Tuesday October 2, 2007
Starbucks Café, Mill Valley, CA
Well, this afternoon I’m catching up on writing, connecting, and anything else I was counting on my computer for… At first it felt as if I’d be wasting the entire afternoon. Then I realized that this is exactly what I wanted to do today. I had just imagined doing it at my campsite, not in town. Alas, being dependent on electricity limits my options.
This morning I walked around the campgrounds, and took a bike ride. The walk along the creek provided another treat. I noticed something move ahead of me on the trail, and stopped short. 30 to 4o feet in front of me,(I’m not so good at judging distance, but it was fairly close) in the dappled sunlight of the redwood forest, was a young buck; small antler rack on his head. We sized one another up for a few seconds, and then he moseyed off. Very cool!!! A little further down the trail was a beautifully intricate spider’s web shining in the warm sun. It was about 2 feet in diameter; suspended weaving of sticky glory…
The dense woodedness of the campground is a bit oppressive. I guess 25 years under the wide open New Mexico sky has affected me. It’s sort of eerie, and my nostalgic bliss of the past couple of days has subsided. I’m still very pleased that I am on this adventure, and I’m really not lonely(except that I do miss you., dear Ted). I keep telling him that I miss sharing all of this with him, and, I’m glad he’s not here. I do love life’s paradoxes…
A number of wonderful little occurences keep happening. Like today, I wasn’t sure what exit I needed to get off, and just happened to get off and pull into a shopping plaza. I noticed the name, as I needed to be sure to get back out of the parking lot and onto where I was really going. A few hours later, I Googled a list of REI stores in the area. Wouldn’t you know it, the nearest one was in that same shopping center! While in REI, I couldn’t resist purchasing a new thicker (for my 50 year old knees) yoga mat. I couldn’t find mine at home before I left, and I wanted to practice while away. Well, on the way back to the campground I passed a community center in the next town that has had a sign out front advertising an upcoming local art showing. Tonight the sign had been replaced by a new sign, announcing a restorative yoga (my favorite kind) class at 6:30 tomorrow evening. Guess who’s going to attend?
Some people would call those coincidences, others blessings, or synchronicity, and still others a result of my evolved cognitive survival awareness. I wonder, what do I call them?
An important part of this journey is to take some time to ponder what it is I truly believe about the mysteries of life…I think that in different circumstances I call these “occurrences” by the name that I think the person(s) I am talking with would use. Does that make me wishy-washy and shallow? Or does it make me wise, believing that no single word or concept or understanding can hold the full complexity of mystery? I guess I’m comfortable with any of these explanations myself. That sounds contradictory, but it isn’t.
I know that I’m primarily a feeling/sensing person, or soul, or spirit, and that the ‘feel’ of a situation informs me on many levels. I also value my intellect, my rational (though frustratingly ever more forgetful) mind. I guess that when the two come together (the feeling and the thinking) is as close as I get to ‘knowing’ in that deeper way I long to ‘know’.
I know that seeing that deer this morning made me ever more cautious as I drove back to the campground tonight, as the sun was setting. I could call that an omen, or good luck, or well honed awareness. I guess that I’d like to be free to use the words that best describe what it meant to me. Maybe I don’t because I fear the judgment of others, my assuming that they are assuming something about me by my use of particular language. Maybe I simply haven’t taken the opportunity to get clear enough to articulate or commit to that particular language.I do know there are things that I do believe and might even be able to articulate. But I’ll leave that for another day...
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3 comments:
Sounds like you're in the groove, having a wonderful time connecting with the world around you - and Marin is so beautiful. I just started reading a book that just fits with your current life in the woods - and written by our girl Elizabeth Gilbert: "The Last American Man" true story about an amazing man she knows who lives off the land in the Appalachian wilderness. Her smart,sassy voice comes through on the first page. I bet you'd love it.
Dear Lorian This blog is a wonderful way to let us know of your adventure. Your thoughts are reminding me of a NPR Living On Earth piece I heard a few years ago. I thought about it ALL day when I first heard it and searched it out to have in print...... Enjoy Love Dave
In Search of Home
CURWOOD: In our increasingly mobile society, the idea of home is becoming less and less clear. On a recent trip to his native Iowa, commentator Tom Montgomery-Fate wondered if home is a real place or just a state of mind.
MONTGOMERY-FATE: I’ve lived in Chicago for 15 years but I don't feel at home, not in the city or the western suburbs where I now live. Coming from a small town in Iowa, I don’’t handle the human density or frenetic energy of the city very well. It tires rather than inspires me. But so do the suburbs. The tangle of eight-lane arteries clogged 24/7 with millions of cars on their way to 200-acre malls and 400-acre parking lots or perhaps to a 30-plex movie theater.
Go west, young man. My wife Carol and I keep moving. We started on the city’’s south side and every five or six years we drift another 10 or 15 miles west. I’’m on a slow, meandering journey home to Iowa, place I’’ll always come from.
The Latin roots of the word ““nostalgia”” mean homesick. I wonder about this today as we drive west on Interstate 88 back to Iowa. It’s dusk and we’re in the middle of Illinois, cruising through fields of corn stubble and past strings of cows plodding back toward the barn. In the distance a cloud of synchronized black flecks, sparrows, abruptly and beautifully change direction, like a fistful of pepper caught in a swirl of wind. Day slips into night and the horizon, the only hard line left in the world, finally disappears.
Wendell Berry once wrote that trees are immobile yet flexible. People of course needn’t be either. Few bloom where they are planted, or are planted at all. Roots have become a liability. We increasingly associate success with being mobile and accessible. We can work and live anywhere with a laptop and a cell phone. Starbucks have become the makeshift offices for an army of small entrepreneurs.
Several years ago while driving through Lancaster County, Pennsylvania I noticed two boys pushing themselves down a dirt road on kick scooters. A friend pointed out that they couldn’t have bikes because an Amish council somewhere had determined that the chain and sprocket was an inappropriately high level of technology. It might break down community, too easily draw people away from their families and homes, from their roots. While this may seem a bit dictatorial it also suggests a sustaining ethic: community over convenience, meaning over marketability, wisdom over information.
It takes two hours to cross Illinois. In the darkness on the bridge over the Mississippi I try to remember a home does not belong to us, we belong to a home. On the Iowa side I see a smattering of lights, a yellow Caterpillar slowly crawls through the mud, its headlights illuminate a new subdivision. Even from the highway I can see the warm breath of steam rising from the fresh gash in the earth.
Lorian,
It has been fun reading about your adventures and thoughts. I look forward to seeing you and hearing more in Billings. Travel safe.
Love, Sandi
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