Interlude for More of Lisa's Philosophical Ramblings

Am I a slacker?

This question has bugged me, on and off, throughout my life. There have been times that I’ve kept a truly hectic schedule (such as that nightmarish semester when I was working five jobs), but all in all, I have loads more free time than most of my friends. Some days, when I ditch my editing for a four-hour walk and hang-out time at Taco Bell with my Dad and a sibling or two, I begin to feel as if I should be back home, “being productive.” And when I travel, it’s hard for me to get anything done except the absolute essentials of my job, when I could be writing and developing my career in a more meaningful way. That insecurity gnaws at the back of my mind, whispering, “Slacker, slacker, slacker…”

It’s true that when I’m on the road, I don’t do a lot of what is classified in my mind as “work.” I keep up with my students, blog every day and try to keep a personal journal, but that’s as far as the writing goes. I could be developing and querying articles, writing novels, polishing short stories, seeking new markets, finding niches for new projects— that is the concrete workings of freelance writing, and that is what would launch my career into the future. How could I abandon these crucial activities to go off and spend half my time sitting in air-conditioned houses in various western states with strangers? What’s the purpose of that?

That’s where travel, once again, has a lot to teach me.

Two of the easiest parts of life to lose sight of are purpose and value, and what they really mean. I have to pause, draw a deep breath, and ask myself, “What is more important: career or life?” I have to take a step back from the culture’s expectations. As much as the Frank Capra sentiment insists that “you can’t take it with you,” nobody believes it. Busyness obviously means productivity and value; free time obviously means laziness. I make this judgement all the time, both on myself and others. But what is really valuable in life? What would happen if we took just an instant to consider, seriously consider, the eternal perspective?

Travel is valuable for me. I believe it’s valuable for everyone, if people travel with an open mind and an open heart. It’s not about the places, although that’s a nice garnish on the metaphorical cake: travel, like life, is about the people.

In Washington I met a farmer who belly-dances at Ren Faires in her spare time, a woman in her nineties who fed me chocolate-covered raisins and hot cocoa, a diehard conservative who wants to kill them Injuns, an 18-year-old who had just traveled the world, a lesbian couple who are saving the earth one farm at a time, a Buddhist South Carolinian in search of a home, a Unitarian celebrant who adopted me as her daughter for the day, and a pot-smoking crochet artist who believe aliens keep the moon in place. In California I crossed paths with a bone specialist who taught me about the holocaust, two French women who cooked me ratatouille, sisters from Taiwan who had lived in South America before immigrating to the US, a hostel receptionist convinced all the world’s problems were rooted in wi-fi and soap, and an unstable young man who let me cry on his shoulder at a vulnerable point in my life. In Florida I discovered an Israeli on a six-month trip around a America, a sixty-year-old woman who was willing to tear up the dance floor with me for three hours straight, a Mayan guru who watched TV all day, a Tennessee sky-diver, and three or four guys who kept with them little slivers of my heart. Now, out west, I’ve rubbed shoulders with an artist who lives in a warehouse without plumbing, a suburban family with a stay-at-home dad, a Colorado farmer who showed his love for his grandkids by slamming his palm on the table or popping a blown-up paper bag, six girls sharing a dorm house together, and a young man on the verge of divorce with his military wife. This is only a sampling— I could go on and on and on about the people I’ve met, the souls who have, if only for a minute, brushed against me and left me with the flavor of their essence.

Henry David Thoreau said, “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” Travel is my way of standing up, of taking in, and of learning more about life and love and spirit than I had ever imagined. Talking to these people, searching out their thoughts, and twisting my head around to glimpse their perspective has been more valuable to me than almost anything else I’ve ever done. Travel is vital to my spirit and my soul, and from those combined sources flow all the wellsprings of true art. I can’t write with integrity without the life that I’m soaking in wherever I go.

So when I’m sitting in the tax office and the representative asks me, “What percentage of this trip was for business purposes?” my response is always, “…Uhm…”

~Lisa Shafter

Epic Trip Out West, Day Forty-Six: A Rest in the Desert

Arizona is the truest desert I could have wished for when I first set sail for the west. Dry, stark, fierce, and unfriendly, it constantly battles its inhabitants for rights to a land that never should have been able to support humans. I keep spare tissue in my pocket for my frequent nosebleeds, and I dare not stand in the sun for more than five minutes without a generous lather of sunblock. The houses are flat-roofed and made of pale-colored brick, with front lawns of pebbles instead of grass, sometimes marked with a saguaro cactus or two, or little cacti with slender yellow spines and tiny flowers clustered on top. A few brave souls have even tried planting trees on their rock lawns, which perch amid the gravel as if wondering how in the world they got there. Above the suburban sprawl, a jagged line of mountains marks the distance, the subtlest shades of pink and blue.

I took it easy today: I worked on editing papers and hung out with my second cousin Mindy and her incredibly sweet nine-month-old, Maddison. I watched bits and pieces of several Hallmark movies, did a load of laundry and hung up the clothes in the backyard (they were bone-dry in thirty minutes), talked with my first-cousins-once-removed Dennis and Sheila, and ate steak for supper for the second day in a row. Tomorrow, perhaps we’ll go out exploring, and Mindy has promised me a game of bowling sometime before I move on. Welcome to Tucson.

~Lisa Shafter

Money spent today: $0

Leeway so far: $4.73 (Even though this leeway will no doubt vanished very soon, I’m glad not to be in the hole anymore.)

Epic Trip Out West, Day Forty-Five: Flat Tire

My first true glimpse of the southwest (other than coming to the surface in the middle of the night to hear that we were in Albuquerque) came this morning when I opened my eyes to sunlight, surprised once again that I had managed to sleep. I looked out the Greyhound window to distant pink cliffs, shadowed in faded navy and backed up with a sky and sunrise clouds that seemed to have been painted with creamy chalk. Then I fell right back to sleep.

Also, I think I visited my first foreign country today. At least, that was the best I could presume from the fact that all the signs were in Spanish and nobody around me seemed to speak English. Or maybe, El Paso, Texas, is part of the US, if only technically. I had a two-hour layover in the city of run-down buildings, southwest style, and Hispanic culture. Then I was back on the Greyhound, and it actually looked like the bus was running on schedule for once. Soon we were in Arizona, and I gazed out at the plateaus and sandy water-worn hills and dramatic buttes jutting above the plains of scrub and cacti. The sky was thin and pale, without even a hint of cloud to break its watercolor hue.

I got an even better look at a particular stretch of scenery when the Greyhound bus decided that it was running with too much alacrity, and must face some sort of hold-up. It decided on a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, and consequently, I learned the art of patience through a two-hour delay (I read Walden and watched the last half of Gladiator).

In the end, we safely arrived in Tucson, and my first-cousin-once-removed Sheila and my second cousin Mindy came to pick me up (I haven't seen them in well over ten years, so we have a lot of catching up to do). They drove me home, let me take a much-needed shower, and fed me a hearty dinner of homegrown steak, corn on the cob, and salad. I think I'm going to like it here...

~Lisa Shafter

Money spent today: $0 (This was hard because I was hungry for "real food," but I got my nourishment through apples, almonds, craisins, and a few leftover granola pancakes. The supper my cousins gave me was definitely welcome, though!)
Deficit: $5.27

Epic Trip Out West, Day Forty-Four: Inspiration

One thing I’ve learned from this trip is, if you’re traveling without a car, you are at the mercy of other people’s plans. Another thing I’ve learned is that the unexpected directions a trip takes are often the best.

So was the case when Beki told me on Tuesday that she would be going to Colorado Springs on Wednesday rather than Thursday. I already had a Greyhound ticket booked for Thursday night, and was unable to change it, so that left me with a mad scramble to beg a last-minute favor of someone. After a bit of debate, I decided I’d be most comfortable calling up Lisabet, who hosted me last week. She sounded a bit hesitant on the phone, but gave me the go-ahead.

On Wednesday, after a morning of washing/bagging salad greens and picking three dozen bunches of beets (I love it— my hands were soaked in pink juice and I grinned every time a beet pulled free of the earth with a satisfying pop), we were off to make the deliveries, sailing along a ridge with valleys leading up to solid blue mountains on either side. She dropped me off in Colorado Springs, and wished me happy trails.

The library was my hang-out spot for the next few hours, but at 8:45 I found myself plunking down into the back seat of Lisabet’s white clunker car, safe from the rain that pounded through the lamplight.

The evening was, in a word, bliss. Lisabet gave me a bagel with almond butter for supper, we had a conversation about travel and family and teaching and culture, and then we sprawled on the floor and read picture books aloud to each other until we were both so tired we were nearly falling asleep on the Steven Kellog illustrations.

I slept deeply that night, and woke up refreshed and ready to face a new day. At 11:00, Lisabet took me to the newest project of a volunteer art organization called Concrete Couch. The project? Covering the ugly concrete columns in front of a business center with earth-toned mosaics. Within ten minutes I was busy breaking donated kitchen tile with a special lever machine, discussing color schemes and patterns with Lisabet, and slopping around gray mortar the consistency of thick icing with a pallet knife. Three other volunteers helped out, and to my surprise, one of them bought us all gourmet pizza, salad, and cubes of dessert! We all paused, sponging the mortar off our palms, and sat in the sunlight while raindrops pattered around us. The clouds looming overhead just couldn’t make up their mind what they wanted to do.

We ended up working for almost four hours, and Lisabet and I completed a good little chunk of tile rows. My pants were spattered in dried mortar and flecks of crushed tile, damp from sitting on the wet concrete, and I managed to spill some mortar dust all over my shoes. I felt grungy but exuberant, and as I looked at the neat little rows of earth-toned tile, I thought, I’ve left a bit of myself in Colorado. And it made me happy.

On the way out, Lisabet ran into one of her friends, a guy named Jonas whose ridiculously-patched pants, sky-blue fingernails, cloth-scrap bracelets and messy blonde hair screamed “artist.” He invited us in for tea, and we walked into the most unique dwelling I’ve ever seen.

Jonas led us to a giant corrogated metal warehouse that hung out by the train tracks, covered in neon graffiti. Rusty trains chugged by, rattling my molars as we stepped inside a door and wound through a workshop area filled with grit-covered tools, spare parts, old bicycles, and a plastic skeleton hanging from a noose, and entered a door that led to a back room. I stepped inside, and stepped into a different world.

Jonas and two girls shared a room with a twenty-foot ceiling, no plumbing, and no windows, but transformed into a surreal fairy-tale land. The walls leaped out at me with amazing cartoon artwork sprawled in every spare inch, interspersed with designs made of nails and string, black-and-white cereal-box masks, children’s book covers, slogans written in marker and Russian, strands of Christmas lights, and random half-finished slashes of plum-colored paint. 

As I spun slowly in awe, Jonas made us hot chocolate flavored with green tea bags— a combination that worked surprisingly well. I sat on the white shag carpet and sipped the tea-chocolate and talked with Lisabet and Jonas and his roommate Courtney about couchsurfing and art and travel and backgrounds, my head spinning with the clutter of wonderful art splattered over the walls, which I found out were all Jonas’s. We only stayed a little while, but the image of that magical corner of the warehouse by the tracks will stay in my memory forever.

Lisabet drove me back to the house, helped me pack up a pasta salad for supper, then drove me over to Sondermann Park. Conversation on the way over? A discussion about values, hypocrisy, and dumpster-diving. 

When I said good-bye to Lisabet, I felt an overwhelming sense of inspiration. She has inspired me in so many ways— through her open heart and home, her incredible generosity, and her love of blanket forts and mosaics and card-making parties and children’s books and people.

Euphoric, I wandered through the rugged fields and hills of Sondermann Park, through flaxen-colored grass, sharp against the red gravel of the trails and the rusty earth beneath. Stark gray bushes dotted the hills, and I glimpsed twin deer with velvety antler buds, who stared at me curiously until their mother appeared and hurried them up the hill. I climbed to the ridge of the highest hill and gazed out at the mountains: verdant with pine in the foreground, twilight blue in the middle ground, with one snow-spattered peak drifting above the others. The swatches of white and gray cloud still couldn’t decide whether or not to rain, and slashes of pure springtime blue lit up the sky. 

Once again, I was stunned. “How am I even here?” I said aloud. “How did I even get here? How has a month gone by already?” And I laughed, and I jogged down the trail, and I wandered the trails through a forest of oak and cottonwood beside a joyful muddy creek, and the sky was extremely blue, and the babble of the brook was music, and at one point I just took off my backpack and laid down in the middle of the trail, feeling the warm earth against my back, and smiled.

It’s been a good day.

~Lisa Shafter

Money spent today: $0, thanks to various people’s incredible generosity.

Deficit: $15.27

Epic Trip Out West, Day Forty-Two: Sleepy

This afternoon, I got to line a path through an herb garden with stones, and the sun was out, and the chocolate mint was fragrant, and the bindweed tore off in huge clumps in my hands, and my heart was at peace. It was a good day.

~Lisa Shafter

Money spent today: $0

Deficit: $35.27

Epic Trip Out West, Day Forty-One: A Long Way Home

Today, I fought an epic battle with bindweed and, for the most part, won. The earth was dry and crumbly beneath my fingers as I rooted up the vicious plant more commonly known as “morning glories,” but a warm sun and a cool breeze kept me at the perfect temperature. Listening to Vivaldi’s Spring seemed fitting, and when Long Way From Eden by Watching Judas shuffled into my iPod, I paused and looked up at the cloudless sky, the wide plain and the mountains, rusty red and green through the sharp springtime air, and everything just seemed to fall into place. I’m still missing home, but I’m over the worst of it for now. It’s a new day, and the sky is blue, and possibilities are falling into place.

~Lisa Shafter

Budget notes: Today, I booked my Greyhound ticket from Colorado Springs to Tucscon. The price made me flinch, but it’s not bad for a trip of 957 miles. Unfortunately, I now have deficit rather than leeway, so it will be my challenge to rack my savings back up over the new few days. We’ll see how it goes. (Incidentally, I'm going to Tucson because I have family there.)

Money spent today: $138.60 (bus ticket)

Deficit: $45.27

Epic Trip Out West, Day Forty: Tears

For the past couple days, I have felt on the verge of tears far too often. Everything from animated movies to glimpses of a river to C.S. Lewis quotes have pushed me to the edge, where my cheeks prickle and my nose strings and water begins to press against my eyes. This is my soul telling me I haven’t had a good cry in a while, which most likely means that my tears will burst out at the most awkward moment possible.

I always get teary-eyed at the ending of Toy Story 3, but should I really be biting my lip when watching Tangled? Should an observation about the nature of melancholy make a sob press against my whole head? Should someone saying “Hi” to me at church form a lump in my throat so big I can only choke out words like a crybaby?

Apparently, I will cry, no matter what should or shouldn’t happen. My dad is sick, possibly with cancer, and I don’t know when he’ll be well, and I’m a thousand miles away from him. No matter what I do, no matter how I console myself, this irrefutable fact keeps on slamming against my forehead. When it doesn’t slam, it seeps, and curls its way around my brain and my head and forces out the tears when they don’t belong.

The fact (not the Person) that encourages me the most in all of this is that the tears don’t merely belong in the sadness. On Friday, Beki gave me a tour of the farm in her four-wheeler, and as we skirted the edge of a creek, I looked at the vibrant grass growing along the bubbling water, with trees overhanging, tossing in a light breeze. And I cried. It was too exquisite, too intimately overwhelming, too chock-full of beauty on a Midwest scale. If no one had been watching, I would have wept for an hour.

Tonight, I met a couple at church who were friendly— the husband was outgoing, the wife was shy, and both were willing to drive me home and pray for me in the driveway before dropping me off. They prayed, I cried a little, and it was okay. Still, had I been at my home church, I would have sobbed.

I’m homesick tonight, but I’m incredibly excited about the next segment of my journey. I’m homesick tonight, but I profess the goodness of my God. I’m homesick tonight but, in spite of every tear that I release and I hold back, I am at peace.

~Lisa Shafter

Money spent today: $0

Leeway so far: $93.33

Epic Trip Out West, Day Thirty-Nine: Patience

What happens when a three-year-old wakes up deciding that the world is her enemy? Lots of whining, lots of sobbing, lots of screaming, and lots of awkwardness for any unfortunate volunteers who happen to be around when the crisis comes down. I’ve always hated being around when parents are disciplining their children, and today was full of those uncomfortable minutes of trying to look utterly otherwise engaged in the sidewalk cracks or the owner’s manual in the carseat. I’m learning something, I kept on telling myself. I’m learning patience.

I have a theory that it isn’t only the elderly who are deaf— children seem to have no concept of what will break someone else’s eardrums. And when you put two hard-of-hearing people with two toddlers at a lunch table, nerve-fraying noise ensues. At lunch I devoured grilled cheese sandwiches and mushroom soup and, in between wondering why Beki’s dad found it necessary to drop the spoons on the table with an ear-splitting clatter rather than simply setting them down, I told myself, I’m learning something. I’m learning patience.

At last, silence away from anybody else— I found myself planting red-leaf lettuce in the field, just me and my trowel and the bedraggled seedlings and the cloudy sky and the wide plain skirted by mountains. I crouched and troweled up clay-like earth for three hours as my back tensed up in growing horror of the stiff positions I put it through. As if lacking a proper outlet, I was affronted by a trickling stream of bitter memories. This surprised me, although just a year ago I couldn’t imagine a time when I could spend a whole day free of angry thoughts. A chill breeze whipped around me, and I put up my hood, trying to take deep breaths. No matter how many seedlings I planted, the flat of tiny plants seemed to be just as full. I’m learning, something, I thought. Did I mention the patience thing?

At the end of the day, we visited Beki’s friend and I filled my plate with homemade spaghetti and meatballs, spiced with bay and peppers, finishing the meal with the most scrumptious buttery bread pudding I have ever tasted. As I sank into the couch, my ears tuning out the chaos of children around me, I savored every bite of dessert and thought, This is good. This is really good. Sometimes, I have to pause to remember why I’m glad to be here.

~Lisa Shafter

Money spent today: $0

Leeway so far: $83.33

Epic Trip Out West, Day Thirty-Eight: Dirt

My crusher hat, my Watching Judas shirt, my cammo trousers and my Nikes were baptized in Colorado dirt today. Beki drove me over to the farm around eight this morning, and within the hour I was down on my knees in the sweltering greenhouse, rooting up arugula that had gone to seed. Crouch and pull, chop and sweep. Duck between wind and warm, sunshine and greenhouse. Drag the hose around without demolishing the mint. Pause for lunch with four generations of the J. family, a cacophony of charitable souls, half-deaf with age and weather, dishing out slabs of lunchmeat and white bread and colby-jack. Dig holes for the chives, plant herbs, hoe the earth and spread the kelp powder, keep three-year-old Zia from digging up the beds.   All in a day’s work. 

I doubt my fingernails will ever be clean again. 

~Lisa Shafter

Money spent today: $11.78 (almonds, craisins, clif bars)

Leeway so far: $73.33

Epic Trip Out West, Day Thirty-Seven: Colorado Springs

Today has been a leisurely stroll through the hours, wandering around Colorado Springs, popping in and out of coffeeshops, sitting on park benches reading “The Hobbit,” buying stamps and sending out letters, eating a ridiculously large double hot-dog topped with a gallon of chili, and finally meeting Beki, the owner of the farm where I’m going to be volunteering for the next week.

The drive from Colorado Springs to Cañon City gave me a panorama view of Colorado in all its glory: a tapestry of mountains, cobalt in the distance and russet dotted with evergreen in the foreground, with ruffled cumulus clouds overshadowing them. Behind the nearest “foothills,” I caught glimpses of the snowy peaks that entranced me when I first came out west. Even after more than a month out here, I still get chills when I see the Rockies.

~Lisa Shafter 

Money spent today: $17.92 (acai-blueberry-pomegranate shake, book of stamps, and massive hot dog)

Leeway so far: $75.11