"therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods, and mountains"

i've been away, getting to know better my home (defined broadly). and now i'm back inside and trying to figure out where to put the loveliness and lessons i've been collecting the past month. isn't this always the trick: to wear our education on our souls, to be changed by the faces stories smells ideas love we encounter, to walk away from our past more enlightened, more enabled, more engaged?

here's what's working to rub my insides round: God loves all his creations. all of them. he loves them in their diversity, in their context, and along the spectrum of their potential.

i'm trying to expand my use of "beautiful" to include biting gnats and warthogs, but in the meantime, these i can't deny:

near vernon.

steven's arch.

coyote gulch.

encore.

encore.

zebra.

calf creek.

antelope island.

encore.

encore.

woods creek.

little mountain.

great salt lake.

spiral jetty.

yurt, uintah mountains.

from charles lamb, master of essay, in "new years eve:"

"I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets.
I would set up my tabernacle here."

go outside! fill your hands with rocks and dirt! let's meet there, under the sky!

remembering

do you ever find that you are forgetting who you are?

tonight i tuned the radio to my girls (nanci, shawn, patty, eva, rosie, joni), and something came back.

i am strong women.
i am commitments and firmly held beliefs.
i am soul.
i am a song to sing loudly.
i am what came before and what will come after.
i am those who love me.

because i'm going out of town from the internet for a while

sometimes i don't have anything to say. amendment: sometimes i don't have anything meaningful to say. where do the words go, and how do they talk the ideas into ditching with them?

sometimes i worry about not having anything to say. (yes, L, me too. all the time.) of course, worrying is pretty par for the "me" course. i am constantly worrying about getting dumber, less funny, more boring, less with it, slower at nertz--basically, i worry i'm losing my edge. an edge is an edge no matter how dull and i'd like to preserve mine. (i guess an edge actually stops being an edge at some point of dullness, right?)

i think this kind of worrying is patriotic. it means i'm relating to the current cultural moment of crisis: is america losing its edge? are we slipping behind?

don't hate me, but i'm not convinced that america needs to stay the superduper power. there are lots of countries that aren't the superduper power, and they do all right. in fact, by many counts, they are happier in those countries than we are here. maybe being unhappy keeps us on the edge. being unhappy could be the mother of invention.

so while worrying about having nothing meaningful to say stresses me out (the stress is compounded, given that success in my near future depends on my capacity to have meaningful things to say), --- SEE! proof. i forgot where that sentence was supposed to go. read it again; it'll leave you hanging (not in a Jack Bauer way but in a grammatical way). that sentence was supposed to be the resolution of this post, the "it's okay that i'm losing my edge because i've still got my teeth" finish!

america, i'm sorry i've let you down.

life has loveliness to sell

i am amazed at how stepping out the door opens my mind. i just walked to campus to run some errands and felt my thoughts warming up, revving, stretching, and taking off. to the green buds popping out of the dark tree trunk like roots from a potato. to the metamorphosis from blossom to leaf that i've never caught mid-act. to the hundreds of times i've walked to school, learned who to be, returned home again. to the next round of graduates, to the way we transition in mass but not really, and to how we all have our own path to find.

"spend all you have for loveliness."

read the rest of the excerpted sara teasdale poem here.

spring. i'm planting flowers in my heart

today i rode my bike a ways away from home. i saw many blooming things, smelled new beginnings, and thought: i could make it spring inside me.

when it's springtime in the rockies*:

1. hope for thaw.
2. bring fragile things out of hiding.
3. plant seeds.
4. nourish.
5. breathe deep deep deep the life.

if, at the beginning of every winter, i feel i've lost everything all over again, every spring convinces me i'll get it all back.


*look up the lyrics to this song. and maybe watch a few videos of it on youtube, like this one here. and think about how much you'd like to have heard my wonderful uncle boss speak about this song at my momma's funeral.

"When it's springtime in the rockies
I am coming back to you
Little sweetheart of the mountains
With your bonny eyes of blue
Once again I'll say "I love you"
While the birds sing all the day
When it's springtime in the rockies
In the rockies, far away."

where the deer and the antelope play

on wednesday, i drove to denver. i'd never been to denver, nor have i spent any time in colorado beyond glenwood springs. the car winded and weaved through beautiful canyons and i thought, this is a wonderful place; maybe even a home place.

denver was nice, but unfamiliar. the mountains were too far away.

today, i drove home. i learned that most of wyoming is not a home place, not yet (except for those acres near dubois where i worked at the ranch and the trails near jackson where i biked a summer.) today, when the car came over the ridge to drop down into heber, the valley appeared to me more beautiful than anything i had seen yet. is the beauty in familiarity or the scene itself? how do i recognize home?

climb on a back that's strong

remember when i posted about that movie katyn? well today i read about this tragedy and i was very sad for the strange coincidence of events. what gets me about this (and the article points this out) is that so many key figures were killed together. i can't fathom that sort of death, the sweeping kind that makes extinct a group or team or race or family or nation or gender. think post wwII america (or any involved countries). think holocaust. think katyn.

i've been at a writing conference all weekend and my brain is stuffed fuller than a mushroom that has been stuffed really full (they taught us about proper metaphor use, clearly.) some of the questions churning up there follow: how should literature (and art generally) deal with or portray incredibly difficult circumstances/themes? what do we do with violence? what is the socially and ethically appropriate response to atrocities?

i wonder this relative to katyn because it was an important movie for me to see, but a difficult movie. in one panel i attended this weekend, the authors suggested that we don't look away from violence, but we do challenge it. we don't leave viewers or readers in the victim position at the end of our art--we give them handholds to find their way out. isn't that a lovely thought?