Last week began with a reminder about how quickly things can change. On a Monday afternoon walk, a plume of smoke wafted over the hillside across the highway.:
Roughly twenty minutes later, this was the scene:
Cal Fire threw a ton of resources into fighting this fire and extinguishing it. Several different kinds of aircraft dropped this red stuff (flame retardant of some kind?). A crew of firefighters made their way up the hillside and within about an hour, the fire was not more. In an abundance of caution, here at the house we had our emergency bags ready in case we had to evacuate. The good thing about being so transient is that my emergency things are always at the ready. It was a reminder of a few of things: how dry the area is already this early in the fire season, how a quickly things can change and how a fast response can turn the tide.
Every place has something. On the little island it was cyclones (and an extreme level of corruption that was just the culture). In Florida, hurricanes. Here fire...I talked with a friend in Austin, Texas and she told be about “hail season”. I’ve experienced hail in Texas before. My dad and I drove my then husband’s car, Sasha, across country. Texas is big. It took days to get across it depots the 90 mph speed limits. On a flat stretch of desert clouds darkened and the wind picked up, rain began, then hail. An exit appeared, I took it and we found the one underpass on that stretch of road. Soon we were joined by others trying to escape being pelted by big ice chunks. Every place has something… but it is really dry here.
This week I’ve been busy creating some art for the new literary agency I signed with. They asked for a piece that said Summertime and freedom. This is what I made:
I remember being a kid and the all day adventures my sister and I had with neighborhood kids. We basically disappeared out the door in the mornings and returned sometime before dark after having had a day of adventure. We were lucky to have been so free as kids.
Remembering those days exploring the forest (which was a small green space in back of my parents’ house). We built a tree fort using about a million nails. We made a garden on the forest floor carefully outlining the boundaries with rocks and sticking sticks in the ground and fended off (imaginary) enemies. We played for hours upon weeks. One year we found a treasure trove of morel mushrooms and spent days searching for them on the forest floor and being bitten by mosquitos in the hunt.
Here is a guy who does a different kind of playing in the forest.
And not only do these mushrooms make music, they help form a way that trees can talk to cone another.
It’s absolutely incredible to think of all of the things around us that are communicating to one another that we are mostly unaware of.
In fact, there is so much information being sent back and forth out there, not just underground. Our nervous systems respond to being in nature. Our microbiome improves in nature…our microbiome plays a major part in how we feel and think. There are signals and messages everywhere, we just have to tune in.
Lately though, my schedule has gotten pretty full and tuning been falling to the wayside, replaced by keeping up. Things are a bit off balance at the moment, but then again I think that the state of balance is one we visit from time to time, but we seldom stay in it. I was looking for a quote I had flagged to put here, but I can’t seem to find, so I’ll paraphrase: Anything worth fighting for requires an imbalance- at least for a little while.
For around four weeks now at approximately 5:50 in the morning, an erratic tapping sound has awoken everyone in the house. Sleep has been impacted (for four weeks!). Days of feeling slightly exhausted…. My friend, Phil, has gotten up at 5:50 many times and walked around the house to try to find the source always coming up with nada. Theories abounded- anxious construction crew breaking tiles for a roof or framing a building, the neighbor possibly having installed some new automatic landscape feature…none of these panned out. But this morning, Phil found the culprit- a Junco bird. It was looking at its reflection in a window leaned against a fence in the neighbor’s yard. Maybe the bird sees a rival? This is not a great example of receiving information from the outside world, this is an example of misinterpreting something. An object now blocks the window…good nights of sleep ahead! (Fingers crossed).
My ex-husband blames me for a lot that went wrong on the little island. But, even after I unknowingly escaped and he decided to stay and a few weeks later found himself trapped there, it was the same. It wasn’t me. I was not the issue. Like that junco bird pecking…
This week I found all kinds of random things in my explorations on the internet:
A Public Domain Image Search where you can find this picture by Henry L. Stephens and thousands of other images in the public domain.
I wonder what the inspiration was with this one? I like searching this catalog. I find so many interesting things there… like going to a rummage sage and sorting through the piles.
I revisited a series of interviews by Elaine Pagels on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. She writes mostly about the Gnostic Gospels and in this strange time of religious upheaval in the Middle East (and here), I found re-listening to these grounding.
An article about how forgiveness changes your brain. This is something I’m still struggling with my former husband….and if I’m having trouble with this one, I think about places where perceived wrongs have played out generation after generation like in so many geo-political spaces in the world…how do we transcend these things? And is it even possible? And of me personally, how can someone be your partner for nearly two decades and then just vanish without being dead?
At a dinner here last week the subject of Carl Sagan came up and his Pale Blue Dot. Carl was the person who insisted on putting cameras on board the Voyager space crafts because he understood the power of images. Cameras are not necessary for the science being done by the two Voyagers, they were a bit of an extravagance. In 1990 when Voyager 1 was about to leave our planetary neighborhood, Carl had the camera pointed back at Earth just tone more time before the power to the energy expensive cameras was shut off. The image captured was of a tiny little Earth out there in the distance.
He used the opportunity to reflect on humanity and wrote this:
I wish the leaders of the World would check in again with this…but they seem busy with a pissing match that has us all on edge.
And now for a song from one of my favorite bands…something for the times:
So, right now, I’m taking things day by day. Not sure how all of this will play out or my place in it all. All I can do is really just move forward. This place I’m at now is crazy expensive, but everywhere I would want to be is because the places I want to be are beautiful (and do not have harsh winters and icy roads). I still don’t know where I want to be (or can afford to be)…I’m trying to balance living sustainably and with some level of inspiration with also being able to invest and grow a little something . How did this world get so expensive so quickly?
Where to go, should I go?
A sign somewhere in Arizona…
Until next time.
xo,
Steph
Love the Summertime sketch! I grew up in a similar era, wish my kids could have had the same thing, but we were definitely “play date” parents.
A world and beyond of random curiosities, and memories of long summer days of wandering and wondering!!