field notes:

5.3.2003

Another storm arrived in the night. It no longer feels like spring, but I guess this is just a defining part of spring as wildflowers and the first warm days were. Today I'm thinking about old friends in far away places. When I left my home in Nayarit, a friend said of my sadness, "Just think of this as a place in the world where you have a lot of friends." I do, but that doesn't make me less sad, only more so. If I were to follow my feelings of longing to return to all the friends whom I've loved, and places I've been drawn to or called home scattered around the world I'd never stop moving.

At some point, you just have to settle in somewhere. What I'm learning about "settling down" is that it's equally about adjusting to the loss of where you're not as it is about deepening the connection to where you are. So as days have the quality of music to them, this one feels like a lone violin. It's searingly beautiful, but like anything too beautiful, it has it hurts.

So I think of the people whom I love. They live on the edge of this same continent, but removed from me by a coastline thousands of miles long. When I close my eyes, I hear whispers from that sweet lost intimacy. When I close my eyes, I see men on horseback riding down a dry riverbed near my home. When I close my eyes, I am there, but when I open them, I am always here.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 9:45 AM link | comments []

4.30.2003

Sunrise beckons with orange brushstrokes on a white sky. I walk to the beach and watch the bald sun enter the misty firmament above the far shore. The horizon is shrouded by whiteness that extends out towards me on the unmoving, reflective waters. A blue rowboat sits offshore. It holds all the promise of a planet dancing around its brightest star.

posted by Lisa Thompson on 7:37 AM link | comments []

4.29.2003

Inverness

For me, it is an example of those places which we come across by chance and rather reluctantly, but which gradually begin to inhabit us and later take on meaning.
-- Czeslaw Milosz in Milosz's ABC's

I've lived in Inverness for close to two years now, and I understand these words of Milosz's more now than I did when I arrived. A couple I met in Bolinas a few weeks ago asked me where the center of Inverness is. I know of two answers. The post office and the Inverness Store are town centers of a sort--you run into people you know there. And it could also be said that there isn't a town center, and that would be more accurate. Point Reyes Station is a town like that, with a downtown and the Dance Palace, a community center that serves Inverness as well.

But Inverness has no center, or if it does it remains hidden, and like much else here only reveals itself over time. On a first visit, you would think that not many people live here, and that there aren't too many houses. But as you walk the roads homes appear amongst the trees as if in a fairy tale. Glimpses between rose bushes and through garden gates reveal cedar-shingled cottages nestled in the valleys, on the mountainsides, on the mesa, and in the hills and bowls of Inverness. A friend who lives here tells me that people, too, appear even after many years, whom she's never seen before.

In Bolinas, they call Inverness "Inwardness". They're onto something. This place encourages reflection, it's paths beckon the lone walker. We are not only priveleged by proximity to this park where animal and human lives overlap, but protectors of its sanctity, interpreters of its isolation and beauty, gatekeepers. It is our job to stay hidden and quiet. Nature doesn't reveal her secrets all at once, she reveals them slowly, like Inverness.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 7:43 AM link | comments []