Wandered around the island, looking for my video partner so I could film him and a friend fixing a windmill. They were off-schedule so I ended up taking pictures instead.
If you want to read about going to Norway, which was mostly in December, you can find it under "December" in the Archives (see above right), or click here.
Happy Birthday, Vruba!
Cleaned house. A troupe of philosophers is due to descend on us, fresh from a conference organized by a friend. We'll host one of them, a man I met in St Petersburg a couple of years ago, who specializes in the brain changes that happen when one meditates. We think that he will be happier if he has clean sheets.
Wandered around the island, looking for my video partner so I could film him and a friend fixing a windmill. They were off-schedule so I ended up taking pictures instead.
Just read an article on torture. Muslim detainees (don't you love that word? George Orwell would have a field day) are being questioned by scantily clad women, or women who claim to be menstruating. Well, I condemn torture. That's an easy one. This article raises juicy questions. Is it torture if you wouldn't mind it being done to you, but someone else considers it horrible? It certainly makes it easier to pretend that you're not doing anything wrong. But if it hurts your victim, it's torture, and wrong.
I wonder about religions that claim that God is all-wise, all-good, and then go on to fix the problems he has created. So, God created pigs and squid, but he screwed up. They're unclean. And God created women but he screwed up there, too. We're unclean.
I do understand the notion of "unclean." Everyone has thoughts that are best left not acted upon. Maturity isn't eliminating bad thoughts, it's acting wisely even when your thoughts are foolish. I can even understand how a religion might claim that certain actions that I personally don't disapprove of are unclean. So far, fine. But as soon as something that somebody does not have control over is called unclean, then there's a problem. To menstruate is not a choice, to be born Untouchable is not a choice, to be homosexual is not a choice (I know that's last is being debated, but the biology is clear). I think it's time that religions grew up and distingushed between things that one is born with and those that are a choice.
Got up early to return the video camera to my partner. Spent the morning struggling with computer issues. Mine is too small to accept the right programs, or to work with too many movie clips at a time. So we searched for a more powerful computer. Expensive.
At home, worked on Spanish and clearing a log out of the building site and burning disks of stuff that can live outside of my computer. Cleaned all the food cupboards out. But if I did that, why is there a bigger mess in the kitchen than before? Can anyone explain that?
Yeesh. Just read about our president's agenda for the next four years, but in The New Yorker, which isn't right wing. I don't want to say that it's left wing, because I think of it as reasonable more than political. That is, its editorial policy is to examine trends and events using reason as one of the tools. I don't think that reason enters into the Bush way of thinking, nor into the current right wing thinking in the US.
I don't say this because I disagree with right wing principles, although, as applied in the public arena, I generally do disagree with them. (In private, I'm pretty conservative, but that's as applied to my own life, not how I think laws that apply to others should be made).
After klezmer music, one of the audience (yes, we did have an audience of two!) stayed late to discuss politics. I've been discussing politics with a right-wing fundamentalist neighbor (whom I enjoy very much), and had a realization about his views lately. Because he's a fundamentalist, he has had to swallow a lot of things that are contradicted by evidence. For example, the Bible says that the world has four corners supported by pillars, and those of us who have flown in an airplane say otherwise. The age of the universe can be calculated to come out the same from several sets of different data, while using Biblical assertions comes out with an age that all solid evidence says is too young. In addition, he's had to believe in things that he does not believe in. For example, he does not condone slavery although the Bible implicily does. While he does think Leviticus is right about homosexuals, he is fine about shaking hands with menstruating women and not performing the many ritual cleansings and prayers that are given equal weight. He would be shocked if he saw Jesus knock over moneylenders' tables today.
The result of these difficlt mental gymnastics is that he cannot accept evidence as a means of understanding the world. During the presidential campaign, he told me that "there's no way of telling which one of those guys is lying." I protested, saying that you could look up the record, watch old news clips, or do other forms of research. He was completely unconvinced. He voted for Bush, not because he agreed with what Bush said or because he wanted his policies implemented. He had no confidence that what Bush said had any relation to what he would do, nor that one policy would be any different than another policy. He voted for Bush because Bush didn't vacillate. I argued 1) if the thing he isn't vacillating about is something you disagree with, that's a danger signal; and 2) if you count lying as vacillating, then Bush does nothing but. But what I was doing was appealing to reason, which is not a decision-making tool that he can allow himself to use.
The Spink said that if you do something that you know is wrong, and lie to cover it up, then you can feel a trash pile grow in your brain. You have to behave honorably to clean that trash pile up. But if you don't, then you get used to living in a pile of garbage.
Winter. Short days. Lots of sleep. I dreamed that lots of people were crowding around me. I had three wishes, in the form of sunflower seeds. I ate one, and said, "I wish that whatever the next two wishes are will benefit the maximum number of people and harm the minimum of people." Now that is just too, too earnest, even if it was in a dream. I should have wished for the ability to talk with animals, or window trim for my house, or something frivolous but satisfying. Too late now.
Spent the morning writing a proposal to do a fundraising video for the county's land trust. It will be a great thing, especially if I learn how to run a video camera and the editing software in the next coupla days.
Planted daffodils and moved plants out of the way of the new path. More burn pile. Fiddle night!
Spent the day on a burn pile. I love 'em and hate 'em. On the hate side, is that they release the carbon dioxide stored in the wood back into the atmosphere, as well as particulate matter. On the love side, is that fires are incredibly cool. Who would have thought of incandescent gas? I mean, if you were the one who designed the universe, would it have occurred to you? And then, there are all those stumps on our land.
We have been slowly cutting trees for the past ten years. The first few were to make a house site. I think the boys still remember when The Spink was rolling around on a fleece one rainy week while the three of us dug out a stump in the future garden site. The garden now only has three big stumps left in it. Every year, I build a fire on top of one of the most obnoxious stumps and keep it going until life intervenes. Since stumps burn less readily than the tops of trees, some of these old burn sites still have charred lumps on them. But I keep doing it because it's a chance to get rid of what woody debris we don't leave lying around for bird habitat.
Had a pleasant dinner with an invited guest, his small daughter, who is a pirate ("Hey. Julie. You know um asldkfjsd;ljfsaldkjf?" I asked for clarification. "Hey. Julie. Hey. You know how much a pirate charges for ear piercing Julie it's a buck an ear! Hey. Julie."), and an univited but mostly welcome guest, who ate the half of the lasagne that we had intended for leftovers for the next few days.
The Piano Player came by and we pounded out some jolly contradance tunes. Then we and The Spink dyed each other's hair purple. David left in a fit of primness.
There's a berm between the beach and the wetlands at Loon Cove. The wetlands are flooded and the pipes draining the wetlands are clogged. Gardens are flooded, and a toolshed's several inches underwater. We spent some time digging in the dusk on the beach, trying unsuccessfully to find the drain heads.
I'm sitting on Orcas just outside the library (closed) on a be-drizzled park bench. It's under a tree, in case you're worried about my laptop. The occasion is the imminent high school recital, at which The Piano Player will be playing one of Yann Tiersen's babbling brook pieces.
Spent the morning in bed, reviewing half the Spanish grammar I ever knew. I have this love/hate relationship with correspondence courses. It's so much easier sitting in a classroom. There, you seem to absorb the material simply by presenting the raw physical matter of your body. Doing the work alone, on the other hand, means it's all up to you. The rich, wet world of reality has been pared down to flat paper and ink.
I remember Sister Corinne Marie de Hoyos, a peppery little woman with a deeply lined face and feral black eyes, lining us up under the suffering Jesus at Immaculate Heart High School. We were doing reflexive pronouns. The first girl would point her finger at the girl across from her and shout, -!A mi! and the other girl would yell back, -!me! This would go down the line: -!a ti! -!te!; -a Usted! -!se! I only took one semester from her before I graduated, but man, I've got reflexive pronouns in my tissues. And no, I'm not going to invent clever things I can shout in my bedroom tomorrow so that I get the healthful benefit of kinesthetic learning. I'm just going to lament that Sister Corrinne Marie isn't in my bedroom along with my Spanish book.
Teachers in Washington are supposed to take 15 credits every 5 years. I do most of mine through the University of Wisconsin's distance education program. The courses are meaty and I've enjoyed the enforced studiousness. I just signed up for World Music and Spanish 2a, partly because I'll be teaching in March and want subject matter.
Rivers on the mainland are flooding. We don't have rivers here, but the wetlands just over the beach berm is full of water. We picked our way through in a pouring rain and walked to the point for the COASST beach survey. It was like Isaiah. The rough places were made plain, the sand cliffs had exfoliated to make the cobbled beaches sandy, the sandy beaches had been scoured down to the cobbles. One of the beach houses no longer has front steps, or a way to climb up to the door. Sally's nifty bathtub contraption, with cemented rock fireplace and quaint looking chimney is now perched on an overhang.
Birds may have died in the storm, but we saw none. Just some oversized oyster shells and Sally, dirty Sally. No doubt somebody will write a song about her and her tub.
Klezmer night!
We were talking about Hendrik Hertzberg's piece in The New Yorker, where he gives the horrendous death tolls of disasters besides the tsunami; deaths from AIDS, the wars in Congo and Sudan, and malnutrition. One and a half million per year from diarrhea, a horrible way to die. We can rally behind relief efforts for victims of natural disasters because we aren't complicit in those disasters, at least.
My neighbor observed ruefully that we can't really call ourselves civilized. "Ah, but yes we can," I said sententiously. It's because, as civilization moves along, it includes improving the quality of life and the means to do so. Since the Enlightenment, it's included the notion of a common humanity. Since the hippies, it's included the Gaia concept. Just because some people lag behind, is no reason to say that civilization is a hollow concept.
A friend once suggested that it would be a good thing if humans agreed to go extinct. On the contrary, I think of us as part of Creation. I think that with each step in complexity, the Universe is more cherished and appreciated.
That's good.
Fiddle night!
Outside our door was a headless snowman. We followed the footprints in the slushy snow to several other snowmen, ending at the boat where a headless snowman in a yellow slicker was standing at the tiller in a pile of slush.
Later on at the bay, we watched fifteen harbor seals accompanied by a mixed flock of 10 Western grebes and 20 gulls cruise along happily chowing down on a huge school of fish. Herring, probably. I've lived here fifteen years and remember big schools of herring from fifteen years ago. Back then, you could spot the herring because flocks of maybe a hundred gulls would gather screaming around them, causing the fish to gather in a tight protective ball. Then we stopped seeing herring balls. Now, there are far fewer gulls. The rumor is that the growing population of bald eagles is reducing the number of gulls. At the same time, the ban on shooting seals is allowing their population to rise.
I marvel that within such a short time, such a large change can be seen. I mentioned this to an old-timer who repeated the same tragic story I've heard from so many other people. He said that back in the 1970's, they used to be able to get abalone, oysters, crab, shrimp, salmon, herring, or halibut any time they were hungry. It took three years, just about, for each of those populations to be effectively wiped out by commercial fishermen. The abalone, oysters, and halibut seem to be locally extinct, but the others are just no longer available to casual wildcrafters. You have to search for them.
Pisses me off.
Everything's still frozen. David seems to be fine and toddled off to work. Had a visitor regarding school, did morning chores, The Spink rushed off to hang out with a friend (one of her first times leaving home for that purpose. I'd thought kids did that as a matter of course, but mine seem to have to wait until adolescence for it).
Started a new watercolor and listened to a French Canadian jazz station for a while. Stoner blues. Not to my taste at all; caffeine is my drug of choice. Switched to a Canadian Carribbean station, keeping to the pot theme but I do love reggae.
The Piano player arrived. His playing's gotten a notch better. He's working on Yann Tiersen's melodies from the movie Amelie. We had a peak music moment when I persuaded him to try the Amelie riffs as we played contradance tunes together. They're a bit too sweet to use all the time, but perfect for some of the more lovely dances. St. Timothy's March, for example.
David's back was bothering him, so we went on a very slow walk. He dropped me off at the pond near school, where a good portion of the island children and their parents were ice skating. It began to snow.
That evening, a couple of my former students dropped by to watch Hero, a cinematographiccaly perfect Chinese magic-sword movie. If you don't mind seeing the same characters die in several different stylized ways, I highly recommend it. Swish! Ting! Fwoosh!
I had inexplicably promised a bunch of yarn to a visitor, so I spun some really grotty wool while the kids played Settlers of Catan until midnight. It started to thaw. Drip drip dripdripdrip.
After yesterday, awoke with a resolve to get various household tasks done. Keep the fire going, finish the watercolor, clean out half a file drawer (medical and veterinary records, credit card PIN numbers, warrantees, car repair receipts) wash a few dishes (not a lot, as our water line is seriously frozen and it will be Monday before a thaw), build a fire in the cabin and paint one of its pink walls white, clear out some of the "I'll just put it here for now" debris that seems to collect in there; all to the very loud clarinet of The Klezmer Conservancy Band, followed by the more jazzy Klezmatics, capped off by the scratchy Naftule Brandwein recordings dating from around when mom was born.
I timed it so that I'd finish washing the paint roller and brush just in time to leave for school, where I might or might not be getting a piano lesson. (Now that Dave Barry has retired, I cannot ask Mr Grammar Person the following important question: does English have a future subjunctive tense? "Would or would not?" Or do I just use "might?" I once owned an English verb tense book, presented to me by the Moscow English teacher who wrote it, that claimed there are almost a hundred tenses in English. He had them all laid out in charts, but it was difficult for me to understand since he had gotten the related idioms wrong.)
So, I collected my knitting and a handful of books to donate or loan to school staff, and another handful of piano books, and charged out onto the icy pathway. A truck pulled up with David in the passenger seat. He stumbled out and lurched towards the house.
As the story came out, he'd gotten up at three in the morning (I kind of remember that), eaten some pasta, and started his day. At 8 he went off in the boat, took people hither and yon, and headed back home against the wind and tide. Close to home, he realized he was too chilly to think. He tried to warm up in the boat cabin, but ended up having one of his passengers take the boat in for docking. Concerned people insisted that he spend the next hour in the Post Office, warming up but not moving too much. If you're hypothermic, you shouldn't let the cold blood from your extremities get to your heart before your torso warms it up. His chill was exacerbated by the fact that yesterday, he threw his back out to the point of steady pain but not immobility, and managed to fix it by walking around Friday Harbor, around home, and around home again. Lots of unaccustomed miles, not enough metabolic fodder, near-freezing spray, and a wind chill well below zero.
So, that was the rest of the day. I was advised to get into bed with him and warm him up flesh-to-flesh, but, due to my having a thyroid condition that makes me chillier than other people, and him having a hot metabolism, I was actually colder than he was. So I built up the fire and did things with hot water bottles and cats. At one time, the house was filled with six other guys, concerned that he was okay, and finding other things as an excuse to come visit. By evening, David was under four blankets, one cat, and two hot water bottles on the futon near the stove, having a meeting about uncapped wells and parking lots. He'd finally stopped shaking. The Spink and I ate gingersnaps.
Went to Friday Harbor today to see about printing good quality images of the pictures I took in Norway. Spent pretty much the whole time at the print shop, trying to format in such a way that their computer could read my files. Finally decided that I needed to get PDF995 and PageMaker 7.0. Later, I downloaded the first, and tomorrow will look for the second, which is somewhere (I think) in the rubble by the computer table.
Sat in a cafe and wrote part of Chapter 10 (admit it. You'd forgotten about that project.) The topic is whether it's worth it to do art. Amazing how that works.
Read the last chapter of Dealing With Dragons by Patricia Wreade (a good read!) to a kid who had been climbing the walls of the boat but stopped, temporarily, for as long as the chapter lasted.
Slushy day. Dinked around the house stupidly, not able to fix on any one of the many things available. Worked on the watercolor a bit, read half of Mark Childress' Crazy in Alabama, set in 1965. Dink, dink.
Finally decided to use that peckish, unfocused prowling energy to clean out my files. Well, that sucked it up! Got two paper bags full of old papers. I can call it done, or take it to the next, grimmer level, where I scan in old photos and save them on a disk, and sort through old letters and put them in some kind of album. Not very likely, it's true.
Boggle with two visitors in the evening. I'll write a college recommendation for one of them. A big responsibility, to think that someone else's future depends on my ability to write about him well.
Yesterday, David and I had a discussion about whether art has value.
I can tell it's a good question because I'm not really sure how it does. I'm sure that it does, but it's no fair to argue like that.
People do need art. You can tell, because children sing and draw constantly if they're not shamed out of it. You can tell, because even the most sterile of offices tend to fill up with Muzak and clever things that sit on computer monitors. Art makes you see things in a new way. Everyone craves novelty, if it's safe. And the fact that art has a form - a square canvas or a three minute, two octave song - makes it physically, if not intellectually safe.
I think that the effect of art on its consumers has been adequately addressed over the years. What seems important to me, is that creativity is universal. I think that people who suppress their creativity too much end up eating away at others or themselves. So, whether or not anyone needs to be a consumer of art, I think that everyone needs to create it.
Here, I'm thinking of art as a pretty broad thing. One of my friends is a gifted interior decorator. Another works on elegance in computer programming. Whatever.
Am I saying that the product doesn't matter as much as the process? That's true for me, usually. But no, I think it's that both process and product matter. We need art in order to stay balanced.
We were walking through the feta-cheese snow (texture, not saltiness). "Tell me about your earlier remarks about art," I asked David.
"I think it's better to be a good husband than to produce some fantastic work of art," he said. "Even Mozart. The world wouldn't be much different if he had never been. What we need more of is compassionate people. I'm a little tired of all these great artists that are jerks."
I admit that I never thought of it that way; that, if you had to choose, you might choose kindness over awareness. Not that I disapprove, but the way of framing the question.
I, too, have noticed that a lot of great artists have been described as assholes. Why? It seems to me that there could be a number of factors. For one thing, I think that people have to work at maturing. Toddlers enter into this work with vim, but, as a teacher, I've seen that amongst school-age kids, there are already some who seem to have given up. Perhaps, if you are told that you are a great person, you are more likely to relax in the never-ending struggle to improve yourself.
There's the mystique of the artistic temperament, too. Perhaps some artists feel that in order to be truly artistic, they have to act eccentrically or immaturely. I think there's some truth to that. I suspect that artists are more flambuoyant and/or more sensitive than the general population. Part of art involves thinking outside of cliches, part of it involves being attuned to subtleties. Both those qualities can be drastically misinterpreted, and both can be warped.
Another problem arises from the committment that is necessary to complete a work of art. At a certain point, you either have to throw yourself into the work, ignoring the needs of people around you, or end up with a mediocre piece (I think this is why there are fewer famous women artists than men).
I think that a good artist has to keep open to the promptings of the unconscious. There's a fine line between insanity and sensitivity. I once sat with a person who was having a psychotic episode, and didn't recognize it for what it was, even though, in retrospect, he was clearly dangerous to himself and others. Aside from pure dumbness on my part, this was because I've worked with kids and adolescents for so long. If you think about it, the mood swings, inappropriate behavior, and other oddities of your basic child would be crazy in an adult. And because I'd been doing intense dreamwork at the time, and I hadn't completely returned to the world of daily reality. This convinced me that daily reality and psychotic unreality lie along the same continuum. There's no single line that divides the one from the other.
But finally, it could be that people in general are pretty skanky. If you sit smack in the mainstream of a culture, your quirks don't really show because culture is designed to deal with ordinary blokes. But if you push the envelope by being an artist or a politician, your faults no longer slide along with the general framework of the culture and you stick out. People make remarks.
The topic for today is loneliness. After spending a month in Astri's space, the sudden friendship vacuum aches.
Over the years, I've made strong connections to a lot of different people. Some of the connections have been one-way, such as the ones that develop between a reader and a wise author. Others have a natural lifespan. One of the strongest friendships I had was with a great-uncle that I only met once, but with whom I carried on an intense correspondence for about a decade before he died. I bonded closely with my children, but part of that was a promise to let go when it was time (although I hope that, once the mother-child nuances have faded, that my children will re-open the close friendship that we once had. I know it's possible, as I developed a strong and valuable friendship with my Dad after our toxic earlier relationship had healed).
Most of my friendships are confined to a particular situation. They are fun or educational or useful within, usually, clear limits. I can't easily imagine hanging out with the "current events" friend and the "pleasant card game" friend in the same room, for example. In some ways, these friendships are more relaxing than more integrated ones, because I know what to expect.
On days like today, I wonder if anything further is ever possible. If the sense that we get of communion is a fiction biologically designed to keep us going long enough to take care of our progeny.
On days like today, I'm reminded that the warmth of friendship and tribal affiliation is just one way of looking at it. From another stance, we're each alone and unreachable. Even within our own heads, the unintegrated portions of our psyche don't, so to speak, see eye-to-eye.
What's worthy is to keep trying for connection. Just as, today, I see futility, so, on another day, the unforced pleasure of friendship and belonging will define the world.
Ahh. This is the reallll Northeaster. An inch of snow in the morning, lovely wind, David home all day. Two walks, a third of a watercolor.
Lovely day. Awoke to a spit of snow, then same of rain. Spent the morning unpacking, the afternoon fussing around the garden; moved rose branches to the compost heap, moved some dirt away from the still-unfinished concrete pour.
I'm in seat 36B, 33,000 feet above the Canadian Rocky Mountains as I write this. Outise the window, it's -83 degrees F. Ice overlays the farms and dendritic rivers north of here, and to the south, the soft blue-green furze of the mountains is peeled off in disturbingly regular icy clear cuts. Almost home.
We played a few final games of Boggle last night, as those Russian monks that Astri's mom keeps squeezed in her CD player braided their song. We tried to sleep before the alarm rang at 3:00 to go to the airport, but I at least lay drowsing in the subArctic night, listening to my heartbeat.
It's another cusp, the change from here to there. My heartbeats midwifed the kinds of thoughts that you get when things are changing again..
If I know I'm going to have a long uninterrupted down time, I tend to go hang out with the spirit creatures I've met during dreams or shamanic journeying. From the little I've read, it seems that I'm doing it "wrong." Much of what I've read has to do with healings, lifestyle questions, and the like. I tend to use my intellect and mundane experience for lifestyle questions more than spirit creatures. And healing seems both implausible and presumptuous. Setting aside my rationalistic doubts, I would want a clear statement from the other person that they wanted a healing to be attempted.
I suppose what I do is to use the spirit world as a framework in which to collect significance, usually in the form of artistic images. This time, there was a lot of free-form clothing design, crafts ideas, interior decoration, and a painting of the recent tsunami with a benevolent looking (but surely psychotic?) guardian angel hovering over it. I can't imagine having the sociopathic courage to paint it... but maybe I will, if I can make more sense of it than just recording the active malice of God.
Sort of like the gnostic idea that since Oneness is bliss, then clearly any god that doesn't remain One but decides to create, has got to be crazy, or bad. At least on the daily life level, there's plenty of evidence for that. But, not to go there today.
Today, we'll go back to the fitful in-again, out-again hypnopompic state I was in. The Arctic has a special dream significance for me, although I don't know what it is. Something to do with purity, and the deadly indifference of Nature to human vulnerability. But also the potiential for dialogue with implacability, though always on its terms.
So, ushered by a spirit creature, I went North, until the North Star was directly overhead and the entirety of Orion hung visible, busy in a kind of static urgency. My death waits here, the vital source of my creativity. After this trip, I suspect that the deep booms of the frozen lake will join that landscape. I can't tell you any more about that visit, not from bashfulness but because it receded into dream. There's a sense of it lurking underneath consciousness. Which, I suspect, is a good place for it.
Gardemoen is beautiful at five in the morning. We played Boggle (what else) in the melancholy moments before takeoff. Then, The Spink and I had to run to the gate, which was closing.
The Rijksmuseum has a branch in the Amsterdam airport. We saw evocative pictures of Holland in winter, including one by the acknowledged world expert in depicting ice skate blade tracks, and one by a man who died at 28 as a result of a chill caught while painting a winter scene, and one done in the 1500's of people and dogs excreting in the snow.
Security check to get onto an America-bound plane. After a month in a more or less homogeneous country, Americans look shabby, multiethnic, dangerous. I felt energized by that.
Passport check. Pick up baggage. Declare caribou skin, get shunted off to a baggage check. Pick up baggage again, take to conveyer belt, where three burly guys threw it onto the belt. CLUMP! Take train to baggage claim. David came just as we located our stuff and we were off!
First stop, Cenex in Marysville for sheep feed. A Northeaster is coming and they can't make do with the paltry pasture we have them on.
Next, Costco. We're vegetable starved, The Spink and I, so we filled the cart with peppers, lettuce, onions, broccoli, apples, anything fresh.
The ferry line. Ate at Charlie's, a surprisingly good restaurant.
Orcas, 7 pee em. Unload car at the dock, load up the boat. A crisp, starry crossing.
Unload the boat. Load up the truck.
Drive home. Unload the truck, put groceries ... where? Not in the house, because they'll go bad. Not outside because it's freezing. By the doorway, then.
Bed. We've been up since three in the morning, plus an extra nine hours for the time zone change.
The thaw continues. The neighbors came by to retrieve their three pairs of skates so they could skate over to the little island. Knowing when it's safe is a skill that we lack. Another neighbor came over with her small daughter to hang out. A mutual friend dropped in with his wife and small son on their way from hither to yon. A neighbor came by to play fiddle, but she was feeling frazzled and we ended up singing vengeful ballads and sea shanties out of Rise Up Singing instead.
Last time, I came here in summer and got an enormous amount of creative work done. This time, while it hasn't been an artistic wash (two good papercuts, one good fiddle reel, one good watercolor, and about twenty good photos), it hasn't been exhilarating in that way.
Creativity might not come on demand, exactly, but it can be encouraged or hindered. I've got an enormous creative urge, but an almost equally enormous ability to sabotage it. In past years, it's been easy to blame outside circumstances for this: I had an exhausting job, I had children, I was too poor to buy paint, I had no privacy. Maybe so. Who took on the exhausting jobs, the motherhood, the voluntary poverty? Me. Taking responsibility for my choices needs something other than self-blame, though. Without being judgemental, it's useful to notice what works and what doesn't work, and then to make choices based on that.
So, what's different between this visit and the last one?
1. Lack of solitude. I'm extraverted enough to be drawn to the people I love (The Spink, Astri), and the people I like (some of Astri's visitors). I'm introverted enough to need emotional as well as physical space in order to begin a creative project (although I can finish one, usually, amidst chaos). So, when there are people around, I can't start anything.
2. Lack of daylight. I'm perimenopausal and have SAD, both conditions surging with hormones, including whatever ones that have to do with being awake during the day and asleep during the night. Here, with only five hours of bright daylight, I've been spending a good amount of time in that adequate but not alert state that morning people get at night, and night owls get in the morning. It's enough to clean house with, or chat with the neighbors, but doesn't cross the threshhold into creativity.
3. Cold weather. It's a challenge to go outside. At home, I spend several hours a day outside, partly because it's an antidote to SAD, partly because I need a dose of aerobic exercise daily to feel healthy, and mostly because being in nature feeds my soul. It's kind of a vague thing; I'm not a natural history expert and I don't know every tree on my land. But it's powerful. While we've done something outdoors almost every day, the layers of clothing or of caution between me and raw Norway feel wrong; as if somehow the insulation that's physically necessary translates metaphorically to insulation from creativity.
4. Lack of opportunities to talk one-on-one. This is true both between me and Astri, but also between me and The Spink. My relationship with those two is necessarily different, and so are our conversations. With the three of us together, we've stayed with surface pleasantries. I crave uninhibited conversation with my friends and relatives for the usual female reasons; connection, emotional stabilizing, compassionate support. But there also seem to be artistic reasons. A really good conversation often feeds directly into the creative process.
I'm not complaining, not at all. This visit has been wonderful and I wouldn't change any part of it. But what I see is an opportunity to take the controlled conditions of the two visits; this one and the one 18 months ago, and learn something about one of my big life issues; that of shooting myself in the foot as an artist.
So, what I'll take away from this is a committment to finding solitude, to using a sun lamp in winter, to spending time in nature, and to connecting one-on-one with people that I love.
I've never enjoyed fireworks. Too noisy, too linked with testosterone poisoning.
But last night was uplifting and enchanting. We went down to the lake near midnight, kicking gouts of sand-dry snow aside with our boots. It was about minus 12 C. The lake had been reverberating all day, with sloshes and muffled booms. Occasionally you can feel a lurch if you're standing on the ice. We speculate that it's the ice freezing at different rates, and as it pulls away from the water below it sets up waves. Maybe not.
Anyway, the lake is surrounded by low hills, and the village and a few small farms are sprinkled along the margins of the lake. Near midnight, people started setting off fireworks, mostly the kind that bloom in flowery sparks. We were joined by a small group of kids and adults; the kids with fireworks and the adults with champagne. We'd see a set of flowers bloom across an arm of the lake, then a few moments later, hear the whistle and crack of the explosion. Then, the sound somersaulted around the lake, echoing from the foothills and across the ice, which went bawoom, bawoom.
We got up late and lazed around, reading. The Spink and I went ice-skating briefly, but the lake has between one and three inches of snow on it, which is good to learn on but not too good to actually skate on.
And now, it might be too late. Since dark, it's been raining.
We're bustling about, getting ready for the New Year party tonight. Everyone is feeling melancholy, as the news of the hundred thousands dead in the tidal wave in SE Asia is on everyone's mind. At least 500 Norwegians died, which brings it close to home.
To dispell some of the gloom, we borrowed skates from a neighbor and went down to the lake. As we laced the skates on, we could hear muffled booming sloshes, as though the lake trolls had indigestion. Bawooom wooma! Astri skated out a few meters and there was a deep-throated crrackawoom bawoom! A crack unzipped in front of her skates but she didn't stay to watch. "That's the end of skating for today," she informed us.
So we went home and vacuumed.
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