Difficult Things Are Difficult (and other statements of profundity)

If I had known, 11 years ago, how much effort it would take to become a proficient violinist, I would have given up on the spot.

If I had known, 20 years ago, how much effort would be required to learn to draw at a basic level, I would have been crushed with the hugeness of the task.

If I had known, 24 years ago, how much effort it was going to take to live life, I would have asked not to be born.

Anything difficult in life requires a lot of effort— so much, in fact, that when I look back, I’m amazed that I was ever able to accomplish anything at all. To me, it’s a small miracle every time I realize that I’m at point where I can realize that a huge chunk of the hard work has been done. I can play violin pretty well. I’m okay at drawing. I’m still alive and haven’t gone crazy yet. 

All in all, I think it’s a great mercy of God that I don’t know how hard stuff is going to be until I actually do it. 

~~

Driftwood, Seaside, Oregon

Random Drawing of the Day (From Three Years Ago)

I think it’s a perfume ad. Or perhaps the introduction to a clothing line. Whatever it is (and whatever I was thinking when I drew it), I like it.

100-Word Memoir: A Four Year Old Wakes Up

That day, I was wandering in figure eights around a sandy lawn in North Carolina. In that yard, between the coiled hose and the crab apple tree, I had a revelation. 

Slowly, I spoke aloud. “Once upon a time, there was a girl who had an evil stepmother…”

In that moment, I realized I was doing something magical— I was telling a story! It was the first time I had ever tried to do that without stuffed animals for assistance. My world blew open.

My grandmother, watching me wander and mumble to myself, asked Dad if I had “special needs.”

~~~

Why I Like Walden

A few days ago, I read an excellent WriteAtHome blog about literature courses for teens. One of the items on the book list was “Excerpts from Walden by Thoreau.” In the comments, a couple different people mentioned that they didn’t like Walden. Since I’m currently reading Walden for the second time, it made me think about why I do like it.

Walden is one of the great transcendentalist works of the nineteenth century. The author, Thoreau, spent about two years on the shores of Walden Pond in Connecticut, building his own house and making a living on the small patch of crops he could grow. It is not a survival manual, nor is it intended to be. He walked into town regularly (which was only a couple miles away), bought and traded supplies, welcomed guests, chatted with woodsmen, and generally stayed a member of his community. He wasn’t surviving— he was seeking a simpler lifestyle.

The book tells a lot about his methods (how he built a house, how he grew crops, how he entertained guests), but it mostly focuses on his thoughts about nature, farming, cities, woodlands, commerce, fashion, theology, social conventions, and anything else he cares to ramble about. Living in the woods is a framework for his thoughts, and it keeps the readers grounded in what might otherwise be a mishmash of random thoughts.

Fragrance Lake, Bellingham, Washington. Close enough.

So, why do I like it? I could harp on its literary features: his description is unparalleled, his characterization vivid, and his sociological tangents quite an adventure. But the main reason I like Walden is that Thoreau has such a different point of view than I do— and he presents it with a fiercely innocent arrogance that I find irresistible.

It’s obvious in his writing that he assumes himself superior to other people— he puts the snobbiest hipsters to shame on this front. He has the corner on the truths of the universe, and he watches the poor mortals (aka, the entire rest of the world, except for the noble savages, of course) who flounder about in their futile existences, hoping that he can somehow help them break free. His unshakable confidence that he is right, and everyone else is wrong, is fascinating to me. 

Along the same lines, his romantic views of nature are laughable. He sees nature as a perfect symphony with no flaws, no dangers, and no downfalls, although he also imagines nature as becoming even greater under the hands of a thoughtful human (aka, himself). There is no room for savagery, disease or discord in his view of nature. (Incidentally, Annie Dillard’s writing is a great antidote to this.) And yet, and yet… Even though the ridiculous romanticism is the same stuff as the groan-worthy material of Disney’s Pocahontas, Thoreau actually believes it. Living in the midst of nature, with the mosquitos and dirt floor and wood chopping and bitter winters and rain dripping through his roof, he still believed that nature was perfect. There’s something beguiling about that kind of conviction.

I think Thoreau has a lot of ridiculous ideas, but that is half the fun. The pages of my copy of Walden are full of marginalia: I tell him he’s ridiculous; I applaud him for an insight; I assure him that I see where he’s coming from, even though I don’t agree. With the exception of C.S. Lewis, Thoreau is the only author that I actively argue with when I’m reading. Reading his book makes me feel like I’m engaging with someone who delights in debate— except that, unlike a real conversation, I have nothing to lose.

I don’t want to give the impression that I simply like Walden because I think Thoreau is silly. Far from it— despite his snobby romanticism, Thoreau has a lot of really interesting and wise things to say. He is earnestly trying to convey wisdom as he knows it, and jewels of insight glitter all throughout the book. He condemns materialism, challenges ridiculous social norms, and makes some striking predictions about the future (there is a section that predicts the existence of tabloids). Buried in the middle of the book, Thoreau writes this gem, his most famous quote:

“Simplify, simplify.”

In a cluttered, busy, fast-paced world, this advice is more pertinent than ever. Simplify, simplify. Thoreau showed the people of the nineteenth century that you could build your own house and eat a simple diet and patch your clothes and leave broad margins in your life. He teaches us today that things don’t have to be as complicated as we make them, that there is great value in silence, and solitude, and simplicity.

He invites readers to stop going through the motions of life, to think about things, to wake up, to be present. He encourages us to  stand in the sun, listen to the birds, chop some wood, watch the pond freeze over. Live, Thoreau tells us. Stop sleepwalking and live. “To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”

It’s a strange and captivating book, and it’s certainly not for all tastes. But I like it, and I think that I always will. After all, as Thoreau himself said, “My shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.”

~~~

Travel Tip Tuesdays: 15 Ways to Make Any Trip Cheaper

Chocolate-covered pretzel: highly
recommended as nonperishable snack.

1. Travel during the off-season (after Labor Day, before Memorial Day).

2. Ask hotels if they can give you a better rate.

3. Pump up your tires and get an oil change before a road trip.

4. Fly on off days (Tuesdays and Thursdays) and at off times (early morning, late night).

5. Use GasBuddy to figure out where the cheapest fuel is.

6. Camp, couchsurf, and stay with friends as much as you can.

7. Bring non-perishable food for snacks and meals.

Inconvenient, but much cheaper.

8. Try to find free days or coupons for attractions you want to visit.

9. Take a bus instead of a taxi.

10. Try to stay somewhere with a kitchen so you can cook your own food.

11. Don’t spend money on stuff you don’t care about.

12. Plan things in advance so you don’t have to make big last-minute purchases.

13. Seek out free attractions.

14. Make a budget for the trip and stick to it (but leave some room in the budget for spontaneity).

So much better than a museum.

15. Cherish time with people above “touristy” stuff.

~~~

Have a travel question? Leave a comment and I’ll answer!

Where to Go: Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park, Missouri

I’m loving this cool weather, but if summer throws one or two more hot days at us Missour’ans (as it is apt to do), then you need to check out Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park. Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait until next summer.

Johnson’s Shut-Ins is not a mental hospital, even though that’s what it sounds like. A “shut-in” is “an Ozark term for a river that’s naturally confined within a deep, narrow channel” (thank you, Wikipedia). In this case, the Black River begins as a normal little creek, then splashes into jutting dikes and ridges of rocks, forming a challenging obstacle course/natural playground all along the river. It ends in a deep, cold pool that’s perfect for swimming. 

There’s more to the state park than just the shut-ins: there are hiking trails, walking trails, picnic areas, and a visitor’s center. But honestly, come for the shut-ins: everything else is icing on the cake.

Why you should go: If you’re looking for an afternoon of water activities in an idyllic Missouri setting, this is the place to go! Good for rock-climbers, swimmers, explorers, and generally outdoorsy kinds of people.

How to get there: Johnson’s Shut-Ins are located in the beautiful Francois Mountains of Missouri. You can find directions on their site.

Our somewhat failed attempt at a group shot.

What to bring: The most important thing to bring are aquashoes, skeletoes, or strap-on sandals. The rocky creek beds are brutal on bare feet, and something with grips are really useful. Also bring your swimsuit, a change of clothes (there are changing rooms there), snacks, water, sunblock, bug spray, and anything else you need for the outdoors.

What else you need to know: The park closes at 7, 6, or 4, depending on the season (check the hours here). Be prepared to get some bruises— the shut-ins are tough to navigate and the park hasn’t done anything to make it safer for swimming. The more physically fit you are, the more you’ll enjoy it!

~~~

Checkerboard and marina, Bellingham Bay, Washington

Dreamer for a Dreamer

Yesterday evening, I sat down at my computer, pulled up a copy of my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel Dreamer (I lied to you in the previous blog when I said it was 2011), and began reading. As I read, I wrote a brief sketch of each chapter in a separate document, noting inconsistencies, looking for larger themes, reminding myself of the plot, cringing at some sections, smiling in surprise at others. Half my brain immersed itself in the story while the other half ran a list of a million questions about timelines, pantheons, logistics, character traits, themes, nonsensical plot twists, and so on. 

I didn’t notice time going by. I just looked up and saw it was time to make dinner for Zachary when he got home. I leaped up, danced into the kitchen, and worked on homemade pizza, my mind still lost in the land of Chaldia. I peeked through the window slats at the sunset, blazing in the sky and in a puddle and on the side of the neighbor’s car.

I felt ridiculously alive, present, aware of everything in acute detail. 

I had forgotten how much I love writing novels. Not just the raw material, but the second and third and twentieth drafts. The search for plot holes. The tweaking of each word. The hours of nitpicking and rehashing things you’ve already nitpicked and rehashed a dozen times before. I love it all so much.

Now I’m going to work on my tutoring so I can finish and continue outlining Dreamer.

~~~

100-Word Memoir: Confusing Moments of Childhood, Part One

One day I was playing with my Barbie dolls when, in the next room, Mom shouted elatedly, “My work is done!” 

I paused, shocked. How could this be? She was much younger than most people who retired! After a few confused seconds, I reasoned that there must be a set amount of work to do in life. If you worked quickly, you’d finish sooner.

The next day, I found Mom editing her book. My hypothesis shattered. I felt melancholy. I had thought that, since Mom was done with work forever, she’d have more time to take us on field trips.

~~~

Pictures from the Past Few Weeks

I’ll get around to a real blog this week eventually, I swear…

Proof that my sister Mary was actually here a couple weeks ago.

Zach, Christian and I took a day trip to Johnson's Shut-Ins and Elephant Rocks State Parks.
I'll tell you more about them later.

Christian, me, Ivy, and Zach at the coolest place in St. Louis: City Museum.

Ivy and me at another awesome place in St. Louis: The Art Museum.

Seven Things I Learned Last Week

Hello, dear blog readers! As you may have noticed, I didn’t post anything last week. My editing job just started up, and between 37 students and spending time with my sister-in-law who’s visiting from Oregon, I’ve decided to let blogging fall through the cracks. Today I’m stealing time from editing to say a few things, though. Namely:

1. My sister-in-law Ivy is awesome. Not only do we get along fantastically, but she’s a beautiful person who’s really fun to talk to. Whether discussing theology or crying over Mufasa’s death in The Lion King, we have bonded a lot. I can’t believe that I not only got an awesome husband, but an awesome family of in-laws, too.

Christian, me, Zach, and Ivy, ready to head to City Museum.

2. I have a hard time balancing life and work. Even though I don’t work that many hours a week, I find it hard to finish my deadline and get anything else done. I don’t know how I ever juggled 40 students with 40 hours of farm work a week.

3. Autumn is the best season ever. Actually, I didn’t learn that this week— I just remembered why it’s true.

4. Frozen custard is, in fact, the Platonic paragon of soft-serve dairy dessert.

5. I really really really like having someone around the house all day, even if she’s reading and I’m editing papers. Although I enjoy mostly solitary activities, I hadn’t realized how much I love having another person in the house. 

6. I’m proud of my city. I hadn’t really realized this before, but in showing Ivy around a bit, I recognized that I feel happy to live near St. Louis, and I love St. Charles very much. Despite the awful weather, these cities have a lot to offer. I’m proud to live in them.

7. I’m going to start working on a novel again. My 2011 NaNoWriMo novel Dreamer was a pretty darn good rough; it just needs an overhaul and some fine-tuning. I’m probably not on the road to publication with this, but I realized that writing novels is not a career for me: it’s a way of life.

~~~

Dead tree, Weldon Springs Conservation Area, Missouri

Sunrise, Emerald Isle, North Carolina

100-Word Memoir: Nearing Autumn

Laying on my back on a blanket at my brother’s football practice, I looked at some trees across the park and realized I’d remember them forever. 

They stood motionless, hard tree-shaped sponges. The late afternoon light painted them intensely green with crisp shadows.

They looked just like the trees across from Grandma and Grandpa’s house, which I could not forget either. Breathless and stone-like. Solid. They seemed detached from my other senses, like a photograph.

I rolled over onto my stomach and draped a coat over my back. I didn’t like lying exposed under such an open sky.

~~~

Other Random Photos of Orcas Island

Yesterday I blogged about Orcas Island, and I realized that I had too many photos to jam into one blog. So here are some more.

These trees were strung thickly with spiderwebs. The forest felt like something out of a fantasy story.

I liked this pier.

I want to live on this street!

Here we see Orcas Island's main exports.

I wish I had taken more photos of the view from Ship Peak.

This is the road I walked back to the ferry.

Scenes from Orcas Island, Washington

I mentioned a while back that I might post some more stuff about the San Juan Islands, a little group of islands in Washington state that captured my heart on my first solo trip. 

In that vein, here’s a blog I posted on September 29th, 2009, about a day trip to Orcas Island. My total walking distance (shortened slightly by some hitchhiking I forgot to mention) was 12 miles— a distance that became pretty routine later on in my traveling. Oh well. I had to start somewhere.

~~~

“Can you walk 1.3 miles?” I asked myself, staring at the trail ahead.

“Of course,” I answered myself. “That’s like walking to the depot. No problem.” But still I balked, staring up at the trail that meandered through the pine trees at a gradual slope. Sure, I could walk 1.3 miles. Never mind that it had taken me five-and-a-half-mile walk to get to this point. None of that mattered now. I could walk 1.3 miles.

There’s a reason people make analogies about life being a road. The trail immediately got harder, sloping up to a 45º angle as it wound between rocks bound up in lichen and feathery moss. I trudged onward, sometimes collapsing in exhaustion, but always moving upward, always asking myself, “Can you walk 1.3 miles?” How many miles I’d walked before didn’t matter, and how many miles I’d have to walk afterward didn’t matter. I only had to walk 1.3.

I did indeed reach the top of Ship Peak and took in the scenery. I didn’t stay there long; the view was breathtaking, but I only felt the need to take it in for ten minutes or so. I sat in the shade of a pine and listened to scores of tiny birds making all manner of chirps, whirs, cackles and twitters, like a musical box. Then I headed down for the long walk back. After the initial slopes, which taxed my knees and back, the ground leveled out and my feet knew how to walk again. It was an easy walk back, as I constantly asked myself, “Can you walk until you reach the harbor?”

Orcas Island is like a dozen islands in one, for the landscape changes quickly even at a walking pace. I walked through dark evergreen forests, where silence was a sentient presence so thick that no birds sang. I hiked past woodland pastures with small run-down farms and cream or brown sheep grazing, rather like West Virginia. I passed West Bay, which boasts a marina and several ranch houses, and I explored the beach for a bit, feet crunching on the pebbles and shells. I found several tide pools with limpets and barnacles, and discovered three dead jellyfish, each one’s umbrella the color of grape or strawberry jam. The bay stayed constant on my left for much of the walk, and I marveled at the Pacific madrone trees: tall for beach growth, with the twisted thick tangle of twigs common of ocean trees. Their bark is thin as crepe paper and brittle as parchment. The wood beneath the peeling layers is skin colored, but the bark nearly glows in the sunlight: a shocking burnt orange-red. 

I felt like I was receiving a lesson in the various habitats of the northern pacific islands— and all this in a three-hour hike.

~~~

Travel Tip Tuesdays: Dealing with Culture Shock When You Come Home

"Here I am just returning from my life-changing
experiences as an organic farmer, and I resolve
to hold weekly square dances and grow an herb
garden and raise my own honey and…"

When people think of culture shock, they usually think about something that happens on the road (see last week’s blog). However, there is a second, and often unexpected, kind of culture shock that occurs after a long trip: the shock of coming home.

This happened to me almost every time I returned from a multiple-week trip. Everything at home seemed familiar, yet I didn’t experience it in the same way. After a few weeks, I was always frustrated that I didn’t seem to have changed as much as I thought I did, and that I just fell back into my normal patterns when I was home again— and yet things still seemed off or different. My perspective seemed skewed, or changed.

Being home semi-permanently has been a huge shift for me. I face the question that many just-graduated college kids face: away from the social constructs of travel, how do I make friends and develop meaningful relationships? These are not easy questions, and I’m still working on answers. But in the meantime, if I could follow my own advice, these are the things that would help the most.

Give yourself time to adjust. Don’t come home from a long trip and expect to hit the ground running. Allow some transition time. 

Accept that other people have changed. People grow up without you (sometimes quite a bit), so you need to brace for this. Remind yourself that change is okay. However, even more importantly…

Accept that you’ve changed. This past week, my sister visited from California. I hadn’t seen her in half a year. I thought it was strange how much she had changed in that time— until I realized that I was the one who had changed more. Changes are sometimes so imperceptible that you don’t notice them.

"…Never mind."

Accept that you’re still the same person. On the flip side of this, it can be disappointing to return from a trip and immediately revert to the way you’ve always been. This usually happened to me— after swearing to be forever changed by these incredible life-shaping experiences, I’d find myself being the dumb shy kid who eats a lot of fried chicken. No matter how much you change, there will always be tendencies and personality traits you’ll have, and that’s okay.

Don’t try to force things to go back to the way they were… and don’t freak out if they do. In other words, one of the best traits to nurture in your life, whether you’re on the road or at home, is flexibility. Go with the flow. Live in the present. Embrace change and cherish stability. Or, as I said in a previous blog on a similar topic: “My travels have taught me that you have to constantly adjust to your environment. That includes being home. You still have to seize the day, enjoy the moment, and look for opportunities to learn and experience new things. The little joys and opportunities are all around us, no matter where we are. Sometimes, you just have to create your own adventure.”

~~~

Depths of Summer

In St. Louis, summer and winter both strike an arbitrary point where being outside is unbearable. In winter, a wet coldness sets in, dumping bucket-loads of half-frozen slush into the streets. In summer, a wet heat swamps the city, making a minute-long foray outside feel like stepping into a sauna with a broken thermometer. In these respective times we stay cozied up indoors, drinking hot chocolate or eating popsicles, dehydrated and trapped in our mercifully climate-controlled houses.

On days like this, when the weather breaks, the humidity falls, and the temperature that seemed unbearable at the beginning of summer feels downright cool, I feel like I can begin to start living again.

I’m going to take a walk now.

~~~

Seed pods, Denver, Colorado