Boat Across the River
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Trash on the Beach…
Again, I was sent into a tailspin of despair after eating at a restaurant that uses only disposable plastic cups. After I asked the server if they recycle, she first said yes. Then she seemed confused and changed her answer to, “Well, no…We just throw them all away.” How hard would it be? For just one person working at every restaurant to care enough to collect recyclables in a trash can?
Every time I go on vacation, I have to come to a resolution about where the trash goes. Will it go in a landfill? Will it go in an incinerator? I’ve convinced myself that an incinerator is preferable. At home, I’ve made my peace with the impact I have on Earth. I know exactly where my trash is going. I’ve limited my consumption both in terms of the amount of things that I buy and also what it is that I buy. And I’ve come to terms with what I do and don’t control.
When I go on vacation, I go into this tailspin that I mentioned. I worry about everything from the unnecessary bags that Subway puts every sandwich into, to my child’s diapers, to other people’s trash that I see left on the beach, or even in trash cans. Where will all this trash go? I watch the dolphins swimming nearby and whisper my apologies. At least once an hour, I have to remind myself of what I actually have the power to control.
(P.S. I am very excited to read the new book coming out on this topic, called Garbology!)
“Travelin’ Thru”
I’ve been reading a lot lately — not writing a whole lot. The following excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays: First Series struck a chord with me, especially in light of my previous post about wanting to travel more. The essay in particular from which these lines come — Self Reliance — is apparently listed on President Obama’s Facebook page as one of his favorite reads. So there you go. I have also been enjoying that essay a lot and have only found a couple things with which I disagree. One is that Emerson mentions his belief that he has no responsibility to the beggar on the street or to the vast number of charities trying to collect money from him. I think if someone asks me for money on the street, I should give him a dollar at least. And I think we should pick a few charities to give to regularly as well. Maybe Emerson meant that you can’t give to every charity that comes calling, because that’s true. I’d have nothing left with which to support myself, and would become a charity case myself. I also disagree that travelling has nothing to teach us. I do agree though with many of his words here, especially that our society fosters restlessness, and that our minds are always travelling even when our bodies are not.
I also love the lines that “the soul is no traveller” and that when the wise man is abroad he “is at home still.” I was meditating the other day and had been thinking about the Buddhist concept of no self. When I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind, what popped into my head was the image of “me” in a sticky web of sorts; the material that glued my “self” in place was my relationships with other beings. The way our experiences and stories all fit together was what held the me in place and made me, me. When those relationships are gone, maybe the me I thought I was will disappear…but I also don’t think those relationships do ever disappear. So that on some level, the me of this lifetime will always exist once I find the love that existed in this story I am currently living. If I can find those loving relationships, I will find the self from this experience in particular. Then what popped into my head — and this was before I read the words by Emerson — was that no matter where I travelled, I would always be in the same place. My self would always reside in the same place, the same spot on the bookshelf, no matter where in the universe my body happened to be. I am here, no matter where I am.
Well, enough about that. Here’s Emerson:
It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling…retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign soil, he is at home still…
He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things…
Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Rome I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk…and at last wake up in [Italy] and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical that I fled from…
But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay home.
Seeing the Truth
It would probably be impossible to have had a life more stable than the one I have thus far lived. I have lived in the same city since birth except for a year and a half “abroad”. I have never experienced a move as my parents, who have been happily married for forty years, bought the house they currently live in when I was an infant. My grandparents have lived in their house since before I was born, and they were married for sixty four years. I attended the same high school as my mom. My dad grew up down the street from where I am now and lived there from the time he was born until he got married. That’s the house in which his father died, and where his mother lived for over fifty years — until she moved into a nursing home. He has never lived anywhere but here either. There is no divorce in my family. I feel like, in the midst of a big city, I have had a stereotypically small town experience. And that I have been lucky to have had every important privilege.
Sometimes I feel so attached to this place and this life that I don’t even see it anymore. It’s like looking at my own face in the mirror. I’ve been looking at the same things for so long that they’ve almost become invisible to me. Driving to a restaurant downtown, I suddenly saw the city, the hazy sunset over the fluffy trees, the little houses snuggled close together. I saw the city as if for the first time and managed to grab hold of that image. In Buddhism, there is talk of trying to maintain a Beginner’s Mind — to keep that freshness, that quality of really seeing something for what it is. I have that when I am traveling; I see every little detail of a new place as if it’s charmed. I notice everything from apartment balconies, to little pink flowers streetside, to Spanish moss in the trees, to the little boy holding his father’s hand. I want to try to reclaim that freshness of Beginner’s Mind when I look at my own city, so that I am actually seeing where I am — so that I actually perceive the life I am living.
(And for those us who are longtime adherents to a specific faith tradition, it’s important to also see things as they really are — to not be so attached to our beliefs that we can’t see the truth anymore).
Heavenly Day
(That is a great song by Patti Griffin, by the way).
When I stepped out my front door at 6:45 this morning, it was raining. But it was so gorgeously warm and balmy. It was one of just a few times where I’ve stepped into darkness and felt totally comfortable. Usually, the dark scares me — that fear of the unseen. This morning, though, felt like the time I was in the Caribbean.
We stepped into the ocean and it was clear and blue and warm and the French couple we met — the guy — described it as the only time he’d been swimming in the ocean when he felt “no hesitation.” That’s how I felt this morning. I stepped into the warm wet darkness like I had stepped into the ocean: with no hesitation.
The tall tree in front of me opened thousands of its white flowers in my face and all the birds were singing and singing. Was it a bright and sunny afternoon? No. Was it beautiful? Yes.
Leaving the Island
I carried my daughter out onto our balcony to say goodbye to the ocean at 6:30 in the morning, before we got in the car for the longest drive in the world. It was still dark and the water was so quiet that I told her the ocean was still asleep.
She said, “And he takes his blankie and lays down his little ocean head on his little ocean pillow…”
Goodbye Cedar Key!
two year old sees an egret
White egret
standing in the water
looks like the crests of the waves
breaking around him.
The stormy air still thick
the egret flies away
my daughter says,
“Look at the bird
swimmin’ through
the air.”
Ceremony
Closing my eyes on the couch
in the house above the ocean,
I heard what I imagined was a woman
shaking out the laundry
to hang it on a line.
Wet clothes smacked the air;
I was dozing and dreaming
of this woman working.
I saw her behind closed eyelids:
hair pulled back but flying away
in the salty air, red
and yellow shirts, blue jeans
kept slapping, slapping
as she shook them out.
Finally getting up to see,
I leaned against the rail of my balcony.
Ten pelicans sat like fat footballs
on the calm water below;
they were taking turns
smacking their wings with purpose
against the ocean’s face.
One set off the next, and they beat
their wings on water.
Until eventually: they pumped their feet
against the soft runway,
and then they flew away.
Pelicans of Cedar Key
I just watched thirty pelicans fly by my open balcony doors!
I think the birds are starting to come back to the area to nest on the protected island nearby where people are not allowed and where there is a rookery. We boated out there a few days ago, but the birds had not arrived yet.
Seeing the group fly by just now was spectacular, though, and I can only imagine what the skies are like in a few weeks.
Poet of the Marshes
“As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.”
– Sidney Lanier from The Marshes of Glynn as compiled in Sidney Lanier: Poet of the Marshes Visits Cedar Key, 1875 by Charles C. Fishburne, Jr.
