St. John, Living Loud, and the Endurance.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I got up early to see the sun change the sky different colors. The sun was rising behind the bay we are staying in and all night I slept restlessly a little nervous for being sure that I would wake early enough to see anything the world might do. 

Annie Dillard's writing is all about finding the beauty, mystery, and intricacy of nature in an otherwise small dull thing like a muskrat, a tadpole, a creek called Tinker. And in the tropics I seriously wonder what she would say. Every piece of life here is loud, begging to be noticed, almost a shirtless lady during Carnival. 

Is there mystery in blatant beauty? Is there grace in it? Or is it too flamboyant to be just that? What if my noticing it isn't ironic enough for a world of hipsters, freaks, and geeks? Would Annie Dillard implode at the sight of some of the plants I've seen here?

I sat on the dock and watched as each minute seeped across the sky like a brushstroke; this cloud here, that one there. The waves kept time to the breeze; the breeze keeping time to my ever-resistant breath. 

Below my feet was a veritable mall of activity. Fish with broad and bold black and white stripes, thick around the belly, floated back and forth, self-aware, or so it seemed. Around them, a chorus of David-Bowie-electric-blue fish strutted by; so blue, that you could have sworn they were painted. And then a joke of a fish, with a rainbow for a body, and a straw for a snout, sauntered on by. The water is so clear the prickle of sea urchins feels almost palpable from above it. 

Birds of long, short, broad, and narrow surrounded me. A pelican cannonballed heavily into the water plumbing the shallow waters for food. Once he has got what he is searching for he keeps his beak under the water, allowing some poor being the time to contemplate its Jonah-like fate, and then clumsily raises its neck to finish the poor bugger off. This, against a lush backdrop, a window display of the kind Anthropologie would pay oodles for. 

How do you live in the loud? What happens when all of life is big, boisterous, and beautiful? Does it mute the small stuff? Is that a bad thing? Are we missing something important when all the colors are turned on? 

As I am here I am reading a book about Ernest Shackleton's incredible journey through Antarctica, which began on a ship called the Endurance, and ended, well I don't 100% know yet, but I know it ended "alive to tell the tale". The juxtaposition of all of this loud beauty with stories of stark darkness, whiteness, blankness, and rugged survival is one I'm enjoying. I read it on the beach in the sticky comfort of my sunblock and toweled chair. 

I think I enjoy it because it is simple. It's the very opposite of all this beauty, lushness, and brio in the Tropics. The men of the Endurance left for adventure, for the enticing challenge of doing something no one in all time has been able to do, not even 100 years after they were able to do it. They left for the spirit of the thing. They knew the goal: stay alive. 

The sugar cane mills and plantations around here tell different tales. All this beauty has a back-story, like a sad tale of corruption, a played out movie star with bloody hands to hide. The sugar mill is lit up at night like an old movie set. It crumbles and groans under the garish night light. That's the thing about beauty - it can get complicated to have, to want, to hold. You feel a need to own it and as soon as you do, a part of seems to bristle.  It is not as beautiful if it is not free. 

We took a sunset cruise a few days ago and it was like something out of a Flannery O'Connor story. The couple that ran the sailboat had left their business in Oregon after coming down here for their first vacation in seven years to "have no more employees" and to take advantage of the fact that "life is just too short". They had been engaged 9 years before being married.  Another couple was from Boston and had brought their two and a half month old with them to the island. They were kind, eager to be relieved of her for a moment, but also clearly tender parents, and generally happy people. They knew a psychiatrist who had been an engaged for 21 years before being married. A third couple was dressed in lace and polos and spent their time smiling and drinking further up the starboard side of the boat. 

The woman who was sailing the boat was asked what the farthest she had ever sailed was. She had sailed to Bora Bora over the Pacific in a 38 foot sailboat over the course of about 30 days with one man ("an asshole") and a cat ("helpful"). But this trip was tarnished by the memory of the man, who was violent, and a force she eventually had to leave. Can you imagine not ever speaking again to the person you sailed through the brightest stars, deepest nights, darkest fears, and bluest oceans with? That's saying something. 

Our sunset was not big or bold, it was amethyst, peaceful, and felt like rum punch with a side of Gouda, which is also what we had to snack on. There was a moment when we passed by a series of small islands, and a small sailboat between them perfectly balanced itself in a photo I would never take. But that was it. No drama - just another brush stroke. 

I can't put my finger on what I am trying to say, aside from describing the fact that these juxtapositions are happening in front of me constantly and I really do feel like they're going to lead me to some conclusion that I need to come to. I'm not sure what they are leading up to but they allow me to know this: 

1. Beauty, and love, need freedom. 

2. What is loud, is also hiding something. 

3. Pelicans are total klutzes. 

"Your One Wild and Precious Life"

The Summer Song

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

i believe in living.

i believe in living.
By Assata Shakur

i believe in living.
i believe in the spectrum
of Beta days and Gamma people.
i believe in sunshine.
In windmills and waterfalls,
tricycles and rocking chairs;
And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts.
And sprouts grow into trees.
i believe in the magic of the hands.
And in the wisdom of the eyes.
i believe in rain and tears.
And in the blood of infinity.

i believe in life.
And i have seen the death parade
march through the torso of the earth,
sculpting mud bodies in its path
i have seen the destruction of the daylight
and seen bloodthirsty maggots
prayed to and saluted

i have seen the kind become the blind
and the blind become the bind
in one easy lesson.
i have walked on cut grass.
i have eaten crow and blunder bread
and breathed the stench of indifference

i have been locked by the lawless.
Handcuffed by the haters.
Gagged by the greedy.
And, if i know anything at all,
it's that a wall is just a wall
and nothing more at all.
It can be broken down.

i believe in living
i believe in birth.
i believe in the sweat of love
and in the fire of truth.

And i believe that a lost ship,
steered by tired, seasick sailors,
can still be guided home to port.

Because I always miss book club

Ladies and gentlemen of the internet, I - Erin Davidson Farmer - am in a book club. I'm in three book clubs in fact. I'm in three book clubs in which I read about 30% of 30% of the books that are suggested and read. But I am, still, in a book club.

Today was the fateful day in which I might have actually read a major portion of and attended an actual meeting of the aforementioned book club(s). As time and tide would have it however, I was sick. I figure that this might be the perfect opportunity to relinquish my thoughts upon the world in the same old way I used to: the good old-fashioned blog post.

Our book this time around was "An Anthropologist on Mars" by Oliver Sacks. I should start by saying, I love Oliver Sacks. I don't know anybody who couldn't love Oliver Sacks - I mean, if they tried even a little. He was a weightlifter, a writer, a neurologist, a great proponent of fruit and the British, and a lover of all things truly mysterious.

If I had gone to book club today, I would have spoken about the following quotation from our book; Sacks is referring to an experiment done in which colors were seen present in an image but not presented in the image at all (conjure up some memory of the blue/black or white/gold dress debacle and you'll have the picture): 

"These demonstrations, overwhelming in their simplicity and impact were color "illusions" in Goethe's sense, but illusions that demonstrated a neurological truth - that colors are not "out there" in the world, nor (as classical theory held) an automatic correlate of wavelength, but rather, are constructed by the brain."

That's right.

What we see as red, or blue, or any shade in between, is a projection of more than the anatomy of our eyes, but the desire, function, and fault of our brains.

So what does this have to do with us?

I think you can flesh must of it out from this other statement of Oliver's:

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination, "(Musicophilia). 

The thing I have been thinking about in reading this book is how very much that seems stable and sure, is really fold over fold of a thousand layers of assumption. These colors are like the layers of a tree, laid down year after year of perception, climate, and time. They come out bold at the end, strong and sure as hell - but nonetheless, like paper tigers.

Nothing is more like this than human relationship.

Once upon a time I dabbled in playwriting.

No, I am not making this up.

As part of a study for my playwriting, I spent a lot of time analyzing the way that conversation works. We think of all conversations as going something like this:

Person #1: Hey there!  How are you?
Person #2: Doing fine, how are YOU?
Person #1: Not too shabby myself. Hoping for a change in the weather soon.
Person #2: I know! Gray days are the worst!

But they really go something like this:

Person #1 & Person #2: Hey! What's up? Hi! How are you??
Person #1 (fumbling with phone and headphones): I'm late! I'm going over to a thing.
Person #2 (avoiding eye contact, avoiding lingering, sensing a rush): Yeah, hey, I know, all good...
Person #1 (interrupting) Yeah, catch you later! Sorry about all that!

One conversation is layers of understanding, layers of assumption, layers of color.  And most of it, most of the time makes no sense.

It reminds me of this scene from I Heart Huckabees:

The real way we know each other is the space between. Our relationships are composed of millions of decisions. Our decisions are based on color, smell, feel, and the basest of senses. We float towards each other and away one microscopic movement at a time. Who knows why this way and not that?

It is unfathomable. And it does take trust. It takes trust to believe that we have any control at all over who we are, what we see, and what we do.

I try to remember this when I feel like I am misunderstood or have misunderstood. It has taken a million steps for a perspective to be made. I am not the only part of someone else's perspective that matters. I am not the only part of that perspective that could change. I am not the only part of that perspective that might NEED to change.

What we can affect may feel like moving mountains, but it starts with what we choose to see. This shift in and of itself might be the biggest, and most important shift of all.

This to me, is a challenging thought, almost a dangerous one, but I like it. If I were to make a list of all of things that I choose to see that may not be real I'm sure the list would be long, and jarring (I know this, because I have made this list.)

I think these thoughts would taste a little better to the palate with some chicken chili.

Until the next book club meeting...

Unfolding.

“I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough

to make every moment holy.

I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough

just to lie before you like a thing,

shrewd and secretive.

I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,

as it goes toward action;

and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,

when something is coming near,

I want to be with those who know secret things

or else alone.

I want to be a mirror for your whole body,

and I never want to be blind, or to be too old

to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.

I want to unfold.

I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,

because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

and I want my grasp of things to be

true before you. I want to describe myself

like a painting that I looked at

closely for a long time,

like a saying that I finally understood,

like the pitcher I use every day,

like the face of my mother,

like a ship

that carried me

through the wildest storm of all.” 

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

The Finish Line.

I'd like to step up on a pedestal for just one moment and have a good think about the point.  What is the point of the race?  The race to win.  The race to compete at all.  The race to be healthy, look your best, or do something you've never done before. What is the point?

I feel that in thinking about this you must do as you would with anything else: begin with the end in mind.

When you get to your goal - whatever it is - when you finish it - when you complete the journey - what is the feeling that you feel?  What is the moment like?  Can you say that the work was worth it?  Can you say that you travelled honorably?  That you were made a better person by the trail?  Or that you improved the lives of those around you by taking up the task?

The finish line to me feels like this: you cross, you smile, and you immediately think about what is next.  Whether it's brunch, or a little bit of crying with a friend, or a blog post, or simply, a series of thank you's - after the finish line, life is still waiting. Normalcy is still there.  A new challenge still waits.  The allure of the race is still alive.

What comes with the win: a new job, new friend, new lover, new money, new-found fame or anything else is sooner or later inconsequential apart from how you begin to feel it defines you.  The truth is whether you have money or don't or whether you have a gold medal or not - you are still you.

The perpetual challenge is to remember that the race gets us all to the same place - a time when we will look back and consider how we've spent our time.

These are honest thoughts, but honesty like truth is, as many of you know, a powerful and life-changing thing.  Honest thoughts lead to overhauls.  To me, honest thoughts have always lead to the right, though difficult decision.

I would like to say that all this honesty boils down to one (rather kitschy but nonetheless true) conclusion: we must all run the race in good company - often, in the company of people we don't get to choose.  If we can improve the circumstances, if we can lift someone up when things get difficult, if we can do better than we are and learn from trying, we should do that.

Why?

Because that is what we will REALLY be thinking when we cross the finish line.  We will remember every moment we didn't think we could handle one more step, every day that we committed to trying after failing, and every person that came alongside us along the road. All achievements in the world are more memorable for the earning of them.

“Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don't be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren't paying any attention to you. It's your attention to yourself that is so stultifying. But you have to disregard yourself as completely as possible. If you fail the first time then you'll just have to try harder the second time. After all, there's no real reason why you should fail. Just stop thinking about yourself.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

Playing around with a new toy, and one of my favorite pics and one of my favorite quotes.