Place Journal, Day I

This is part of a week-long assignment about reflecting on place. I plan on continue with the haiku motif, but with further exploration in prose. Since it is very much akin to what I try to maintain on here, except for recipes, I figured I would post them here as well.

Also, making vegan chocolate chocolate chip cookies tomorrow. Planning on having friends over to eat them. Will post the recipe once it gets worked out, though it will likely be heavily influenced by an Epicurious recipe that I'll link to.

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Entry 1, 7 February 2011

Branch & trunk, the crash
of light & time; growing days
meet & carry me.

Spring arrives weirdly in Flagstaff. At least my first one is doing that. It is early February and it feels like Spring. The light here has a crisp intensity, not unlike the Minnesota chill light, but touched and touching with its own clime. The days are lengthening, though I notice their earlier starts more than their later hours, but the roles of my life are catching up to me.

Something Janine (Dr. Schipper? In my discussion notes in class, at least while I'm taking them, I write her down as Janine just as I would a student. I was trained years ago to assuage titles and formalities when it comes to colleagues.) said during our class exercise struck me: “Do not rush to the responsibilities of your day.” I mentioned afterward that I do not want to collide with my day, I do not want violent interaction with it. I wrote:

do not rush to meet the world
allow the world to rush to you
meet like lovers, old friends
& be together there

Joanna Macy wrote The World as Self, The World as Lover, a text read last semester that I did not especially enjoy, but one that touch on the ecstatic relationship one might have with the world. I dusted off Rumi the other day, looking for poetry to read at Lauren's (my best friend) wedding; an ecstatic Sufi poet, engaged with the world in intimate reflection, discovery, and delight. These words echo, I hope authentically, the sentiments of Rumi or of Sufism generally.

As the responsibilities pile up – baking work, classwork, study time, assistantship work, friends, self – I hope that I can resolve the tension of rushing into the day. That is what I refer to with “the crash of light & time;” or at least, the light of wintry Spring and the time of early Spring semester. Rather than combating time, what about coincidence and cooperation? By coincidence, I suppose I mean the process of inciting together, deriving insight together, instantiating the moment together. We do not make our moments on our own, we produce them collectively, crafting scene and sense and memory and the rich web of perception with the world, with our companions, and with our memories and imaginations.

In A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, the indigenous sisterhood of Shora use language in descriptive, philosophical ways. A recurring theme is the action-reaction relationship: One cannot strike without being struck, when one swims one is also being swum, and when one connects one is also the object of another's connection. Writing that the “growing days meet & carry me,” I refer to this sort of relationship. First, the project of the day is a collective, social act between the participants of the day; we act in unison – though not always in cooperation – to create the heterogeneous, vibrant, and confounding reality of the moment. I also want to connect with another, more personal reality that I have often meditated on: When we breathe, we are also being breathed by the pressure in the air which fills our lungs. Janine's exercise touches on this relationship with food – specifically breakfast – but the cooperative action of breathing is relaxing and comforting. Imagine a hand, softly pressed on your chest, as if it were performing a mild CPR on your relaxed body. And finally, I think of the ways in which we greet, converse with, and either connect to or divorce ourselves from the day. In this conception, the day is itself an entity, defined as it is by certain cosmic cycles, but ultimately coming back around, beginning again, somewhat different but somewhat the same as well.

In this place – Flagstaff, Arizona; February of 2011; the SSLUG garden and now the new house on Agassiz St; here, wherever I am – I am uncertain of the relationships I have built and the ones I am engaged in building. What I have is an increasingly familiar, warm, comforting space: the circle of tree trunks around terra cotta tiles, amidst pine trees and the slumbering stumps of broccoli and other garden produce, a bed of pine needles, and the softly descending sun. My mornings are long, but I may begin to lengthen them further for meditation, writing, reflection. Are not one's values in one's action? Perhaps that is the Catholic still speaking in me, or perhaps it is the virtue ethics with which I feel bound. Most likely, it matters less than the conviction to acquaint myself to the here and now and the difficulties I have with doing that.