On our own two feet

On my way to the cabin

As I was walking out to the cabin this morning, the coffee pot in one hand, my coffee cup in the other, and my camera bag slug over my arm, I thought, ‘The reason women need purses is that we’ve always got two hands full.’ It seems sometimes as if men travel lighter through life, but then again it just cracks me up that I’ve got to make two trips most days, just to sit for an hour or so. Last night I left my laptop here, so today I didn’t have to make two trips. But then, as soon as I got here, I had to go to the bathroom.

I’ve just started bringing the coffee pot and have been thinking about getting a coffee maker. But then I’d have to bring water. I could get a dorm-sized refrigerator, but I’ve less need for cold drinks. I’d like a more comfortable place to sit, but then, with any of those things, I feel as if I’d lose the charm or the simplicity. Walking back to the house isn’t a big deal, it’s just that, other than for in the early morning, I know I can get stuck there. If Henry wants to see me, if a meal is being made, if I notice something that needs doing…I feel that conflict between coming back out and staying inside.

I had another one of those mornings when I woke up early, about 4:30, and thought how lovely it would be to get up and have a little more time out here in the dark. But I stayed until I realized my cell phone wasn’t on the table next to my bed. I didn’t get up long before its alarm would go off, or get out here much sooner.

The cabin door creaks like one of those in a scary movie and Simeon just came in and creaked it as he came.

The sky is white and the ground dark back here at nearly 6:30, but when I look out toward the yard the day is evident, the stucco of the house visible, the tall yellow galardia a spot of color in the green.

I’m slowly realizing people won’t change until they’re ready. You’ve got to feel the pain of being disorganized enough times before you’ll get organized. You’ve got to feel the pain of the sedentary life before you get moving.

I’ll walk today. It’s Saturday. I take Henry (and Sam) on an adventure early on Saturday mornings. We go to the neighborhood park and walk the trails. So far Henry’s not keen on the mud but he knows mornings are wet and that the ground will dry. I ask him how it will dry and he says “From the sun.” That thrills me. He wants me to carry him over the muddy places and I tell him that explorers have to stand on their own two feet. When his grandpa came with us one morning he whined about being carried practically the whole time…when it’s just him and me he doesn’t keep that up.

Donny feels like he is here to meet the needs of his family. That’s been a pretty tough job and he’s getting worn out. Men have their burdens too.

But we’re all on an adventure and have to stand on our own two feet. That’s what I’m discovering anyway.

Cabin Videos

I talk kind of wistfully in the first "cabin video" about the loss of my grapevines to Donny's fruit trees. So I thought it only fair to put up a picture of his apples.


I’ve been working on these cabin videos. I’ve done three. So far I’ve only been able to get one to post to The Given Self website: http://www.thegivenself.com. That’s what I’ve been doing rather than writing. They’re almost like video blogs but they’re too big to post here. I can’t write short, and I guess I can’t talk short either. I start out feeling as if I’ve got nothing much to say and then this whole stream pours out of me once I get going.

There’s a woodpecker tapping on the side of the cabin. Henry calls them peckerwoods.

This break from the usual to work on video has been a strangely happy time. Doing something new is so engrossing. When I did the first two last weekend, I was so focused, in a creative way, that there was stillness everywhere else. Then when I finished them and saw myself looking relaxed and happy, I felt as if I’d accidentally captured “me” – I mean the real me, the person who I feel myself to be. It was so weird. It was so…inspiring!

Maybe that sounds narcissistic or something but I mean really…when do you ever “see yourself”? How many “family entertainment” videos have you been in that make you cringe and vow to run each time a camera ever gets turned on you? You never again want to be put through watching yourself scowling as you give a feeble wave when someone tells you to say hello into the camera, or even worse to see yourself eating or even standing around looking bored.

After I got that excited, happy, “Holy cow how did that happen” feeling of “seeing myself”… I felt as if I could never do it again. It was just a happy accident that I got what I did. And yet it suddenly felt like a standard. The whole zone of that experimental feeling of doing something new left me as soon as I got to thinking about how I could do more videos that were like the first two.

I find that really profound and confounding – how in doing something “new” there is this pure creative energy, and how trying to “do it again” causes that same energy to fly the coop. It’s one of those things you know happens, and yet when you experience it happening it always surprises you.

I had to wait for that energy to wing back before I could go for a third. But it did. It came and lighted softly. I’m truly amazed. If I’ve used that word (amazed) sixteen times, I apologize, but there it is. I am amazed.

Here’s the deal with what I set out to do. There was a little bit of that “should” feeling in it.

“What’s the next step?” Oh. Video.

Then I had this weekend open up in which I had time. I wondered if I could “do it myself” and just wanted to see if I could. I’m not very technical but I figured if I needed to wait for someone to help me I’d not ever do much of anything with it. I never expected it to be fun, but it was a gas.

All I’ve got up so far is the one introductory video. I tried doing a short one for posting here but I kept running over by about 30 seconds. Then after I’d done it five times trying to shorten it, it lost some of its spontaneity and appeal. So that’s the state of affairs at the moment.

Each video somehow turned out more like Course of Love videos than I intended – or I guess I should say I really didn’t intend anything. I just had this thought of doing “cabin videos” and the natural starting point seemed to be telling the story of how I got the cabin, and that…and then it seemed everything else I had to say…did relate to A Course of Love in one way or another.

That’s just the way it is and I’m not going to fight it. I’ll probably end up posting them to the Course of Love site once I get it all figured out. For now, this is simply the way it happened.

Shadows in and out

I got to standing outside under the trees in front of the cabin today. I remembered how, when it was getting built, a friend who had a cabin of her own came over and said “The one thing I’d recommend is cutting those trees back before you get going on it. It’s a pain in the neck to have to do it later.” Five years later, well, I mean to tell you, it’s really cool out here. I went in for the camera to get a picture of the shadows on her but the darn thing was out of juice. I plugged the battery in for about two minutes, checked if the shadows were still there, unplugged the battery… thinking, all I need is thirty seconds. The camera turned on, tantalizingly close, and then turned back off.

The shadows were about as perfect as they could get – like a reflection of what I was seeing when I stopped on my way in and looked up – but then again not really. The shadows were like a painting of ivy and tendrils where looking up it’s a mass…so much it blurs together. The shadow…oh, no, only each one distinctly.

The cabin now appears to have been here all along; the woods to have grown up around us. When I look up, the feeling comes for the impossibility it would now be to plop the cabin down where it is. We are surrounded. She is canopied. “They” were here first, but she and I feel as rooted now as everything else.

You could feel, at this time of year, really embraced, or just about choked out. Confined or liberated or both at the same time. I was reading this book review the other day and the writer described the book as inspiring and devastating. It is like that out here, and my soul knows it. And I keep coming back for it.

Cabin Fever

Out in the yard, the snow is gone. Not even a trace of it is left. Henry’s plastic playhouse is propped up. Can’t tell what Donny stuck beneath it – a board of some kind I suppose. Only days ago it needed to be angled for all the snow to melt and run off. It’s green, red, and blue sides, tilted and lopsided now, fill the yard with a rakish air.

Donny’s already had the conversation with me about changing things too. He gets ambitious at this time of year. He wants to move the back yard fence deeper into the woods. I say, “It sounds like a lot of work,” and hope he doesn’t do it. But he can if he wants. There’s a lot more woods than yard.

I might get ambitious toward the end of May. Memorial Day. That’s when you plant. That’s what the old-timers like my dad always said.

The rivers are rising and the first shoots of the perennials are coming up through the leafs and birdseed.

At the convenience store, the Arab gentleman told me the weather would last. I said, “No. We’ll have another snow storm.”

“Is it predicted?” he asked.

“Uh…no. We just will.”

The only other person I’ve said it to is my mother. I don’t want her to get too despondent when it comes. She hasn’t lived here her whole life. It seems to make a difference…as if…by only spending 50 years in Minnesota, you somehow miss it that there’s always a major snow storm in March, usually just after you’ve put your boots away.

Since I have the cabin out back, it gives a whole new meaning to cabin fever. I was out there a week ago and swept her out and washed the floor and the rug, wiped down the desk and the table. It’s one of the more amazing feats of spring that I can go out and find her unchanged…right down to the crumbs on the couch.

You don’t ever get that feeling entering a room in a house. As if the room just sat there and waited for you to return, and was undisturbed during the wait. I’d left the last newspaper article I’d brought with me on the desk. I should have checked the date. It was an announcement for an Anne Lamott, Trish Hampl combo…both of them speaking on the luminous. I never use that word, but I could imagine it as I opened up the cabin that first day, and as I await the snowstorm with a new, but still short pile of books (three), and the Fahrenheat.

Melting

I’m beginning to feel that feeling of having too much on my mind, too many areas of focus, too much involvement in too many things. My feelings have been hurt by someone other than my daughter in recent days. It’s a sure sign of overload. I need some time and space.

Luckily, it’s almost cabin time. I went out to visit her yesterday but only stayed a minute. It was a combination, I suppose, of cold, and things to do, but it wasn’t that cold and there wasn’t that much to do.

Still, at this time of the year, when it’s just topping 40 degrees, there’s a need to prepare the cabin and yourself for cabin time. It’s way too chill to go out in the morning. But if the weather holds, I can tromp through the snow with my heaters early Saturday morning, and spend a few hours there in the afternoon. My soul yearns for cabin time.

The change in the landscape since I wrote last has been enormous…inner and outer.

The snow is melting. I was on the freeway for the first time in a while the other day, and the banks to either side are free of snow. I don’t know if this is due to the steep slope of the hills going down to the freeway trench, or if the major highways have the majority of snow removed all along, but it was startling. There it was – the dirty looking signs of spring. And under the tires the potholes, and in the paper, even on the front page, the beginning of the pothole discussions that will go on until the snow falls again, complete with diagrams that show the anatomy of the hole. I meant to read it but never did get around to it. That’s the way things have gone lately.

This morning there was a hawk perched over the yard, and the attendant crows, but the hawk’s gone now and I didn’t see him leave. That’s the way things have gone lately.

The icicles have melted, the parking lots are almost free of their dangerous patches of dirty ice, the birds are singing, and when the sun shines, people are out in force, walking their dogs or their kids, but I haven’t been out for a walk. I spent last weekend doing taxes. It’s a sure sign of spring, and a sure sign that this coming weekend, I need cabin time.

I’m a little down. I get this way from time to time. There doesn’t have to be a reason, but there usually is, and I usually look for it, and it rarely has little to do with anything other than the feeling of needing time and space. This time there’s the extra component of having given a talk and the doldrums that come after. That is done. I try to move right on to the next big thing on the horizon, but the energy isn’t there….

So I’ll get my cabin time this weekend, and maybe shake off the winter doldrums, and feel the heat of the sun falling through the window onto my face, and remember that the landscape doesn’t change in a flash. There’s a slow melting. While it happens, there’s a refreshing that goes on, but also a few potholes.

In appreciation of rain, stones, and people

I’m writing with my hood up for the first time. The keyboard has a definite chill. I may have to draw the line at gloves.



It’s raining. When I first walked out the rain was very fine. I had the yard light on and I saw it in the one brightly lighted spot, a thousand needles of rain. Each drop looked shiny and sharp, so I put up my hood and hurried through it. When I got to the woods, the leafs were luminous in the dark, wet, light. I smiled, hurried on, unlocked the cabin, turned on the light and the heater, and turned around.

I brought back two cups of coffee this morning. I thought of a thermos, but by the time I get through two cups I’ll need to go in to use the bathroom anyway. Coming out the second time the rain had already changed. It had grown bigger and more ploppy. Who needs a yard light on when you want to enjoy the dark, so I wasn’t so much seeing it as hearing it. Sam came with me. The cats stood at the door but decided against it. They’re not fond of rain.

So I get sat down with my hood still up and I notice right away I feel a lot warmer. I can see my reflection in the dark windows. What a stitch. Hood, glasses, indistinct nose, lips. It’s already warmed up to 52 degrees and the heater blows the air up inside the hood. This is good.

The hood made me think of my nephew, a spoken word artist who wears all the hip rapper clothes, and how I’ve always thought of having an in-depth conversation with him but never have. I’ve had my difficulties with the groups that grow out of resistance to the culture and then all dress alike, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. What’s your uniform if you’re my age? Probably jeans, like mine. I used to think a good-fitting pair of jeans was the most comfortable thing in the world. Now I prefer sweats.

The girls and I went on a rock- and jewelry-buying trip to Arizona once when we still had the shop. There were tons of old ladies in sweats and jewelry – aqua sweat suits and tennis shoes with big strands of turquoise or lapis beads, silver finery. I told my daughters, “That’ll probably be me in a few years.”

“No way! Don’t even think about it.”

I’m sure they thought I’d keep the jewelry and not pick up the sweat suit, but it’s turned out the opposite way. Not that I don’t still have my rocks.

Now Henry knows all the stones: rhodocrosite, carnelian, malachite. I’ve got a box full here and a tin there, and a group in a small fountain that sits on the back of the toilet. Since he’s potty training, he spends a lot of time with those. He even knows that the shiva lingam came from a river in India. Before he knew that he called it a penis. It looks a little like one.

I’ve also taught him that Obama is president. He gets Joe Biden and Joe Mauer (Twins catcher) mixed up sometimes though.

The naming of things has begun. Can’t really do without it. We have a bag of letters I cut out from some blue packing material and we work with those too, but the stones probably interest him the most. It comes partially from them being tucked away and my insistence that they stay where they’re tucked. He knows they’re not toys. I make a big deal out of how not one of them is the same. Shape, color, size: all different. One looks like a whale. Another like a penis. Within the category of agate, how much more variety could you find?

I hope it translates to an appreciation of people. I think it will.