's not the end of the story. When I spoke to my friend Lynn, she mentioned apropos of something else that she'd heard that Kay Ryan would be reading in Soldotna this coming Sunday! So that woman must have been Kay Ryan! Was I the only person there who recognized her, who cared so much? What would Mary Mullen have felt, to know that she had such a distinguished audience? Did I just miss a uniquely intimate opportunity to have a conversation with the person who produces this poetry I so admire?

A Different Lifestyle - Dipnetting

I got up to Anchorage thanks to the Red Salmon run - all of south-central Alaska, numbers swollen with tourists and 'snowbirds,' is on the move, dipnets of all shapes and sizes strapped on to vehicles ditto, fishing at the mouths of the Kenai and Kasiloff rivers, or (as Phil prefers) taking a boat across Kachemak Bay to China Poot creek. Our friend Joe and his sister came down for some, and Phil and I joined them.  Phil did, anyway. In as deep as he could possibly go, of course!

See Phil in his golden fleece?

A whole different truth, here - a whole different lifestyle, little kids in chest-waders, wielding dipnets, a whole moveable city of RV's with all kinds of portable creature comforts and rubbish, all picked up and set down in these very remote areas. Some people had very high-tech, shiny, expensive equipment; others (like us) had dip-nets fashioned from copper pipe and old bits of gill-net; we saw a little kid wielding a dipnet whose handle was a recycled crutch! Old, heavyset men in chestwaders dragging coolers full of fish along the sand in dinky little plastic sleds. Imagine going every year with your family, possibly coming from outside Alaska just for the possibility of scooping up red salmon in a big net, plucking last year's sand off of all the equipment, repatching the waders...even loading up the little rubber dinghy and braving the strong current there to try to catch some from a boat (can use a bigger net that way).

Anchorage Opportunities

In Anchorage today, I picked up a last couple of supplements that the ND recommended to help me with anxiety and fatigue during the next couple of weeks - help to keep those at bay, that is. One of them was simply 'rescue remedy,' which I was raised on and so familiar and comfortable with - my mum would drop some onto our tongues any time we had an accident or shock. It's the most famous of the Bach Flower Remedies, and has something of an instant calming effect, working on the essence/energy level.

[Sorry for the mess here - I dropped that image in and can't do anything with it, can't move it, can't remove it, nothing - anyone with blogger expertise - please help!]

 The other one works on a more metabolic and chemical level - it is a phospholipid called Phosphatidylserine. I could have gotten the exact thing for cheaper online, but I got the closest thing I could find at the natural food store. Anchorage is a treat for me, boasting a natural food store as it does. This supplement is sold as a supplement that promotes acuity and brain function, but it's definitely a strong adrenal medicine too, which was why the ND gave it to me in the first place a couple months ago. It's so expensive, but it does work! If I hadn't been being cheap with myself, I'd have been hitting it hard this week, having been so anxious: it really does help, and I haven't always been a person to notice big differences from supplements.

The library here is so beautiful - 

Z.J. Loussac Public Library, to give its full, imposing title.

- and check out the schauspieler fountain! Especially check out the plants around the border - most of the edge plants are parsley! - Beautiful curly parsley too. Some huge red cabbages and kale too.

Bee Musings

Happy Midweek everyone! Mittwoch - that's what Wednesday's called in German - no getting over the fact that you get past today and you're on your way home, so to speak. I like how I see people calling it 'hump day' - a different visual for the same concept.

I'm at the Safeway and the internet is much faster than it was at the library yesterday, so no browser-collapse mayhem and I've successfully uploaded the pictures for yesterday's post - a very stubby maca plant and two oddly angled photos.

Today, I wanted to talk about bees a bit. I spent a large amount of my time working bees when I lived in Hawaii, and I got into it because I found myself eating a lot of raw honey. At that stage, it really seemed to help my digestion. Specifically - and I have no good explanation for this - it seemed to enable me to digest fat better than I had been able to. At that point, I was a high-fruit raw foodist and deathly afraid of fat, partly for the good reason that any kind of fat made me feel sick. In Hawaii, eating honey, I found myself eating more avocado and coconut without difficulty and built some muscle for the first time in a very long time. Probably the best explanation is that it was partly in my head, partly that local avocados and young coconuts were more easily digested than the nuts I'd been eating in California, and partly that it stimulated my appetite a bit and enabled me to eat a bit more. That said, the communion with bees piece, the connection with such a different species that can teach us so much, was a big draw for me too. I read The Shamanic Way of the Bee and some other books like that, and was very influenced by that too. But for many people it's just another form of farming. And some of the diseases that afflict modern honeybees send one into a vicious cycle of overmanagement and overdependence.

I still love bees. But I can't eat honey anymore - I don't know if I ever will, although I eat some bee pollen, and I truly believe in honey's magical and healing potentials. And now I live in Alaska. I'm very mixed about the whole thing...

Bees. There are people who have been keeping bees up in Alaska for decades. The Russians first introduced them here in the early 1800's. So it's a well-hallowed practice. But rather like growing tomatoes in a greenhouse here, you can only keep bees in very well-insulated hives, and even then many hives don't make it through the long winters. Homer's maritime winters, which often feature spells of thawing lasting up to two weeks, are even worse for beekeeping than the bitter months of unbroken 40-below of the Interior. In the latter case, the bees simply hibernate solidly for more than half the year. But in the freeze-and-thaw scenario, they can often wake up, move around, feed, only for the temperature to drop again, at which point they can often either freeze or run out of food and starve. And this is even when they're well-managed. 

In other words, of course there are no feral honeybees in Alaska. Yes, people keep bees over winter successfully, but most bees are brought up from California in the spring. Just like the tomato, growing something that can't live wild here is something that I feel uneasy about. And even more so, because of the level of interference in their natural cycle of activity involved in managing them. 

When I took advantage of the sunshine on Monday and went to work a friend's pair of strong overwintered hives, what I was essentially doing was castrating the hives. Bees want to swarm in summer. A colony of bees is an organism that reproduces itself by rearing a new queen, who flies out to mate with drones - hopefully a non-incestuous union bringing in new blood - and then the old queen flies away, taking many of the old bees with her, to found a new colony. Swarming is discouraged in the lower 48 (and elsewhere) too, because it interferes with the honey harvest - making a new home and putting stores in the current one are two opposed activities. But if they swarm here, there are no wild drones around to mate with (although in there may be drones from managed hives if you're not too remote), and more importantly, once they've flown off, there's nowhere for them to set up home that they could possibly last the winter - or even the late summer night time temperatures.

So, there I was, barehanded but with a veil over my head, going through every frame of the two hives, removing every drone cell and queen cell that I could find and so retarding any efforts at colonization in this inhospitable land. I was doing 'the right thing,' as no swarm could ever survive up here, and the colony left behind would be weakened by their departure to the point of diminishing its chances of survival too, but it felt so…rude. On the one hand, I'm being as gentle with my hands as possible, trusting them barehanded and seeking the thrumming bee communion that I've always loved about working bees, but on the other, whenever I find drone cells or queen cells (which was extremely often on Monday - on almost every side of every frame, in fact), I'm brushing aside the bees to scrape off their inanimate infants with the sharp point of the hive tool!

I've heard that some folks up here remove the queen and a skeleton staff of workers when the flowers are in full bloom, so that the workers can focus on gathering as much nectar and pollen as possible, rather than being distracted by the reproductive/swarming business. But I've never known hives to be happy not having a queen for long…

Meanwhile, my own two hives with their difficult start and nightmare journey here… I need to merge them, their numbers are so depleted they don't have a chance as two separate entities… But I've been dragging my feet over getting it done, partly because I was going to do it at the same time as moving them, which is best done at night and I'm generally wiped out in the evenings, and partly because I was loath to kill the queen of the weaker hive, which is what I'd have to do to merge them. When I checked them on Monday, the weaker hive no longer had a queen. Did she swarm? She'd certainly made some drones earlier on… She wouldn't have had a moth's hope in a candelabrum if she did that. 

It makes me a little sad, but despite today's sunshine it's been a cool and wet summer so far, which is unlucky for trying out something so chancy. 

Going to Fairbanks! What I'm Going to and What I'm Leaving

On Thursday night or Fri morning, I'm catching a ride up to Anchorage, and from there, up to Fairbanks, another 400 miles further north and more. I'll be there for two weeks, to attend the Writers' Workshop that is part of the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival! I got a scholarship to attend that through some great good fortune and, naturally, am very excited indeed. I've never been to Fairbanks before, and I've never been to a creative writing workshop of that extent and duration. 

Naturally too, I'm quite nervous. Not so much about the writers' workshop itself as about logistics, getting here and there, conserving my energy, getting along with people and taking care of myself. Alaska is expensive and Fairbanks, being way 'in the Interior' is going to be even more so than here. When traveling alone, I have a tendency to get 'sticker shock' and go without, go hungry, etc. I have some fairly hair-raising travel stories like that in my past, and right now my body just isn't equal to that kind of hardship and I really want to be my best for the workshop.

What I'm Leaving Behind

In this asymmetrically-seasoned climate, being gone in the second half of July is to be gone for the busiest part of the garden season. Summer is short and so intense. I could work from now until I leave just on weeding/harvesting/replanting. And since it's been so rainy (yes, it started raining again after yesterday's sun!) I'm starting to see the dreaded slugs, even in our raised beds!! There's radishes to harvest, arugula going to seed (on purpose - I'm hoping to save home-raised seeds), some spinach ditto, a decent early crop of cilantro…  

Maca grows at 14,000ft in the Andes, but seems to be having a hard time here with all the rain and late cold this year. I'm so excited to be trying to grow it, and it's so pretty. But the little root on this one that I pulled out by mistake looks kind of exiguous.

I'll miss my salads from our garden, but may take with me at least a bunch of our herbs and maybe a few other things. I'll be leaving behind my kefir grains (will probably refrigerate in new coconut cream so they can just work slowly), kombucha cultures, sauerkrauts, jars of sprouts.

And then, it's the height of the fishing season also, and Phil has now gone twice to dip-net for red salmon. I'm feeling some guilt over my lack of enthusiasm to participate in this but trying to focus more on how glad I am to be doing what I'm doing instead.

Phil got most of the muslin up on the ceiling and even got most of the edges quite stylishly tacked down, but we still have a ladder in the middle of the floor and my workspace had to be pulled apart again. So, probably that won't be a done deal when I leave either.

That's the southeast corner of our ceiling, from an odd angle. You can just see the highup window that we have to climb on the counter to open and close, and on the left you can just see the ladder we ascend to our sleeping loft!

Most of all, I'm going to be leaving behind Phil. Here he is, taking a nap this rainy afternoon.

This will be the longest time we've been apart in two years and almost the longest we've ever been apart since being in a relationship. In my experience of relationships, extended separations, especially when I'm off doing something I'm excited by, aren't always good for the relationship. And then we have three different groups of friends coming up in succession right when I get back, so making time together will be important. I will miss him.

[Updated Wednesday - I'm in the Safeway and uploaded those photos with no trouble at all! A relief after the grinding tumbling-browser fiasco at the library yesterday!]

What I'm Going To

At this point, the plan is that I'm going to crash on the very-generously-offered floor of one of the Fairbanks faculty, which is a couple miles away from the university campus where the festival takes place. Fairbanks is flat, and I'm very much hoping I'll get there in time to rent a bike for the duration.

I know that I'll be crashing in a cabin with no plumbing, like ours, and I don't know how many folks besides me will be also crashing. So, I'm not expecting to be able to do any food-prep to speak of there. I'm also, through long experience, not expecting to be able to pick up food 'on the fly' wherever I end up going. So I'm taking a cooler up with me and brainstorming on what are the best 'easy' things to take. I've made two batches of 'bark' already, with coconut oil and protein powder. I'm soaking a bunch of nuts

[Photo to come]

that I'll then dehydrate and bring with me. I soak them with some peroxide in the water - it makes such a huge difference to how palatable and how much less tannic they are afterwards, especially walnuts! 

I expect I'll take coconut oil, flaxseed, spirulina and chlorella (I hope my new chlorella arrives in time!), shaker-ball bottle, and some protein powder - probably the 'Shake and Go' from Averie's giveaway (I figure a bit of cacao in this situation mightn't be a bad idea) and some other also. I'll probably take some sea veggies - wakame, hijiki, that I can just add water to. And then all my myriad supplements and aids-to-normal-functioning… 

I'm really hoping that it isn't going to be all about that - that I can maintain blood sugar to fuel my body and brain, not have to spend too much time outside class looking for/fixing food, that I can get along with and socialize with and make friends with people graciously without my lack of participation in coffee-and-pastry rituals being a detriment.

Ack - and now I get online and discover that my ride up to Fairbanks has fallen through - more logisticking to do, pages failing to load everywhere, craigslist uncooperative - keep hat on to avoid tearing hair out...