The heart is filled by water

I used to think of myself as a forest person. I grew up in the woods of upstate New York, and one of my first memories of sheer joy was taking off shoes and socks and wading in the the stream behind the garages and down the steep bank. The stream, a distant cousin to the stronger Agawamik Creek further north, flowed lazily along the north end of our property and it was full of crawfish and tadpoles and water skippers and picked up speed as it narrowed. It was cool and wet and in places you had to look hard through foliage to see it. That's how I saw the world then, as something where things were hidden by nature and to find them you had to look hard.

I started thinking more like what Bill Holms called a prairie person when I studied poetry with him in graduate school in Minnesota. Things were still hidden in that view, but because they were closer to the earth, often right underfoot. You didn't have to look hard, you just had to notice them. Now I live on the edge of a Great Lake, which is like a moist prairie in what things aren't hidden but you do need to notice them. I often start my barefoot walking starting with the grassy hill about a half mile from my home that runs down to the beach and then northward for a mile or two, before disappearing under a pier and the weight of local businesses.

I've written of the jolt of recognition I experienced when I realized that, in doing this, I've come to live out the dream I had for myself 30-odd years ago. I've lived in several river towns--in the east and midwest it's almost impossible not to. Lakeside living was never something I had experienced before moving here, and in the winter especially I cherish it. In the forest, nothing ever seems dead in the winter; on the prairie, everything seemed dead when covered with two feet of snow, ice, and bitter wind; here on the Lake, there is a sound of life all winter long, even when the ice shelf covers a mile and a half from the beach, the regular pulse of water coming in and going out, helping me to breathe through the winter.

What brings all this thinking on is having read Terry Tempest Williams' An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field. I hadn't read a book by nature essayists in a long while, and since I picked that up I've gone back to Gary Snyder's Practice of the Wild, an old essay collection from Anteus someone sent me decades ago, Peter Jenkins' A Walk Across America, Bill's The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth: Minneota, Minnesota, books about not only wandering around in the woods but stopping to look closely at what you're walking among and on. I expect I'll even go back to Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the one that began it all for me. I have a first edition I picked up somewhere on whim 40 years ago that is so water- and sun-logged, its sleeve long since shredded memory, whatever value there might be to it rests in what the cost to recycling the paper might be.

Stop doing so much, start slacking

In the past few weeks, I've had a tremendous and sharp pain in the lower left quadrant of my back, right above my butt. It's as if someone had been slinking a dagger slyly under my skin and into the muscle, shiving me between the sleeve and the meat. It hasn't knocked me down, but it's threatened to.

It was so painful for so long that yesterday I visited my chiropractor. He worked on me for a while, and while it felt better for a few hours after, what helped me most was what he suggested I do as an exercise to ward it off. Demonstrating, he said, "It's a kind of lunging motion, using the opposite side's muscles." And when I saw it I shouted out, "I do that! Or I mean, I used to do that, or something like it."

What he was showing me was similar to a yoga exercise I'd made a part of my stretching routine, and which I haven't done much of for at least a couple months. For reasons I can't articulate, except that avoiding the act became the reason itself, I'd filled up my days with so much busyness that, rather than stretching and doing tai chi before taking a leisurely walk, I'd been just walking without stretching or doing chi. When I explained this to him he smiled and said, "Well, it's not a mystery any longer, is it."

What had I filled up my days with? I can't really say that either. The endless embarrassment of the Trump administration is one issue with which I've busied myself, often only for argument's sake. Extra time for reading on the internet is another. Still another has been nearly daily naps. None of these have added anything beneficial to my life. It's been like I've been engaged in proving the truth of the adage that activities expand to take up the alloted time.

I had posted this cartoon some years ago and it popped up on my FaceBook page recently. It is an important reminder to me that what is important isn't the things that are done, it's what is accomplished. I haven't been accomplishing much lately, and the stress has finally gotten my attention.

I'm reminded of visiting a Gurdjieff community in West Virginia decades ago and coming across a woman sorting buttons from a large cookie tin by size in the dark. It is that sort of attention I need to cultivate again.

Visiting Dad, Day 5

Well, it's not really the fifth day of seeing my father. Actually, it's the ninth day in real time, but the fifth in terms of arriving, then leaving for several days to visit my sister in New York, and then returning to see dad. I arrived back in his part of Pennsylvania around four o'clock this afternoon, checked into the motel where I often stay because of both its cheapness and its proximity to dad's nursing facility. Then I walked over to see him. I was surprised because he was awake and alert and sitting in the hallway. He recognized me immediately and had even remembered I was returning to see him (although he'd forgotten the day). I sat with him and we talked for a bit about small things: the weather, his sweater, how he felt. I walked him to the dining room and then we discussed when I'd come back tomorrow, and then returned to my motel room to watch nerdy TV.

What I did while I was away: I spent Friday until this morning with my sister and her family, eating, drinking, watching pro wrestling with my niece and nephew, going out to dinner, napping. During the time I spent a day visiting an old friend back where I grew up who had a stroke a year ago and remains in a rehab facility. On my way there, I wandered along the Red Trail at James Baird State Park.

I spent another day in my old haunts in New Paltz where I ran into several old friends while walking on the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, hung out in one of the places I most enjoyed as someone with a lot of time to kill, then visited the wife of another friend who is in Italy. It was wonderful, one of those days which, if it's true heaven is where you spend eternity reliving the most pleasurable day of your life, would be among the top twenty.

In addition, I operated a little Grammar Nazi monkeywrenching on a not-so-innocent sandwich board along the road.
 

But, because I think when people who live the type of life we live get together to catch up there is always the stories about the lost and the dead, I also learned of the sad end of a friend of mine from so long ago. This is the story the locals managed to cobble together.

258 candles-day 61

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: See a movie.

258 candles-day 5

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Today I'm celebrating myself because I don't want to forget the little humanizing touches that will never be written up for posting or linking otherwise. It was above 50 degrees today in the hub and I desperately wanted to get outside and walk in the sunshine. Although I'd walked yesterday, my body felt the familiar ache of wanting to be in motion. When I stepped outside, putting on my gloves and sunglasses, I ran smack into Alice.

Alice is an older woman I've come to know who lives literally around the corner. She will turn 87 this year, and takes a daily or nearly daily walk around the block just to keep herself in motion. Naturally, at 86 and using a cane she is very, very slow. 

Alice doesn't know my name although I've mentioned it several times, but she knows my face and my dogs and as I came down the steps she greeted me as if we'd just been talking earlier. What I did, what was so small and good, was to walk with Alice the length of the block to the corner where she peels off to her apartment building and I swung off toward the park. I shortened my stride, matching her tiny steps with half-steps, and listened to her as we walked. 

I lost perhaps five minutes of my walk, or I didn't lose those five minutes so much as I postponed them. Now, I'm not about to convince myself or you that those five minutes made any kind of difference to Alice--she's unlikely to remember having walked with me or what we talked about, and may not even remember (again) who I am. But five minutes is an awfully small price to pay to keep the wheels of human behavior lubed. There's the old quote by the otherwise awful didacticist John Bunyon that "You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you." It's true, as what we are made up of, and what makes our frail human race ultimately greater than the sum of its parts, is the coming together of those moments that, in the best sense, are forgotten by both the payer and the payee because there are simply too many of them to keep track.