A long walk yesterday as the earth warmed around me. Families were ambling together, young children running ahead, babes in arms.
It wasn’t exactly the paseo, the leisurely evening strolls you see in Portugal, Spain and other European countries. It was too early and too diffuse for that. But it was movement for the sake of movement, not to get anywhere in particular.
Compared with these folks I must have seemed a woman on a mission. But at the end of the walk, I may have been as relaxed as some of those slower strollers. I know I was looser of limb, more open to life’s possibilities. And that, I think, is worth ninety minutes.
(The lights had come on but people were still strolling on this June 2022 evening in Lisbon.)
She made her home in D.C., but she was a citizen of the world. In 1946, at the age of 21, Shirley Duncan hopped on a bike and rode 11,000 miles across Australia with a friend. It took three years and also included transit in boats, on camels and on sea turtles.
The pair slept under the stars and air-dried their creek-washed clothes by stringing a line between the handlebars of their bikes. To finance their expedition they made beds, mustered cattle and served as spokespeople for Peters Ice Cream, which entitled them to free ice cream throughout their trip.
Duncan never looked back. She lived for a while in London and wrote a book called Two Wheels to Adventure. She explored Lapland, Siberia, Morocco, Malta, Turkey, Yemen, Tibet, Japan and Tahiti. She journeyed overland from Paris to Singapore, hitchhiking through the Soviet zone of Austria and lodging on a houseboat in Kashmir. She worked for Reuters in Laos and National Geographic in Africa, where she spent a week with Albert Schweitzer.
When she “settled down,” Duncan made travel her business. Her company, High Adventure Tours, took travelers to exotic destinations throughout the world. This woman had a life! And it didn’t end until a week ago, when she died of renal failure in a District hospital at the age of 99.
In her poem “The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver once famously asked the question, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” For Shirley Duncan, the answer was travel.
The 2,500-year-old Swayambhunath Temple in Nepal, one of Duncan’s favorite countries.
“Set an intention,” said Christina, my yoga teacher, at the beginning of class yesterday. She says this often and I take her message to heart. Usually, I skim through the lives and situations of my three daughters, tabulating which one needs my intention most that day.
I try to keep my intention in mind through the sun salutations and down dogs, though I can’t always say I’m successful. Yesterday we tackled garudasana, eagle pose, so mostly I tried to stay upright.
But a couple of hours after yoga class I spoke with the very daughter I’d made the focus of my intention. She had resolved a problem we’d discussed earlier, she said, had made a decision she’d been thinking about for days.
It was most likely just a coincidence, but I like to think that some little transfer took place, that the regard and effort of one life can somehow be applied to another. Wouldn’t that be something? A chink in the armor and boundaries of self, proof of our permeability, reason to hope in the power and the purpose of everyday actions.
Last week’s class was about Galileo. This week it was Sir Isaac Newton, widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of all time. His laws of motion and universal gravity put to rest any doubt about an earth-centered universe, and his book Principia laid the foundations for classical mechanics.
Newton was one of the inventors of calculus and his theories on optics showed us that white light is composed of all the colors of the rainbow. His work spanned optics, physics, mathematics, thermodynamics, chemistry and early economics. Later in life he was named Master of the Mint and he reformed British currency.
After hearing all of this in class last night, I wanted to learn more about the man himself, so I looked him up this morning. He was born prematurely, three months after his father’s death. He was so small at birth that his mother said he could fit in a quart jar. The plague interrupted his studies at Cambridge and sent him home to spend two of the most productive years any scientist ever spent, when he developed theories of gravity and optics.
Newton was the first scientist to be buried in Westminster Abbey. Alexander Pope wrote this epitaph: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night. God said, “Let Newton be” and all was light.”
The snow could be deeper and more intense than any we’ve had this season, the forecasters said. Prepare for another winter storm.
But that was Sunday. The weather gurus have backed off now. The snow will mostly fall south of us, they say. At most we’ll get a glancing blow, a dusting to an inch.
I accept this new forecast, but I can’t ignore the stripes in the road, evidence of the slurry used for pre-treatment in these parts. Will they be necessary? Probably not. But it’s good to know they’re here.
I’m picking my way through the book Generations by Jean M. Twenge, and it’s making me feel better about things. “Generational change is not just about individual people changing; it’s about cultural norms shifting.”
Layered within our daily interactions with each other and with people of different ages, then, is the steady creak of cultural change.
And there’s a reason why generational shifts seem to be happening ever more quickly: It took decades for half the country to start using a landline phone, but within five years of its debut half the country owned a smartphone. As the pace of technological change quickens so does the pace of generational change.
A power outage yesterday left us in the dark for several hours. It happened late afternoon, shortly before sunset. I used stored power and outdoor light as long as I could, writing on this machine (almost fully charged!) and sorting clothes — a long-postponed task — by an upstairs window.
But there came a point when darkness was inevitable. I did all those silly things you do when suddenly deprived of electricity, like flipping light switches. Then I lit a candle, played the piano and embraced the 18th century.
What sticks with me now is looking outside at the houses around us. A couple have generators so they don’t count. But the others were indistinguishable in the darkness. It was a blank landscape, deprived of familiar landmarks and human warmth.
How I’ve come to count on the porch light, the lamp in the window, telltale signs of human habitation. They keep us company in the dark. I miss them when they’re gone.
Yesterday the world warmed and most of the snow melted, but late in the day a cold wind sprang up, and it’s blowing still today, bringing us back to winter again.
But nothing can dispel the wellspring of warmth that this day exudes. It’s a day devoted to love, love in all forms, all languages.
Night before last, I dreamed I heard a knock on the back door. It was two of my grandchildren, wanting to come inside. Later today I’ll see those two, and the rest of them, and give them big hugs and too much candy. It will be loud, chaotic, sticky fun. It’s a perfect way to celebrate this day.
“It’s the Kardashian effect,” he said. “Famous for being famous.” These aren’t words I’m used to hearing from my professor, so he has my attention. And the person to whom he was applying this descriptor was unusual, too. It was … Galileo Galilei.
Yes, the 17th-century man of science may well have been the first science celebrity. This is not just because we still remember him, because we also remember Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe and many others.
Galileo was a science celebrity because he had a knack for witty repartee and a rapier wit. Guests knew when he was at a dinner party. His words had weight. Too much so at times. His celebrity status may have done him in.
The Catholic church censured Galileo for believing in the Copernican view of the universe — that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. But mostly he was censured for being so upfront about it, or at least that’s what I think now. The paper I’m writing is due next month. I may change my mind.
(Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition by Cristiano Banti, 1857. Courtesy Wikipedia.)
Here’s our latest snow in real time, a white world I want to stare at all day. It won’t last long. Temperatures will rise, rain will fall. Knowing this snow won’t last for weeks makes it more precious. I’m winter-weary, yes, but not so soured on the season that I can’t be revived.
It must be the Catholic school kid in me, but I like to feel I “deserve” each season when it comes, that I’ve fully experienced the season that’s come before. This year, there will be no problem enjoying every speck of spring, because we’ve certainly endured the brunt of winter.
This is a heavy snow; shrubs and trees are coated. The only creatures stirring are the birds at our feeder. Fox and squirrels have yet to make tracks. All the better to enjoy the tableaux, the pristine expanse, the snow in real time.
