Travel anxiety takes many forms. We are packing for a two-week trip to China and three months at our cottage in Rhode Island. I am very familiar with the many forms of travel anxiety this week! One form is a manic energy for doing laundry, for packing pretzels and nuts into ziplock bags, and for watching whole seasons of Scandal on demand. The mirror image of this is a deep lethargy brought on by the long list of phone calls to make, including stopping two newspaper deliveries and checking in with our credit card security department so they won’t cancel the card upon seeing charges in two or three countries while we are in transit. The confusion of packing for Nanjing—sometimes referred to as one of the “little ovens” of China—along with cool nights in Rhode Island, and a wedding in New York has my head spinning. I’m packing tee shirts made in China to bring for our Chinese host’s new baby. I’m trying to guess what sandals I’ll want to wear on an evening a month from now.
My husband and I are book people. Before we both had Kindles and iPads, we packed three or four heavy paperback books to read and exchange. Now we shop the online store and load up the e-readers with books recommended by our friends and hope that we’ll always find an outlet (and our cords and adapters) when we need a charge to keep us supplied with our psycho-literary fix. The thought of being delayed somewhere without a book . . . that's anxiety!
I have a new four-wheeler suitcase. My old, bright red two-wheeler has been roughed around for six or seven years. I’ve been envying the four-wheelers for some time. These pieces of luggage seem to float along beside the travelers allowing a side approach for narrow passages (into bathroom stalls, for example) and easily gliding to a front-on stance facing the counter of the newsstand when purchasing Reese’s Pieces or The Atlantic Monthly before a flight. An ache in my shoulder and back from pulling my two-wheeler with an accessory backpack through airports hastened this upgrade.
My new suitcase has three shallow zippered compartments on its topside, a zippered main compartment, and one of those expansion zippers that increase the depth of the bag by another two inches. My back pack has three zippered compartments and a small front mesh pouch, also with a zipper. I’m not even counting the zippers on the insides of both bags, or the zippers in my wallet and cosmetics case, or the quart-size ziplock bag with my travel liquids. Let’s say, I have about a dozen or more zipped areas available for expressing my travel anxiety. And that’s not even counting my Eddie Bauer “SPORT” slacks with 4 zippered pockets. Travel anxiety? When asked, I will deny it. When observed, I will fake it. I love to travel, so why am I creating so much activity around the contents of all the little segmented compartments of my baggage?
My checking and rechecking of the stuff in all of these sections and partitions approaches an OCD symphony. Dollar bills for the water machine? Bandaids and tea bags? Slippers, pajamas, pens, pencils, paper? Phone charger, camera charger, extra batteries? Even at the airport, finally relaxing with a cup of hot tea, I’m unzipping, zipping, and checking little side pockets and pouches to find my travel notebook, Dramamine just in case, and the tiny card that has the codes for remote accessing my home phone voice mail. And this is all before entering the security line! After going through the strip search of airport security, there is no turning back and my anxiety muscles begin to flex for the new challenges ahead!
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Auracular Spaces #1: London and Libraries
I remember the first time I realized that there is an invisible mist or essence around me and other people, an aura of sorts. It looks like empty space, but it is inhabited with sensory receptors and meanings.
I was sitting in one of six chairs at a heavy oak table. My work was spread out in front of me, and my molecules and meanings were also spread out, maybe eight inches all around my body, maybe even farther. It must have been farther because when another person took a seat opposite me and began to spread out his work and his molecules and meanings, mine were disrupted. I tried to continue thinking, but my processes had been punctured. I made the reasonable request that the person move to another table and he was offended. That chair was empty, the space was free. Wasn’t it? No, it was most certainly occupied, though he could not see or believe that it was.
The image in my mind of what my aura looks like, if it could be seen, is something close to what we see in magnified images of zooplankton: an undulating misty gel that floats around my solid flesh and bone, spreading like a three dimensional halo with indistinct boundaries and a very delicate, sensitive skin just one scintilla thin.
That is just my personal space. There are many kinds of auracular spaces, both personal and communal; human and natural. There is also a resonance between the individual spaces and those larger spaces that are also filled with meanings and sensory experience. More than a resonance even, it is a visceral attraction, a kind of magnetic allure. We go to certain spaces—and we create certain types of spaces through architecture—that tickle and amplify the auracular sense.
In work-a-day life, the zooplankton don’t register in awareness and I’m not attuned to my aura while commuting from station to station. On the other hand, in wandering time and thinking time, the aura unfolds and glows with sensitivity . . .
We strolled up the Strand, past the Inns of Court to St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was closed, so we used the opportunity to have a bit of refreshment and conversation, and then took the tube to Westminster and enjoyed a leisurely stretch of time meandering around the tombs and chapels of the Abbey centered around the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor (c.1002-1066). Mosaics here date from 1268. Old cathedrals always evoke in me questions of sacred space: what architectural manifestations realize the worshipful thoughts of cultures and generations? What exactly were those populations worshiping, and why do we (I) visit these spaces in awe? Sacred space may be a species of what I am calling auracular space.
And a cathedral may be a species of human enclosure that seeks to replicate the experience of awe felt in some natural spaces. In his diary of 1832, the twenty-two year old Charles Darwin speaks of the rain forest of Brazil in these terms.
Whilst seated on a tree, & eating my luncheon in the sublime solitude of the forest, the pleasure I experience is unspeakable . . . . I can only add raptures to former raptures . . . . I was led by feelings ... to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul ... [W]hilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind. I well remember by conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/darwin/diary/1832.html
Human feats of soaring; enclosed space of stone or steel and glass are attempts to replicate that experience in human settlements. St. Chapelle in Paris filters light through colored glass to achieve a related effect, not soaring height, but visually intense and stimulating space. Is the effect of a place like Stonehenge thought to be the same? Was it an attempt to evoke other senses or to evoke spirit directly?
After Westminster we search out the underground Cabinet War Rooms where Churchill and his advisers spent the most dangerous days and nights of WWII. The rooms are preserved just as they were at the end of the war. Broadcasts of Churchill encouraging the citizens of England are tremendously moving in several rooms where photographs of the effects of German bombing surround the listener. Especially after seeing Copenhagen the previous evening, we can’t help but be awed by evidence of the devastation and extremity of war. In this space, I realize that I don’t fully appreciate my father’s perpetual retelling his landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day and liberating Europe with the First Infantry. This was the defining experience of his life.
Exhausted by so much concentrated viewing, listening, feeling, we take a respite in a low-ceilinged pub with another version of bitters and fish and chips and then return to our hotel for a rest and planning for the evening. By the time we get re-mobilized, a movie seems the best idea and we take a London cab (quite the luxury experience!) to see a film called The Last September about the final days of English imperialism in Ireland as “the troubles” were beginning to erupt. Some fine performances, but a very difficult script, confusing, gaps, etc. We walked home and found a late snack of hummus and nutty wheat bread at a local mini-mart just before closing.
We missed breakfast time at the hotel on Saturday morning, but that’s vacation! We walked to the nearby British Library and in far more beautiful, indeed inspiring, surroundings, had a brunch-time snack. This library, opened within the past two years, is a sacred space of a different kind. Its modern design wants a little exploring before full appreciation dawns on the explorer. The feature that transformed it from a building into a work of art for me was the six-story glass tower of books at its centre. Called “the King’s Library” this collection of 65,000 volumes from George III’s library is a stunningly beautiful, and yet practical, column that defines the core public space in the entire building. To be in the presence of this commitment to the history of human thought seems to me a kind of worship. I could sit here, in the fullness of this presence, and read and talk all day.
We spend deeply-felt time in the hushed and darkened manuscript room noting the qualities of documents such as the Magna Carta, the letter of King John listing the “liberties conceded by him to his subjects” in 1215, as well as many handwritten manuscripts of our favorite literary figures: Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Auden, among others. In this room, you can put on headsets and press a button to listen to the recorded voice of many of the figures who did public broadcasts in the early years of radio. We both listened to Virginia Woolf’s broadcast from April 20, 1937 of an essay called “Craftsmanship.”
This power of suggestion is one of the most mysterious properties of words. . . . Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. . . . they are so stored with meanings, with memories . . .
[Words] hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change. Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity--their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. (203, 206)
We also spent some time with a real printing press and heavy metal pieces of type in another room. We are both attracted to the physical object of “book” as an important experience rapidly diminishing in importance in our globalized world. What does it mean if the texture and subtleties of paper, color, and weight are no longer associated with the process of reading or learning? Does it mean anything? We have always been subject to changes in technology that have one generation lamenting the loss of their valued experiences while another embraces new modes and values. Some say we gain the very fullness of association that Virginia Woolf lauds through our new web-based technology where links create a finely threaded network of meanings, echoes, memories, and potential futures. Have we lost very much as we gain this speed of technological association? I think so. It feels different to experience the associations coming via synapse firing in one’s own brain than via hypertext links across the internet. Loss or gain, is anyone measuring this?
It was hard to leave the rich auracular space within the library that resonates at the same frequency as my own aura. Vincent and I had our first date in the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. He was sitting outside on the steps between the stone lions waiting for me, wearing a red shirt. I approached via 41st Street and saw him first. We sat beside one another in the main reading room for hours. The compatibility established in that afternoon will last us a lifetime.
I was sitting in one of six chairs at a heavy oak table. My work was spread out in front of me, and my molecules and meanings were also spread out, maybe eight inches all around my body, maybe even farther. It must have been farther because when another person took a seat opposite me and began to spread out his work and his molecules and meanings, mine were disrupted. I tried to continue thinking, but my processes had been punctured. I made the reasonable request that the person move to another table and he was offended. That chair was empty, the space was free. Wasn’t it? No, it was most certainly occupied, though he could not see or believe that it was.
The image in my mind of what my aura looks like, if it could be seen, is something close to what we see in magnified images of zooplankton: an undulating misty gel that floats around my solid flesh and bone, spreading like a three dimensional halo with indistinct boundaries and a very delicate, sensitive skin just one scintilla thin.
That is just my personal space. There are many kinds of auracular spaces, both personal and communal; human and natural. There is also a resonance between the individual spaces and those larger spaces that are also filled with meanings and sensory experience. More than a resonance even, it is a visceral attraction, a kind of magnetic allure. We go to certain spaces—and we create certain types of spaces through architecture—that tickle and amplify the auracular sense.
In work-a-day life, the zooplankton don’t register in awareness and I’m not attuned to my aura while commuting from station to station. On the other hand, in wandering time and thinking time, the aura unfolds and glows with sensitivity . . .
We strolled up the Strand, past the Inns of Court to St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was closed, so we used the opportunity to have a bit of refreshment and conversation, and then took the tube to Westminster and enjoyed a leisurely stretch of time meandering around the tombs and chapels of the Abbey centered around the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor (c.1002-1066). Mosaics here date from 1268. Old cathedrals always evoke in me questions of sacred space: what architectural manifestations realize the worshipful thoughts of cultures and generations? What exactly were those populations worshiping, and why do we (I) visit these spaces in awe? Sacred space may be a species of what I am calling auracular space.
And a cathedral may be a species of human enclosure that seeks to replicate the experience of awe felt in some natural spaces. In his diary of 1832, the twenty-two year old Charles Darwin speaks of the rain forest of Brazil in these terms.
Whilst seated on a tree, & eating my luncheon in the sublime solitude of the forest, the pleasure I experience is unspeakable . . . . I can only add raptures to former raptures . . . . I was led by feelings ... to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul ... [W]hilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind. I well remember by conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/darwin/diary/1832.html
Human feats of soaring; enclosed space of stone or steel and glass are attempts to replicate that experience in human settlements. St. Chapelle in Paris filters light through colored glass to achieve a related effect, not soaring height, but visually intense and stimulating space. Is the effect of a place like Stonehenge thought to be the same? Was it an attempt to evoke other senses or to evoke spirit directly?
After Westminster we search out the underground Cabinet War Rooms where Churchill and his advisers spent the most dangerous days and nights of WWII. The rooms are preserved just as they were at the end of the war. Broadcasts of Churchill encouraging the citizens of England are tremendously moving in several rooms where photographs of the effects of German bombing surround the listener. Especially after seeing Copenhagen the previous evening, we can’t help but be awed by evidence of the devastation and extremity of war. In this space, I realize that I don’t fully appreciate my father’s perpetual retelling his landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day and liberating Europe with the First Infantry. This was the defining experience of his life.
Exhausted by so much concentrated viewing, listening, feeling, we take a respite in a low-ceilinged pub with another version of bitters and fish and chips and then return to our hotel for a rest and planning for the evening. By the time we get re-mobilized, a movie seems the best idea and we take a London cab (quite the luxury experience!) to see a film called The Last September about the final days of English imperialism in Ireland as “the troubles” were beginning to erupt. Some fine performances, but a very difficult script, confusing, gaps, etc. We walked home and found a late snack of hummus and nutty wheat bread at a local mini-mart just before closing.
We missed breakfast time at the hotel on Saturday morning, but that’s vacation! We walked to the nearby British Library and in far more beautiful, indeed inspiring, surroundings, had a brunch-time snack. This library, opened within the past two years, is a sacred space of a different kind. Its modern design wants a little exploring before full appreciation dawns on the explorer. The feature that transformed it from a building into a work of art for me was the six-story glass tower of books at its centre. Called “the King’s Library” this collection of 65,000 volumes from George III’s library is a stunningly beautiful, and yet practical, column that defines the core public space in the entire building. To be in the presence of this commitment to the history of human thought seems to me a kind of worship. I could sit here, in the fullness of this presence, and read and talk all day.
We spend deeply-felt time in the hushed and darkened manuscript room noting the qualities of documents such as the Magna Carta, the letter of King John listing the “liberties conceded by him to his subjects” in 1215, as well as many handwritten manuscripts of our favorite literary figures: Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Auden, among others. In this room, you can put on headsets and press a button to listen to the recorded voice of many of the figures who did public broadcasts in the early years of radio. We both listened to Virginia Woolf’s broadcast from April 20, 1937 of an essay called “Craftsmanship.”
This power of suggestion is one of the most mysterious properties of words. . . . Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. . . . they are so stored with meanings, with memories . . .
[Words] hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change. Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity--their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. (203, 206)
We also spent some time with a real printing press and heavy metal pieces of type in another room. We are both attracted to the physical object of “book” as an important experience rapidly diminishing in importance in our globalized world. What does it mean if the texture and subtleties of paper, color, and weight are no longer associated with the process of reading or learning? Does it mean anything? We have always been subject to changes in technology that have one generation lamenting the loss of their valued experiences while another embraces new modes and values. Some say we gain the very fullness of association that Virginia Woolf lauds through our new web-based technology where links create a finely threaded network of meanings, echoes, memories, and potential futures. Have we lost very much as we gain this speed of technological association? I think so. It feels different to experience the associations coming via synapse firing in one’s own brain than via hypertext links across the internet. Loss or gain, is anyone measuring this?
It was hard to leave the rich auracular space within the library that resonates at the same frequency as my own aura. Vincent and I had our first date in the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. He was sitting outside on the steps between the stone lions waiting for me, wearing a red shirt. I approached via 41st Street and saw him first. We sat beside one another in the main reading room for hours. The compatibility established in that afternoon will last us a lifetime.
Friday, May 3, 2013
One Foot On the Ground
What comes to mind when you hear the phrase, “one foot on the ground”?
“Where is the other foot?”
In a literal sense, the other foot might be poised in the air, in liminal space, neither here nor there but utterly capable of landing fore or aft, higher or lower. The literal quickly gives way to the metaphorical, however, and I begin to imagine that other foot in seven-league boots at the end of a telescoping leg worthy of Dr. Seuss and extending across several pages to land quite anywhere in this galaxy or another.
Well, that isn’t exactly my story!
I have strong roots in several specific places and I love my home and family, but there have been times when I’ve been beguiled by the idea of reincarnation. At those times, I have felt strongly that my spirit sailed with explorers on uncharted seas. Seated at the very tip of the bow of a sailboat on a 360-degree plate of Atlantic Ocean, I tingled with the excitement of recognition. Maybe today we would make safe landfall, but if not, if never, this extraordinary elation might be enough. Sleeping out alone under the stars, albeit on my own farm, I felt the earth at my back and the deeply bright universe meeting me as surely as the familiar local views approaching through the windshield of my Prius. I would have lifted both feet willingly if my call to be taken by extraterrestrials had been answered in those nights.
I have one foot on the ground, a solid foundation for building a nest, loving children, and serving a community, but the other foot is a rambling rover. It has walked in heavy boots in the fresh furrow and in red high heels up and down the avenues. It has been tickled with my fancy for crossing bridges literally on foot, and humored my delight in walking down the middle of the street (not to be confused with the middle of the road). My itinerant foot has helped me cross many a line in the sand when that foot wasn't stuck in the mud or in my mouth.
It was on both my feet that I walked into the woods near Walden Pond where Henry David Thoreau created a small base for his peripatetic musings. With one foot on the ground, I appreciated his encouragement to keep the other firmly in the air along with scores of castles thriving in the celestial atmosphere. “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
My nomadic foot has had a more profound influence on my career than its steadier mate. I embarked on an adult career path as a school teacher, one of the steadiest jobs in town. I heard my peers declare in our mid-twenties, “I have secured tenure and my own classroom, and I never need to do anything new for the rest of my life!” I nearly tripped over a foot bent on skipping off that path where a dim horizon spooled off slowly like a narrow rope.
Taking risk after risk walking in different shoes has rubbed my skin raw in some spots and built up calluses in others. There were some years when I willingly soaked both feet in lukewarm water and rested for the next incitement. Fortunately, we now have a term for the zig-zag career path I’ve had a hard time defending as an early adopter. This generation of workers who build skill sets that can be transported across professions is called “Generation Flux.” All in all, I’ve felt extremely fortunate to work and walk in locations as diverse as farm fields, hospital corridors, classrooms, and Rockefeller Center with people ranging in age from pre-school to the 95-year-old senior partners in a NYC law firm.
These essays are witness to life when my rambling foot has been ascendant, taking me around the block, over the mountain, or to another continent. It is written in a state of mind produced when—shoelaces, buckles, and velcro be damned—that foot has been given free rein to lead me a merry chase down a grassy lane, subway steps, jetway, or simply along a train of thought. My walking foot adopted a motto from Thoreau and infused my life with it: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life . . . and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
I’ve been on a journey—not entirely footloose, but not tethered or blindfolded either—and these are the souvenirs that I’ve collected along the way. Some are as ephemeral as the rainbow I embraced with naked arms in an outdoor shower, and some are the same souvenirs that you carry with you because every time I put one foot forward, my human experience is both similar to and different than yours. This is not a chronological narrative of one or even of several travel adventures, but you will find many stories and anecdotes where vivid characters will do a holographic dance in front of your eyes. Behind your eyes, I hope you will experience the curiosity and wonder of not knowing where that foot will land next, and maybe even feel the tingle in your own mobile appendage.
“Where is the other foot?”
In a literal sense, the other foot might be poised in the air, in liminal space, neither here nor there but utterly capable of landing fore or aft, higher or lower. The literal quickly gives way to the metaphorical, however, and I begin to imagine that other foot in seven-league boots at the end of a telescoping leg worthy of Dr. Seuss and extending across several pages to land quite anywhere in this galaxy or another.
Well, that isn’t exactly my story!
I have strong roots in several specific places and I love my home and family, but there have been times when I’ve been beguiled by the idea of reincarnation. At those times, I have felt strongly that my spirit sailed with explorers on uncharted seas. Seated at the very tip of the bow of a sailboat on a 360-degree plate of Atlantic Ocean, I tingled with the excitement of recognition. Maybe today we would make safe landfall, but if not, if never, this extraordinary elation might be enough. Sleeping out alone under the stars, albeit on my own farm, I felt the earth at my back and the deeply bright universe meeting me as surely as the familiar local views approaching through the windshield of my Prius. I would have lifted both feet willingly if my call to be taken by extraterrestrials had been answered in those nights.
I have one foot on the ground, a solid foundation for building a nest, loving children, and serving a community, but the other foot is a rambling rover. It has walked in heavy boots in the fresh furrow and in red high heels up and down the avenues. It has been tickled with my fancy for crossing bridges literally on foot, and humored my delight in walking down the middle of the street (not to be confused with the middle of the road). My itinerant foot has helped me cross many a line in the sand when that foot wasn't stuck in the mud or in my mouth.
It was on both my feet that I walked into the woods near Walden Pond where Henry David Thoreau created a small base for his peripatetic musings. With one foot on the ground, I appreciated his encouragement to keep the other firmly in the air along with scores of castles thriving in the celestial atmosphere. “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
My nomadic foot has had a more profound influence on my career than its steadier mate. I embarked on an adult career path as a school teacher, one of the steadiest jobs in town. I heard my peers declare in our mid-twenties, “I have secured tenure and my own classroom, and I never need to do anything new for the rest of my life!” I nearly tripped over a foot bent on skipping off that path where a dim horizon spooled off slowly like a narrow rope.
Taking risk after risk walking in different shoes has rubbed my skin raw in some spots and built up calluses in others. There were some years when I willingly soaked both feet in lukewarm water and rested for the next incitement. Fortunately, we now have a term for the zig-zag career path I’ve had a hard time defending as an early adopter. This generation of workers who build skill sets that can be transported across professions is called “Generation Flux.” All in all, I’ve felt extremely fortunate to work and walk in locations as diverse as farm fields, hospital corridors, classrooms, and Rockefeller Center with people ranging in age from pre-school to the 95-year-old senior partners in a NYC law firm.
These essays are witness to life when my rambling foot has been ascendant, taking me around the block, over the mountain, or to another continent. It is written in a state of mind produced when—shoelaces, buckles, and velcro be damned—that foot has been given free rein to lead me a merry chase down a grassy lane, subway steps, jetway, or simply along a train of thought. My walking foot adopted a motto from Thoreau and infused my life with it: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life . . . and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
I’ve been on a journey—not entirely footloose, but not tethered or blindfolded either—and these are the souvenirs that I’ve collected along the way. Some are as ephemeral as the rainbow I embraced with naked arms in an outdoor shower, and some are the same souvenirs that you carry with you because every time I put one foot forward, my human experience is both similar to and different than yours. This is not a chronological narrative of one or even of several travel adventures, but you will find many stories and anecdotes where vivid characters will do a holographic dance in front of your eyes. Behind your eyes, I hope you will experience the curiosity and wonder of not knowing where that foot will land next, and maybe even feel the tingle in your own mobile appendage.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Kayak Chronicle #2
After yesterday’s rain there was bright sun, crisp air, and a stiff breeze on the water at 7:45 a.m. I pointed my boat up river into the wind—choosing to have the “uphill battle” while I’m fresh and then glide easily home afterwards. This choice might just be a life strategy, too. I can see it more clearly on the river than anywhere else.
Today I paddled farther than ever before, stretching to go a little bit farther, just to see what’s there. I went far enough to see three blue chairs poised between the white birch shade and the water shadows. Those three blue chairs could become a destination in themselves, but today I went beyond the chairs to see the dock with the fairy lights.
Note to family with “MELENEY” painted in block letters on a float north of Edgewater beach, just off the beach in your own neighborhood: “Your sailboat—RI0334S—is restless. What do you think it is doing when you are not looking? Do you think it is resting peacefully just off shore waiting blankly for you to return? It is not. Your boat is restless. It pivots gracefully around the tether like a young horse, golden in the early morning light. The other sailboats are resting; your boat is not.”
Watching the little ripples on the water gives no clue whatsoever to the random movements of this boat. The breeze holds steadily from one direction and yet the filly swings her head to a different drummer. She is restless and yet, she is also thoughtful and deliberate. And unpredictable, so I keep my distance. Perhaps I seem the same to her or to any other observer—a blank entity, resting on a paddle, floating in the current? But I am most active and alive, filled with intentions and processes. If asked, “What are you doing just sitting there?” I would say, “I am writing a book.”
I balance the paddle across my boat and let go to see what happens next. If home is at 12 o’clock and the direction I’m heading now is toward 6 o’clock, the head of my boat swings counterclockwise slowly to 11 o’clock, silently unwinding me.
No ducks today.
A few days ago I took my own storm to the water and paddled uphill in both directions. There was a stiff wind, but my internal turbulence trumped its force. “What puzzle did I bring to the water, hoping for a solution by throwing my being into propulsion?”
Learning to share is a lesson we repeat over and over for toddlers and children, but as adults we need to keep learning it over and over as well. As the oldest of five children, forced by circumstances to share everything, I may be more sensitive than others. Sharing is more complex than we think, and out on the water in my own initiative, I can contemplate sharing at a safe distance. It calls for mountain climbing effort to reach the peak where a gift is set entirely free from expectations, and all inconveniences are forgiven. I find myself caught in a misty humid morning at sea level. I brought no joy; I found no meaning.
Today I paddled farther than ever before, stretching to go a little bit farther, just to see what’s there. I went far enough to see three blue chairs poised between the white birch shade and the water shadows. Those three blue chairs could become a destination in themselves, but today I went beyond the chairs to see the dock with the fairy lights.
Note to family with “MELENEY” painted in block letters on a float north of Edgewater beach, just off the beach in your own neighborhood: “Your sailboat—RI0334S—is restless. What do you think it is doing when you are not looking? Do you think it is resting peacefully just off shore waiting blankly for you to return? It is not. Your boat is restless. It pivots gracefully around the tether like a young horse, golden in the early morning light. The other sailboats are resting; your boat is not.”
Watching the little ripples on the water gives no clue whatsoever to the random movements of this boat. The breeze holds steadily from one direction and yet the filly swings her head to a different drummer. She is restless and yet, she is also thoughtful and deliberate. And unpredictable, so I keep my distance. Perhaps I seem the same to her or to any other observer—a blank entity, resting on a paddle, floating in the current? But I am most active and alive, filled with intentions and processes. If asked, “What are you doing just sitting there?” I would say, “I am writing a book.”
I balance the paddle across my boat and let go to see what happens next. If home is at 12 o’clock and the direction I’m heading now is toward 6 o’clock, the head of my boat swings counterclockwise slowly to 11 o’clock, silently unwinding me.
No ducks today.
A few days ago I took my own storm to the water and paddled uphill in both directions. There was a stiff wind, but my internal turbulence trumped its force. “What puzzle did I bring to the water, hoping for a solution by throwing my being into propulsion?”
Learning to share is a lesson we repeat over and over for toddlers and children, but as adults we need to keep learning it over and over as well. As the oldest of five children, forced by circumstances to share everything, I may be more sensitive than others. Sharing is more complex than we think, and out on the water in my own initiative, I can contemplate sharing at a safe distance. It calls for mountain climbing effort to reach the peak where a gift is set entirely free from expectations, and all inconveniences are forgiven. I find myself caught in a misty humid morning at sea level. I brought no joy; I found no meaning.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Driving in Italy
The seaside community of Fano was described as a “sleepy little town” in our guide book, but we found it to be fairly large with energetic crowds of vacationers and vigorous street life. In fact, from our room at Hotel Roma, Viale Dante Alighieri, we were immersed in street life for about twenty hours a day! Just as we thought things were calming down around 3 a.m. on our first night, there was a horrendous metallic crash just outside our window. We were surprised not to hear shouting from the drivers involved (a crash sound is always followed by shouting in our experience). In the morning, litter from the event and a crumpled guard rail remained as evidence of the nocturnal collision. On our second day we were sitting at an outdoor café less than a block away when we witnessed another accident on the same corner. Needless to say, our departure from the hotel in a rented car was rather stressful given the record of one accident per day on that corner!!
After a long morning walk north along the waterfront of Fano, we departed with vague directions for reaching Urbino. Driving in Italy requires quick decisions based on sketchy information. Everyone else knows where they are going, and there are far too many traffic circles! We are used to 4-way stop signs or traffic lights. Even though I know that traffic circles are demonstrably safer than, say left turns against oncoming traffic, I still prefer the full stop to the ambiguous glide. It seems to me that traffic circles bring on a collective, and very literal, agoraphobia.
Highways in Italy are kind to the landscape. They are built with many bridges and tunnels in order to accommodate the hills and valleys. These roads seem soft, unlike those where a bulldozer rearranges the earth to make a straight new thoroughfare.
Urbino’s signature is “Emozioni in forma di città,” and we learned it the hard way. The drive from Fano to Urbino seemed quick compared with the time it took us to locate the conference site once we arrived! We quickly found the location of the “Seven Deadly Sins” meeting we had attended eleven years before at the Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, but that entire campus is now under construction. That didn’t hinder people from sending us to three or four buildings based entirely on rumors. An hour later, when two recommendations converged on the fact that we needed to go to another campus 5 km out of town, we were not surprised, but were disappointed that we would not be within walking distance of Urbino.
The Sogesta campus is isolated from any village by 5 km of very steep, curvy, narrow roads. Even after we found the main building, it was difficult to find the registration desk for the conference. On the other hand we were able to register for our room right away and discovered that it was air conditioned!! We both remembered a torrid room facing the afternoon sun at the other campus.
I had a wonderful pranzo in the cafeteria (chicken, vegetables, salad, fruit, wine) and then took a nap. I hope to do the same every day! Being isolated on this campus all day was frustrating, so we decided to take an excursion to Fermignano, reportedly closer than Urbino. As we approached a stop sign just outside the town, I shouted to Vincent to stop, and so he did, causing the car behind to hit us.
The driver got out and began shouting at us in Italian. When Vincent got out of our car, looking a little dazed and confused, the other driver got progressively more and more angry at my husband’s silence. Finally, after two long minutes of this shouting and pointing, I regained the presence of mind to say, “No capisce Italiano.” The formerly aggressive driver shifted his tone and began to apologize (I think). Vincent and I were both shaken by this episode although neither car was damaged at all. We tried to go to a grocery store in Fermignano, which, of course, was closed, so we cautiously drove right back to the campus parking lot and went to our room to compose ourselves before dinner. I felt a little like a character in the short story, “The Appointment in Samarra” by Somerset Maugham. After all of our efforts to avoid the “crash-a-day” we witnessed in Fano, “fate” followed us all the way to Urbino, and came close enough to give us a fright!
We had a very nice dinner on campus with our friends, and found a ride into Urbino for a nightcap afterwards. Vincent offered to drive, but fortunately someone else won that joust. We sat outside a café in the Piazza de la Republica, drinking Campari while water sparkled from the fountain like a curtain of jewels.
After a long morning walk north along the waterfront of Fano, we departed with vague directions for reaching Urbino. Driving in Italy requires quick decisions based on sketchy information. Everyone else knows where they are going, and there are far too many traffic circles! We are used to 4-way stop signs or traffic lights. Even though I know that traffic circles are demonstrably safer than, say left turns against oncoming traffic, I still prefer the full stop to the ambiguous glide. It seems to me that traffic circles bring on a collective, and very literal, agoraphobia.
Highways in Italy are kind to the landscape. They are built with many bridges and tunnels in order to accommodate the hills and valleys. These roads seem soft, unlike those where a bulldozer rearranges the earth to make a straight new thoroughfare.
Urbino’s signature is “Emozioni in forma di città,” and we learned it the hard way. The drive from Fano to Urbino seemed quick compared with the time it took us to locate the conference site once we arrived! We quickly found the location of the “Seven Deadly Sins” meeting we had attended eleven years before at the Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, but that entire campus is now under construction. That didn’t hinder people from sending us to three or four buildings based entirely on rumors. An hour later, when two recommendations converged on the fact that we needed to go to another campus 5 km out of town, we were not surprised, but were disappointed that we would not be within walking distance of Urbino.
The Sogesta campus is isolated from any village by 5 km of very steep, curvy, narrow roads. Even after we found the main building, it was difficult to find the registration desk for the conference. On the other hand we were able to register for our room right away and discovered that it was air conditioned!! We both remembered a torrid room facing the afternoon sun at the other campus.
I had a wonderful pranzo in the cafeteria (chicken, vegetables, salad, fruit, wine) and then took a nap. I hope to do the same every day! Being isolated on this campus all day was frustrating, so we decided to take an excursion to Fermignano, reportedly closer than Urbino. As we approached a stop sign just outside the town, I shouted to Vincent to stop, and so he did, causing the car behind to hit us.
The driver got out and began shouting at us in Italian. When Vincent got out of our car, looking a little dazed and confused, the other driver got progressively more and more angry at my husband’s silence. Finally, after two long minutes of this shouting and pointing, I regained the presence of mind to say, “No capisce Italiano.” The formerly aggressive driver shifted his tone and began to apologize (I think). Vincent and I were both shaken by this episode although neither car was damaged at all. We tried to go to a grocery store in Fermignano, which, of course, was closed, so we cautiously drove right back to the campus parking lot and went to our room to compose ourselves before dinner. I felt a little like a character in the short story, “The Appointment in Samarra” by Somerset Maugham. After all of our efforts to avoid the “crash-a-day” we witnessed in Fano, “fate” followed us all the way to Urbino, and came close enough to give us a fright!
We had a very nice dinner on campus with our friends, and found a ride into Urbino for a nightcap afterwards. Vincent offered to drive, but fortunately someone else won that joust. We sat outside a café in the Piazza de la Republica, drinking Campari while water sparkled from the fountain like a curtain of jewels.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
I Love Maps!
I love maps. Maps are affordable gateways to movement and transformation; the intrinsic pleasure of stretching out an arm and reaching deep into the universe to grasp a star or a starfish. They are finite in shape, size, and data, but infinite as sinkholes into a jungle, desert, city, pyramid, marketplace, river, cave, museum, tundra, or fireside. Love of maps is similar to love of travel, and Pico Iyer describes that joy as “the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.” (www.salon.com, March 18, 2000).
I love maps. When I taught seventh grade in my twenties, I petitioned AAA to donate a classroom set of USA road maps. I created individual student assignments to write directions from, say, Ypisilanti, Michigan to Portola, California. Each student would slowly read his or her directions while everyone else traced the route at their own desks. The goal was to skillfully guide everyone in the class from the starting point to the destination. It was a lot of fun, everyone participated, and I hope they learned something about giving (and following) directions! When my own two children were about middle school age, we bought a white van, customized it with a plywood seat/convertible bed, and set out across the country. Each day, one of the kids would be in charge of maps and directions, letting us know where we were, how far to the next destination, what crossroads or major intersections we should encounter, etc. That was a long car trip for young adolescents and I devised quite a few activities in addition to maps to occupy them through long stretches between territorial targets. There were no seatbelts in the van, the air conditioning stopped functioning before we hit Texas, and we had more than a few battles over who sleeps in the tent vs. the van!
I love maps. Several years after being lost on a highway near the wrong Las Vegas, I was clutching a subway map and learning the byways of Manhattan. One of my first assignments upon joining a small publishing house at the very bottom of the pecking order was to go to the map room of the New York Public Library and identify maps for a book called Christianity Comes to the Americas. It was a plum of a mission; I was the proverbial “kid in a candy store.” With the authority of being “on assignment,” I looked at many more maps than necessary, completely fascinated by early perspectives of territory and experience. I recently came across this quote attributed to Christopher Columbus, “For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.” (www.brainyquote.com) Columbus does not, however, disavow using stories which long-preceded maps as inspiration for exploration. Philosopher Michel de Certeau comments on the evolution of present day maps from narratives. “Maps of medieval times, which were really illustrated stories telling of journeys made and of memorable encounters along the way, were gradually supplanted during the early history of modernity by spatial representations of the earth’s surface.”*
I love maps. While I am out in the world spinning my own narrative thread, I often integrate a variety of maps. I superimpose maps one on another: for example, a simple grid marked only with numbers keyed to an index of site names is superimposed in my mind with a full color map that has little pictures of churches, monuments, tramcars, fountains, ships, etc. On a trip to Helsinki, Finland, I collected and carried around four maps: a guidebook map cut with a razor out of the big fat travel book, a color grid of streets, a tram map superimposed over light grey streets, and a sketch of the city with destinations of interest highlighted. I studied my maps frequently, seeking the layered knowledge of the city they offered. I was a visitor to Helsinki, but when a city dweller knows her or his city, it becomes a series of layered internalized maps, many more than my four maps of Helsinki. For example, one layer would be a map of daily routines; another might be be a map of significant sites in this person’s life as lived in this city.
I love maps! My most recent map purchase is a world map called, “What’s Up? South!” by ODT, Inc. It is based on the simple premise that our typical representation of north at the top of a map is somewhat arbitrary. How strange and unfamiliar the continents look when the whole scheme is reversed! I should have learned this lesson years ago from my favorite Sesame Street animation and jingle, “That’s about the size of it.” It’s a lesson about relative sizes to be sure, but the refrain of “where you put your eyes” is significant when considering the perspective of a snail versus the whole universe, and those of us wandering in between, both near and far.
*According to Tim Ingold (“Up, Across, and Along” p. 48, accessed online at http://www.spacesyntax.tudelft.nl//media/Long%20papers%20I/tim%20ingold.pdf) who reports on de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life. 1984: 120-1)
I love maps. When I taught seventh grade in my twenties, I petitioned AAA to donate a classroom set of USA road maps. I created individual student assignments to write directions from, say, Ypisilanti, Michigan to Portola, California. Each student would slowly read his or her directions while everyone else traced the route at their own desks. The goal was to skillfully guide everyone in the class from the starting point to the destination. It was a lot of fun, everyone participated, and I hope they learned something about giving (and following) directions! When my own two children were about middle school age, we bought a white van, customized it with a plywood seat/convertible bed, and set out across the country. Each day, one of the kids would be in charge of maps and directions, letting us know where we were, how far to the next destination, what crossroads or major intersections we should encounter, etc. That was a long car trip for young adolescents and I devised quite a few activities in addition to maps to occupy them through long stretches between territorial targets. There were no seatbelts in the van, the air conditioning stopped functioning before we hit Texas, and we had more than a few battles over who sleeps in the tent vs. the van!
I love maps. Several years after being lost on a highway near the wrong Las Vegas, I was clutching a subway map and learning the byways of Manhattan. One of my first assignments upon joining a small publishing house at the very bottom of the pecking order was to go to the map room of the New York Public Library and identify maps for a book called Christianity Comes to the Americas. It was a plum of a mission; I was the proverbial “kid in a candy store.” With the authority of being “on assignment,” I looked at many more maps than necessary, completely fascinated by early perspectives of territory and experience. I recently came across this quote attributed to Christopher Columbus, “For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.” (www.brainyquote.com) Columbus does not, however, disavow using stories which long-preceded maps as inspiration for exploration. Philosopher Michel de Certeau comments on the evolution of present day maps from narratives. “Maps of medieval times, which were really illustrated stories telling of journeys made and of memorable encounters along the way, were gradually supplanted during the early history of modernity by spatial representations of the earth’s surface.”*
I love maps. While I am out in the world spinning my own narrative thread, I often integrate a variety of maps. I superimpose maps one on another: for example, a simple grid marked only with numbers keyed to an index of site names is superimposed in my mind with a full color map that has little pictures of churches, monuments, tramcars, fountains, ships, etc. On a trip to Helsinki, Finland, I collected and carried around four maps: a guidebook map cut with a razor out of the big fat travel book, a color grid of streets, a tram map superimposed over light grey streets, and a sketch of the city with destinations of interest highlighted. I studied my maps frequently, seeking the layered knowledge of the city they offered. I was a visitor to Helsinki, but when a city dweller knows her or his city, it becomes a series of layered internalized maps, many more than my four maps of Helsinki. For example, one layer would be a map of daily routines; another might be be a map of significant sites in this person’s life as lived in this city.
I love maps! My most recent map purchase is a world map called, “What’s Up? South!” by ODT, Inc. It is based on the simple premise that our typical representation of north at the top of a map is somewhat arbitrary. How strange and unfamiliar the continents look when the whole scheme is reversed! I should have learned this lesson years ago from my favorite Sesame Street animation and jingle, “That’s about the size of it.” It’s a lesson about relative sizes to be sure, but the refrain of “where you put your eyes” is significant when considering the perspective of a snail versus the whole universe, and those of us wandering in between, both near and far.
*According to Tim Ingold (“Up, Across, and Along” p. 48, accessed online at http://www.spacesyntax.tudelft.nl//media/Long%20papers%20I/tim%20ingold.pdf) who reports on de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life. 1984: 120-1)
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Kayak Chronicle (#1)
When my father died at age 91 in April of 2012, I received a small inheritance from the sale of the house that held nearly all of the life wealth of my parents. My brother Andrew, the executor of his will, hosted the five sibling beneficiaries on the anniversary of Dad’s landing on Omaha Beach, and wrote a check for each of us. I knew that my parents—my mother in particular—would have wanted me to appreciate at least part of this inter-generational gift through some adventure, transforming the solid foundations of home into flight, laughter, and new horizons. As I drove for three hours from New York to Rhode Island, toward a little blue cottage on Narrow River, the kayak bloomed into my life.
About a month later, on the very day that the mango-and-flame-colored boat was delivered, a Friday, my husband Vincent helped me attach the little wheeled contraption to one end to roll the boat down to our neighborhood beach to launch it. This was the first water craft that either of us had owned. We each wobbled around on the water for about twenty minutes while the other watched from shore. It was an awkward birth.
The next afternoon, Vincent delivered me to the beach and then went home. I spent about an hour paddling up and down about twenty feet off the shoreline. It was Saturday and there were weekend jet ski people and speedboat people out there making waves that rushed into collisions, multiplied, and collapsed into me. It was a lively scene from “Storm At Sea: The Kayak Disaster Movie.”
Skip Sunday and Monday.
On Tuesday, I intended to get up by 7 a.m. and try a new solution to the kayak transportation issue. I wanted to be completely independent in moving my kayak from the driveway to the beach and back again. If I am dependent, I know I won’t be going to the river as often. I created an auxiliary transportation device out of our son’s skateboard taped with bubble wrap as a cushion to protect both the board and the boat. Bungee cords from Ocean State Job Lots and an old green towel completed the scheme. After testing on the driveway, I abandoned the ragamuffinly, towel-ends-dragging contrivance and arranged another assist from my patient husband. I vowed to give this another try when it was not 90 degrees out. After all this, I forgot my paddle at home and had to walk back to get it.
When I finally got out on the water, it was approaching 9 am and the sun was shining unabashedly. The water was still and green, thick and opaque. My paddles and a black duck created only the slightest turbulence. Once I got into a rhythm of not dipping too deep, I found myself gliding with minimal “point oscillation” (front end of kayak pointing left and right as I dipped the paddle on opposite sides of the boat). Finally, I understood what salespeople were saying about my 9-foot boat being very stable, and that the longer, thinner boats “track” better. Ah-h-h, yes!
No other boats were active that morning, save for a solitary motor boat with a standing driver racing inexplicably up and down a short section of the river for about fifteen minutes. The wake from this boat reached me in sheets of flexible mirrored surfaces. I let my boat face the curves coming at us quietly like “shining from shook foil.” Not long after, the intense sun chased me back to my beach and a call for help to get home.
On Wednesday morning I set my alarm clock for 7 a.m. and, even so, the sun was up way before me. I remembered the paddle, but almost forgot the cellphone and life jacket! I was on the water by 7:30 a.m. and found that I could comfortably trace the shade along the east bank of the river where tall trees would hold slumbering shadows in their arms for another hour or so.
Alone with black ducks (Anas rubripes) and dragonflies (Anisoptera), this fourth expedition was the experience I had been hoping for . . . gliding without knowing effort; floating without sensing weight; and just being a bundle of elements continuous with elements above and below, inside and outside.
I set myself the challenge of sliding between two buoys on which serene black ducks were perched. I focused on not hitting the sides of the boat with the paddle, not splashing, not making any noise at all. Slowly, I drifted between the ducks without making eye contact. If I don’t make eye contact, I don’t exist. For one brief instant while crossing the line between two ducks contemplating morning, I became a black duck looking at the same quiet water, feeling the same light breeze ruffle my feathers.
Shortly after I crossed that line, the duck on my right broke the spell, lifted off the float, and skimmed in a wide arc through liminal space; not quite air, not quite water. I placed my palms flat on the water on both sides of my boat-skin and felt a synesthesia of temperature and texture: air . . . water . . . thick, warm, deep: breathing water; floating on air; which is which, both . . . and . . . I am, I am.
When my father died at age 91 in April of 2012, I received a small inheritance from the sale of the house that held nearly all of the life wealth of my parents. My brother Andrew, the executor of his will, hosted the five sibling beneficiaries on the anniversary of Dad’s landing on Omaha Beach, and wrote a check for each of us. I knew that my parents—my mother in particular—would have wanted me to appreciate at least part of this inter-generational gift through some adventure, transforming the solid foundations of home into flight, laughter, and new horizons. As I drove for three hours from New York to Rhode Island, toward a little blue cottage on Narrow River, the kayak bloomed into my life.
About a month later, on the very day that the mango-and-flame-colored boat was delivered, a Friday, my husband Vincent helped me attach the little wheeled contraption to one end to roll the boat down to our neighborhood beach to launch it. This was the first water craft that either of us had owned. We each wobbled around on the water for about twenty minutes while the other watched from shore. It was an awkward birth.
The next afternoon, Vincent delivered me to the beach and then went home. I spent about an hour paddling up and down about twenty feet off the shoreline. It was Saturday and there were weekend jet ski people and speedboat people out there making waves that rushed into collisions, multiplied, and collapsed into me. It was a lively scene from “Storm At Sea: The Kayak Disaster Movie.”
Skip Sunday and Monday.
On Tuesday, I intended to get up by 7 a.m. and try a new solution to the kayak transportation issue. I wanted to be completely independent in moving my kayak from the driveway to the beach and back again. If I am dependent, I know I won’t be going to the river as often. I created an auxiliary transportation device out of our son’s skateboard taped with bubble wrap as a cushion to protect both the board and the boat. Bungee cords from Ocean State Job Lots and an old green towel completed the scheme. After testing on the driveway, I abandoned the ragamuffinly, towel-ends-dragging contrivance and arranged another assist from my patient husband. I vowed to give this another try when it was not 90 degrees out. After all this, I forgot my paddle at home and had to walk back to get it.
When I finally got out on the water, it was approaching 9 am and the sun was shining unabashedly. The water was still and green, thick and opaque. My paddles and a black duck created only the slightest turbulence. Once I got into a rhythm of not dipping too deep, I found myself gliding with minimal “point oscillation” (front end of kayak pointing left and right as I dipped the paddle on opposite sides of the boat). Finally, I understood what salespeople were saying about my 9-foot boat being very stable, and that the longer, thinner boats “track” better. Ah-h-h, yes!
No other boats were active that morning, save for a solitary motor boat with a standing driver racing inexplicably up and down a short section of the river for about fifteen minutes. The wake from this boat reached me in sheets of flexible mirrored surfaces. I let my boat face the curves coming at us quietly like “shining from shook foil.” Not long after, the intense sun chased me back to my beach and a call for help to get home.
On Wednesday morning I set my alarm clock for 7 a.m. and, even so, the sun was up way before me. I remembered the paddle, but almost forgot the cellphone and life jacket! I was on the water by 7:30 a.m. and found that I could comfortably trace the shade along the east bank of the river where tall trees would hold slumbering shadows in their arms for another hour or so.
Alone with black ducks (Anas rubripes) and dragonflies (Anisoptera), this fourth expedition was the experience I had been hoping for . . . gliding without knowing effort; floating without sensing weight; and just being a bundle of elements continuous with elements above and below, inside and outside.
I set myself the challenge of sliding between two buoys on which serene black ducks were perched. I focused on not hitting the sides of the boat with the paddle, not splashing, not making any noise at all. Slowly, I drifted between the ducks without making eye contact. If I don’t make eye contact, I don’t exist. For one brief instant while crossing the line between two ducks contemplating morning, I became a black duck looking at the same quiet water, feeling the same light breeze ruffle my feathers.
Shortly after I crossed that line, the duck on my right broke the spell, lifted off the float, and skimmed in a wide arc through liminal space; not quite air, not quite water. I placed my palms flat on the water on both sides of my boat-skin and felt a synesthesia of temperature and texture: air . . . water . . . thick, warm, deep: breathing water; floating on air; which is which, both . . . and . . . I am, I am.
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