Seattle is a city of vistas: heading west to the bay and the sound, islands on the horizon, ferries and tug boats and freighters plying the deep, unfathomable blue.
Or looking east, to the lake and Capitol Hill, the muted colors of sky and clouds, small sailboats on the water and a cathedral on the summit.
One of the things I like about travel is that you move through time as well as space. You recover lost springs and leap ahead to crisp autumns.
On Monday I strolled through the Columbia City neighborhood of south Seattle. It was sunny and cool, and I snapped a photo of a gnarled and mossy tree with crimson leaves.
My head was still spinning from the flight across the country — an unusual tail wind meant we made the trip west in less than five hours — but it was alert enough to register this place, this northern place, as already ahead of us in the march of time.
A spur-of-the-moment trip to Seattle (I can do these things now!) means that I’ll attend class tonight on Zoom rather than in person. While I’ve had plenty of experience with Zoom meetings the past year and a half (haven’t we all?!), I’ve been driving down to Georgetown for the real thing every Tuesday evening.
While this seemed slightly terrifying at the start — where will I park? will rush-hour traffic make the trip twice as long as it would be otherwise? — those concerns have largely faded. And the joy of being in a classroom again (even if only one other classmate is there with me, which has been the case the last few weeks) has more than compensated for them.
But tonight, we’ll all be on Zoom. We’ll be a class, a community, of the ether — as so many communities are these days.
(Sunset from the Car Barn Terrace, where I am not whiling away time before class tonight.)
Not to get too meta here, but writing this blog is largely a seat-of-the-pants enterprise. Most of my life has been tightly scripted until recently, so I’ve wanted to keep this writing loose and open.
I’ve also resisted the temptation to draft a bunch of posts on the weekend to carry me through the first few busy days of the week. The details of the day are my inspiration, and they usually (kinda sorta) pull me through.
But recently, I’ve found myself writing several posts a day. This may be, probably is, a momentary thing. Inspiration tends to go in cycles, I’ve noticed. And it is undoubtedly made possible by the gift of time.
Whatever the reason, though, it’s meant that, for the first time in forever, I have a few posts “in the can,” as we liked to call them back in my magazine editor days.
They will come in handy on the days when the muse of daily inspiration is otherwise occupied.
For someone who doesn’t always sleep through the night, I’m always grateful to wake up, glance at the clock and see that it’s truly morning, not some middle-of-the-night hour. (Glancing at the clock is necessary now as the light dwindles. I did it this today since it was still dim at 6:30.)
It strikes me often, though, that the gratitude I feel upon finishing a seven- or eight-hour snooze ought to carry over to the four- or five-hour variety, as well. After all, I usually drift back, and when I don’t, there is always something relaxing I can do: read or write or pick up a dream thread and follow it back to its source.
William Arthur Dunkerley said it best: “Thank God for sleep! And when you cannot sleep, still thank him that you live to lie awake!”
It’s the first day of a new month, “the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” a phrase that has stayed with me since I read Keats’ “To Autumn” in high school.
What I don’t remember are the later phrases, these sumptuous descriptions: “close-bosom friend of the maturing sun” or “to bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees” or these lines from the final stanza:
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
I’ve nothing to add to that!
Not on roses, actually, but raindrops on the leaves of the elephant ear plant. Raindrops I first spotted a few weeks ago when I was out walking Copper on a moist morning.
I marveled at the way the liquid pooled on the surface of the giant leaves, thought to myself, you must snap a photo of this.
But I came inside and immediately forgot the impulse. By the time I remembered, it was too late. The sun had warmed the leaves and the moisture had evaporated.
The artistic imperative strikes when it strikes. It does not linger. Luckily, it rained again.
Doctors are taught that when you hear the sound of hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. It’s a saying I’ve always appreciated, worrier that I am, a reminder to see the molehill instead of the mountain. But even doctors know that in some situations, it’s better to think mountains — or zebras.
This is especially true in Maryland, where five zebras escaped from a farm and 30 days later have yet to be caught. Zebras have been spotted grazing in suburban yards and dashing across suburban lanes.
Officials tell folks to be careful around the wild animals, that they cannot be caught, they must be corralled. Funny, I was just reading about zebras in the book Guns, Germs and Steel (more on this classic in a later post), how, unlike the forerunners of the horse, zebras are impossible to tame. They cannot be lassoed, and they have a tendency to bite.
The Maryland zebras are living proof of these biological and historical facts.
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
As I plunge further into class readings, further into class itself, I notice a difference in the way I’m thinking. Is it possible … could it be … is a new logical cast creeping into my thought process?
The class topics are some of the big ones facing society: medical research and ethics, life extension and new methods of reproduction, artificial intelligence and information technologies.
The philosophers and historians and scientists I’m reading are dealing with these changes in language that is sometimes clear, sometimes obscure but always logical. There is little in the writing that appeals to the emotions; it’s all about appealing to the intellect.
There is a certain tidiness in this approach. But I haven’t written this way in a long, long time. Fingers crossed that I can. My first paper is due today.
Here is the lesson hummingbirds bring to humans, at least this human. Not just their impossible splendor, their swift jabbing attacks at the feeder like knights at sword fights flashing silver, a miracle of motion that makes me appreciate my own movements, no matter how sluggish.
And not just their seemingly impossible, near-perpetual flight, though seeing it makes me think, no matter how much I’ve done in a day, it’s never enough.
It’s not even their way of pirouetting in front of me, as if to say thank-you, which speaks to me of gratitude whether they intend it to or not.
The lesson hummingbirds bring to me every year, from late April through late September, is, to use the movie’s hackneyed phrase … “if you build it, they will come.” Because, at least in this part of the world—and in many others from what I understand—all you have to do to see these glorious creatures is to fill a feeder with nectar and hang it it up outside. So simple, so obvious, like so many truths right there in front of me if only I would pay attention.