In the last few weeks, I’ve been making more of an effort to stretch after running or walking or bouncing. This is something I always mean to do but never have time for.
Now it’s time. Past time, if you want to know the truth.
Stretching not just the body but the mind and heart. It’s one of the best ways I can think of to stay limber, to keep growing and changing, not to ossify with age.
It’s a personal goal for my own personal new year, which starts … today.
I’ve been working with Winrock for two years and am finally at headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. I flew here Monday morning, looking out the window at the bright sun and clouds, at the green patchwork below.
When I lived in Arkansas years ago, I wrote an essay called “Out of Arkansas.” It was a play on Out of Africa, the memoir by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen).
My move from Manhattan to a mountaintop in Arkansas seemed as radical to me as Karen Blixen’s trip to Kenya must have seemed to her. And when I looked from the plane and saw the vast landscape below, I thought of the breadth of Africa and of the American West.
It’s a liberating landscape for those accustomed to more cloistered, forested Eastern environs.
Children need roots and wings, says one adage. They need the security of home and family and the confidence and freedom to fly away from it.
It occurs to me today, riffing on this, that what I need now is headspace and legroom.
Headspace so I can vanish into a world of my own creation, beyond home, family and work.
Legroom because as much as I need the mental space, I crave physical movement, too.
It’s freedom I’m after, both literal and metaphorical.
I can’t let April slip away without a nod to Virginia bluebells. I went to see my favorite patch of them last week.
After two bounce-less months, I finally ordered a new trampoline last Sunday. Two days later, there were three boxes sitting outside the garage when I got home from work.
They were heavy and compact, a tidy package.
After a few days in the garage and hours of labor yesterday, the three boxes have become — a trampoline.
Limbs and branches from last month’s storms may still litter the landscape, but in one important way, the backyard is back in business. Once again, the lady has a tramp.
Yesterday I found myself with a windfall, a three-hour window without meetings or interviews.
I also found myself in Patan Durbar Square. Durbar squares (I’ve just learned) are plazas opposite old royal palaces. The Patan one is, according to the guidebook “a marvel of Newari architecture.”The Newaris are the original inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley.
The square was filled with stupas and temples … and rubble. The 2015 earthquake is still very much in evidence here, with piles of gravel, half restored buildings and blue tarps everywhere. The town is also getting a new water supply, which means even more digging and dust.
None of this stops anyone, though, least of all the ubiquitous and death-defying motorcycle taxis, which whizz around corners with complete abandon.
Luckily, I found a car taxi to take me home. All I had to do was share it with the driver’s brothers and a 100-pound bag of concrete.
It was the perfect way to wind down a wander.
Yesterday we learned about some agricultural innovations. There’s the nutritious spirulina (aka algae), which is being grown on a Thai rooftop, collected, semi-dried and added to pastas, puddings and more. It tastes like whatever it’s in, but it packs an impressive amount of protein into a tiny package. Maybe it will help feed the world’s burgeoning population in 2050. Or at least that’s the hope of its producer.
Spirulina is much more appetizing than another idea we heard about today: black soldier flies. Though no one was proposing that we start eating them — yet —the critters are being dried and used for fish food. So if you eat the fish … well, you know.
One more drying story is that of Rhino beads, ceramic beads that absorb moisture, keep seeds fresh and reduce spoilage, where farmers lose an impressive percentage of their crops.
As I sat there taking notes, my mind was full to bursting with the possibilities of it all. After the presentations and interviews, I walked down the street to a nearby park, where runners were making the circuit. From mental energy to physical energy.
It was an energetic whirlwind of a day. I want to capture and store it — not unlike seeds or spirulina —and save it for another day.
National Geographic is one of those magazines that comes into the house, lands on the coffee table and stays there. When the pile of glossy magazines is tall enough, I take it to the basement. Every so often, I read one of them. This time, it’s “Why Birds Matter” from the January issue. I unearthed it this morning after hearing its author, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, talking about it on the radio yesterday.
Turns out, National Geographic and the Audubon Society have proclaimed 2018 the “Year of the Bird.” It’s the centennial of the 1918 Migratory Bird Act, the nation’s oldest conservation law, and in its honor the magazine has given us a rapturous piece about raptors, hornbills, parrots, owls, doves, crows, you name it.
“When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain whey I love my brothers,” Franzen writes. Birds are diverse as the world is diverse, they are also a link to our evolutionary past. They are smart and beautiful and playful (you can apparently watch a Youtube video of crows sledding). They sing, nest and raise their young and, most of all, they fly.
“The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value,” Franzen writes. “They are always among us but never of us.”
In the words of Henry Beston, who I’ve quoted several times in this blog: “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of time and life.”
I almost missed this one, noticed out of the corner of my eye that yesterday’s post was 2,399. Which makes today’s one of those round numbers that I write about from time to time.
It’s the ultimate in solipsism, right? A blog about the things I think about while walking … then a post about how many other posts I’ve written!
Posts on running and dancing and bouncing, about mothering and working and traveling. Posts on grieving and gratitude.
What can I say? We live in a confessional age, and this is about as confessional as I can get. Which is to say, not as much as some, but more than others — and more than I ever thought I’d be.
When I was 24 and Mom was 51 we took a long trip together. We visited England, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy — “the tour.” And of course, Ireland.
“Everyone looks familiar here,” Mom said as soon as we stepped off the ferry at Dun Laoghaire. And in fact they did. You could round up the pedestrians in a Dublin block, plop them down in the pews of St. Peters on Barr Street in Lexington, and you’d hardly know the difference. There would be more tweed and piety, worse teeth, but the dark hair would be the same, and the wide smiles.
“All of my people are Irish,” Mom said, proudly. She meant the Longs and the Scotts and the Donnellys and the Concannons. But she came to realize through the years that their union would compound the immigrant’s distrust and fear. Turns out, her family would not quite survive its Irishness. Now there’s only one Concannon girl left, my aunt of 94. She and Mom barely spoke at the end.
Mom would have been 92 this February 1. I don’t have her Irishness, but I miss it — and her — especially today.