Sunday, February 27, 2011

Haiku - Sleep

Angry words mingle
with amber light and snowfall
crashing through my dreams.

~~~

Nothing spectacular, just a night's sleep interrupted. I am unwell again, but it feels pretty glancing after last week's ordeal. We continue to be blessed with snow and my morning strolls to work are enchanting. If only I could maintain enough sleep to really savor it. Sam (one of my housemates) was sleeping on the couch this morning because his room gets too hot at night. I imagine that as I shuffle between my room and the bathroom, the kitchen and the dining table, that I am strolling through his dreams. I sit with headphones listening to New Yorker Fiction Podcast episodes while I eat breakfast, hoping that it makes the scene somewhat less unnerving when he wakes and sees me there. He inevitably wakes when I am preparing or enjoying breakfast, despite my attempt at soft footfalls and lifting the teapot before it whistles.

Friday night we hosted a housewarming party. Before the night was over I recalled a half dozen folks who I failed to invite. That said, it was a successful showing, with food and drink and words and laughter. The house was tidied for the evening and I appreciate that it has returned to a similar state. Strange: I have never hosted a "housewarming" party, but the term makes sense. Now all these friends and colleagues know where I live, have been made welcome to that space, and have enjoyed what hospitality I could provide. Also, drunkenness allows for my attention to be oddly fixated, on an overfilled wine glass for example, like a soft pressure on my mind. It is not sharp, but gradual and definite. All said and done, it was a delightful evening and I am appreciative of those who attended and apologetic toward those I failed to invite.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Place Journals, 5-6

I forgot I hadn't yet posted these. I turned them in on Monday and look forward to reading the professor's response.

~~~

Entry 5, 11 February 2011

I
A compass rose points
north, but what directs us home?
Where do I find that?

II
Keen sunlight shining
on winter's slumbering crop
while the lizard bathes.

Today we went to Willow Bend Environmental Education Center. The building is simple, long, straw bail construction, and regionally xeriscaped. In the garden a large stone has been cut smooth and a bronze, strangely insect-like compass rose has been set atop it. The compass rose, one of the first things I noted when I circled the building before the tour, has a particular symbolic gravity to it. While Willow Bend is a straightforward and effective piece of architecture, and Thoreau's mission humming in the back of my mind, the compass seemed to point not just in the cardinal directions, but to ourselves and to our simplified future.

That said, how? I do not like posing rhetorical questions. They tend to feel trite and inconsiderate. I have difficulty escaping the tension of what I am studying, where I am, and where I see myself going. The compass embodies this sense of guided directionlessness. So much of the course for this Construction Management: Sustainability course has been cutting edge, high tech, and grand-scale designing. Our first tour guide, the site architect, informed us – somewhat condescendingly – that green building is not cheap. I don't want cheap, I want effective and affordable. If we want to live simply, live well, and live affordably, we have models of the last few thousand years to draw on. We are not doing anything new, our tour guide commented today, in building this way. In fact, I would chime, we are doing something exceedingly old.

In what direction does our compass point? Does it point forward to the time we are engaged in making? Does it point backward to the lessons we can glean from the past? Does it point outward to contain the abundant models and triumphs surrounding us? Our compass, I believe, points in all of these directions. The direction that it inevitably fails to point, likely the most important direction, is inward. Within we can perceive and understand, even sculpt and direct our expectations and values. If I want to live simply, live affordably, and live green, doesn't that mean removing the fat of life and enjoying the lean cut that is left?

In The Omnivore's Dilemma by Pollan, he remarks that “marbled” beef is the nice way of framing fatty, less protein-rich meat that comes from cows unable to exercise or move freely. Marbled is even faintly positive; it reminds us of marble pillars and sculpture, of elegance and class. Marbled certainly doesn't suggest the unhealthy repercussions of an industrial food system that become enmeshed in the flesh of animals and the food stuffs we purchase and eat. Perhaps we have become too enamored with the fatty parts of our lives and ought to expect leaner, more wholesome cuts.

This is all coming from a vegetarian, after reading Thoreau who brags about his vegetable-based diet, and even noticing the fantastic National Geographic info-graphic a professor had posted about water consumption for various food products. Our language is rich in the metaphor of meat and its apparent virtues, I can't turn a good one down if it is glaring, or rather glistening, right in front of me. What I hope to emphasize is the way our homes and our eats are not separate. I want to eat a particular way for ethical reasons, I want to dwell in a certain way for ethical reasons. I even want to date in one way and not another for ethical reasons.

Well, that may be misleading. My ethics is about becoming, about crafting myself into the type of person who lives in a sustainable, regenerative, and interwoven community. I try to fashion behaviors therefrom. If someone were to ask, “How does a good”– that is, recuperative, mutualistic, and interdependent –“person eat?” then someone else might point in my direction, or at least to my crowd. This act isn't intended to be laudable. What could I do with that praise anyway? Rather, it is an act of modeling, of positive participation in the world of others, both human and non-human.

When the question of sustainable living comes back to the home, to lifeways and housecare and quality of life, I am challenged more and more. How do I model that behavior? How do I cultivate it in myself? To whom can I look for guidance? In one way, I can look around, just as the compass directs me. Another way, though, is to see what is already before my eyes that otherwise might elude me.

This latter is one interpretation of the second haiku. Roles of dormancy and solar usage are just about universal in Nature. Besides my stint in Brazil, everywhere I have lived the landscape goes through periods of activity and periods of quiet. These periods relate to sunlight, water, temperature, the length of the night and so on. What time do we make for dormancy? What space to we make for rest? How do our buildings reflect or fail to reflect this need and this space?

Right now, my mattress is on the floor of my new bedroom. I think that this is making my sleep less substantial and satisfying. I have failed to cultivate proper space for dormancy. In addition, this is the result of inadequate finances despite a rather hefty workload, suggesting an overall over-expression of activity and an absence of dormancy. What would it mean to include space for quiet, reflection, meditation, and rest in a home or life or community?

We also have the swift but patient lizard. He reserves his energy for proper use, though is often still. Why do offices all over campus and all over the planet run computer terminals when no one is using them? Why are office lights left on all night? Why do we let rainwater run away from where it can be used for landscaping and allowed to infiltrate? What of the escape of heat through poor insulation or the chill rush of an improperly sealed home? Wherever we look we see the inability to act like a simple lizard who is all the time teaching us. We have so much yet to discover from what is in front of us, I hope we begin to look for it.

~~~

Entry 6, 13 February 2011

I
To become walker
in this space and measuring
distance by footfalls.

II
The sharp mid-day light
singes by faint degree with
marked affection.

III
Skin a-hum – neither
pulse nor tremor – intoning
subtle songs of flesh.

IV
Listen for blue-sky
songs, the music of daylight,
cloud, & whisper wind.

So, first order of business is that I did not journal yesterday. With that said, my first haiku is adapted from meditations this morning on my pre-dawn walk to work. Perhaps I am inspired by Thoreau's reflection on walking rather than working to pay for a coach or train ticket in order to travel, or I am taken by the walkability of Flagstaff, but for whatever reason I am newly determined to walk my way more often. Early last semester, my friend and classmate Katherine shared her love for walking around her new neighborhood in Sunnyside. She wrote a personal essay on the sense of knowing a place, through physical contact with that place. I am taken, more and more, to this notion of physical connection and materiality. Here I am. Here I touch the Earth. Here is where I walk. What power resides in that understanding.

Especially in the darkened morning hours, with the particular darkness – deeper, thicker, sounder – of the Dark City of Flagstaff, walking and reflecting has its own spiritual dimension. Recently, I read an article in a 2008 National Geographic on light pollution. Flagstaff has a tradition of dimming the lights and maintaining clear skies for astronomical observations, but the import of dark spaces is more profound than that. The article goes on to point out the physiological and psychological roles of darkness, of sound darkness in our well-being. Thoreau would have been unaware of this importance as he still lived in a time of almost solely natural light. Though he does deride the artificial flame when the solar light is still about. Should we so easily forget the natural dark?

Today has been a beautiful day. From the clear and crisp five a.m. Dark, to the clean and uncomplicated sunrise, and to the rich blue and whispy clouds and sunlit warmth of the late afternoon, I have been struck with the sincere delight of the day. Outside, reading Walden, sipping tea and munching bread, I saw the sky and awoke to myself and to the space around me. I wrote II-IV in quick succession, first feeling the uncommon pressure of the day on my neck, hair, and scalp; then sensing a strange vibration in my own skin and being struck by the celerity of its rhythm, the strange music lying therein; and then finally coming back to the sky and meditating on a music resonant with my own body. Merleau-Ponty writes that despite the different sensory organs, the act of sensing is unified and whole. I think I was attempting to bridge the distinctions of sense and appreciate the sensual moment of perception.

Also, as I continue the practice of haiku, I come up again and again to the boundaries of the anglicized rules of haiku. Haiku, in the Japanese, is not a matter of syllabic concision or limitation, but capturing a scene or moment – some microcosm of the whole – with as much brevity as possible. In a way, I think that haiku itself recognizes the unification of the senses that Merleau-Ponty identifies. When we attain understanding of haiku, either in the act of writing or reading, it is a full, sensual understanding of the scene, that moment, that pulls us out of ourselves and into the world. Effective haiku knits us to the world and provides a model for active engagement thereto.

To turn back, but also to take with us what has been said, a friend of mine and I long ago discussed night. She thought of night as exhibitionist, a place to display despite the absence of a clear audience; night supposes a clearer stage onto which we play as actors. In one sort of way, I understood and appreciated this sentiment. What I said, and we later agreed on if memory serves, is that night is thick and substantial compared to the lightness of daytime. When you walk in darkness, it is immediate to your senses, unseparated from you.

This is, in effect, a reflection on sight as well. Sight and sound are “distant” senses, they place the subject away from the object. That is because light and sound travel to our senses as energy, whereas smell, taste, and touch are immediate. These latter three come to us through contact with the stuff of the world. In the darkness, even sound becomes more immediate as it displaces sight as our primary perceptive faculty. Our bodies are more prone to responding to the audible messages we receive, making physical the sensual information we receive.

Thoreau at Walden Pond is, in a different way, knitting himself to space. He reflects on fishing in the dark after dining with friends, planning for dinner the next day, and the mercurial qualities of the darkened pond, the rich life he finds there, and the mystical, even divine reality of “earth's eye” watching him. Though I still find his writing rather long-winded and verbose, a quality he himself derides in others, I am touched more in the harmony his own reflections have with the conversations and behaviors with which my own friends are engaged. His rich poetry is delightful for its celebration of place, in the spiritual and even transcendent qualities of Walden Pond; occasionally even criticizing the inferiorities of other small New England bodies of water as he raises Walden Pond to the character of the Ganges and scoffs at the idea of carrying the water away to town via pipe.

With the Dark City Ordinance – recently raised due to Best Buy's daunting interior lighting – and the spiritual and political brier patch of The Peaks, not to forget the tradition of wilderness tourism, preservation, and recovery, Flagstaff seems primed for its own fleshy, sensual thickness. We are, strange as it may sound, closer to the stars here than in other cities. They represent a sort of “real estate” in this town that everyone else must pay homage. Thoreau brings in Greco-Roman deities to whom he gives sacrifice – he burns an old fence, built for Terminus and in ode to Vulcan – while Flagstaff brings in our own mountaintop entities. The Peaks suggest a rich rootedness to place, a soulful fullness despite the political and economical rhetoric; I would go so far as to say that the rhetoric for development substantiates the tension embodies in conflicted space. An argument therefrom is for another forum, though.

I suppose this is coming to a close, though I hope the regularity here has trained me to maintain my own blog with greater rigor. With a certain consideration, I hope that I have touched on place with enough detail to fulfill the expectations of the assignment. That said, my thoughts are often bound to place in veiled or esoteric ways; that is not to suggest that they are any less present and immanent. Rather. I think of the experience and conceptualization of place as more and more the crèche from which my esoteric understanding flows. I think differently here than I have in Lincoln, Nebraska or St. Peter, Minnesota. In Rivers and Tides, Andy Goldsworthy speaks eloquently of his need to acquaint himself to the new places before he begins his commissions, that the work of travel is disheartening and dislocating. I can understand this, though I am less skilled at the work of place-acquaintance than he. The realities to which I am awakening are not different from the things I have otherwise considered and written on, rather, they are like seeds that grow differently in different climes. Give a seed water, soil, and light and it will do what it does best: Grow. Just how it does so, though is up to its own conversation with the magic of that place.

Haiku - Snow

White blankets fall, to
blur the coloring book lines,
and obscure edges.

~~~

Snowstorm this previous weekend. It fell as I was recovering from an illness. Food documentaries and snow block edibles... A fine way to return to the land of the living.

I had difficulty here capturing the sense of lost distinctions that snow gives me. I am in love with the way the world is remade with fresh snow. It is clear and blinding, sublime and unknowable, uniform and edible. I think we know better how the world is - infinite, unseen, uninterrupted - and how we do not know it - covered, untouchable, numbing, present. Snow is soft and painful, childlike and keen.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Haiku - Stones

Weighing stones, my own
& others, unable to
discern them today.

~~~

I am not especially well today, or yesterday, or the day before. I hope that tomorrow brings wellness. Today, though, I have had difficulty appreciating where my own frustrations end and others begin. I am carrying too many stones, stones I think are mine but are not. I seem to be, even if it is just internally, foisting my own stones on others. Perhaps wellness will bring me to myself again, and allow me to see others for themselves, as well.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Place Journals, 2-4

Entry 2, 8 February 2011

Flour, yeast, skin heat;
patient things, living & not,
that touch, bind, & grow.

One key place for me, both physically and mentally, is at the Village Baker. I suppose the mental aspect includes the place I go when I handle ingredient, dough, and bread that includes handling it in my own kitchen. Though cooking holds its own grace, creativity, and spirit, baking is a collaborative act. It is collaboration between oneself and yeast, the flour with the humidity or aridity, the heat of the oven with the sugars in the dough that brown as they bake. Food – growing ingredients, handling them, creating food, sharing and dining – holds so much spirit for me, so much of the reality of community and the manifestations of place.

Douglas Adams tells a joke in one of the Hitch-hiker's Guide “trilogy” novels. He describes in some detail the notion of gravity and the mechanics of the universe and that, with the proper calculations and scientific instruments, one could describe all the bodies in the universe with a single slice of fairy cake appropriately monitored. One of his characters is subsequently strapped into a machine to understand the universe, based off of a piece of fairy cake, and the oddball Zaphod learns, not to any great surprise, that the universe exists for him. He releases himself from the jaw-dropping immensity of the universe that machine portrays, greets his shocked and scientifically-minded captor, and eats the fairy cake, explaining that the universe exists just for him.

I fail at articulating Adams's particular wit and good humor, but I love the notion of a piece of cake explaining everything in the universe. Especially because, on certain days and with certain other conditions, that piece of cake is the perfect explanation of the universe. It is only when our understanding of food is immensely impoverished do we think of it as simple. The experiences we have with food are historical, memory-filled, place-based, illustrative, and moving. Smells return us to our mothers' kitchens; tastes plunge us into private worlds of mystery and discovery; and only special intimacy rivals the tactile detail and intensity with which we confront food.

Participating in the craft of food, especially the interpretive labor of baking, is so important to me because it connects us in all these ways and more. The process and the product of baking are ever-changing, organic, surprising, and satisfying. To meditate on the endeavor, one wonders exactly where the baker ends and the baked good begins; or, for that matter, the roles of the yeast and heat of the oven in their functions in producing each particular loaf. Speaking as one with great experience in baking, the dough speaks and acts differently, engaging you with its own moods and behaviors on each day. Learning to interpret and entertain dough challenges our ideas of sentience and insentience, labor and participation.

But who is patient in this communion? I don't know exactly. “Patient things, living & not” is intended to portray this delicious confusion. First, by valuing and appreciating the virtue of things, we begin to breakdown the dichotomies between subject and object, actor and the acted upon. What can we learn from the objects around us? Do they manifest virtue? Do they describe lessons? How is it that we can benefit from them unless we share something, well, spiritual?

This interrogation extends with the third line, “that touch, bind, & grow.” The bonds between the dough, this dynamic and collaborative food, and the surroundings – the bakery, oven, table, pan, ourselves – are sticky in more ways than one. Sometimes we like to “sanitize” cooking through instruments, tools, and appliances; we make the food appear clean despite its messy history. The manual to my electric mixer has a spotless red appliance, whisk-like blade attached, and a bowl full of what is likely brown frosting without a hint crawling up the edge or sitting on the lip; but everything about the image suggests a lack of mess, polish, and serenity. Cooking is not serene! Nor ought it be. Cooking is about combinations, amalgamations, transformations; biology, chemistry, and spirit!

What is growing, I wonder, and what arises therefrom? What exactly is bound together? I know with my fingers and eyes and nose what is touching, but the magic of it is in the unknown. Gluten forms in the molecules of the flour, but require the water; the yeast feeds on sugars and produces carbon dioxide bubbles, but they have also been awakened from dormancy. Being raised Catholic, I was challenged and eventually discarded the notion of transubstantiation. Now, though, I identify as a witness of the miracle. The only problem is I see it everywhere.

~~~

Entry 3, 9 February 2011

I
My circulation
and inhalation weave flesh
into keen cold air.

On my bike, especially in the cold chill of pre-dawn morning, I breathe deeply of the thin, sharp air. It cuts and soothes and bites and warms. My muscles heat up under their layers, even my hands in their cozy, wind-breaking gloves, and I can push the heat to where I want it to go. Sometimes, at least. My eyes tear up as they become irritated by the aridity, my throat tingles with the hint of a cough, and my lungs and diaphragm quake when the occasional hack arises. My body is, in all of these responses and interpretations, in conversation with the environment; even down to my blood.

“Weave flesh / into keen cold air” bares the weight of this thought. I am stuck in this idea of coming to know a place, both body and spirit. If anything, our bodies are the first to engage with the project. A subject raised in class – during the guided imagining exercise, I believe – was the replacement of atoms and cells in our bodies over rather brief periods of time. I also think of Pollan's reinterpretation of “corn people” in The Omnivore's Dilemma; our bodies reflect the molecules and the construction of the food we consume, and we ought to take this to heart if we want to be part of a more sustainable, rooted culture. Most of us are mostly constructed from corn carbon, composed of carbon molecules taken in from the abundant corn-based products we consume.

I want to consider a different way in which we are our inputs. In our air is nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water molecules, and various other compounds in small percentages. When we inhale, we take all of this in and the otherworldly, inverted forest of our lungs and their alveoli transform that gas into little baskets, carried by our red blood cells, all over our body. The membrane and mechanisms are semi-porous, selecting only what it recognizes or the molecules that confound the system; that is, most of the bad stuff stays out, but some of it gets in. When all goes well, our circulation reflects that positivity. If the air is appropriately dense or our lungs are efficiently adapted, then the thrum of the blood in our bodies is calm and persistent. When the situation changes, everything happens faster and less certainly. Lactic acid and carbon dioxide builds up in our blood vessels and tissues, dust and pollen and mucus accumulate in our lungs and esophagus, and our blood is less capable of moving the life-giving oxygen throughout our body.

The whole process is an act of replacement, consumption, and recovery. These are not deleterious in the same way as they sometimes are in common parlance. Rather, we are taking part in the reciprocal relationship that an ecosystem characterizes. My carbon dioxide with sunlight feeds plants and algae, just as their oxygen and sugars – also, conveniently, from them – metabolize into carbon dioxide for them. Waste equals food; or, in other terms, there is no waste, it is all food.

II
Clouds casting shadows
veil the fat, descending flakes
that sublime in light.

It snowed yesterday morning and is all gone again by now. I may have slipped on some of its icy remnants, but I think that is from the more determined precipitation of weeks before. The temperament of Flagstaff bewilders me. It fluctuates wildly. The amicable snow of yesterday morning all happened before light had crashed in on the Safeway parking lot. (It is our parking lot, too, as well as a number of other shops and services; but I think everyone identifies it with Safeway.) The snow-laden clouds themselves obscured the dawn and obfuscated the light later in the day. I realized that it had all come and gone while many Flagstaffians slept, entirely unaware.

In the bakery, I think we all felt that the day would have been a good one to stay warm and cozy in our beds. The change in the air had surprised me. It was not warm, hovering around twenty degrees I think, but a density or taste that has often eluded me here. Only later when I heard talk of snow did I realize it was moisture. So quickly after moving here from the Midwest, where air is perpetually thick with humidity and its precipitate threats, I have lost the sensitivity or maybe the awareness to such tastes and accents suspended in the air.

Or perhaps I am learning the new dialect of this place, catching the suggestions of colloquialisms and turns of phrase that specific places develop. Flagstaff, and its residents, have their own spins of language that I am learning. The language of its residents, with their tendency toward transience, is often in between or hodgepodge, touched with tempered references from all of our different origins. The language of the place, though, is especially loaded and exciting. Air changes abruptly from day to day, a morning of cloud is gone by night while the daytime sun wards off all but the most determined. I dress for both the chilliest morning and the encouraging warmth of midday when I leave work. Sometimes – more last semester than this – I would leave for work and not return again until the sun had set; a whole day spent in and between the places I work, study, converse, dine, reflect, and ride.

That is a strange thing to consider, especially with the previous haiku in mind: the places I ride. Often, we do not consider our in-between locales. Roads, sidewalks, pathways, trails, neighborhoods, lanes, corridors, and so on, those get us to where we are going. The brief splash of snow, its remnant ice, and the repercussions of each are more hindrances for the places I ride, the places many drive or walk. These are the most prone to elemental, meteorological transformations.

I use “sublime” here for its abundant meanings. In art, the sublime transcends the world, reveals divinity and our inability to understand it. The sublime awes us. In chemistry, sublimation is the transformation from solid to gas; what was solid becomes, almost miraculously, insubstantial and unbound. In each case, the sublime is about one reality juxtaposed, without clear explanation, on another. The morning became a different morning. It happened twice, even. All the while, it evaded most of us. What are we to make of that?

~~~

Entry 4, 10 February 2011

I
Winter's sun kisses
unkempt transient gardens
fertile with green dreams.

II
Glass, leaf, ceramic;
co-mingled, interwoven;
what bulb might burst forth?

Just a few weeks ago I moved into a new place. It is a house, just south of the tracks, that used to be a Mexican wedding chapel and, before that, was a workers' union building. The structure is very much its own, the landlord even more so, and it is refreshing to get out of the apartment that never quite fit.

Tim and I are captivated by having a yard. It is one big mess at the moment, full of dry and disregarded stems of grass that have bent over under now vanished snow, dropping from a few different household dogs, and the debris of parties and unthinking previous residents. I spent some of this afternoon, between reading sessions, picking up cans, shards of glass, odd bits of broken dishes, and every so often finding something interesting. I am tempted to see if Tim would drink the mysterious, unopened can of Tecate still suspended by its plastic six-pack rings.

We want to clean it up, trim the overgrowth, tidy the leavings, spread our compost, maybe dig up space for a rain garden, definitely cultivate an herb garden, and Tim has the bright idea of tiling an extended patio off of the cement pathway. Even just as month-by-month renters, we think of this place as potentially our own, not just ours.

Today Sam, who has lived here for a few months, asked how long I planned on staying; he was happy and perhaps a little relieved to hear that I wanted to stick around for a good while. The house is marked, mostly by the accumulation of odd appliances and décor, as an attractor of transience. That isn't to say transient people, but the feel of shifting, ebbing, uncertain movements. Human-oriented green spaces do not generally appreciate such shiftiness and the yard reflects that. That said, such a wide open space is a rare discovery in Flagstaff with its higher price of living and houses sitting on cozy lots. It would please me to see a more lived in locale, a cared for yard or garden.

Almost since moving to Flagstaff I have been engaged in composting. In the apartment I constructed a box from the remains of a desk I found behind Absolute Bikes. With a little chicken-wire fence and some large terra cotta pots found along the road, I became able to turn the compost between sections. The product has been rich and alchemical. My mother has laughed a good natured laugh whenever I tell her of these industrious undertakings, but I was giddy to pull out a handful of soil, still pockmarked with brown egg shells and the hearts of leafy greens one day. Now we have a place to put it, even if the cold is trying to complicate my experimentation.

If anything, the compost and the arrival here feels like a lesson in patience. A sharp eye and wise use of what little spare time I have has allowed me to make something out of what would have been nothing. Well, not nothing, but just waste to end up in a landfill or something. Instead, through the organic alchemy of warmth, life, and food I have yielded a sort of gold all my own.

Besides patience, the compost has taught me compassion. My brother and his wife tend a compost heap in Louisiana where it stays about seventy degrees just about whenever. At the reception for their wedding, we all chatted and fanned ourselves while we sat doing as little as possible and sweat. I imagine that their compost teaches them generosity, magnanimity with its ease at digestion all they pile on. Out here in the chilly heights, one has to dig and feel and smell, rinse and turn and feed; I sense an Other in there, listening and speaking in calm whispers what it appreciates, what it needs, and what it has to give to me.

I read outside most of the day. It was cool, but the sun shines beautifully on the yard. The light is rich and delicious, an appropriate compliment to Barbara Kingsolver and Gary Snyder. (Thoreau had to wait a while.) The sun was rich and delicious, lazing all through the afternoon. The wind rustling with a sharp chill. Today has been my day off.

Monday, February 7, 2011

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.

~~~

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.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Touching Peace

Touching peace amidst
confusion, caught with strange ghosts 
and my memories

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Orange Date Cookies (Vegan)

I posted pictures of these on the tumblr. Here is the recipe:

2 cups white flour
1 c whole wheat pastry flour
1 c oats
1/2 Tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Mix in a bowl and set aside.

1 c honey
1/2 c sunflower oil (or substitute with canola)
1/2 c milled flax seed
1/2 c warm water (or juice from zested oranges, see below)
Blend in an electric mixer thoroughly, medium to high for about 4 minutes. The flax should make the mixture slightly bubbly.

1 & 1/2 c dates, pitted and chopped
zest of two oranges
juice of the oranges (in place of warm water)
Add to the liquid ingredients and mix. Gradually add in the dry ingredients while mixing until all incorporated. Wipe down the bowl with a spatula as needed. The dough is sticky.

A few tablespoons of flour on a plate or in a bowl.
Heat oven to 375 F. Pinch out dough with floured hands, roll round, flatten slightly (about half dollar coin sized) and place on greased sheet. Bake for 10-13 minutes until golden brown. These like to burn on the bottom, so insulate pan with a second sheet pan below or use higher quality pans than what I currently have. Allow to cool and place on a cooling rack. Makes about three dozen cookies.