As for the Jung Society events I was looking forward to tonight and tomorrow… they are next weekend. I even looked at the site this afternoon to make sure of the time, and totally missed the date. Well, at least I left work at a decent time and had a nice—if quick—dinner of several grain/veggie/fruit salads before heading to the location only to find square dancers and a conspicuous lack of Jungians.

So. OMG. An unexpected expanse of alone time. I’m actually quite relieved. I am exhausted. And this means I don’t have to wait until Sunday to install the new bird bath. I also have made it a vague goal to make it to the farmers’ market tomorrow morning to get ingredients for making kimchi. I see reports that there are cabbages, bok choy, carrots, and garlic at the the market.

Yesterday it was chilly and grey and the air was damp. After digging around in my renegade compost pile to move stuff around (one of my favorite things lately), I heard a red-bellied woodpecker flying up behind me. He flew almost to the side of the house and then made a quick turn to cling to a pine trunk above me. We looked at each other. He flew off a bit, but I could still hear him clucking.

I should mention that I knew a woodpecker made a hole in the side of the house again, but I had never seen what woodpecker.

I took a few steps down the hill behind the compost pile, crouched down, and got still. Red Belly isn’t stupid. He knew where I was. I suppose I backed up and became non-threatening enough that he eventually flew back to the pine tree above me, gave me a look, and then impossibly disappeared into the hole. It looked like he got sucked into a pneumatic tube.

Well, now I know. And I should call my landlord, but after I buy a woodpecker house or something to get the repair person to hang where the hole is now. There’s a slim chance Red Belly would move into that rather than start excavating another hole in the siding immediately as usual. While I do like the idea of him sleeping in the wall next to me while I am in my bed, I do not like the idea of him in there with the insulation. It cannot be good for him. I wish I could control who would fix the hole and when. I have a horror of them sealing the woodpecker up in the wall.

Anyway, after learning for sure that Red Belly is my close neighbor, I walked around in the woods for a little bit.

I am not sure how I missed this most amazing tree for so long, because it is very near the house but off at a weird angle. It is a huge, five-trunked tulip poplar. I must photographic it because it gave me chill bumps when I circled around the side of it and saw how three of the trunks join.

Then a little more walking, slowly, eyes scanning the ground and… what… oh my… THAT is a segment of a branch about the size of my upper arm… with a round opening and a cavity hollowed out… and mycelium wallpaper. Woodpeckers, woodpeckers, woodpeckers…

-=-=-

A week ago I walked home from campus between 9 and 10pm. I stopped for dinner on the way and walked slowly because there was still ice in places. Downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro were deserted. Icy ghost towns. The temperature was in the low 20s/upper teens. A hoarfrost covered all the plants.

I do not know how or why I have never seen hoarfrost at night, but it may be one of the most beautiful things there is. Twinkling white Christmas lights are such a cheap imitation.

That morning I walked up the hill to downtown to catch the bus. Of course, I saw the bus I meant to catch go by while I was still half an icy block away. But before that… on the way up the hill… all was deserted and silent. Silent except for the thrillingly satisfying and LOUD cracking of the ice crust as I broke it with each step. I could hear the sound moving away from me as the crack traveled. I pretended to be Godzilla for a moment. It is true. I also giggled out loud and then looked around furtively.

Later that night I happened to think, “I haven’t heard any owls around here in quite a while. I wonder what’s up with that.” A few minutes later, I popped out onto the front deck to put some things in the recycling bin. And of course I heard a Great Horned Owl.

As I told my friend, I had a conversation with an owl. She asked, “What did the owl say?” I said, “I don’t know… the conversation was in owl.” I think it was probably saying, “God your accent is horrible,” or “Would you please be quiet, you ridiculous human?” Or maybe just, “Don’t worry. There are still owls here.” Who knows. Owls. They are never what they seem anyway.

-=-=-

Too late to do anything about it this past weekend, I learned that a pileated woodpecker was photographed in a not-too-distant state park just a few days ago. Also, I learned that bobcats are photographed at night by wildlife cameras in a few other state parks farther away, but not beyond a weekend trip. Of course LYNX RUFUS would also pop up. Can’t let the woodpeckers get all the attention.

And no, I do not think I’m going to go camp at a state park and see a bobcat, but just to be in a place where true wild cats live is what I want. Not since second grade, when I lived just on the line of the Olympic National Forest in Washington, have I spent time in an area with wild cats. Oh, and that area also keeps popping up.

I keep smelling the moist clean mossy wood forest smell of where I used to play. It may be the best smell in the world.

My friend keeps telling me the Rainbow Gathering is in Western Washington next year. I don’t know about that. I got stuck at finding out you have to poop in a trench in a non-secluded area. Yep. I don’t know about that one… I think my inner hippie may be more of a hermit that that.

It takes 11-13 minutes to walk up the hill to downtown.

When I checked this morning, I saw that the next buses would be arriving up the hill downtown in 4 and 14 minutes. “Aha!,” I thought. “It takes three minutes to walk down the hill to the ‘at trailer park’ stop. I can just go there and it will be just perfect timing.”

If the bus stopped at the trailer park after it stopped downtown, it would have been perfect timing. But it is the other way around. It’s not as if this is news to me—the whole reason I like to walk up the hill to downtown is so that I spend less time in the over-heated, motion-sickness (not-helped-by-drunks-reeking-of-cigarettes-booze-filtered-out-the-skin-and-and-sometimes-also-urine)-inducing bus.

I arrived at the trailer park stop feeling quite satisfied with myself. And then I thought I’d check when the next bus was going to come so that I could inwardly gloat over my great timing. Then I received the text telling me the next bus was in 36 minutes. I went blank and confused for a couple of minutes as I tried to process this. It slowly dawned on me that the bus that would be downtown in 14 minutes stopped at the trailer park while I was traipsing down my driveway on the way to the trailer park stop.

Sigh.

I go through periods of obsessively tracking how much time everything takes. This is how I know it is 3 minutes to the trailer park stop from home, 11-13 minutes to the downtown stop from home, 9-10 minutes from the frat house stop to my desk at work, 12 minutes from the cheap parking deck to my desk, and so on. I always think that if I just know how long everything takes, my problems with time will be solved. I am always wrong.

Times just do not stay in my head in a meaningful way long enough for me to line them all up properly. This is why I have spreadsheets to calculate when to leave for the airport and what time to start baking bread if I want toast at 4.30pm.

Now, this morning I was super-fixated on getting to work at 9:30am because a) that’s what time I am supposed to be there; and b) I had a meeting at 10am and I needed to refresh my memory on the matters at hand. At least, I was pretty sure the meeting was at 10am, but I realized I needed to check just as I shut down my computer before leaving home for the day, and I hadn’t written it in my calendar—because for some reason I always think I will remember the time. Or that I will remember to check the time before I shut down or leave my computer.

Finally it sunk in that I was totally going to be late to my meeting if I took the bus, walked, or biked. I clambered back up the hill and jumped in my car, hoping I’d be able to get back up the hill after work (winter storm alert!).

When I hit my desk at work at 9.20am, I felt slightly heroic for being 10 minutes early. This gave me plenty of time to prepare for my meeting, because it didn’t start until 11.

Every time I have a time-fail like this, I resolve to get my act together and do better. I try, but it never works for long.

Perhaps this is what used to make my parents say “She’s book-smart but she has no common sense.” Which is not true. I have plenty of common sense. It’s just that, between the ADHD and the depersonalization, I happen to nearly lack the normally-functioning time-sense module of the common sense package.

At least I’ve long since given up beating up and berating myself for being an idiot and feeling ashamed when these things happen. Now I can usually laugh at myself and accept that I’m far from an idiot, but certain tangles of my brain just aren’t hooked up right. I do what I can. What I can’t be is perfect, and I’ve got no time for feeling bad about my humanity (except for when I’d rather be a cat).

Oh look, suddenly it’s an hour later than I thought it was and there’s a 9am all-staff meeting that is still on despite the weather being bad enough that the university canceled classes until 11am tomorrow.

The basic attitude in the air in the West is: “Go and get it.” Whoever wants to go and get it, can. This premise is taken as a given: Everyone has the same opportunities, everyone has the same potential, the same smarts, the same possibilities; the chances are equal and open to everyone. “You can do it just like everybody else; you have the intelligence, you are a human being, you can shape your own success; take it into your own hands.” We hear this said, but what is the reality? Those who are capable go happily along and of course are perfectly fine. For them, there is probably no better system than this materialistic society. But it can be very painful for those who cannot face up to life so aggressively. They feel incapacitated somewhere deep inside, as if they are not complete human beings. Instead they need to hear, “You can still do something. You can create more merit, you can make pure aspirations.”

…who cannot face up to life so aggressively, or who are not extroverts, or who are not capable of feigning happiness when they do not feel happy, or who sink to depths instead of skipping across the surface.

I was horrified to learn that introversion has been proposed for inclusion in the DSM-5, and began filing away fantasies about future flight to Finland.

I have been told, and I tell myself, that there is important work for the quiet, the still, the sensitive, the intuitive to do. That I should think more about “valuable differences” than about “alien traits.” But don’t underestimate the difficulty of out-shouting the messages of faster, louder, more that ring from every direction.

I feel lucky to have found work in a library, a place of relative stillness and reserve. A place where a number of colleagues seem as introverted as I am, if not more. But even a week working at the library wipes me out, and I often cling to my weekends as small solitary retreats.

Yesterday I spent several hours observing and caring for a small patch of ground: clearing leaf litter from nascent patches of moss, separating pebbles from soil, noting the directions of water flow from the patterns of erosion, digging with my hands. The closer you look, the more dizzying the array of life as it unfolds. It was good and comforting. Somewhere in there, I remembered this poem:

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who prey upon them with IBM eyes
And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon.
There are men too gentle for a savage world
Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween
And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who anoint them for burial with greedy claws
And murder them for a merchant’s profit and gain.
There are men too gentle for a corporate world
Who dream instead of candied apples and ferris wheels
And pause to hear the distant whistle of a train.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who devour them with eager appetite and search
For other men to prey upon and suck their childhood dry.
There are men too gentle for an accountant’s world
Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass
And search for beauty in the mystery of the sky.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who toss them like a lost and wounded dove.
Such gentle men are lonely in a merchant’s world,
Unless they have a gentle one to love.

–James Kavanaugh

Today was… a blur. Being fully medicated improves everything, including the overwhelm. Imagine that! Maybe I take these things for a reason…. I’m in the in-between stage of getting COBRA set up, so I’m paying out of pocket for drugs this month. So far +/- $320 and another one to fill tomorrow. I am forever ASTOUNDED that they can charge $270 for a 30-day supply of a generic that doesn’t release the same as the brand name. So much gratitude for health insurance, though.

Many emails. Work. Millennium not a happy system. Work peeps all signed a card with mushrooms and fall leaves on the cover. Talked to Will for a while. Rebecca took me out for ice cream. I saw many pigeons. Terrell took me out for sushi. Saw Joe and Bruce at WSM when T and I went for chocolate raspberry cake.

Got home and my door was almost blocked with boxes. I did well at timing my recent purchases to all arrive as birthday gifts. I received:

• My order from Mountain Rose Herbals, including soapnuts. (I made liquid soap extract, or soapnut tea) Also included fir essential oil on sale so my laundry can smell like Yule trees.
• My spiral slicer and kelp noodles
• My WonderWash and spin dryer

I can’t believe how much water that dryer extracts from my clothes. Yes, on my birthday I very excitedly did laundry with my new toys.

And now, no more buying stuff for a while!

Found:
- Smooth, shiny red magnolia seed on the sidewalk, free from its burr and seeming quite jewel-like
- Feather. Grey at the bottom, white at the tip. That’s not very notable, but there is a grey triangle in the middle of the white tip.
- Cicada on sidewalk. Was not sure if it was alive or dead until I picked it up. It was alive so I put it at the base of an oak tree.
- Butterfly

Seen:
- Big black cat with yellow eyes watching me from atop a car in the parking deck
- Nest on the ground, falling apart. I had nothing in which to carry it and it looked like squirrel had rooted around in it anyway.
- At least 5 cicadas squished to smithereens on sidewalks. Number of these seen previous to return of students for Fall semester: 0.

Received:
- One red egg filled with the philosopher’s stone

Noted:
- The dead tree looming over my house from across the street has finally been cut down. Given the distribution of twigs and pieces of branches scattered by the removal, it is a damned good thing they cut it down before it fell.

Did not want:
- Cats yowling outside at 5:30am causing two of the cats in my bedroom to freak out and have a rolling-around, screaming-in-that-creepy-(and really loud)-cat-fighting way.
- My cell phone to have been automatically set one hour late for at least 3 hours Tuesday morning, including the time I normally wake up. The effect was that my cell phone alarm went off at 8:15 (so it displayed) but the rest of the clocks read 9:15.

Enjoyed:
- Writing a quick script to save a colleague a whole lot of time and tedious work.
- Last night’s class session on cataloging in context and FRBR.

Astounded:
- That it is September already.

Wishing for:
- Rain

Experienced:
- Monday night, depersonalization/derealization episode of unsettling strength and duration. Also file under “Did not want,” but here’s to knowledge and intact reality testing.
- Kensho-esque span of some amount of time upon ascending the stairs of the parking deck to open expanse of night sky Tuesday night.
- Intense head pain for an hour and a half last night.

These three things might not be unrelated.

Since I discovered that they are in fact webworms and are devouring the redbud tree that hangs over my car and front walkway, the tiny white fuzzy caterpillars no longer seem cute.

Early webworm instar

Yesterday I tore out all the nests I could reach with a rake. This is the first time I’ve seen these guys since I’ve lived here. Since “the pupae over-winter in cocoons in the ground. Pupae may also be found under loose bark and in leaf litter,” I’m going to blame this infestation on the nasty, ugly mulch with which the landscapers covered the area between my front walk and street last winter, killing the lovely moss that was growing there.

In addition to killing the moss and (likely) introducing webworms to my trees, the mulch looks like a tree-eating dinosaur vomited in front of my house. It is so much uglier than whatever they thought needed fixing. They also planted several bushes in the area, all of which have died. Ugh.

In addition to battling webworms, yesterday I also cleaned and refilled the back birdfeeder, cleared leaves from my (hopefully one day) moss garden, started a compost pile, began creating a brushpile for wildlife behind my house, and arranged some things to try to mitigate the erosion due to lack of downspouts on the corners of my front porch. What I would really like are some rain chains. And to create a dry streambed to shunt the runoff around the driveway to the sunny part of the slope where I could put a rain garden. But I run away with myself…

Today’s work excitement: cataloging research blitz, at which I was a “blitzer” who “blitzed” on the topic of our e-book cataloging coverage and what SerialsSolutions ebook MARC service has added.

Tomorrow’s work excitement: emergency response walkthrough. I’m not sure what that is, but it sounds exciting. I’m sure it will be less exciting than it sounds, though.

Well, that was some week.

Tuesday I got thrown for a loop when students started emailing me wondering why the website for the online course they’d registered for didn’t seem to exist. Well, that would be because I signed a piece of paper saying I’d teach a face to face class on Wednesday nights. There were a lot of personnel changes going on in the department, so I’ll chalk it up to that. I regret that some students had to drop the class, but you really just can’t pull an online course out of your ear on -1 day’s notice.

The course format announcement didn’t get made until Wednesday. I spent all day at work that day, yet put 0 hours on my timesheet because the entire day was spent putting out class-related fires. That’s ok, because I’ve banked over 50 hours of “in case” time off that needs to be used up before I either get replaced or hired. But personnel did call and ask me for my references.

If I get hired, I’m buying myself a bicycle and a new vacuum cleaner. It is highly unsatisfying to vacuum when you can feel the machine spitting stuff out on your toes as you walk behind it.

Class itself was fun, though I’m not used to standing up for 2.5 hours straight any more and it reactivated my lower back pain. Lordosis doesn’t do well with standing around, and I get distracted enough in the classroom without pacing. A lot of stretching has been in order.

I’ve been trying to get more sleep, as I was averaging about 6 hours a night there for a good while. The frustrating thing is that after 7-8 hours, it is much harder to wake up and maintain focus through the day. I think perhaps I really need 9 or more hours (which just isn’t going to happen until my dissertation is complete), and stopping at 6 interrupts the sleep cycle at a point more amenable to waking.

I forget the days now, but there were Treasures to Report.

A mockingbird feather found. A pigeon feeding its babies. Flitting dragonflies. The full moon peeking out from behind layers of clouds. Enough life in the air that it is possible to believe there might ever be a chill again. Butterflies moving on to different bushes with small purple flowers. A little girl climbing a tree more bravely than any of the little boys. A resurgence of local blueberries. Falling asleep with the windows open to the sound of cicadas, crickets, and frogs. Goldfinches at my backyard feeder. Tiny fuzzy white caterpillar with black eye spots.

A sad thing is that I can no longer smell the oaks in McCorkle place because there is always too much nasty Axe body spray/Bath and Body Works hideous synthetic nose burning miasma lingering from the bodies of undergraduates.

A good thing is the word miasma.

The return of the undergrads is always a good exercise in remembering just how much farther there is to go in being equanimous and opening in love to every moment. You’re not really suffused with loving-kindness when you feel like clocking someone in the head with your parasol. The alternative is to really look at them and take them in, which can be overwhelming because the vast, vast majority have so much pain or fear or emptiness about them and yet they are trying so hard to project otherwise. Of course you can really say that about any group of people almost anywhere, no?

Stopped by Weaver Street Market on the way home tonight to hang out with a friend a bit. Had a nice pint of stout. It’s been quite a while since I’ve just enjoyed a nice pint.

And now the cleaning fluid has soaked in long enough and it is time to finish cleaning up after the cats in preparation for my own private dance party. These events have the best DJ ever.

daily report. No more butterflies. Just bees.

Not much else, as I think my cats were somehow feeding me sedatives in my sleep and it was all I could do to walk in today.

A sickeningly thick and strong strand of spider’s silk caught me.

1-5-0 is back open with real food for lunches. With biodegradable forks, even. This is a very happy thing, as I was tired of their tofu wrap and bean salad (and Weaver Street’s vegan chicken salad wrap) and have pretty much given up on keeping myself fed beyond fresh juice, fruit, and frozen Indian entrees.

And then utter chaos erupted and I’m going to try to sleep in spite of it. Tomorrow will be a day. Wonderful things could happen.

A cathedral in a pecked-out cicada thorax. Ants attending Mass. Take, eat.

Two feathers.

Smaller, rounded-winged butterflies in the SILS garden hedge, and fuzzy bee bums.

The fountain in fast-forward, the most exuberant droplets less hesitant than usual.

Surprising rain in the afternoon. The smell of wet bricks.

A very large black bird swooping over the highway.

An old bumper sticker that read, “I     my      ,” because the red was faded

Yesterday: the most perfect acorn.

Nature teaches us simplicity and contentment, because in its presence we realize we need very little to be happy. Since we are part of the animal kingdom, our senses are naturally more alive in the outdoors. The rustle of leaves or the rapid flight of birds could indicate the presence of a mountain lion or bear. Hiking in places where we are not the only predator¹ helps us understand that all of life is intimately interwoven and that we are a part of that web.

— Mark Coleman, “A Breath of Fresh Air“

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

Then, the most amazing thing. There is a little fenced garden next to Manning Hall. A small hedge blooming with small white flowers pads the inside of the fence all the way around. This morning there were SO MANY Eastern Tiger Swallowtails² eating from these flowers. The hedge appeared decorated with living ornaments—yellow and black wings with luscious blue at the bottoms fluttering everywhere. If you looked deeper, past the butterflies—which was difficult—there were even more bumblebees moving around in there.

A plasma display window?—The shifting baseline problem in a technologically mediated natural world
Peter H. Kahn Jr., Batya Friedman, Brian Gill, Jennifer Hagman, Rachel L. Severson, Nathan G. Freier, Erika N. Feldman, Sybil Carrère and Anna Stolyar
Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 28, Issue 2, June 2008, Pages 192-199.

ABSTRACT: Humans will continue to adapt to an increasingly technological world. But are there costs to such adaptations in terms of human well being? Toward broaching this question, we investigated physiological effects of experiencing a HDTV quality real-time view of nature through a plasma display “window.” In an office setting, 90 participants (30 per group) were exposed either to (a) a glass window that afforded a view of a nature scene, (b) a plasma window that afforded a real-time HDTV view of essentially the same scene, or (c) a blank wall. Results showed that in terms of heart rate recovery from low-level stress the glass window was more restorative than a blank wall; in turn, a plasma window was no more restorative than a blank wall. Moreover, when participants spent more time looking at the glass window, their heart rate tended to decrease more rapidly; that was not the case with the plasma window. Discussion focuses on how the purported benefits of viewing nature may be attenuated by a digital medium.

Last night: I was not consciously nervous about today’s phone interview, but some part of my brain was because it would not let me get to sleep and stay asleep. When I was asleep I dreamed about scanning down a column of series headings in Excel. I got maybe 4 hours.

Today: Tired. Only needed to work 4.2 hours, but I went in at normal time to do other stuff while present in case of bibliographic emergency. As the interview time drew nearer my body started having full on anxiety symptoms. Nausea, heart rate up, lips numb, dizzy, feeling of floating above my own head going, “Oh come on body, you are going to talk to people you work with every day and impress on a regular basis. Just stop these shenanigans.” I did some sitting with my breath, but honestly, I don’t think that helps very much. It just heightens the physical sensations of anxiety for me. Or maybe I just don’t do it right. Anyway, the interview was not terrible, but I was frustrated with myself for feeling inarticulate and rambly, and for forgetting to make a couple of points I had down on my notes sheet. Was so jangled afterward, trying to shush the “you screwed that up” fear, that it took me the rest of the afternoon to copy catalog a website.

Read in McCorkle Place for a while, then had dinner with a friend at Pepper’s. He dropped me off at Forest Theater, where I was headed to see Paperhand Puppet Intervention’s Islands Unknown. Going in, I saw the most beautiful dog. It did not look like a Great Dane to me, but its nose probably would have hit the lower part of my chest. It was lanky and glossy black. It struck me such that I told the man walking it, “That’s the most beautiful dog I’ve ever seen.” Went in, immediately spied a friendly acquaintance from circulation, waved, sat down, and then was invited down to sit with him and my ophthalmologist and his family. Just as the show was starting another friend who has been out of town came in and sat right in front of us.

Favorite parts:

• a real butterfly at the edge of the stage when the books in the library became butterflies
• the book on the library shelf pushing itself out to get the girl’s attention
• the cat puppet
• shouting ENOUGH!
• bats flying around overhead
• the information overload puppet
• the movement of the ocean puppet
• the real moon rising up at the back of the theater, opposite the stage moon

Wednesday a friend and I were talking about how Paperhand’s message can be boiled down to “Nature good, Man bad.” That’s a view I can definitely get behind most days, when I witness and hear about humans being bad, bad animals all over the world. There is definitely a Paperhand formula. You know what to expect from one of their shows. But the execution is always different and wonderful. My sense of this show was that it was less “Nature good, Man bad” and more “Nature good, Man part of nature, Man who could be in more balance with nature but chooses not to move toward balance bad.”

On Wednesday, I noticed someone had scratched some moss off a rock. I got so angry. This hatred welled up for whoever thoughtlessly put their desire to make a mark on something ahead of the fact that a tiny plant was growing there, being alive and doing its thing. It billowed out to include the people who mulched over the tiny trees in April, and those who dumped the disgusting ugly mulch over the moss growing in my small front yard area in January and planted shrubs that are now dead. I got to a moment of wondering why we couldn’t just leave things alone and wishing I could avoid causing the demise of any living thing, before reminding myself that I don’t want to have to hack through dense vegetation to get into my house, that I do love McCorkle Place, which is an entirely groomed artificial “nature,” and that I cannot abide a mouse-sized spider running amok in my kitchen. As I said to my friend Wednesday, “It is so hard to avoid being a big hypocrite in this culture.”

I mean, how many carbon credits does the creation and run of a Paperhand show eat up, between hauling materials and puppets, people traveling to rehearsal and performances, lighting (that confuses night flying creatures) and sound amplification, etc.? Less than many less worthwhile things, I’m sure, but still.

1. When I hear a person claim to be “top of the food chain,” I want to transport them to the wilderness with nothing but their wits and see how superior they feel. [↩]
2. I identified the species tonight using my new favorite website: http://www.discoverlife.org/ [↩]

Today it kind of almost felt like my sense of community was coming back.

There is a person I pass every day on the walk across campus. You know, you can do that for years without ever saying anything to each other. I’ve done that before. But three days ago I started nodding and saying good morning. And this person smiles and says good morning back. So what had been, for a couple of months, an internal observation—oh there’s that person again. is that person running late, or am I running early?—has become a small act of connection with more than just the trees. Sometimes it feels like no one wants to intrude on any one or risk someone being mean, so we all go around ignoring each other.

I’ve moved from work projects that required a lot solitary, abstract brain work to a number of faster moving projects that require more interaction with colleagues across campus.

I saw that someone’s car was in the market parking lot when I swung by on the way home from work. I went back and forth about whether to find them and say hello. I felt a bit anxious about how it might be awkward, given the way long-standing friendships and recently defunct romantic relationships had lined up. But I saw him sitting alone and the desire to say hi overrode anxiety.

I was just going to say hi, grab some groceries, and go home to check some things off of my list, but instead we ended up talking for quite a while. With my odd sense of time, I couldn’t tell you how long. But it was very good. And because I sat there talking for a while, I also ran into someone I hadn’t seen in quite a while, but had been thinking about recently. She will be on campus when school starts, so perhaps I will have the chance to see her more often.

Then a co-worker was in the produce section.

Then a large shiny black beetle was frantically on its back on the floor underneath the apricots. I turned him over, but it seemed like he was having trouble walking on the slick smooth floor. So I carried him out the in door (omg I broke a rule!) and deposited him outside.

One of the things I was going to (and eventually did) check off my list tonight was exercising. I run in place on an exercise trampoline. I haven’t done much exercise since starting work at the library in January, but I ran last night and tonight. Exercise is good for the brain and I need all the help I can get right now. One extra good thing about running is that it is captive time. I’m moving but stationary. I can stay still enough (while moving furiously) to watch things—films, talks, etc.

For the past two nights, I’ve been watching “Mindfulness and the Brain: A Professional Training in the Science and Practice of Meditative Awareness.” It’s at the intersection of Buddhist practice and interpersonal neurobiology, so it is a good reminder of the possibility of integration and connectedness.

It is good to re-hear The Good News About Neuroplasticity. Lately my faith had been wearing a bit thin.

This was the word that kept coming to my mind over the weekend: respite.

First, the heat broke. It will be back up to 93°F tomorrow, and I’ll close the windows and turn the A/C on before I go to work tomorrow. But since Friday afternoon, the windows have been open, letting in fresh air and cicada song.

Second, I took an unplanned rest retreat. The only souls I spoke to from Friday at 5pm until this morning at 9:45am were my cats. And they aren’t very good conversationalists. I didn’t play any music, except for a drumming recording last night as I was preparing for bed. After working for a little while on Saturday morning, I mostly avoided the computer, except to watch a documentary Saturday night. I read. I slept. I went feral and loved my silence, solitude, and the smell of the crooks of my elbows. By Sunday evening, I felt recharged enough to take on some neglected cleaning projects. I finally took care of a fairly large energy/emotion suck from my downstairs that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to dismantle in the aftermath of a recent relationship end/shift/change. I feel home in my home again.

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Walking across McCorkle Place this evening, I stopped at Dancer the oak and gathered some of the sawdust still in little piles beneath her. I crouched at her foot and leaned my back against her trunk, observing mushrooms poking up through the mulch.

Ah, the mushroom connection…. le-champignon… that’s another story for later (and/or years ago and possibly still buried somewhere around this site…). What struck me about them today was how the mushrooms themselves are fairly soft and squishy, usually velvety to the touch. Yet suddenly, here they are, appearing to have silently exploded from the earth when I wasn’t looking. Mulch and soil are pushed aside like so much rubble.

I was quickly beset by vicious mosquitoes, so I did not linger with Dancer and the mushrooms. I did notice, however, that her fallen limb was purposefully cut. I assume this would not have been done without good reason, but the fact that it was done in such a way that two lower limbs were damaged made me a bit angry. So it goes. Breathe it out and inhale perspective. How many of my lifetimes would fit in the lifetime of that tree right now? How many of me would fit inside her trunk? What are my concerns really worth? The answer is so faint it passes like one leaf scuttling across the brick path.

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After work I went grocery shopping and was once again astounded at how expensive it is to eat the healthy food I do these days—mainly fresh organic fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. And some cottage cheese, maple nut Clif bars, and cherry Larabars. Oh yes, and frozen Indian entrees. I’m not that virtuous. I am very grateful that I can afford my diet. I couldn’t afford to eat this way before January, and there are a billion ways things could unfold. I don’t assume I’ll always be able to afford it.

Part of the weekend’s unplanned retreat was avoiding the grocery story by raiding the freezer and pantry for some older staple foods like pasta and some frozen vegetables. I love pasta, but I can notice a big difference in how I feel after a big bowl of pasta versus a VitaMix full of grapes, celery, kale, and apple. I just note this and appreciate the fact that I can keep myself well-stocked with fresh bright things to eat if I deign to leave my house.

Speaking of being grateful for good food, I started The Fruitful Darkness this weekend. It is written in a somewhat revelatory tone, but most of what she is saying is not news to me. Animals and trees deserve respect? We are all connected at the root of things? Yes. Being reminded doesn’t hurt, but seeing animals and trees is a better reminder than reading it in a book. A number of things I’d like to read more about seem like mere sketches. All that said, I’m still reading it, so I’m getting something out of it. I mention it here because it includes this Zen gatha by Thich Nhat Hanh, to be recited before eating:

In this plate of food,
I see the entire universe
supporting my existence.

I have a fairly visceral negative reaction to being asked to stop and say something, or listen to someone else say something, before I eat. This comes from years of being forced to hold hands before sitting down to eat in order to listen to someone ramble on to/about the “heavenly father,” who had the power to “bless the hands that prepared this food and the hands that brought it to us,” and to bestow “traveling mercies” on anyone who would be leaving after the meal. There is nothing offensive in the literal experience of this, but it taps a much-deeper vein of memory of assimilation by the Southern Baptist Borg at a time when resistance was truly futile. The quoted phrases above are enough to make me want to kick something if I dwell on them for a moment or two.

These days my practice is to push right into harmless things to which I have a knee-jerk negative reaction. This is what led to me doing karaoke “I Wanna Be Sedated” in my friend’s yard a few months ago. I do not do karaoke, see. Oh yeah? I’ll show me.

The above gatha resonates just enough that it may be the thing to deflate my pre-meal blessings reaction. We’ll see. If I can remember to think about it. Speaking of mental lapses, I apparently forgot I ordered The Fruitful Darkness and ordered it again, because I now have two copies.

I came to my computer to post something else from the book, and talk of food got me off track. This is unattributed on p. 157, and I love it:

Soil for legs
Axe for hands
Flower for eyes
Bird for ears
Mushroom for nose
Smile for mouth
Songs for lungs
Sweat for skin
Wind for mind

As I slowly drove the winding narrow road home from the grocery this evening, a hawk flew low across the street. Right in front of my car he seemed to transition from head-first laser-targeting to talons-first landing in the woods. All I really caught a glimpse of were barred tail feathers spread out as he disappeared behind foliage.

Treasures, all around… magic things…

God made love to me,
Soothed away my gravity,
Gave me a pair of angel wings,
Clear vision and some magic things.
God is love to me.
Thank you for those things.
Understand the world we’re living in—
Love can mean anything.

–Tim Booth

Tonight I did battle with a spider in my kitchen.

At first I thought it was a mouse running directly toward my feet. Then it charged at me two more times. The last time, I had a fly swatter.

I won.

I’m glad I won, or I would have slept like this tonight:

My arachnophobia has really eased up after a year of doing meditation and trauma work. At this point I wouldn’t claim a full-on phobia, as I let many spiders live in the house without disturbing them. And they don’t bother me.

A spider that can be mistaken for a mouse, however… THAT is a problem.