Animal Growth, Plant Growth

Last week I went to Los Angeles to visit a friend. She lives in Japan but would be visiting the States for a convention, and as Los Angeles is considerably easier to get to, I took the opportunity to spend some time with her. As with all the best friendships, it was as though no time had passed, though it had been three years since we’d last been face to face. And though we live in vastly different cultures, on different continents, doing different kinds of work, as we talked we found that we both faced essentially the same core issue at this point in life: not enough time.

I’ve written before about the tension between wanting to live many lives and wanting simply to live one life well. There is also the awareness that our time here is finite and will ultimately run out. That’s been underscored for me lately by the birth of my two nieces, who grow and change so fast at their young age that I can hardly recognize them from one visit to the next. The time that acts on them also acts on me. It’s easy to forget that this is so when I see essentially the same face in the mirror each morning. But it’s why I suddenly feel old when some kid I used to babysit for gets married, or goes to college; suddenly I’m left wondering, what have I done with all this time that has passed?

My friend from Japan had done a great deal since the last time I saw her, at least in my view. She’d changed her career, moved to a new city, and essentially started a new life there, a more satisfying life in many ways. She’d also found a way to come back to the U.S., if only for a short visit, something she’s been wanting to do for a long time. To me, it seemed like a great deal of accomplishment for three years. To her, it seemed to fall drastically short. 

When we first come into this world, there are things we must learn and ways in which we must grow, fairly immediately, if we’re going to thrive. Growth at that age is animal growth, dynamic and physical. As adults, we grow more like plants, which don’t appear to move observed but are slowly, over time, stretching their leaves out towards the sun. It was easy to see this in my friend, how over the last three years, her branches had all grown so steadily in that direction. It takes others to see this kind of growth. It takes friends to encourage us to move, inch by inch, towards the light.

 

 

An Unusual Sense of Direction

In Bill Plotkin’s excellent essay, “The Art of Being Lost,” he writes of the different types of lostness: You know where you are but not where you are going; you know where you want to go but not where you are; you know neither where you are going, nor where you are. 

Some months ago, I wrote about getting lost in the woods of Vermont, how getting lost seems to be part of the way I move through the world sometimes. I find my way, but it’s not always to the destination I expected, and I don’t often take a straight, clear path. It’s hard to be honest about this, especially in the face of life-altering forks in the road. Lately I’ve been interviewing with graduate schools, and most aren’t too keen on a candidate who finds her way by wandering on all the various different paths she finds appealing at any given moment. But that is, in fact, what I do, and only in retrospect does a coherent theme become clear. I’ve learned to trust that wandering instinct, but it has taken a long time. Perhaps it makes sense that most psychology programs seem more apt to trust the candidate who is devoted to one path and one alone, never deviating. That, certainly, is more predictable. But I find it difficult to get excited about that prospect, or about studying in a place where such a thing would be expected and valued. 

So I find myself becoming acquainted with one of Plotkin’s central truths about being lost, that it is possible to benefit from it, if one is willing to give up old goals in favor of new, more soulful ones. It may be that the old destination is not actually worth reaching. 

I looked at my journal from that time in Vermont and recalled what had come to me on that walk on which I got lost to begin with, that the point was not to conform to a teacher’s (or program’s) ideals; the point was to find a teacher who would support an unusual sense of direction.

Bare Branches

Last weekend, my cousin got married in a beautiful little church on a historic property in Tennessee. It was a cold, rainy afternoon. The sun was just going down. The altar was decked with candles. Very simple, very quiet.

The minister said, before things began in earnest, that the ceremony presented would be just as it would have been on this same property in the 1830’s. She indicated the plants that stood over the ceremonial space and the near-winter landscape outside and said, it takes courage to stand here in this space, with no distraction or lavish wedding elegance, to  declare love for one another under bare branches.

She was right. It was a powerfully simple, emotional ceremony.

The time of year when summer cools and begins to turn into fall always feels like a relief to me, the frantic, heated energy of one season giving way to  the cool calmness of the next. It feels like coming home, like remembering some deeper peace that got lost, for a moment, in the heat of things. This ceremony felt like that too, like a remembering of something ancient and true, like a peace that could only have come in this season, with its bare branches and cold rain.

Through a Trap Door

I want a good night’s sleep.
I want to get up without feeling
That to waken is to plunge through a trap door.
   

George Bilgere, from “What I Want”
  

Lately, I have not wanted to get out of bed in the morning. The radiators in my ancient apartment building are not yet functioning at full force, though the morning cold is. Out of bed, there are conflicts to be dealt with, decisions to be made, impossible walls to be scaled. My dreaming life is so much more inviting. It is hard indeed to put my feet on the cold floor, look out my window, and say, sincerely, thank you for another day.

But today on my way to work, I passed a landscaped lawn with one sprinkler on. The sprinkler turned, the water hit the light, and a rainbow formed, just in that one moment, as I happened to glance over. It was a wink from some other awareness, from the part of me that knows, this seeming reality, too, is just another dream world. It was a moment of seeing, awake, to the other side of the trap door. It made the idea of getting up tomorrow a little easier.

On Getting Lost

“Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger”

David Wagoner, from Lost 

I have a particular talent for getting lost; I do it better and faster than most people I know.

This wasn’t something I cultivated. This brain of mine, which does a number of things fabulously, does not hold more than 3 turns at a time, and it is likely to remember at least one of those wrong at least half the time.

So recently, in Vermont, when given the task of wandering in the woods for half an hour or so,  I dutifully picked a familiar direction. I took only 2 turns, and I was careful to note them exactly in the map my mind was making of where I had been. I was so cautious. And somehow I got lost anyway. Even later, walking in that same stretch of woods, I was unable to figure out where my wrong turn had been. It seemed, on turning around, that there were choices I didn’t remember making, forks in the road I had not seen as forks at the time. My mind tried to make something of that, to ask itself what other choices it might have made without even realizing there was a choice. But ultimately, the question came to nothing.

I found my way back. I wasn’t all that lost to begin with. I had picked the right direction, just the wrong trail, so once I got within a reasonable distance, a friend saw me, called out my name, and guided me back to the group.

Despite my best efforts to know where I am at all times, and where I’m going, I have come to believe that I will just get lost from time to time. It seems to be part of how I operate in the world. That’s not easy for a woman who is used to doing most things well and efficiently right from the beginning. I do have a sense of direction; I do find my way back. But it may take me longer than most people, and it may make for some embarrassing moments when it becomes apparent to people that I’m not actually as together all the time as I might like them to think. All in all, though, the moment of being found almost makes up for it. Thank God for the friends and family who somehow manage to meet me halfway down the trail, time and time again, to help guide me back.

Honey Dog, Raven, Angel, Rebel

…there
is Beau: bounding and
practically boundless,
one brass concatenation
of tongue and tail,
unmediated energy,
too big, wild,
perfect…

Mark Doty from “Atlantis“

I’m sitting on the edge of Crystal Lake, watching the new fall colors reflected in the water, waiting calmly for a hurricane to come through, the first Maine has seen in 17 years.

Angel, who is part coyote and has one brown eye, one blue, and one half-missing ear, brought me gently out of sleep by jumping over me onto the bed. Rebel, a small hound, curled in her dog bed by my armchair while I read. Raven, a husky who chose her own name, perking up as the word “Raven” was read from a book, watches quietly out the window for the storm to approach. And last week, Honey Dog, blind and deaf and moving stiffly with age, moved contentedly in her space, exploring what she still could, following scent trails across the ground until the finite length of her leash stopped her, at which point, she would simply move in a different direction.

In a short time, I’ll go back into the world of work and schedules, planning for the future. But today, I’m grateful just to sit with the dogs, waiting with acceptance for whatever it is that’s about to move through. And Angel, who climbs up to put her head in my lap, is clearly not yet ready for me to go.

Time & Space

Over a month ago, I wrote this post at the end of a period of my life that spanned about four and a half years. I finally finished school, graduated, and went back to having just one job. Where I expected things to slow down, however, the sense of franticness continues. While some hurdles have been jumped and old questions answered, the ever-present “what now” feels as pressing as ever, and there is the perpetual feeling of being behind.

The most likely explanation is that it’s my mind that has not slowed down. Circumstances are what they are, but franticness or peace are within, and peace seems to elude me at the moment. I’m hoping to find it, over the next few days, in the Green Mountains, or driving through New England, or visiting with the Lady of the Lake. So wish me safe travels; I’ll be back next month with a full report, and hopefully, a mind more at ease.

The Large Hadron Collider

Yesterday morning, a major historic event took place, though the nature of it was technical enough to be relatively inaccessible to most, so the story wasn’t exactly front page news.

Scientists fired up the Large Hadron Collider for the first time, sending beams of protons around its tunnel. Hopes for the coming experiment (involving circulating beams that will collide) are high; it has the potential to unlock the secrets of dark matter, the big bang, and possibly even the Higgs, or “God particle,” which is said to explain why particles have mass.

Early fears arose when some suggested the experiment might create black holes into which the planet would actually disappear. In NPR’s coverage, scientists explain why this is not a real concern, but the apocalyptic overtones and arguments remain part of the ongoing discussion. There are even jokes about it. To check on the status of this experiment and find out if the worst has happened, you can visit: http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/.

Michael Meade suggests that our usual way of conceptualizing time as a linear construct is only one possibility, that perhaps time is actually circular, such that end and beginning are the same thing. Perhaps we feel this instinctually. Perhaps we know, waiting for the collider to do its thing, that the beginning has something of the end in it, and drawing closer to one means we must at least brush by the other.

But the significant thing is this: The experiment is proceeding, and no credible effort is being made to prevent it from happening. As a collective human consciousness, we seem driven past all obstacles to seek that beginning point,  to understand where we come from.

On the Giving of Gifts

Some time ago, my friend Susan posted something on her blog about the giving of gifts. I found what she wrote touching, and we started what turned out to be a lengthy conversation on the topic of gifts.

I have written before about how fascination with something leads to a greater understanding of and relationship with the larger world. The subject of gift-giving has become one such fascination for me. Gift-giving is as old a practice as we can fathom. The more Susan and I discussed it, the more we realized the very large role that gift-giving plays in human society, the way we use gifts to communicate and relate to one another, and how gift-giving was a skill that could be cultivated like any other.

Recently this ongoing conversation has turned into a new blog: The Best Present Ever.

Take a look. Drop us a line. Share a story or a comment. We would love to hear from you.

A Fish in the Desert

Paul Sereno’s Stone Age graveyard, found in the Sahara desert, contained fish bones. If you know the history of the place, it makes sense; it used to have deep lakes in which Stone Age fishermen caught enormous fish.

But consider, for a moment, working in the dry Sahara heat, no water in sight, or indeed, in the air, and finding the remains of fish. I find such artifacts, from time to time, in my own life, odd pieces of straggling evidence that I was once a different person, living in different circumstances. It’s always jarring. For a moment the old person and the new person must exist together, and however I feel about that former self,  I must accept that she was as she was, that she adapted to the time she lived in, then moved on from there.

Sometimes I also wonder what artifacts from this life will resurface twenty years down the road. What lost note, journal, or dogeared book becomes the fish bones buried in the desert?