Lessons

"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest ... shapes it, renders it, loves it.” – Joan Didion

"The art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood." – Eudora Welty

"You see, I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others — why they must dream up new and marvelous spheres, or long to live elsewhere, beyond this dominion ... but that is not my business. We are all different, I suppose." - Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Stories teach us how to be human. As I understand it, becoming fully human means learning to savor the world, to share in community, to see through the eyes of other people, to take responsibility for our actions, to educate our desires, to dwell knowingly in time and place, to cope with suffering and death. … We need one another. Yet our souls and communities are divided by fear and ignorance and strife. We walk in beauty, yet much of what we do is ugly. We inhabit a magnificent planet, yet we devour our home. Stories are not instruction manuals; they do not teach us in any simple way how to lead our lives. By inviting us to participate in imaginary lives, however, they deepen our understanding and enlarge our sympathies for other people, for other creatures, for the places and purposes that human beings share, and for the earth. That is a good beginning." – Scott Russell Sanders, “The Power of Stories”

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.” – Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, June 26, 2015

On tourism

This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It's a quick fix of empathy. - Leslie Jamison, "La Frontera"

You're just a tourist inside someone else's suffering until you can't get it out of your head; until you take it home with you--across a freeway, or a country, or an ocean. - Leslie Jamison, "Pain Tours (I)"

On nostalgia

Sentimentality is about lies, he says, nostalgia about "real things gone," not so much about what we remember, but itself "an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanence of loss." The body cannot remember a lie. 

[...] I used to believe that my nostalgia was so intense because I felt I had lost something I never possessed. But the truth is that we do not possess our lives. As true exiles know, we stand too easily to lose them, and in the end we are all just passing through. It is what we remember of the journey that we possess. 

- Lee Zacharias, "Mud Pies"

 

 

 

Lessons from INTO THE WILD

Christopher Johnson McCandless

The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
-Chris McCandless, in a letter

The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind. With the gathering force of an essential thing realizing itself out of early ground, I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing--to put away thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on snowshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows--a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.
-John Haines, from The Starts, The Snow, The Fire: Twenty-five Years in the Northern Wilderness

He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others. ... I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor--such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps--what more can the heart of a man desire?
-from Tolstoy's "Family Happiness"

HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.
-Chris McCandless's note over a passage of Doctor Zhivago

Sunrise over Duncan Park

A cloud can be whatever you intend;
Ostrich or leaning tower or staring eye.
       But you have never found
A cloud sufficient to express the sky.

--from "Rural Reflections" by Adrienne Rich

On hiding

"For we must have hiding, places to lick our wounds, if only for a little while. I am troubled by this, and moved. We must have hiding, places where we can drop all pretenses not to just be ourselves but to dissolve into something else. We must have hiding, because we are not private people after all; we are in our own dreams the pull of the same ocean, waves that break and crest together. We can't avoid our human obligations. We must have hiding, because it is only here, away from the processes of society and people-forming that the divine kernel of ourselves is lit and stays glowing among the hypocrisies of the day; we hide because we need to, to let the fragile wick catch fire, burn innermost, keep going, keep going."

--from "Dreams I Had of Hiding" by Robert Vivian

On heritage

"Strange how we'd wanted to get as far away from that life as possible, we'd wanted to escape any chance of daily reminders, and yet all three of us were using art to express and re-create and revisit the past.

Heritage.

The farm would always be ours, even if we were no longer there. We could claim it in writing, in music.

--from "The Orchard" by Theresa Weir

Kansas

Wildness

I've been musing a lot on growth lately. And time. And the way we think about our home land. And what it means to explore. And what it means to take risks.

Two years ago I completed grad school. Two years ago I up and moved to Spartanburg, a place I'd never been, for a job. Two years ago I set out on my own like I'd never done before. I started climbing mountains, to be exact. I wanted to go as high as I could, to test my body, to see how alone I really was, if alone was a state of being or a place I could go when I chose. I set out to escape from and be found by my self. Discovering my self was the only thing I could do.

I discovered that I can go far, both high and low. I can stand on the edge of the continent and not be carried away. I can stand on a cliff and not feel like falling.

Two years ago in August I touched the ocean for the first time, wading in to my calves on a rainy Saturday on Hunting Island. I sat in the sand where the water washed over me and left, taking pieces of my foundation and burying me more each time. It was a surreal sensation, and I wasn't convinced it was actually me in the water, me following waves, me writing "I am here" in the sand. I felt so alone that I didn't answer my phone, cutting myself off entirely from what I knew. I drove home sunburnt and sand-filled, the only proof.

"If only we could keep going, out of harm's way, and take with us only the best part of ourselves; if only we knew why we dream at the wheel or think more clearly while moving down valleys and across rivers."
--from "Hereafter in Fields" by Robert Vivian

One year ago today I brought home a golden year-old puppy named Scooter. He was afraid of the car, afraid of the stairs, afraid of my leaving. He wouldn't sit when you asked but would sit and not budge when he felt stubborn on walks. He was a wonder, my first dog after a lifetime of cats, and his presence in my life terrified me. Suddenly I had committed to this dog's well-being and future. I stressed constantly about how much he was barking when I wasn't home. I walked him so many blocks those first months, convincing him we were in this together, just him, me, and Snickers. And, though, at the time I adopted him there was still another person pulling me in and pushing me away, I already knew that it was over before it was over. I took my dog to my favorite trail; I moved to a duplex surrounded by kudzu and birds. I was alone, and I was going to be good.

"We use the word 'wilderness,' but perhaps we mean wildness. Isn't that why I've come here, to seek the wildness in myself and, in so doing, come on the wildness everywhere, because after all, I'm part of nature too."
--from "The Source of a River" by Gretel Ehrlich

Perhaps this summer will ever be known to me as the summer of adventures with my eyes open. This was the year I began to see, to open up, to breathe in my own wild nature. It began back in January, internally, a wild seeping out that you probably couldn't see. This recovery of my self, a return to true being, propelled me. It led me to May, to build a structure and sleep under it on the forest floor in the rain, plucking just two ticks from my thighs in the morning. It led me to take a road trip--going forward by going back--to see good friends along the way and spend more time with my family than I had since I left seven years prior. It led me to Phillip, a man who makes me feel full, who keeps me smiling and dreaming, who knew me then and knows me now, who has me believing.

The road trip was supposed to end with me camping on the beach in the Gulf, right where Isaac has been hanging out for the last few days. But it was storming that day, too, thick sheets of rain blanking the ocean. So I returned to Hunting Island last weekend with Scooter to celebrate one year together, to take another step in my journey, to finish my summer of adventure.

And a funny thing happened: I didn't feel alone.

Yes, I had Scooter, but I had no desire to write my name in the sand as physical proof I was there. I walked into the ocean up to my ribs at high tide, rippling gushes of water aimed at my chest, and took it on; the waves shook me, set me off balance, and I walked right back in. All evening, I wrote and read in my tent by lamp light. I wasn't afraid of noises in the dark, of the racoons who visited, of the buzzing against the tent wall. Each time I awoke in the night I woke to stars peeking through branches above me. In the morning I gathered my books and notebook and reached the ocean by sunrise, catching the sun's bowl as it lifted from the horizon, and I stayed through morning on a silent stretch of beach to write some more. All the while, content. All the while, eager to read more, write more, soak in the rhythm of waves and slant of sun before it caught day. All the while, thinking I didn't need to escape to be alone anymore, that what I really wanted was to be sharing the sunrise with someone else, to see the orange glow on each others' faces, to walk into the waves holding hands.

Saturday: 1

Two years ago Saturday became my day of exploration. I would drive to a mountain nearly every week on my only day off and push myself to hike it, to see how it felt to complete a challenge on my own. I was new in the South, new to mountains and the ocean and weekends alone.

It began with Grandfather Mountain and continued to the Atlantic and back up into the Blue Ridge. And it was in the Blue Ridge that I found my Southern home: the Art Loeb Trail from Black Balsom Road over Tennent Mountain and Ivestor Gap. Recently, my fourth time on the trail, I finally made it to Shining Rock, the cluster of white quartz you can see from miles away. The first time I took a wrong trail to find it, the second I got rained out halfway, the third was colder than I had prepared for. But this time I had set out with the intention of going all the way--6 miles to stand on quartz and say "I made it."

The morning was heavy with clouds. On the drive up I-26, treed tips of mountains hovered in the air above white. Fog lifted from the Green River Gorge, and clouds moved unimpeded over the Blue Ridge Parkway. The forecast called for a 30% chance of rain, but I needed the hike too much call it off. Scooter and I both needed exercise, and I needed to walk out my distraction of late, to complete something worth my time.

 "...mountains are providers: they catch clouds, shed water, give refuge, cleanse the spirit. Standing up straight, they seem to represent the highest spiritual attainment of the human; they are the natural sacred site on whose summits we express our gratitude and awe."
--from "The Bridge to Heaven" by Gretel Ehrlich

Twelve miles later I had completed my quest, finally tired out my dog, and spent the day amid rocks and trees I love. And I had done it alone, again. My feet were caked in mud, calves shaded by dirt. As I descended the last section of trail through pines, brown rooms meant for bear and rattlesnakes, I wondered if I will ever make it down to the water heard deep in the valley: a rush below green, a depth lower than my feet tend to go.

On Shining Rock

Shining Rock (white quartz) itself

In cloud on the Art Loeb Trail

Contemplating clouds and trees

Dear Kari

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. –Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet. --Dear Sugar.

No matter how carefully we defend ourselves, all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall us to the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships. --Jonathan Franzen, from "Farther Away"

You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotions. --Mary Oliver

One of these days you'll be born and raised, and it's such a waste to grow up lonely. --John Mayer, from "Born and Raised"

13 Ways of Looking at a Road Trip: 8, Collection

Sometimes--well, rather often--others say what I need to say far better than I can. 

I have been so many places I must be sunlight. I have been diffused by clouds. To hike to the top of the mountain, I must spend the afternoon facing the steep slant of earth, my hands in brambles. Only once I am high enough can I turn and see the tin roofs and straight beds of flowers, dropped to an Euclidian flatness. Where have I been? Listen, I have been diffused by clouds, by everyone who has touched me, and just like you I am a radiation destined for the earth. --from Syzygy, Beauty by T Fleischmann

 This could be the very minute I'm aware I'm alive. All these places feel like home. --from "Chocolate" by Snow Patrol

I wrote about Kansas, I wrote about Illinois, I wrote about Indiana; wherever I was. And if I moved tomorrow I'd write about where I showed up, no matter where it was. And so my attitude is this: where you live is not crucial, but how you feel about where you live is crucial. --William Stafford

I love it here. I love the curtains, the ruffles. I love being in the window and off on our own. --my mother, at Carolyn's Essenhaus for lunch in Arlington, KS, with my grandma Lentz

If I ever get around to living, I'll take the end of every day, tie it up to every morning, and sail away. --from "If I Ever Get Around to Living" by John Mayer

We have never held hands before; I have simply reached for his in the dark and held him while he holds me. I want to see our hands on the rough floor, but they are only visible every block or so when the car passes beneath a streetlight, and then, for only a flash. Ben is my closest friend because he lives next door, we are the same age, and we both have little brothers who are babies. I wish he were in the same kindergarten class as me, but he goes to a different school—one where he has to wear a uniform all day and for which there is no school bus. --from "First" by Ryan Van Meter

You are the bravest girl in the world. --my grandma Jackson, when she opened the door to me upon my arrival in town

I toured the light; so many foreign roads for Emma, forever ago. --from "For Emma" by Bon Iver

Where friends of mine once lived,
and I came there to understand: it was like
seeing, and knowing amid what you see.

A meadowlark brought me back,
just flying its road and singing,
being alive. I brought home this tumbleweed.
--from "A Gift for Kit" by William Stafford

Rollin' through these hills I've known I'd be comin' / Ain't a man alive that likes to be alone / Been a while since I've seen my lady smile / Have I been, have I been away so long? --from "For the Summer" by Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs

But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there's a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. --from "Pain Won't Kill You" by Jonathan Franzen

The Bearded Men (my friends)

The latest in a string of video projects over the last week...

Glaciers

She remembers sitting in an armchair with Agnes reading the nature encyclopedia, screaming over and over again, first with fright, then glee, when they turned to the magnified pictures of spiders. Her sister read that spiders have book lungs, which fold in and out over themselves like pages. this pleased Isabel immensely. When she learned later that humans do not also have book lungs, she was disappointed. Book lungs. It made complete sense to her. This way breath, this way life: through here.

--from Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith

Rarely can I say this about a novel, but I love everything about Glaciers. Everything. I started reading it at Panera this afternoon over a cup of tomato soup. I made myself stop halfway, when the dinner crowd started coming in, but I could have read it straight through right there at my little table for two, chair facing the wet cars on the lot.

I melt for her words, her phrases, the atmosphere of meaning of this book. It's delicate and deep and lyrical. It has lungs; the entire time it felt like the words themselves were breathing, a long series of sighs held high in the lungs.

I love it so much I could turn right around and read it straight through again.

That's 3 for 3 on books so far for 2012. Now I'm going to write.

In patches

I had not mopped or swept the floors in months. I had used paper towels when there was a spill and hoped that eventually the entire apartment floor would get wiped up this way. This method of cleaning the floor, in patches, I imagined was like writing a poem every day until you eventually said everything about the human condition there was to be said. But it didn't really work that way, even in poetry; grimy corners remained while certain floorboards got burnished to a slippery, hellish gleam.

--from A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Through here

"Awesome," I said, in that peculiar way, I knew, our generation had of finding that everything either "sucked" or was "awesome." We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps, as with the British, it was a kind of antidepressant inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.

--from A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

I recently saw that a bookstore somewhere in America is running a campaign against "awesome." They have bumper stickers that ban "awesome." I think there are t-shirts. When I saw this I had just begun realizing how "awesome" had become my response for just about anything. (I'm having a baby. Oh, that's awesome! / See you later. Awesome! / I think that reading went well. It was awesome.) Where did it come from, this word, and how did it work its way into my every conversation? What do I say if I can't say "awesome"? I still don't know, but I'm trying to be more conscious of its use. So that the "awe" can return to the word, unless it's meant to become the equivalent of "cowabunga, dude" from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Didn't one of the turtles say "awesome" a lot, too? I should do some research on that.

But I can't say that I thought Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs was awesome from the beginning. Or, perhaps, even at the end. What I'll say is that I was impatient for the first half of the book, nodding in awe, yes, at the language--never a dull or unpoetic sentence!--but where was the plot? Why was I so in the head of Tassie Keltjin when I didn't know where she was going or why? Why, half-way through, was I looking on every page for patterns: stairs, race, names, "sounds good," brothers.

"OK," I said, not knowing what else to say. "Sounds good." It was the midwestern girl's reply to everything.

If I don't say "awesome" I'll likely say "sounds good." I believe I texted "sounds good" this morning, even. And I certainly perked up and nodded the several times that Lorrie Moore pinpoints the patterns in our language. As Luke and I walked our dogs today, I made a point to respond at certain points in our conversation with silence or a nod instead of those filler words. And though so much of this book is the thought behind the action--the thought is the response to the action, and therefore the action isn't necessarily the most important element of the book--it's the silences, the lack-of, that propels you. The questions that have no answer. This is the reason I finished the book in one three-hour sitting tonight. Because just after the halfway point I began to get it and I didn't want it to stop, or, the questions became more complicated and Tassie became both more engaged and more withdrawn.

And then the heartbreak. And then more. And the whole time reflecting the words back on the title. And the whole time seeing my family in Tassie's. And the whole time wondering why we do the things we do to each other. And thinking about women and what it means to love and what it means to lose what you love. (Because all of that is ever-present on my mind lately. I try to decide what to eat and all I can think about is love.)

And after it all, I believe this book is a writerly treasure, an artifact of word-envy for those of us who wish for the consistency of surprise in language that Moore seems to have at her fingertips. I believe that, for those of us who experienced 9/11 and all of its repercussions, even in our small towns where no act of terrorism was itself terrorism, and for whom our friends and our brothers were thrust into situations accusatory and deadly, this book will remain in our gut long after we have shut the covers and alphabetized it on our shelves.

9/11 was a beginning of a different way of life, of different lives, because we had to react to tragedy. How do you tell the real story of an event like that? You tell the after. So perhaps I can say that A Gate at the Stairs was brilliant. Certainly Lorrie Moore is genius.

I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story. But now I'd gone back to thinking, no, the wedding was the end. It was the end of the comedy. That's how you knew it was a comedy. The end of comedy was the beginning of all else.

On fighting for a trail

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

--from Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Aloneness

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCt had altered that sense. Alone wasn't a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before. Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world feel both bigger and smaller to me. Until now, I hadn't truly understood the world's vastness--hadn't even understood how vast a mile could be--until each mile was beheld at walking speed. And yet there was also its opposite, the strange intimacy I'd come to have with the trail, the way the pinon pines and monkey flowers I passed that morning, the shallow streams I crossed, felt familiar and known, though I'd never passed them or crossed them before.

--from Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Fear begets fear.

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.

--from Wild by Cheryl Strayed

The last, the first.

The scene: December 31, 2011. 9:14pm. Living room floor, hardwood. Space heater on high. The Bourne Identity (which one, unknown). Dog asleep on the couch. Cat asleep on the chair.

The image: Girl in fetus position in front of the space heater, her feet so hot they sting. Fluffy white robe covers all but below the knees. Her hair, wet and wavy and slightly darker from the dye, flopped over on the floor. She is passed out, the image of post-party exhaustion. But she never made it to the party. She sleeps, nulling the indecision of New Years Eve plans: fancy party or writing through the night. She had been thinking that she should spend this first NYE alone the way she wants to spend 2012, but she both wants to be more social (read: fun, interesting, fearless with friends) and write (read: be a writer) in the new year. The Bourne Identity was a distraction from this decision. The space heater was a necessity. The freshly dyed hair was a belated attempt at a refreshed self-identity. The robe was a comfortable placeholder for the clothes she couldn't decide to wear.

The action: Sleep, on her side, until 12:02 am. An infomercial now on the screen. She wakes, startled that she had ever been asleep, and sees the clock. She gets up, stiff from the hardwood, and limps to bed. She climbs in her bed still in her robe, perhaps thinking that she might still get up again and write in the first hours of the new year.

The action: Sleep, in her robe, until 4:54 am. She wakes, startled that the lights are still on, that the tv is still on, and that she is sleeping in her robe. She gets up, turns everything off, feeds the cat in hopes of preventing her from pawing for food in an hour, gives the dog a cookie for waking him, changes into the usual bedtime fare, and gets back in bed. She moves likes a drunk, though she's had no food in 18 hours and only Dr. Pepper to drink. She doesn't care that she missed midnight. She will have her own story to tell.



The last day of 2011
I woke late, at 7:30, and glad. We started with a hike on the trails in Duncan Park, the trails that start just a block from my home, and muddied our feet in the red ground. Fog hung low, and the sun cut through, creating a bright blur to the south, an image you can only hope for in photographs. Through the trees, shafts of light and silent puffs of cloud moving out. Over the bridge, the lake was still, and we kept on the trail until we met its edge. Mallards flapped in the mist and quacked a chorus as they kicked toward the body of the lake and out of the marshy shallows. We followed their tails through branch and limb but headed back, up through the leaves to home.

Because the humane society would be closed on Sunday, the traditional dog-walking day, my Sunday group met at 10 on Saturday, and the four of us ventured to walk them all. It seems many of the puppies were adopted for Christmas, and so they were mostly older than 6 months, all of walking age. I went down the back line, skipping only those, like Duke and Dozer and one of the Boscos, because they were too big for me to handle. I began with Mason, then Jacolby and Odyssy, down the line to Tommy and Tabitha and over to Marley. We walked and played and then had to time ourselves because we were spending too much time with each dog; it was taking too long to walk them all. I left after Marley, came home to let Scooter out on the tie out in the 60-some degree sun of the last day of the year.

I took out the new bookcase I bought last week at Ikea, taking it piece by piece out of the box from my car. I vacuumed out the hair and the rocks, sprayed air freshener. I made my car clean on the inside, something I hadn't done in likely over a year. The outside is still spotted and masked with dirt, but I care less. Scooter and I took five bags of recycling to the bins behind Krispy Kreme, and that lightened my load.

I built the bookcase and arranged my nonfiction books in its cubes. I placed my Steve Snell blue bear and former HUB-BUB green typewriter on top. This place is becoming more and more my home; the yellow walls reflect and emit so much light. The room is open; there is room for moving, for playing, for breathing.

I ate leftover pizza for lunch. I planned on getting Chinese take-out between dying my hair, showering, and going to the party that started at nine. I needed cash for the party. I needed dark hair for the party. I needed to get ready faster. I needed to decide if going to the party is really what I wanted. I ate corn chips in front of the space heater in my robe and watched The Bourne Identity as I lamented that my hair was not as dark as I'd hoped it would be. I wanted to be warm. I wanted Jedsen. I wanted New Years Eves of past. I lay down to rest as I tried to decide what to do. I lay down, and that was my decision.

The first day of 2012
I intended to spend the first day of 2012 doing what I hoped I would do all year. I started by taking Scooter to the abandoned baseball fields in south Hampton Heights, something I try to do once a week so he can run, run, faster than I can for him. He runs across the field to me and past me; he shows me how fast he can be. I hide behind piles of dirt in the middle of the diamond, and he seeks me out, excited to have found me and gets low to the ground.

I intended to swear off fast food a month ago in honor of the new motto I'd like to live by: "Why do I want to invest in?" But I wanted a breakfast of biscuits and gravy, and a friend had told me that Hardee's was the best in town.

I intended to swear off pop years ago, but at the last minute I decided I needed Dr. Pepper with that biscuits and gravy combo.

I ate my breakfast and watched the Sunday Morning program on CBS, learned how to help a hangover that I didn't have. Scooter tried to bite the end out of the paper bag to get to the hashbrowns. I gave him a celery stick so he'd leave it alone for a few minutes. I watched Face the Nation and rolled my eyes. Then church programs came on every network channel except Fox, but I wouldn't watch Fox News, so I flipped through the in-between channels that I never try and found Create. I learned that you use paint stain on outdoor wood rather than paint to allow the wood to breath. I muted the tv and continued reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed. It's about her solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, about her trying to recover from losing her mother, her marriage. I read myself in her, in why I go hiking and go alone. I say I am not crazy for going alone. I say I want hiking to heal me. I read until I need to go run errands. I make a list and, for once, stick to the list. While I'm shopping, all I can think of is reading and writing this. And all I can think of is that I'm so excited that all I can think about is reading and writing; I'm returning, I think. I eat lunch at Panera Bread, my "third place" and order a U Pick 2, tomato soup and turkey sandwich. I savor it and read, while sipping my second Dr. Pepper of the day. I can't stop. Outside, the clouds get dark, and the wind is a Kansas wind, foreign here, and strong. It looks like rain, cold, but it's still in the 60s. I finish a chapter, finish my plate, and drive home.

Writing. Thinking about writing. Blogging. I get to it.

Knock knock. My neighbor needs his car jumped. We talk in the drive while our cars are connected.

Good luck dinner. Celia and Randy explain the meal, the sides: pork, black eyed peas, collard greens, cornbread. All have meaning, all for luck.

I end this first day full of friends, words, and Dr. Pepper. Tomorrow, words and some work.

On War

When your fight has purpose--to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent--it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling--when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event--there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.

--from The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht