This weekend I spent my time in the details. There were drops of water on succulent plants, sun salutations to lengthen my spine, and lots of getting familiar with my new kitchen by baking and stewing and getting those last few boxes of cooking items unpacked.
For so many reasons it was worth stepping away from the “big picture” for a few days to spend time with a macro view.
Two weeks ago we flew to Denver for the weekend, staying in a small writer’s cabin on the top of a hill near Estes Park. Driving there in the dark that first night we saw fields full of deer staring at us as we meandered around curving unpaved roadways. All night long we could hear the yapping of coyotes in the hills around the house.
As is typical for me, I don’t sleep in well in the mornings. I’m up with the sun and looking forward to those first quiet moments over a cup of hot coffee. The sun cast beautiful shadows across the landscape as it rose, and we had a large deck with a view to enjoy it all.
My feelings about this part of the world are complicated, so much so that I feel like I’m in the middle of a vortex of memories each time I visit. It was in Denver that I was diagnosed with bone cancer and had my leg amputated. It was in Denver where my father wanted our family to settle (instead, we only lived there for three years). And it was in Denver four years ago that my leg infection landed me once again in the emergency room.
That trip four years ago kept surfacing in my mind as we drove around the environs of Denver. In particular, I remembered an afternoon in my hotel room after I’d been several days alone there and was in terrible pain from my infection. It was a dodgy Residence Inn–cheap enough for a traveling graduate student and smelling of curry and dirty socks. The only sunlight that entered the room was a bright beam from a high window in the bathroom. I remember sitting in that patch of light and singing “Sunshine on my Shoulders” to myself as a distraction from my circumstances. I felt very alone that week, but I also realized how strong I was becoming and dealing with things that were beyond my control. I had offers from friends and family to come and rescue me from Denver, but instead I dealt with the medical issues myself knowing that it was something I needed to do alone. And as a result I returned from that experience knowing that I was far stronger than I’d been before, which was an important lesson for where my life was headed.
So just a few weeks ago as I sat in the deck in that high dry Colorado air and enjoyed the sunshine on my shoulders once again, I felt that all the pain and trauma of that place was long gone. What remained were the lessons learned. And the in-the-moment joy of warm breezes on bare skin, making me feel alive and strong and even a little teary-eyed at just how beautiful life can be.
I really miss the Gowalla app. I liked “checking in” as I moved around and I learned a lot about my local environment. One of my favorite tidbits was learning about famous sculptures at UCI that I’d walked past for 20 years but didn’t know about their origin until I’d “checked in” there. It helped, too, that many of my DH friends were early Gowalla adopters and I enjoyed following along virtually with their travels.
Instagram shares a few of the features that I enjoyed with Gowalla, but doesn’t offer the same incentives for check-ins, nor does it connect me to other users (or contacts) who are traveling the same paths as I am.
Recently I downloaded Wenzani which seems to share some of the location-based functionality that I enjoyed with Gowalla, but it’s not really caught on in my area so I’m navigating the app alone (which means it’s no fun, really). Wenzani strikes me more as an cleaner-looking yelp app than a game. But I don’t like that Wenzani is pushing its updates to Facebook (I’m incredibly weary of FB right now, but that’s a topic for another day).
At my daughter’s suggestion, reading one of her favorite book series (the Protector of the Small
It’s such a simple thing, but it’s been making me very happy lately to have my daughter share a bit of her literary world with me (that, and I love bouncing my writing ideas around with her–she’s one smart cookie!).
I’m a creature of habit when I’m at the sushi bar. All I need is some fresh yellowtail and a bit of fatty tuna and I’m a happy camper. Usually I’ll have me a salmon handroll and some seared scallops for variety, but I don’t veer too far from the predictable. However, last night our sushi chef was tempting me to move outside of my comfort zone a bit more than usual (nice, to have a sushi chef who’s getting acquainted with me and is helping me to learn to try new things). In the past I felt really edgy just by going for the red snapper that he assured me I would love. So when he suggested ankimo (monkfish liver) and uni (sea urchin ovary) last night I was pretty sure that was not going to leave me with a smile on my face. Eating the innards of various fishes hardly sounded anywhere near as appetizing as the fleshy-parts. And I’ll confess that the ankimo wasn’t an instant hit, although if I’d expected something more like paté than sushi I think that would have landed better with my palate. But the sea urchin….oh my. The chef explained to me that he had a few pieces left of the highest-quality uni from the fish market, and the taste was “on the bar” to see if I would like it. He watched my face as I put in my mouth and chewed it, apologizing the whole time because he was worried it would be too ‘ocean-tasting’ or that it would be a texture that I wouldn’t tolerate. But that was…probably the best mouthful of sushi that I’ve ever tried: buttery-rich and smooth, with just a hint of the sea.
Ten years ago I’d just started on the path back to school, enrolling in three undergraduate classes at UCI with the intention of eventually applying to graduate school. Here’s my blogpost about that on my old old blog at enivri.com (courtesy of the wayback machine)…
This is why I’m headed to the High Country this weekend. It’s about time…
(From “The High Country” by Bernard DeVoto):
I wish that everyone could know the high country….[where] summer is, like all brief seasons, passionate and intense. The crest has passed by the middle of August, and then there comes a period which I find the most poignant of all. A new brightness comes into the air and the colors. The underbrush is splashed with scarlet, poplar and cottonwood leaves are gold, and the aspens have reached a high, shining silver. Mist hangs blue and lavender gauzes across the canyons and the distances almost till noon; twilights are early and long. There is a hush, an expectancy in the air–a portent of winter, a premonition of death, but the world is resolved to reach its fulness first. There is an illusion that no one is here but you, and you respond to it with a delight so deep, so moving, so complete that it is wrapped round with sadness. Above all others, this is the time to visit the high country.
Why, yes, I did hold one of my classes at the Orange train station. Trains + teaching + awesome students = WIN! 🙂
It also helped that we were discussing the impact of the trans-continental railroad on the environment of the American West as the trains were whooshing past us on the tracks.
I’ve attended more THATCamps than I can keep track of now. THATCamp Prime and THATCampBayArea and THATCampSoCal are standard annual events for me, with a few others working out in conjunction with other conferences that I attend along the way. I’m used to the drill of TC and as a result I’ve even begun to wonder whether the familiarity of the unconference experience meant a loss of use-value for me. You see, I easily become weary of the conversations about the abysmal academic market or the lack of funding for graduate student projects or the lack of women in tech-fields. Not to say that these aren’t important conversations, I just don’t enjoy the repetition very much–I want to start the revolution, not just talk about what needs changing.
And while there was some repetition of some of those typical conversations at this THATCamp, I found it to to still be quite useful for me, and this is why:
All of these bullet points have one thing in common, and that’s the value of attending a conference where others are invested in the DH community and are excited about sharing with they know with others. There’s a generosity at THATCamp conferences that is above and beyond what I’ve experienced at other academic venues. Attending this event today reminded me just how much I need the mentoring and examples of other scholars in this field, and also affirmed my hope that I can offer the same to others, too.
From Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert
I write to make peace with the things I cannot control.
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white.
I write to discover.
I write to uncover.
I write to meet my ghosts.
I write to begin a dialogue.
I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.
I write to honor beauty.
I write to correspond with my friends.
I write as a daily act of improvisation.
I write because it creates my composure.
I write against power and for democracy.
I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams.
I write in a solitude born out of community.
I write to the questions that shatter my sleep.
I write to the answers that keep me complacent.
I write to remember.
I write to forget.
I write to the music that opens my heart.
I write to forget the pain.
I write to migrating birds and with the hubris of language.
I write as a form of translation.
I write with the patience of melancholy in winter.
I write because it allows me to confront that which I do not know.
I write as an act of faith.
I write as an act of slowness.
I write to record what I love in the face of loss.
I write because it makes me less fearful of death.
I write as an exercise of pure joy.
I write as one who walks on the surface of a frozen river beginning to melt.
I write out of anger and into my passion.
I write from the stillness of night anticipating–always anticipating.
I write to listen.
I write out of silence.
I write to soothe the voices shouting inside me, outside me, all around.
I write because of the humor of our condition as humans.
I write because I believe in words.
I write because I do not believe in words.
I write because it is a dance with paradox.
I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in the sand.
I write because it belongs to the force of the moon: high tide, low tide.
I write because it is the way I take long walks.
I write as a bow to wilderness.
I write because I believe it can create a path in darkness.
I write because as a child I spoke a different language.
I write with a knife carving each word through the generosity of trees.
I write as ritual.
I write because I am not employable.
I write out of my inconsistencies.
I write because then I do not have to speak.
I write with the colors of memory.
I write as a witness to what I have seen.
I write as a witness to what I imagine.
I write by grace and grit.
I write out of indigestion.
I write when I am starving.
I write when I am full.
I write to the dead.
I write out of the body.
I write to put food on the table.
I write on the other side of procrastination.
I write for the children we never had.
I write for the love of ideas.
I write for the surprise of a beautiful sentence.
I write with the belief of alchemists.
I write knowing I will always fail.
I write knowing words always fall short.
I write knowing I can be killed by my own words, stabbed by syntax, crucified by both understanding and misunderstanding.
I write out of ignorance.
I write by accident.
I write past the embarrassment of exposure…
words are always a gamble, words are splinters of cut glass.
I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient we are.
I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.
Photo above taken on a rambly drizzly walk in Tuscany. Because I also write to remember where I’ve been…