Earth Quakes and Tremors: The Passage of Time

When I returned from Peace Corps I started playing the “One week ago today game.” This game would consist of me marveling over how different my life was from the week prior. The first time I played it was the Friday after Thanksgiving 2007 three days after I arrived back in the states. On that day I went shopping with my friend Marie in San Francisco, changed in the store into a new pair of jeans, a stylish pink top and black trench coat and went with some funny, witty, urbane new friends out to Vietnamese food and a martini bar afterwards. The week prior to that I had been saying my good-byes to my students in a school with no running water and intermittent electricity and burning garbage in the back yard of my soviet block apartment next to a dead goat hanging from a laundry line.

After that I briefly played the “One month ago today game” but settled on the “One year ago today game.” It was a pretty fun game for a while. The stark contrasts just kept on coming. One night last October, I was wearing a formal gown driving in a taxi passed the White House leaving a statistics review session and on my way to a black tie energy awards dinner. I tried to remember what I had been doing one-year prior, probably sitting by the pond in my village watching the geese fly or cutting up Peace Corps manuals to make flash cards for my students. I played this game countless times, often with Peace Corps friends who also had the Grand Canyon between their life then and their life now.

A few weeks ago I went back and read every post I have ever made on this blog. I began posting in July of 2005, just before I left for the Peace Corps. So many things have changed in my life. But today I am reflecting on the things that have not changed, or sometimes the stories that bend back over on themselves with out the players even realizing. Today I relived a very familiar scene on the front step of my apartment building, something which happened with a very different person almost exactly one year ago today. As we swim through the Christmas season and on toward the New Year I would like to think that the circumstances of my life have changed. But I understand that I am looking at the wrong thing, there isn’t a whole lot I can do about the actions of others, about the way they choose to regard me in their lives. And I understand that this description is fairly oblique and lacking in all of the colorful detail I so like to provide my readers, but it hasn’t exactly formed a shape in my mind either. Maybe my lesson for the day is that not every single thing can be described and nailed down for all eternity on a previously blank page.

I suppose it isn’t reasonable to win the World Series of Change every year. I think, and I have observed this phenomenon in others, that I am in some ways addicted to change, to contrast, to challenge and conflict. This habit is hard to kick, contentment is some how uneasy for me because I have lived my life seeking and striving for an unnamed finish line because the thrill of the new and the hard won victory are my drug of choice. But when I observe what has happened over the last several years I see that a lot has truly changed. When I play even the “One month ago today game” I see that things are different, that I know more about the world and about myself then I did just thirty days ago but the tempered Obama incrementalism of my daily life just doesn’t feel like enough against the emotional craving the electorate has for change, for the swift delivery of the hope promised. But intellectually I know that it isn’t reasonable to feel the earth move under my flip-flops on a daily basis, the tectonic plates creep ever so slowly toward a future configuration. Some days we can feel them, some days it’s a problem, some days a disaster, scientists can even measure these things, but they can only guess when “The Big One” will hit.

Writing: A Love Letter of Sorts

Never fall in love with someone because of the way they write. People are more honest when they write, even if they are not telling the truth their words are manifestations of something veracious with in them. That much authenticity is intoxicating, enrapturing, electrifying, misleading. People do show themselves with their word choice and their characters but the private self that writes, even when you choose to send those words out into the world, is not who appears when the computer shuts off, the pen rests, the typewriter’s keys stop singing. A person will reveal a lot about themselves by the way that they write, their intelligence and humor, their patience and their love. You can’t help but know someone better through their words.

I’ve been thinking about writing and writers this week and even though I know enough not to date them I still want to be surrounded by them. I’ve been thinking about dedication to craft mostly because I joined a new writers group. I looked around DC at a couple of different groups and found one in which I was significantly dragging up the average age and one in which I was dragging it down. In both of these I was not impressed with either the talent of the writers nor the quality of the feedback they gave. My writing group back in the Bay Area set a very high bar for quality of both writing, critique and, most importantly, a sense of community.

One of the things I like most about writing groups is that it satisfies my shameless love of compliments. There is nothing better than having someone tell you are brilliant on an otherwise average Wednesday evening or that your characters really touched their heart, crystallized an allusive thought or made them laugh. I like that the time I spend alone writing can have a positive impact on someone. But what really makes these compliments carry weight (besides the fact that I wish them to be true) is the people who give them. The members of my group back in the Bay and my new group (neither young nor old, but just right) are by and large brilliant but quiet artists who take the ordinary building blocks of our world, language, faces, feelings and landscapes, available to all of us, and construct works of great beauty.

I crave this type of group because they never fail to surprise or inspire me. Some of these writers have been published and some of them will be and should be published in the future. But there are no guarantees that any of what we write will see the light of day or even the dusty back shelf of a book store. The reason that we write is that we love it. That there are certain things that are worth saying and worth exploring even if no one ever knows that this mountain has already been climbed, this terrain has been tread upon before. I think I can safely say that I am in love with the process, the rocks that get in between my toes, the mud that gets all over my clothes, the sweat rolling down the back of my neck from the exertion of it all.

Modern Poetry for the Old Soul

 “The Russian Greatcoat” by Theodore Deppe

While my children swim off the breakwater,

while my wife sleeps beside me in the sun,

I recall how you once said you knew

a sure way to paradise or hell.

Years ago, you stood on the Covington bridge,

demanded I throw my coat into the Ohio-

my five dollar “Russian greatcoat,”

my “Dostoevsky coat,” with no explanations,

simply because you asked.

 

From the height, the man-sized coat fell

in slow motion, floated briefly,

one sinking arm bent at the elbow.

At first I evade the question when my wife asks,

as if just thinking of you were a act of betrayal.

The cigarette I shared with you above the river,

our entrance into the city, your thin black coat

around both our shoulders.  Sometimes I can go

weeks without remembering.  

Me and DC: One Year and Still Going Strong!

DC and I have been together for one year now and while he certainly isn't perfect, he is worth keeping around.  He can be selfish and self-absorbed sometimes and he sometimes he forgets that the rest of the world exists.  But he does care and everything he does, misguided as it can be, is for the common good.  He is a little older than I am, but it gives him character and a stately presence.  Oh DC, it so difficult to say how long a relationship will ever last, but for as long as we are together I promise to love you (though I may flirt with others)!

Hubris: Pride comes just before the fall, the broken bone and the broken ego

When I was a senior in college I broke my ankle, while walking home, stone-cold sober, from a science fair where my roommate won $500, so engrossed were we in tales of her nerdy brilliance and shrieks of joy that I did not pay any attention to the pile of tiny, trecherous rocks in my path.  The street where I broke my leg is just below greek row in the sleepy college town of Pullman, WA and everyone assumed that I had been having a grand old time, drunk and silly and clumsy when I had my little accident.  I did not often seek to correct this assumption because that year I got to thinking I was pretty hot stuff.  I looked good, I felt good,  I was studying something I loved, had many wonderful close friends and these friends and I were practically fighting off interested men (it is a fairly liberal use of the word man apply it to college seniors, but I am going to do it anyway) with sticks.  I think that it is this feeling of power, of control, of beauty and of confidence, a growing supercilious and arrogant nature that caused me to break my leg.  Something inside me knew that I needed to be humbled.  And like Achilles and Caesar, there was pride and then there was a fall.  

It seems I have not learned my lesson.  But where is the rule written that you must apply a lesson once you have learned it.  I have found in life that people are excellent at forgetting, especially the unpleasant things.  And again I fell prey to my own hubris earlier this year.  As anyone who has read my blog knows, I have lived overseas and travelled more than most.  And in this time abroad, I have never had anything stolen except for two bars of Ghiradelli chocolate (a loss to be sure, but not a fatal one) and I have never lost anything of major value ( a sweat shirt, a knife, a hat).  And in a long, rambling conversation about travel and life on the other continents with my friend Ruth, I went on an on about how it was important to be smart when you are a woman traveling abroad alone.  I admitted that there was of course an element of being lucky to staying safe and keeping all of my possessions while on the road, but mostly it was my finely honed senses and strategies which clearly so many have not mastered.  In the next week after this conversation I lost a beautiful and expensive shall from my mother, locked myself out of my apartment twice, lost my access card at my office and had my ipod pick pocketed in the metro.  Though there was no physical fall this time around, I felt truly defeated and all the bravado I had felt, the audaciousness, the self-posession and poise were gone.   I had not, as I had thought, conquered the world.  I couldn't even conquer America and I hadn't figured out things that others could not master, I had been lucky.  

The opposite of hubirs is most certainly humility.  I have gotten a healthy does of that this week as well.  I bought a new dress this week, a black, v-neck, spaghetti strap dress, that fits perfectly and hits just below the knee, the perfect, dress up, dress down, a perfectly timed one-two punch of class and sex appeal.  I look good in this dress.  I have also had a very successful work week and had lots of fun with my friends and been loving the city.  I was almost beginning to feel like the city itself loved me back.  This time again the fall is not literal, but dating (one of the ultimate exercises in optimism) has provided many tiny checks on my ego.  I hope that I am beyond the physical falling onto, into or over things, though I doubt it.  The constant rising and falling of hopes in one thing, but when you add the dress, and the ferocious feeling of fabulousness that accompanies it, it is far to fall when someone is not interested.  But I will do what I have always done, hobble back up to the top of the hill, where I can see everything and hope that maybe I have gotten one or two things right, that maybe I am brazen and maybe someone will like that about me.  

Chris Matthews on Swaziland

This clip is from the Chris Matthew's show Hardball.  Chris was a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland in the 70s.  What I love about this clip, besides the interesting facts and beautiful shots of regions in southern Africa, is the warmth and care you can hear in Matthew's voice as he speaks about the country that he served.  Logically it would follow, or one would hope, that the people that he served would speak this way of him this way.  But what I hear from him, between the lines is all the things his country of service did for him, things that have stuck with him decades later as he continues to visit, educate people in the US and teach his family about his experiences.  It is difficult to describe this feeling without being overly sentimental but there is a deep and abiding fondness for a place that gives you so much knowledge and perspective.  

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From the Essay "Experience" by Emmerson

"We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended and there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight..."

I would like to state for the record, as these posts have times and dates, that I am between my evening activities right now.  I just had a wonderful dinner at Poste and am waiting for a good friend to arrive and stay the weekend.  The weather is perfect, which always makes me want to read the deep thoughts of other.  Thank you Emmerson.  

"Always roaring with a hungry heart much have I seen and known..."-Ulysses by Tennyson

This quote strikes me today, as I reread for the millionth time one of my favorite poems.  There is such a sense of adventure and weight and import and ceremony and knowing in the lines of this poem.  And this poem, this line about the hungry heart seeing and knowing rings true for me this week because I have spent so much time with my friends from Peace Corps.  It is truly a privilege to know them all, to watch how they slowly and quietly conquer the world with intelligence, humor, grace, wit and understanding or the desire to understand which is even more important.  It is that desire to understand, to meet others on their terms, if only for the curiosity of knowing what they might be that I think makes a good volunteer and creates compassion.  I am not really going anywhere with this except to say how lovely and interesting they all are because of how interested they are in life.  

I know from my conversations with them and the way I feel myself that we struggle with life here and I think it is because everyday our experience is contrasted against something else which we have seen and known and must think about.  But the reward for this is all the things we get to know about because we seek.