Adjustment

I want to go camping this weekend. I am tan from the Italian sun, tannest shoulders I've ever had. Blonde streaks in my hair. Feet and legs strong from consecutive 10-mile walking days. I've returned home from Europe without a mobile phone-- it is probably still in the seat-back pocket of seat 18E on Aer Lingus flight 403 from Rome to Dublin. Adapting back to regular American life is a bit stalled, as dreams of cappuccinos from the downstairs cafe on Via Arenula and steamy nights on the cobbled streets of Trastavere, distant sounds of Vespas still swirl before my eyes.

I came back and Boston gave up its 2024 Olympics bid. The Brazilian coffee shop on the neighborhood corner closed and moved into the grocery store across the street. Other than that, everything seems pretty much the same. Except that now we are now losing light every day, and the sun will set before 8 p.m. after this weekend. But summer isn't over yet.

It has been two years since I've hiked over the shoulders of mountains and looked down on sparkling rivers, scanning the banks for a good swimming spot. Sweat and dirt washes off in cool fresh streamwater. We make pepperoni and cheese rollups for lunch. We sleep in our tent on a platform by a beaver-dammed lake, high on the nape of the mountain's neck. There's a bear box and tarp-covered cooking area where we boil water for our Zatarain's rice and sausage dinner.

The simplicity of those things is what I crave. There was simplicity in Europe too, in other ways. The simplicity of never even missing a television or text message or twitter on your phone. The simplicity of not ever using a kitchen or groceries, instead exploring the neighborhood cafes, meeting people and asking for directions, and paying cash for everything. Yesterday morning I went to the grocery store for milk and cereal, and was sad that I would have to eat in my own house from now on, away from the sparkling life of local meeting spots.

When I was readying to board my flight to Boston in the Dublin international terminal, and I realized that I left my phone behind, before the customs check, in the last plane, I was horrified that all 600 photographs of our 12-day adventure in Europe were most likely vanished from my life. I didn't really think much about the apps, the texting and calling capabilities, the google maps that I so frequently depend on. Now that I have resigned myself to never seeing it again, I am reassured by the thought that though the pictures are gone, the experiences and memories are not. The practice and passion I found in photographing in a journalistic style, especially documenting the experience of my parents on their first ever journey abroad, will remain. And further, it's a blessing that I don't have to return to the isolation of modern life quite so quickly. I will have a few weeks of waiting and wondering, and hopefully savoring the time I have without a screen to look at, without a social distancing crutch, without convenience that precludes the necessity to ask for help, information, directions.

Then I realize how much of our lives will not be afforded this break from the oppression of technology-derived experiences. When else will we have the chance to experience the world naked and face-to-face?

For the next four days I'll use my laptop to look for jobs, and make to-do lists for cleaning and organizing the house, and finally write those wedding thank yous that my mother has shot me withering stares about. But perhaps this weekend we can drive up North and forget this world for a little bit longer. Using a trail map and a compass, we'll turn off any dependence on GPS or wifi. We'll be surprised by bends in the trail that we couldn't have known about beforehand. We'll say hello to fellow hikers who march placidly in the other direction. We'll listen for the wood thrush that beckoned us to our campsite two years ago in the failing light that spilled over the wooden boardwalk of the swampy trail. We'll bend over and inspect ghost-colored indian pipe poking up through the mud. We'll meet the pleasant hut caretaker who spends his days high in the hills who knows how. We'll sleep with our backs straight on the hard ground, and toss and turn and wonder what tomorrow will bring, hoping to find a hidden pool for drifting, face-up, contemplating the sky, whiling away the rest of the world.

Coffee shop Monday

Atomic Bean Cafe, Central Square.

Reading about the social, political, and economic issues brought on by Hurricane Katrina. This year will be the 10th anniversary of the storm.

Emailing a student an article about the riots in response to police brutality in Baltimore, an issue he's talked about and seems intrigued by.

Contemplating what's next in my life, and how I can find time and passion for blogging again. Supposed to be planning and grading, now in our 3rd to last week of school. Fantasizing about coming to this same cafe without a load of papers to give feedback on, to sit and work away on articles, curriculum plans, maybe a novel. And looking forward to working on garden curriculum for Somerville Public Schools this summer through the Urban Agriculture Ambassadorship I am currently completing, thanks to our mayor.

In the meantime, lately, I've been taking walks to soak up all the spring things that are happening.

New lime green leaves popping out of dark ones on rhododendron shrubs. People stopping to smell white britches-shaped flowers on the Lowell Street bridge. Finding Somerville's very own Ponte Vecchio with its 5 "love locks" hanging from the fence of the Cedar Street bridge. Curious-looking rock on the side of the new part of the bike path, dense, dark rock with flaky layers. Is it sedimentary, which is supposed to be unusual here? Or is it metamorphic shale?

Also on Cedar Street, I've been seeing a woman painting a mural that looks like a big branching tree on the circular pavement. The other day, 3 people stopped by, seeming to be meeting the artist for the first time, and began helping with the project. A little googling helped me to find out the project is being funded by Somerville Arts Council and led by artist Crystal Burney. She's inviting community members to help on two consecutive Saturday mornings in June, including this coming Saturday. Maybe I'll join.

Sunlight and rain

Being in Somerville after this winter feels like a brand new experience. Spring comes every year, yes, but not like this, not for me. Describing it as coming out of hibernation is an understatement. It is more like being born again. Learning how to walk again, without heavy boots. And how to interact with the world outside your doors again.

We had some hot days in May, reaching the mid-90s at times. And then this week, the rain finally came. As I walked home from yoga on Monday evening, I admired the beauty of the wet seeds and leaves stuck to the bike path. Everything was being washed and hydrated.

After three days, the sun returned, but not the heat. There's an autumn-like crispness in the air. The difference though is the amazing bounding up of everything green, pink, and purple, like these peonies on my street. My mom's favorite flower.

Rooting my feet in the Earth first, then I can reach out toward the air and sky

During yoga class today, Holland, the instructor, made a point of focusing us on our body's connection with the Earth as we sat with our legs crossed and our spines extending up to the ceiling. She stressed that without a good foundation, your practice will be unsteady, no matter how far and hard you reach up and out. She reminded us again when we hopped to the front of our mats after spring-loading our knees in a down-dog. "Be nice to the Earth, and try to land softly," she said. Later, after sivasana, we rolled to our sides, curled into a fetal position, and connected our foreheads to our mats. I felt this flood of gratitude spill out of me toward the Earth as I curled up against it and pressed my brow down into it. Thank you for supporting me, I told the Earth.

I remembered this as a I walked home, and with each contact between clunky winter boot and cement sidewalk, I felt more gratitude for the support of the Earth below me. With my strong foundation in the ground, I felt comfortable and happy looking up and around me at the busy street, the dirty snowbanks, the newly twilit sky deep after 7 p.m. I felt unhurried and unworried by the thrum of life around me. This connection to something nonhuman gave me a brand new sense of relief in a period of time in which I was struggling to find it from within myself and from the other humans around me. 

I decided: sometimes it isn't other people, or ourselves, who can heal us. Sometimes health needs to come straight up through the Earth and into our toes. And then we need to accept it and allow it to grow through us.

Soak up the snow

From David Epstein's Weather Wisdom blog, on this historic winter of snow:

"Whatever your personal take on this, everyone is connected, because most of us can't escape the weather. We often use the term "hardy" as a way for New Englanders to describe ourselves. We are agile and nimble, smart and innovative, we will keep on shoveling and pushing through, that is what we do. When summer arrives, we’ll still talk about it, brag about it, show pictures of it and recount how collectively, how we shoveled, pushed, climbed, and moved all that snow making it through the Great Snow of 2015."

That and:

"This area many of us live and work in is a leader in so many arenas. Millions of us go to daily jobs feeling the pressure of performing for our co-workers, our boss or self-imposed ideas on taking our career to a higher level. Now, the snow has just put a halt to much of it. Sure you can work from home, but the meeting you had yesterday or today is cancelled. While the day off might seem relaxing for some, stress levels may have actually increased due to the lack of being able to get stuff done. Students are missing school, teachers aren’t able to teach, a house that was being built down the road halted construction and the state’s largest mass transit system isn’t even working.

"In 1987 when the stock market crashed it looked like a really big deal and in many ways it was. But nearly 28 years later that dip has been smoothed by time and is barely noticeable on a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial over the past 100 years. At some point in the future, maybe next week, maybe next year, all that is being missed during this Great Snow of 2015 will be barely a memory. You’ll likely remember the snowbanks, the shoveling, the days off from school, but most of the other stuff just fades with time."

 This is what I was trying to say in a recent work meeting as we were "checking in", which we typically do at the start of a meeting. I wasn't feeling great. Pretty stressed actually. Frustrated by the huge task of getting to and from Framingham from Somerville by car through snow clogged streets and the worst part: our frozen driveway piled high on either side with banks. But I held up a snowflake token and said, I want to remember to appreciate this time and this snow, and accept and appreciate it as an emphatic reminder that Nature is in charge here. Though we struggle and stress through it, we can't change it. And what's better, why not ENJOY it? How amazing is this in terms of a meteorological wonder? A defining and challenging time for our community? Let's study it, be patient with it, and soak up this time. Because we're going to want to tell stories about it for years to come. Might as well live the story fully while we're in it, so we can linger on those little details, tell of the plot twists and turns, and hook our young audiences in those future tellings.

Photo from my mom: Their front yard in Abington, Mass. The lamppost is virtually buried.

Snow days

It has been 6 snow days in a row, and I'm using them as a chance to step back, slow down, and work on accepting the idea of anti-progress, while at the same time looking for lessons in the simple things in life. Here's what I did and what I learned in that time.

1. Started using Twitter. On @thewhistletree of course. I am still in the trial phase of being a twitter-person (is there an consensus on twitter terminology yet?), and I see both pros and cons.

Pro: I feel super connected to the pulse of life in all the places I'm interested (not as connected obviously in arenas of life that I don't seek out and follow, of course, but how much would I really want to spend my time reading things that aren't relevant to me?). I have a rapid-fire changing news feed that always gives me something to look at and occupy my brain cells, and it is sans-baby pics (it's like I get to start an all new Facebook account and selectively choose only the most interesting people to be friends with). And there's no facade that connecting with someone means you're "friends" or socially connected other than on the web.

Con: There is always a rapid-fire changing news feed for me to occupy my brain cells. This is probably the only con, but it's big. I quit Facebook because I thought it sucked away my attention from important things and weirded me out how much I was being updated on the mundane details of the lives of people I'm not very close to. I thought this was a bit poisonous, tilting me to worry about how my life measures up compared to other people at my stage of life. Twitter changes that in making the issues I follow much more pointedly important to me and makes me feel pretty good about spending my time on them. However, I still see some opportunities to fall into the same old trap of becoming down on myself for not winning an award for writing the best feature article of the year or not applying to all the cool field research internships that I keep seeing pop up. But shouldn't I just be able to avoid this by changing my mindset toward constantly judging myself and my accomplishments? It certainly doesn't seem like avoiding all social media is the answer. There would always be ways to be critical of myself.

Diagnosis: I will keep tweeting for now! I think it will just be a process of discipline to put the phone down and pick up a book or open up the laptop or pick up the stack of grading. I will get better with practice. For now, I'm pretty psyched about twitter so watch me tweet away and if you've got twitter tips and lessons for me, a greenhorn twitterer, please send them my way. I keep feeling like I am doing it wrong and I'm not quite sure how to best go about learning twitter-speak syntax norms.

2. Painted almost the entire house. Six rooms to be exact. And it was a lot of work. My husband and I went at it over the past three weeks and essentially finished it off in one marathon day this past weekend. It involved learning how best to preserve paintbrushes, balancing breaks with the ticking time-clock on paint-drying, learning where the paint tends to splatter, little expletives when we made boo-boos, a refreshing feeling when switching from large-scale rolling to the precision work of edging, and an engineering and geometry challenge of painting a 20 foot stairwell using the articulating ladder and 2x4 my dad lent us. (This resulted in one little scary accident when the ladder slipped off a stair and bringing Santosh surfing on the 2x4 down the stairs as the ladder bashed me in the shins, but we're both OK. It taught us to be more vigilant, and the rest of the time we pretty much mastered the art of teamwork between climbing & painting and spotting roles. I'd argue the spotter role was harder...). Finally at 2 a.m. that night, I pushed my way through the bedroom furniture that was congregated in the middle of the room and climbed into bed, paint speckles still hardened in my hair, and tried to fall asleep amid the paint fumes. It was pretty hard actually, and my sleep schedule is still completely messed up because of it. But waking up the next morning to completely different colored rooms was pretty cool. All that was left to do was take all the blue tape down, with one more trip up the scary ladder into the stairwell, and then packing up the apparatus in the car for me to return to my parents when I drove down that night for the Superbowl.

Lesson here: setting up a home is hard work. And it never stops! Now we are on to trying to figure out where to hang pictures and posters, and what to do about our complete lack of an entryway in this super snowy slushy winter. Is there a point at which it becomes easier? I do feel that now that the painting is done, it's more tweaking and organizing that we're doing. Like finally finding a way to file away receipts before they become crumpled inky paper monsters on the dining room table, and organizing the stolen hotel shampoos my husband likes to hoard in rescued shoe boxes from our growing cardboard trash monster.

3. Shoveled my fair share. I finally ventured out around 4:30 yesterday to put a dent in the shoveling as the sun set and while my husband finished work. There was a lot of snow! It's perplexing to waddle through knee deep snow and think, how do I make this into a smooth, nicely manicured sidewalk space? How do I uncover the car from the giant snowdrifts that somehow surrounded it on every side? Well, it's just a question of repetition. The laws of physics say if I keep carrying snow from one spot to another spot, eventually all the snow in the first spot will be in the second spot. So that's what I did. First I found a good Spot, the only one left really, at the (newly designated) "end" of the driveway. (Really just halfway down, since it'd be crazy to shovel the whole thing for just one car parked at the street end!). All the other spots were already towering above me, and I couldn't reach or throw snow high enough to use them as my depositories. So, sherpa-like, I picked up snow, I walked it around the car, and I pitched it into the lovely depths of the driveway (soon enough, that tower became too big too). It was daunting how repetitive the task would be, and how never-ending it felt, but it was gratifying to know that the task would inevitably be accomplished if I just kept going. In this stage of my life when every task seems to lack any clear guaranteed road to results, this felt so refreshingly unusual. So I kept going, and going, and going. Stopping every once in a while to check my phone, taking breaks, not rushing. It was nice.

4. Read a book for a whole day, and finished it. The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer. Biggest takeaway: I'm not the only one who has voices in my head saying "get a job" and "doing something that doesn't have a steady paycheck isn't allowed!" AKA, anything otherwise is slacking, not being a responsible adult. Amanda had them, and she ignored them, and made up her own ideas of success. She just went out and did her thing, and figured out how to get the money along the way. She trusted others to pay for her contributions, and in turn, worked her tail off to live up to her supporters' expectations. She probably worked ten times harder than most people who work 9-to-5's for a paycheck from a faceless corporate office. Because she knew who she was doing it for. And then in turn, those supporters supported her ten times harder than any stale business transaction ever would. Why does this ring so true to me? Why does this feel like a revolutionary idea in our capitalist, cut-throat world? I've been so at a loss for answers as to why life feels so hamster-wheel-like. Work, get money, buy stuff, try to de-stress, eat and sleep. The Art of Asking starts to scratch at the surface of this problem. What is a more authentic way for money to change hands? Or even, what is a more authentic way for us to use our support systems for our basic needs and stop our desperate cycle of scrambling to do everything all by ourselves? It's a lonely, lonely way to get what you need in life, I think. I think it would solve more than one of our problems if we leaned on each other more to get the things we need. I think I would really like living in a world like Amanda's, where people are not afraid to ask each other for help and joyfully rush to one another's aid when they hear the call.

Snow Days summary: it's been pretty great. I take the gift you've given us, Mother Nature, of time. I'm still struggling to be OK with soaking it up without judgment or guilt, but I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to practice. It's OK with me if you keep on snowing. Every once in awhile we humans and our progress need to be put in our places. I think the more reminders of this, the better.

Girls in peacetime want to dance

So excited about this album. Listening to Belle and Sebastian, for me, is like a warm hug from the best moments of the past. March 30 at House of Blues.