Rekindling Friendships, written March 2014

Sights, Inspirations and Rekindling Friendships  March 18, 2014

It’s three weeks since I’ve written.  At the moment I’m on a bus in Oregon along the Columbia River that Amtrak has hired to shuttle us— our train lost time in the Cascades behind a limping freight, and now they are aiming to make up time and catch the eastbound Empire Builder that left Portland ahead of us.  

One way or the other, I should end up in Sandpoint, Idaho in the wee hours of the morning.  I have a place to stay for the next 2 nights, and various leads to follow towards finding a small place or room to rent for the next months.  I expect these next few days to also rendezvous with Shane and my little car, battery reconnected after its long winter of hibernation.  For sure, I am unlikely to be sitting around much in the next while, so this bus ride seems the perfect opportunity to write you all.  I plan to stop by the Sandpoint Library tomorrow, connect to the Internet, and send this off!

These weeks have been rich in incredible countryside, and even richer in people, stories and  conversation.  In the midst of much unknown, I am also hopeful and inspired.  

Powerful winter storms and uncertain timing of ice in Chicago encouraged my friend Elizabeth and me to err in the direction of caution and cancel our long-planned trip to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in nearby Missouri.  We turned the disappointment into quiet time together and a project with Elizabeth’s vintage Singer sewing machine and a lovely Goodwill Store silk scarf to create a lavender-filled eye pillow as a gift in appreciation for our hostess at Dancing Rabbit whose significant coordination efforts were for naught.  And we feasted on the incredible variety of an orchid show at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Traveling by public ground transportation has gone well.  It was just delightful to benefit from my strategy last summer of accumulating Amtrak points and to have earned a tiny sleeper space on the California Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco.   The space design is superb and I took notes and pictures:  living and sleeping space for 2 along with a compact closet in less than 32 square feet!  I loved it!  During the day there were 2 comfortable facing chairs that at night flattened into a lower berth with another bunk above:

Arriving in the soft spring of California began with another wonderful Servas host family in Palo Alto and a gentle transition to Petra, Joseph and the Wilderness Guides Council’s annual Gathering in an absolutely sweet place along the Pacific near Bodega Bay.  At night, I could hear the ocean surf, and this is the time of year that the grey whales are migrating back north from Baja along this shore with their newborn calves.

The entire Gathering was incredible for me:  I particularly loved all the new members we had, many of them in their twenties and thirties.  And hard work that I and others had invested beforehand concluded in a broad and amazing consensus process to move ahead with the intention of becoming a public benefit nonprofit that I will continue to be significantly involved in, towards long-held dreams by many of us to one day make earth-based rites of passage work accessible to every family and community.

I’ve spent the week since the Gathering with 4 different sets of friends in northern California, sharing news and hopes for the future.  Over the weekend, I was with Dominique, David and Torin, hiking along Sly Park Lake and catching up- we originally met when Shane and Torin were in a Montessori pre-school together.

And yesterday I was with my two best friends from California teacher training for the first time in 13 years or so.  Deb and I joined Arlene in her 5th grade classroom, and then had some great visiting time together before I caught the train last night out of Sacramento.

I feel quite blessed in all these circles of amazing friendship and possibility in my life.  Connecting, and staying connected across wide gaps of years and geography--- it's a discipline that seems vital to community and creating the potential for it in a broad variety of ways.

P.S. Wednesday, March 19  Arrived safely in Sandpoint in wee hours last night and found a friendly fellow-traveling family to give me a ride to the home of the young friends where I am staying through tonight, so I didn’t have to wake any one up!  Currently at the library with internet access and have started following leads for congenial places to live.  

Community Winter and Idaho-Bound, written February 2014

Community Winter and Idaho-Bound  February 26, 2014

I realized that this winter was a time to put some good foundations in place and tie up loose ends   I sold my car and my old laptop, finally got a will and a Health Care Power of Attorney written, moved everything into a different storage unit for a lower monthly rent, wrapped up final energy models with my engineering work, navigated the Affordable Health Care Act, and the like.  

I spent a good deal of time with my sister Susan, Mom and as many friends as I could manage to connect with, and with the land of North Carolina.  
 

And I had the good fortune to share the home of my good friends Becky and Lee, surrounded by their larger co-housing community of Arcadia.  

Our neighbors were welcoming and generous to me, sharing beeswax for a candle-dipping project, a bike with great side baskets that supported some helpful bus-bike travel on various errands, an interesting book on off-the-grid power, and some hiking boots to keep my feet dry climbing various springtime mountains with Shane!

33 homes clustered this way chew up much less land in roadways, and neighbors walk past rather than driving, so connections happen easily.  The storm water pond attracts birds, and there are shared garden, play field, and community dining/cooking space for meals and celebrations together.  Every morning I could run through the small woodlot next to the pond, greeting my favorite white oak tree and whoever else was out at the same time.  (You can tell we had an unusual heavy snow a couple of weeks ago!)

Of course it’s crucial to be kindred, AND I am more and more inspired by the huge benefits of house-sharing with others— now more than ever, with natural resources precious and dwindling, finances tricky, and demographics leaning towards many single people.

The most lovely part for me is how easy it is to counter the isolating impact of busy schedules this way, with impromptu and rich conversations, laughter over side-by-side meal preparations, games.  I reveled in it!  Turns out Becky had as much fun dipping beeswax birthday candles as I did, and we are a dynamite jigsaw puzzle duo!

Instead of working inside all day after our big storm, I yielded to temptation and played with my buddies in the snow!

Becky dreamed up a shared trip as I was leaving North Carolina that was an incredibly sweet transition:  first to the mountains near Asheville to visit land that is about to leave her family, while camping with my dear friend Justine.  We had a sweet morning snuggled in our sleeping bags near the pond full of springtime frogs, and talking about life. 

Then Becky and I headed to Charlottesville, Virginia and we each visited good friends before her return to North Carolina and my boarding the train for Chicago.  I had a joyous evening with my high school friend Jane and her good husband Mark.

And I’m getting to spend time with two lovely women I got to know last year— Kristina in Charlottesville 

and Elizabeth in Chicago.  

Before I head on to the San Francisco Bay area, Elizabeth and I are quite anticipating a weekend trip together to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, a very interesting intentional community in northeastern Missouri that is hosting us to learn more about what they have figured out.

Most of the tiny house frame, various tools, my bike, and boxes of books, cookware and some clothes are tucked into my 10 x 10 storage unit as I head towards Sandpoint, ID and the mysterious yet-to-emerge patchwork of community and livelihood that await me there, along with great time with Shane.  I expect I’ll head back to North Carolina in September or so, and maybe this next winter will see the tiny house taking form.

New Orleans and Old Stories, written late October 2013

New Orleans and Old Stories  October 30, 2013

I love that there are some operating streetcars in New Orleans' transit system, and I rode one at the end of the day after a walking tour of the Garden District:  a section of huge old homes built to impress "the neighbors" in the mid-1840's after a Frenchwoman sold her plantation.  The streetcars were fun to ride.

Odd to walk the city thinking what it must have been like just after Katrina, and also noting all the stark contrast of privilege and oppression.  But I found it a friendly city with a sense of humanity (unlike Houston, which felt creepy to me…. urban sprawl, corporate greed, asphalt and mining the earth without thought of the impact and the future). 

Before walking the Garden District, I took the bus (I loved the city's great public transportation!) to Audubon Park near Tulane and Loyola campuses, intentionally to see what they call "The Tree of Life".  It is a live oak called the De Bore oak that they estimate was planted in Audubon Park in 1740.  Here it is.  I sat up against it for a while and imagined the stories it has witnessed.

My hosts Grace and Harvey are an English-as-a-2nd-language teacher and a city permit/planner with the New Orleans Water Board, respectively, with a love of old trees.  Harvey is an amateur dendrochronologist who has been working energetically since 2003 (that was 200 years since the Louisiana Purchase) to register old bald cypresses in the state that pre-date the Purchase.  His efforts help educate owners to the wonder of preserving such long-lived and slow-growing trees.  One of them is almost 19 feet in circumference and dates to be at least 800 years old.  

Harvey and Grace's house is just south of the Garden District and near the Mississippi River, and was built before 1850 in this old working class neighborhood.  Again, I wondered about the stories going back into past centuries.

Two coincidences of interest:  Grace and Harvey had stayed with the same Servas couple in Sandpoint that I stayed with who are sailors and very involved with smart growth and the Idaho Bicycle and Pedestrian Alliance, and liked them as well as I did.  And Harvey did his graduate work in Cincinnati in the late 70's, when I first lived there, and was quite interested in the Urban Ecovillage work there of my friends the Schenks that I stayed with this summer.

The Sonoran Desert, written October 2013

The Sonoran Desert and Its Wild Life October 26, 2013

It's funny.  While traveling by train, I have been "landing", quite appreciative of the gracious invitations of various families:  a flat bed to sleep in and a place to shop and cook, launder and shower, but without any expectations of the particular place.  This has led to all kinds of lovely surprises.  I just had 2 amazing days in the desert ecosystem around Tucson, Arizona, courtesy of my Servas hostess, also a Carol.  So this blog is born of my love of this land and its creatures that I got to be close to.

I went hiking in Sabino Canyon the first day- a recreation area in the National Forest with great displays and a nature walk with all the desert plants labeled, plus miles of trails.  

Then yesterday we went together to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.  This museum is a mix of botanical garden, enclosed habitats and excellent educational information.  

The Sonoran Desert is the only place the saguaro cacti grow, and I loved learning about them and their ecosystem.  They don't start branching or flowering til they are about 70 years old, and the diameter of their shallow root systems is roughly equal to their height.  

The prickly pear cacti are amazing, too.  Carol treated me to some of the fruit, called "tuna", frozen and then juiced.  It is brilliant magenta and somewhat reminiscent of pomegranate juice perhaps.  When I learned that cochineal, a prized deep carmine dye that I knew about from spinning and weaving, comes from a small insect whose home is the prickly pear, I wondered if the cactus is pulling a particular mineral out of the desert soils that is the source of these intense colors?????  Agave are important here too, and the ancient Hohokam desert people farmed them by aligning stones as "water bars" whose slight accumulation of the rain water was enough to improve the growth of the agave.

The desert ecosystem is amazing and fragile.  Bats and butterflies pollinate and are critical.  Over-harvest of the agave for alcohol is upsetting the delicate balances, as is habitat destruction for the saguaro and the bats.  People are learning  to intentionally provide housing for the bats when repairing the highway bridges they now use as caves….

In honor of my recent sighting of a mountain lion while driving near my north Idaho campground, I loved seeing the young male cougar at the Museum yesterday, learning that he was rescued as an orphan kit this spring from a backyard in San Jose, and getting a great picture of him!

Twice a day, falconers on the Museum staff offer free flight demonstrations of raptors.  It was amazing to watch and to learn more about their training.  To see them in flight as they are in the wild, but up close, was phenomenal.  We saw a barn owl and Harris hawks.  One of the staff noted that the owls are less "bright" than the hawks and slower to train as most of their brain capacity serves their incredible sight.  The Harris hawks are unusual in hunting as collaborative families, somewhat like a pack of wolves on wing.  All these raptors are housed at a distance and during the demonstration come zooming in out of the desert to the Museum site where multiple falconers direct their flight from spot to spot over observers' heads with strategic, sequential placement of food on various perch cacti and trees.  

Here is the barn owl.

The Harris hawks have a hierarchy, with an alpha female leading.  At the end of yesterday's flight, the handlers were heading out into the desert to find her.  Perhaps they have radio transmitters to aid?  (they had to go, so I didn't get to ask!)  They said she is quite an accomplished huntress and had taken off after a rabbit.  I loved that they were working with the ancestral in-bred characteristics of these birds and flying them free, with intermittent glitches like this unplanned rabbit chase.  There were six of the birds working together yesterday.  Here's a shot of 3 of them in the process, and a great portrait of one alone.

“The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now; there’s a power in me
To grasp and give shape to the world.

I know nothing has ever been real
Without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
And they come toward me, to meet and be met.

No thing is too small for me to cherish 
And paint in gold, as if it were an icon
That could bless us
Though I’ll not know who among us

Will feel this blessing.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

West-Bound Train Connections

West-Bound Train Connections  August 9, 2013

Roaming around the country, I'm rubbing up against all kinds of conversations.  And there's something about the train that is more spacious and encourages human connections.  Most of us are here "for the long haul".  I'm on my way to Montana today and it's 26 hours for me.  Some of the Amish families I've talked with this morning are also going to Montana but have been traveling more straight through than I from both Pennsylvania and from Indiana.  Other folks were on the train before I joined in Minnesota last night and are going all the way to Portland, Oregon.

Our seats are quite roomy and I'm getting the hang of sleeping pretty well.  But during the day, the lounge/observation car is the best.  There are 4 person booths on each side of the aisle.  People share, since there are limited spaces.  Some play cards, or snack.  I'm not only writing this blog, but theoretically will finish up a dangling chart summarizing the energy and mechanical equipment design characteristics of the Salvation Army shelter in Raleigh that was my favorite energy model project.  And right now there is a young woman fiddling. 

She's from the Twin Cities and on her way out to Whitefish Mountain in Montana.  A mandolin player has joined her and they are jamming.  Their choice at the moment is the City of New Orleans- appropriately about a train!  It already seemed to be a friendly crowd and the music is expanding possibilities for strangers to connect across this shared pleasure.

~

An hour later and our fiddler inspired a young keyboardist (no piano in tow) to enter in.  His mix of full-on zest and enthusiasm with self-possession reminds me of Shane.  He has one song he knows with a cup.  Well…. he had so much fun, and so did the audience, that he offered an encore and suddenly there was an even younger percussionist in the aisle.  At first she just watched, but when her mom offered that she had learned the same song herself at camp, everyone encouraged and we suddenly had a duet.  I loved it!