Apologia

It seems I have terrifically underestimated the time - and energy - demands of full-time parenting & part-time teaching. I've spent almost the last two months compiling the beginnings of nature blog entries & sticking them into a Word file, which is now many, many pages long. Will those fragments ever become manifest? I certainly hope so. I keep up with the reading, but not the words, not the thoughtful part of things. I have a tiny moment to breathe, and I hope to catch up with responding to all those Words Not My Own this week. But as for the currency of this blog, I can safely say that I definitely do not get a *passing* grade for my own assignment!

Landscape & Intimacy

I’m now comfortable in the darkness of the sequoia forest as if it were my own skin. When insomnia awakened me at night as a child, I would feel my way deliberately down the hallway and across the furniture, without turning on the lights, remembering instead the placement of each obstacle in my path. Mastering the darkness was exciting, the way it tested and forced me to be brave. The darkness taught me to see with my senses, not simply through my eyes. It is the same way now with the forest.

Tonight I decide to hike to Sunset Rock to sit beneath the stars for what may be the last time here. My headlamp is forgotten in my cabin but I don't care. The slivered moon remains hidden behind the sheer granite faces and heavy forest canopy. I drive my car to the chained service road near Round Meadow. On the other side of the road the path is wide, the direction it takes overly familiar from my years of use. I walk straight until the soft ground turns hard, then right when the forest thins out. From memory my feet follow each twist and bend along the trail at the edge of an old pine forest. Twigs and fallen branches snap under my hiking boots as I walk slowly.

I do this more to savor the act of walking than to feel my way in the darkness. Nighthiking becomes an instinctive act. I move forward. Eyes open, then closed. My heart beats loudly, rhythmically, but the sound doesn’t frighten me. Still unable to discern tangible and familiar shapes, but it hardly matters. This is a darkness to which human eyes cannot adjust. Like swimming in a blueblack ocean under a moonless sky.

There is always the possibility of falling, stumbling over a large rock underfoot. I trust. With each movement, each step, my feet will meet solid earth. I walk without hesitation. With the same sort of ignorant faith that once made me believe a former lover, when he had lied to me many times before. The air overflows tonight with the the musty forest scent of loam and wet, decaying leaves.

The trail isn’t long and when my boots scrape the huge granite boulders, I know to stop. In a clearing now, out of the darkness, my eyes focus on the outline of the valley below. The moon has risen slightly and the rocks reflect the pale light, illuminated white and shiny. We came here once my first season, to see fireworks on the Fourth of July. How could I have known that the towns would look so small, pinpricks of light in the distance, or known that the ledge where we watched was much higher than the tiny, far away explosions? I remember disappointment, because there was no sound, no loud booms or firecrackers, only the midsummer sounds of crickets and owls.

I’ve spent so much time here. We came to these rocks to drink wine and tell ghost stories, to watch sunsets, and to sunbathe in the late summer before the weather turned cold. If I could put all the time together in a straight and continuous line, Sequoia is the one place I’ve lived the longest since I was a child. This forest is my home.

Lying against the rocks, the granite is cold and rough on my back. I look up at the sky and try to find the few constellations I know. Aries, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the Pleiades. Since I was a small child I’ve searched in every clear nighttime sky for those same constellations. Always comforted by knowing they are there, fixed and constant.

At this high elevation the stars seem close enough to touch if I reach out my hand, the Milky Way a curling ribbon of smoke that weaves in between and around the stars. The planet Jupiter looks like a single star, not much brighter than the others. And in the place where I know a lacework nebula exists, I see nothing.

I am feeling very small, humbled by the vastness of such a sky. I’ll need to make a decision soon about where to go this time when I leave. I have clarity enough to know that I’ve learned what I needed to from this forest, have learned many of its secrets. Feeling very small, but not scared of this open expanse of life. The shadows and tall trees will outlive me.

Needfulness

Between the Cold. That. Wouldn't. Leave, the upcoming family visit/birthday party planning, and teaching, I'm finding this weekly blog business to be more challenging than I imagined. I had somehow envisioned my being able to keep right up, and the practice would feel as good for my soul as the spring that's is lurking just under the surface. I've composed many entries in my head, but haven't found even a minute to manifest the words. Funny how things don't quite turn out as we'd hoped. And now that I have a moment - a stolen, brief moment - I'm not even going to write one of the entries that has been circling without landing in my mind.

I just had a phone call from the doctor's office, with news about all the bloodwork that it seems every physician insists upon doing at the first meeting with a new patient. Nevermind my insistence that my cholesterol is below average, or that despite 20+ years of vegetarianism I've only ever suffered pregnancy-induced anemia (vindicated again this time!). The nurse rattled off everything I already knew, but then she said something stunning and wholly unexpected: I am, apparently, extremely Vitamin D deficient - something I've never even really heard of in an adult. How I got this way is perplexing, since even in winter I do not sequester myself in the house, run several days a week outdoors and take the wee ones to park usually every weekend. How I fix being this way - and I will have to fix it, as the consequences aren't so appealing - is pretty straightforward: intensive supplements with retesting in a few months, and a directive to get outside more.

Now I find myself considering the metaphorical implications of this diagnosis. I've always known that I am happiest and feel most thoroughly alive, something I commented on in Kristin's recent post, A Cold, S(easonally) A(ffected) D(isordered) Place, when it is sunny and warm outside. My Self was most centered when I lived in Tucson, with its two seasons of Warm & Hot. People always tell me that I'd miss proper seasons, if I decided to settle in a place like that. And I tell them I most certainly would not. It's interesting to me now that my lifelong, intuitive desire for a place marked by endless summer has not been just an emotional one. More than just desire, it is also a real, physical need. My body craves the light for physiological sustenance just as much as my soul craves it for balance and inner happiness. And it's no longer a want, but a genuine need (a difference I wish I could make the three-year old realize...). It's a large realization, this. That my body simply cannot live without the light. Well, it can. But it shouldn't. And so oddly comforting, somehow. A justification - as if I ever needed one - for being out in the world as often as possible.

Origins

I've spent the better part of the last week (or perhaps, to say "the better part of my entire life" might be more accurate) considering these, my very own words, and how I might respond to them:

Meditate on the landscape and culture that gave birth to you and nurtured you. What connections can you draw between the elements of that landscape and the elements of the culture? Speculate on the ways in which the environment of this place might have shaped the character of the people who live there (or you!).

It seems that the more I meditate on the place of my birth, the place where I lived for the first two decades of my life - northeastern Ohio - the more I come up empty-handed. Or rather, empty-hearted. I know that these formative places and spaces are supposed to have some importance, some resonance. Even if our relationships to them have been difficult or conflicted, they should, my logical mind tells me, have some meaning for us. And yet, when I consider Ohio, something I never, ever did when I lived there, it feels like a vast and empty space, a blankness, both in my mind and in my heart. It is place that has never felt like mine, a part of me in the least. I could have been raised anywhere or nowhere at all. No matter how deeply I try to make myself think of it, how much I try to conjure memories or attachments, it remains a place that almost never really existed at all. Almost as if my life itself didn't exist until I left.

And when I do look back, try to understand how little it impacted me, I realize now that although it was mostly unconscious, I did spend all my time there wanting and waiting to leave. Feeling as if I had been somehow born in the wrong place. That Ohio was just where I had the misfortune of being born and raised.

My place-related memories are so few: I remember a particularly cold winter in 1985, walking to the bus after school in the -10 degrees, and wondering what I was doing there, whether I had a choice to be there. I remember being forced on a hike in a local park so I could get my Girl Scout hiking badge. At the time, it felt like some kind of torturous, never-ending death march; I remember just wishing the entire time that it was over. Years later, on a visit back to that park, I realized the trail we took that day was only something like a mile long (in my kid mind, it was easily 10+ miles...). I found an old photo from that day recently and was stunned to realize it had been a breathtaking autumn day, in the height of the leaves changing, simply gorgeous. And yet, I saw none of that. What few memories I have are these two extremes, either utter lack of attention or a desire for escape. It's no wonder then that I ran away at the first chance I got and never looked back. No wonder that I spent most of my adult life physically and spiritually *homeless*, trying on new places wherever the wind took me. I guess all that time I must have been looking for what I had never had, had been looking for a place to call my own. My home.

And still, despite my own lack of history and connection, I'm still not sure whether it's possible to grow up without some sense of place, even if that sense is absence or disconnection. Is it the fault of my parents, that I almost never considered where I was from and what, if anything, it meant? Like the Hungarian language, history, and culture my immigrant father never taught me, Ohio is something I never taught myself, never allowed myself to learn. If anything, what I have learned now only in retrospect is that I do not wish for my daughters to feel the same sort of lack, placelessness. It has become critical that I teach them how to truly see their world, their places, this one, and all the ones to come. That they feel connected in some way to the land. I had no such teacher myself, so I fumble my way through.

Tobacco

In reading others' blog entries this week, I am immediately intrigued too by MAR's commentary on smoking in his first place entry. Perhaps it's the reformed smoker in me that relates to these ideas. I remember thinking about this issue often while in Sequoia National Park: sitting on the side of a trail during a long hike and taking a smoke break, being far into the backcountry away from all other humans and smoking around camp at night, climbing a mountain with a pack of cigarettes easily-accessible in my pack. Tobacco was a huge part of my life there, then, as it was for everyone I knew. And I remember thinking so many times how its very existence seemed in conflict with my that place and that very life. How hypocritcal I felt.

It makes me think about that question of "natural" vs "unnatural" - is smoking a natural behavior? Is there some contradiction in the idea of being in a natural place while doing it? Tobacco also grows, much like the dormant plants in the community garden that MAR describes, so that should mean it's inherently a natural process. But at the same time, there feels, intuitively, like something unnatural in it.

And while I'm four years reformed - now it's so hard to even imagine that I was ever a smoker in the first place - this entry made me want to know more about the whole aspect of tobacco growing, the history and culture and myth. These are facts I should know, living now in a state where the primary revenue source is tobacco. A state where it's really a whole way of life. I've been given much to meditate on further!

Shades of Gray

It's very hard to craft a *place* entry when my place for the last week or so has mostly been my house, more particularly, my living room, where I can still be found coughing uncontrollably and existing on a diet of soup and popsicles. I wonder why it is that whatever illness Z brings home from school always seems to hit me hardest (well me and now her baby sister). So I have no choice but to write a place-by-proxy entry...

One of my only excursions into the outdoors this week, an early morning walk with Pepper, rushed because it was cold, because we were running late and because there were, as always, things to do and places to be. On the return home, in a yard, there was the briefest flash of white and black very nearby. Instinctively, my mind immediately went back to the the last time. As such is the nature of The Peppy, she barked and lunged. And I couldn't help but immediately panic. And how sorry I felt for that poor hapless black and white kitty on the receiving end of such an unwelcome morning greeting. I guess some things will never change, some instincts are just that, instincts, overwhelming and hard-wired.

But the encounter got me thinking more about these creatures - not the kitties, though the whole indoor vs. outdoor cat issue is definitely post-worthy - who are such a ubiquitous part of this place. Until coming here, I'm not sure I ever saw a skunk in real life, had only experienced their presence left behind. I think about my English friend, smelling one for the first time in California, since there are no skunks where he comes from (a place where there are also no fireflies, sadly). And I realize that although I have always known of them, like my friend, I really don't know them at all. But I am learning. Just last week I watched the PBS episode of "Nature" "Is That Skunk?". Fascinating stuff. I am most compelled by the idea that skunks are marginal animals - literally and figuratively - that live on, in, around the borders between natural and unnatural spaces; they make their homes in the artificial borders that we humans have created. I think of my UK student Johnny, and his interest in these borderland areas. And wonder whether there is an English animal counterpart, some animal there that makes its home primarily in these blurry places.

That show, and my recent skunk encounters, serve as good introductions to what will probably be more research, more of my own learning about this place where I live (and where I shall probably live for quite a while longer).

Joining the Flock

Since I've asked all my students in the nature & environmental writing course this semester to keep a nature blog, I feel like I also should do my best to complete my own assignments as well. Doing so would be a useful and much needed exercise for me too. What I've asked them to write, during most weeks:

1. One posting from a chosen “place” where students will go weekly;
2. A second posting in response to a directed question/prompt related to the week’s
course topic;
3. A third posting that reflects on or responds to:
a. Either a blog post by one of the fellow students OR
b. A blog post found on an outside nature blog through the Nature Blog
Network (http://natureblognetwork.com/).

To be honestly practical, I have to admit that I will likely not have the luxury of setting aside time each week for writing about a chosen place - though my several-times-weekly runs in the park could probably fit. I have so little time, still, and parenting and teaching takes up most of it, still. But I can write to the other two requirements. In fact, I actually look forward to trying.