Seven days are not long enough in Maine....I didn't even see some of the people I wanted to see, but these last few days have been full of thoughts, plans, work and decisions.
Now I head back to Philadelphia with a plan, so it's less scary. More to come soon......but suffice it to say: beauty lies along the horizon....
Grizzly Bear - On a Neck, On a Spit
My last few posts have been too vague for my comfort level and I aim to fix that this weekend.......
I just turned off all the lights at my parents house; just the first floor, I suppose, since the second floor lights were already out and rooms full of sleeping people and animals. I walked out onto the porch in my mom's super thick and protective winter coat, boots, gloves, scarf and hat, because it is three degrees out there.
Three!
Three is when your body feels really tight and rigid and you can really only think about how strange it is to feel that cold anywhere exposed to the cold while the rest of you feels just fine.
Anyway: I stepped out on my porch and stared up and rapidly pulled in a breath in awe. The amount of stars, numerically, is incredible! But the sizes, too, are mind-boggling: some small and some large, some white and some yellow or copper or blue. Some constellations tiny and compressed, some large and extending for what must be trillions and trillions of miles.
Orion stood out to me tonight. I could see his belt and his knife, but that is not impressive. I could also see every point on the wooden part of his bow, as if I could just lay a real one on top of the stars and fit the curve perfectly. I saw his hands, his wrist, the bend of his elbow and the shape of his arm. I could see his head and hair, his feet, legs, and of course, the dogs laying underneath him. I could see many other constellations, too, but Orion stood out tonight.
Three degrees!
Wow.
It is so beautiful, outside in the cold, when you look around and see the cozy, warm glow of the houses against the stark black night studded with millions of stars. Looking out to the northwest, you can see the twinkle of lights of other houses across the bay, and the way that the sky is reflected onto the surface of the ocean. You can see trees reaching their naked fingers up into the sky. The only sound is the occasional car on Route 3 or sometimes, the twisting noises of tree trunks twisting in the wind.
I wished, a few minutes ago, that I could sit on the snow. But, three degrees is cold and the stars will be there again tomorrow.
Lately, it has been all about the rediscovery of truths and necessities in my life: those things that sometimes we file away and forget, and when they are missing for too long we wander around our heads and hearts and houses seeking something impossible to find because it isn't laying about anywhere.
One of the things I love about Texas is its wide, wild, open spaces. I love driving through them: seeing barbed wire fences, cows, cactus and sunsets. Oh the sunsets! The mile markers, the Texas shaped highway markers, the vultures sitting on power lines, and the oak trees. The grass and the light. The scrubbiness of Texas countryside and how the texture of the plants and light changes as the day advances from misty morning to dry afternoon and dusky evenings. Even at night the land makes a noise as the wind blows across the dust and the weeds: when you drive with the windows down the perfume of the land blows through the car and just makes you realize where you are.
Late Afternoon Texas Bluebonnets, Indian Paintbrush and Live Oaks
I love driving, always have. I love driving long distances in the day and at night. I prefer the day because I love to stare off into distances and see what is coming. I love to look out at fields and notice the animals living there. I love to watch clouds change as I drive underneath them, and I am a sucker for sunsets.
Today I drove from Philly to New Jersey, to my cousin's house for Thanksgiving. I had some new records to listen to, a box of knitting projects and a snack or two and took off up I-95 towards Morris Plains. Just south of Trenton, I hit terrible traffic and crawled for an hour and a half and traveled two miles! Luckily for me, this was not caused by a truck spilling industrial chemicals all over the highway but just accidents and road work (I hope everyone is okay).
A Road at Night
After I found my alternative route, it was dark. I turned off my GPS because I looked at an old fashioned map in the Service Plaza and figured out my way. I listened, in the early dark, to Beirut's new album from start to finish, and had a beautiful drive, by myself, through the night.
A Candle's Fire
Tonight's drive made me think of all the drives I made between Austin and Houston all those years ago when that was a drive I made all the time. That drive is all countryside, while this one is almost all city...but the driving is the same. The sense of moving through space, of shifting and getting away from the day to day, of controlling your destiny more so than when you are in a plane. I love it.
I realized tonight that one of the truths about myself is I need space. I need space to drive, space to live, and space to bicycle. I need wide open sky and stars and trees and fields with cows. I need open windows and sunsets and time. Time just to be, just to listen to records as the clouds pass overhead, as the asphalt passes underneath, as mile after mile passes by and you get to where you are going.
please excuse crappy phone photos from here on out
I have spent the afternoon making jewelry....lovely, soul-sustaining artwork in my friend Allison's gallery. I pulled out all the almost completed and old pieces from their ziploc bags and polished them, took them apart, set some cabochons, and ultimately, re-oriented how I felt about them. Tonight, they join the ranks of other pieces on the bright white shelves of Zuzu in Collingswood.
It feels good to take a look at old things that have been hidden for too long. Sometimes, it's like your eyes just forgot what something looked like, and in other cases, its as if a piece wakes up for the first time. All of a sudden you can see it for what it always should have been.
The Under the Sea Necklace originally was a necklace on lots of chain with a clasp and it was very dark: very heavily oxidized. Today I cut it all apart, threw the extra pieces I was tired of looking at into the pickle pot, and proceeded to clean the oxide off the pendant with steel wool. And then I saw it and realized: this is how it should have been all the time!
After that, I set the earrings that have been scuttling around the bottom of one of my jewelry boxes for months and months and months....these earrings are set with pictures from stereographic images....the vertically oriented ones are of a hillside in Mexico, and the horizontally oriented ones are a mountain in Scotland.....
Jewelry is an amazing force in my life: as is all creativity. Without it, I literally wither and begin to become a nutty shell of my former self. Had I known this as distinctly as I know it now, I probably would have researched Philadelphia a bit better. Had I known alot of things, I would have researched Philadelphia better. But now I know: six months in, I know what is important.
While polishing these pieces and thinking about the next six months, and the changes that will inevitably happen, the luck that will wax and wane like the moon each month, I have been dancing to The Smiths.
I have no doubt that whoever has walked down Haddon Avenue tonight has wondered why on Earth that tall girl in cowboy boots is dancing around while clutching small pieces of silver and steel wool. But that's okay. Maybe they will go home and dance around while clutching their laptops, their knitting projects, their dogs or cats or babies.
Soon I am off to Karaoke Obscura at the Tritone, and soon after that I am off to New Jersey and New York City, and then to Maine for the holidays. The time passes by so fast....it's hard to know what to do just to take advantage of the days....
Dancing to The Smiths sounds good now, though....and singing Regina Spektor or The Yeah Yeah Yeahs later on sounds great.
I just deactivated my Facebook profile.....I need a break from all of this constant contact. I need time to think, just to be. I have decided to suspend it for a week.
Funnily enough, I almost reactivated this morning when I woke up! As if I couldn't go through a morning without it.....that means that deactivating was a good choice.....what a strange life this one is, this 21st century life. We have so much, buzzing around us, all the time....it's hard to know what invest your time in.
This morning, when I woke up, before I had coffee or anything else, I watched this video as it was delivered to me with my weekly BrainPickings bulletin. I find the Holstee Manifesto be very inspiring to me at the moment. Right now I feel like I am struggling unnecessarily all the time: I can't give myself a break. When I read the words of this statement, it gives me pause to think about what I am doing and why it is that my daily life is not making me happy.
Last night I went to go and see Kurt Vile and the Violators at Union Transfer: I was so tired from working all day at the Philadelphia Craft Show, but I am so happy that I went. His music is so beautiful and the band's guitar playing is so ear-wrenching...it was fantastic, and made me realize how much I love to see live music. Since living here, that has definitely fallen off so I have recommitted to going to shows whenever possible.
It has been a weekend of music! On Friday, I went to a Secret Show in someone's living room in North Philly with my friend who has definitely become one of my best friends here in Philadelphia. He invited me and off we went to someone's house, sat in the living room, were hosted by a lovely English girl who reminded me of my friend Mercedes, and listened to four acts who played four songs each. We went to see the Lawsuits, but Alessi's Ark was such a surprise: her music is SOOOOOO beautiful, I became very teary-eyed during her singing. She was lovely and warbled: her mouth changing shape to echo beautiful bird sounds as she sang.
The fall is here! The ginkgo trees are bright yellow. They pop out at you from corners, against walls, against fences and trees. As I drove to Doylestown the other day (photos to come later), I was overwhelmed with color!
This morning, I watched this series of short films and listened to the words of Dr Richard Feynman. They are magical words, and magical films, and these are my thoughts after watching and listening.
The Feynman Series - Beauty
"Beauty is truth - truth beauty, that is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know."
- John Keats "Ode to a Grecian Urn"
Lately, I have been meditating on beauty, and truth, as it were. Lately, I have been living in a great, old, American city. This great, old, American city is filled with amazing historical buildings and ideas: the ideas that this country was born of were born here. Here Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and William Penn and other abolitionists and believers in democracy strolled the streets, dreamed of the way they could be, and built them.
They paved the streets in cobblestones and traintracks. They built City Hall in the image of Parisian buildings. They built the Franklin Institute, the main branch of the Philadelphia Free Library, and Fairmount Park so that Philadelphia would be the most beautiful of American cities. And they succeeded. They built house after house, all stuck together in rows. Some row houses have three floors and others two or four. Some have trees lining their streets, some are bare. All the houses are old, old, old, according to an American timeline. The outsides have changed little, the insides dramatically. Despite time or fire, wind, snow, rain, these houses stand and will stand, I am sure, for a very long time.
So this idea is beautiful, really. Using Hall Quarry granite, carving out a European city, a beacon of America on the edge of the Delaware River. A city born of the ideas of equal representation, democracy, freedom and liberty.
Then they paved over the cobblestones, covered the traintracks. They maintained the city around City Hall and around the park. Center City flourishes, South Philly grows, Queen Village maintains its classic beauty. Around the edges, though, city planning and city resources grew thin. Slowly, they became dismantled, as did every great American city. The industries moved out of the city, but left unemployed workers and empty factory buildings for us to see every day. Giant brick buildings broadcast who once lived and worked there: who made their living there, but no more.
Those young people who were born around those city edges, the ones who saw their grandparents and parents have solid, stable jobs at factories in Philly all of a sudden saw empty brick buildings. All of a sudden, they questioned whether they had a future here at all. And the answer was, no. The schools deteriorated when the city and government limited their funding. An overwhelming sense of dependence on data as the determining statistic for education overwhelmed schools populated with children who knew there was no future for them: they began to fail.
People grew sad and disenchanted. They saw the people in Center City and wondered why the rest of the city was so different. What had they done? And they had done nothing. The City itself, the powers that be, had sold their future for the present. The idea that all of us had to now pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, when in reality none of the wealthy had done this, at least not in several generations, pervaded the City and if you were not able to do this, you were degenerate, pathological, a culture of poverty.
I take the train to work in the morning and pass an amazingly beautiful, Grecian style building. I wonder what it was, because now the doors and windows are boarded up. There are trees growing through holes in the sides of the building. Across the park near the school is an incredible church. It must be over 150 years old, judging by its spires and stained glass, sculpted windows. The front is boarded up now, the windows are broken out. There is scaffolding in front to keep people out.
Now Philadelphia is decorated in so many amazing murals, all across the city. The murals celebrate the diversity, beauty and history of this city. Every time I walk past them it makes me happy to see such beauty on the sides of old, giant buildings, apartment buildings, under over-passes. I do wonder, however, what is the future for the children of Philadelphia. Will they be able to appreciate the beauty here? Or will they simply see how the old is paved over? Will they see the empty buildings and see opportunity? Or will they continue along the strange path that our old industrial giants have taken...
The Feynman Series - Honours
This week, I learned that I have the honor of participating in an exciting program: EduPERCS: Partnering Educators and Researchers in Collaborative Science. I will be working with a scientist whose focus is on ocean health and ocean awareness, and who specifically wants to work with middle school students and help them understand what "real" science is and how scientists do their work. We will be collaborating over the next year (and hopefully years after): my classes will speak to her, work with her, and I will share ideas with her so that we are really working on a program together. I am excited to see what happens!
When it comes to other honours in my life, of late I have had a fair few. I have learned that one of my first students, from 6 years ago, has just finished Marine Boot Camp and will return for combat training in two weeks. He is very excited and loves what he has chosen to do, which is to fix and work on computers for the Marines. I am happy that this means he will not be out on the battlefield, and hopefully will be less in harm's way. Another one of my students' parents emailed me because she found the postcard I gave to him 6 years ago on his bedroom floor. She told me that he ended up loving school, attended summer school all through high school, and finished with his freshman year of college already finished. He is now going to the University of Texas at San Antonio, living in an apartment, and apparently is 5'11"!!!! She wrote:
"Thank you for the positive impact you gave... in the short time he was in middle school. I'm sure as a teacher you always wonder about some of your students and what became of them. It makes it all worthwhile when you hear great accomplishments from former students so we hope we made your day."
So, for me, honours are what we receive when we are being quiet, diligent, doing our jobs as best we can, and sometimes we are handed surprises that make us intensely happy and fulfilled, and make all the frustration and confusion less important. Honours like this are the most important, the most real. I have to agree with Dr Feynman above that other honours, the honours of trophies and certificates, are ultimately meaningless when you can experience the real honour of helping someone other than yourself.
The Feynman Series - Beauty
Last weekend it was very chilly and the rain was still misting down, and I went with my friends to Wissahickon Park. We parked and wandered down the trails, talked to the ducks, looked at the old old bridges, spotted a stream, climbed into some tree roots, peed in the woods, ran down the trail, and the littlest ones of us were swung by the arms of the larger ones.
Later, we fed the ducks with bread that a nice fellow-park-attendee could spare. We spotted beautiful wood ducks with all their colors, mallards, and their duller, female companions. We talked about why the lady ducks are less pretty than the male ducks, and again, the littlest ones of us had more to say because they were curious and mystified as to why the lady ducks were not pretty like lady humans.
Afterwards, we went to go and drink some wine and have some snacks, and the older ones of us talked and laughed and watched the littlest ones draw mobiles on napkins, draw and write a story on a scrap sheet of paper, and stick straws into a hat. Again, the littlest ones walked around the restaurant, talked to people, came back, ate ice cream and off we went home.
My friend Karen's children are amazing and are a wonderful age for curiosity, passion, and exploration. They are four and seven years old, have no television at home, have an art teacher for a mom, a house painter for a dad, are Brazilian-American, and live in a giant, old house in Germantown where they can run around, whether inside or outside. They are curious about everything: sharks, turtles, lizards, dinosaurs, cheetahs, knitting, spider webs, ducks, river water and trees. They reminded me to everyday take moments to appreciate the amazing beauty that surrounds everything. To question what makes everything work. To wonder......to spend time in trees and parks, to play with others and especially animals. To make magical hideouts, to dress in costumes, and to eat cakes and cookies.
