9.14.2002
My friends invited me over for an impromptu dinner of salmon and berries -- oh to eat like a bear! I declined due to a hot date with my soul tonight. Sometimes I really need a night of quiet solitude with no plan.
So briefly....lest I neglect my date.
Same friends took a swim with me late this afternoon. We wondered what it is about swimming that makes you feel so great afterwards. The water can't be too warm, but can be salted or fresh for the effect to occur. Is it something so logical as negative ions or increased endorphins? I prefer to think it has more to do with state. We are, after all, 97% water ourselves. On a cellular level we are liquid, and our cellular memory is of liquid.
When we return to the water, we leave so much of our physical legacy behind. Stepping from the airy shore we swim through a bouyant atmosphere which we can finally see. It cools our skin, we displace it as it clings and drips from us, moves aside for us, and cradles us. Floating, we defy gravity. Kicking and pulling, we abandon bipedalism.
I need water like some people need trees, mountains or desert. It's good to know what you need.
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For Josef at A Blog Ringing in the Empty Sky, a kindred spirit in blogging:
Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.
Teilhard de Chardin
-a morning prayer
posted by Lisa Thompson on 8:34 PM link | comments []
9.13.2002
my first north millerton paddle
Wind from the south today -- unusual. It really began to pick up in the half hour before I went out. It began as a gentle wash but by the time I brought all my gear down the wind was up to probably 15 knots.
I tacked upwind at about 110 degrees and then tacked back with the wind at my back. Left just ahead of the high tide.
I wore my paddle skirt but didn't attach it to the boat -- trying to take advantage of the rare sunshine. The wind was to my advantage once I reached the inlet and made it past the small mouth eddy. I was able to float with very little paddle input deep inside the little arroyo. I floated past a preening egret, cleaning his long feathers. There were lots of egrets. I could hear and see crabs scuttling up the banks to my right into the low scrubby grasses whose vines remind me of mangroves. The mud, the crabs, the abundance of life here all remind me of Mexico or the Everglades anyways.
The tide gently floated and twirled me. I closed my eyes and heard nothing, I opened my eyes and heard the wind ruffle the feathers of an egret.
There is a breach down here in the old railroad track where the tidal water was rushing in. I didn't go in cause I wasn't sure about getting back out. I suppose I could have ported back if needbe. There was a blue heron guarding the entrance, watching the flippling little fish in the short rapids. As I came near he suddenly called out and then flew across the little body of water into the wetlands between me and the bay. As I floated past the breach I could see lots of surface activity in the water beyond the old railway. It looked like small fins and reminded me of bat ray wings. But it's extremely shallow coming in here and I can't imagine how they would have arrived.
Heading back I saw a couple of cormorants, so I suppose that I could have seen the rear of a diving cormorant or two.
As I continued to drift beyond the breach I was struck by wide snakelike wounds that meandered east-west across the floor of this body of water. I was in less than 10" of water. The lines were about 8" wide and symmetrical. The angles and length between curves seemed symettrical too. They were very unusual. I guess that what causes them is the sun's heat when the water completely recedes from this mudflat. Over time the hairline cracks widen and smooth out with the constant ebb and tide of water to ease the hard angles.
This water sits on top of the San Andreas faultline. The epicenter of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 is only several miles away. Could these curvey lines be related to the fault? I don't know.
I took the opposite tack coming back across so that I'd be heading into the waves for the last tack back into the beach. Saw a harbor seal pop up about forty or fifty feet off the end of the pier. Sometimes they are curious about kayakers and I waited hoping he'd surface again. This time of year there are plenty of kayakers about -- too many for a harbor seal's taste I'm sure.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 6:47 PM link | comments []
9.12.2002
9.12.02
I can't stop listening to Rabbit Songs by Hem.
It's the best thing I've heard...
After some thought I've changed my mind about the value of celebrating the 1-year anniversary of 9-11 yesterday. I think that marking the day with some kind of personal ritual has benefit. I do feel better knowing that a year has passed and that we are still intact as humans -- it felt good to write '9-12-02'.
I watched a documentary on HBO last night that had footage from the day. I never saw too much of it cause i didn't have tv back then. It blew my mind, mostly because so many people were directly involved and affected, not just those who were in the towers or who died there, but all of lower manhattan as the clouds of destruction blew down the streets and covered everybody in dust.
The most powerful thing for me to remember is how we all felt sorrow at the same time, and that for a day or a week, most of the planet united around that.
Just as my whole life stops when my back goes out, the world stopped when it saw such horror perpetrated by fanatics against innoocents. It's just good to know that we care, it's good to remember that we do.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 11:44 PM link | comments []
9.10.2002
9.10.02
I said goodbye to a new friend last week. She left her home of many years, and a town she loved, to live in an assisted living facility in another state close to her family.
She did this with grace and dignity that saved the parting from sentimentality. She knew that the time had come to leave her home, and she didn't rail against the unfairness, or bitterly rue the day -- nor did she break down -- at least not in front of her assembled friends and neighbors. Instead, she thanked each friend and neighbor for their contribution to her and shared a private moment with each. I can't imagine what it would be like to be driven away from my home knowing that I would most likely never see it again. What a tough passage to undertake.
It's tough hanging in. It would be so much easier to die in a sudden fashion -- by accident or heart attack. The suffering would be less. What my friend is going through now, adjusting to a new life in a new place is tough, but it's part of a long life well-lived. Truthfully, it's more fortunate to live through the sadness of moving on, to say a conscious goodbye to the people and places we love, than it is fortunate to die without suffering. Suffering is where we find out what we're made of and what others are made of. She has awed me.
I saw an old friend last week too. He was visiting from the east coast. It was like falling off a log to spend the day with him and another friend of ours. What a blessing to have friends like that -- where 10+ years can go by and it feels like it was yesterday except that we're talking about what we've done in those years. It's really been 18 years since we spent time together on a regular basis. If we keep up this rate of getting together, and live normal life spans, we only have 4 or 5 meetings left. That thought makes life seem too short.
These separations are what happen because we move. We move around the country and around the world. I've left southern California for northern. For awhile I left the country altogether. I've been keeping up a hectic schedule of driving to southern California to stay close to neices and family, but it's too hard on me to keep it up. I have friends everywhere. Hell, it's even hard to get together with friends here in the bay area. Oakland and San Francisco are an hour and a half away. The closest big towns are 35 minutes away. Time and distance make it hard to get together. I think that's why the tv show 'Friends' is so appealing -- how great would it be if all the people you wanted to be near were near?
This is why I feel a big interest today in lifeforms that don't move, or don't move much. I'm drawn to the sponges, the barnacles and oysters, the clams, mussels, limpets, piddocks and sea stars.
Did you know that a sea star can travel 3-4 miles in a month? I'm taking them off my list. They move too much for me right now. I'm collecting friends that stay put.
Sponges multiply. In the sheltered part of our beach there are few sponges, but in the cove to the north where the wind waves and the tidal action is more constant there are many. The waves must cause breakage. When a piece breaks off it lodges nearby and becomes an autonomous life itself. A sponge neighborhood is thriving along this shore.
Most of the barnacles here are acorn barnacles. They are sessile, from the Latin meaning to sit. They attach themselves to a permanent base after a short period of free-swimming early in life. They afix themselves with a cement-like glue and they stay put. Some attach themselves to a moving object, of course, such as a boat, or even the carapace of a crab like one I found the other day -- covered in little acorn barnacles. They must have really slowed him down.
At low tide today I sat and watched a part of the shoreline that was several inches below water. The water was moving but gently, and there were no crabs or other ambulatory species about. But the life force was abundant. Any given rock might house oysters, mussels, limpets, barnacles, and sponges, along with unidentified algae. The clams or mussels in the area were noisy with clicking and once a minute or so somebody was shooting a spray of water. I was never looking directly at the place where the spitting came from.
I've been wondering why I rarely see crabs walking about the flats during low tides, but I find crab bodies after every high tide. Today I stopped looking. I'm learning to take comfort from the sessile forms of life. I've never been a person who stays, but its something I aspire to. I'll watch the tidepools and the mudflats and sit. I'll just sit and watch.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 9:09 PM link | comments []
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