Freshness

In spirit of the season, I decided to make sure I am putting forth an effort to mantain some level of freshness in my life, and my understanding of Spanish is now a part of this.   I felt comfortable speaking spanish when I left Peru, but recently I have gotten a glimpse into expressing emotions in spanish, and I see there is a world of learning I have ahead of me. While in my personal life I am cultivating relationships and attempting to explore more spanish, I have also picked up The Captain's Verses, by Pablo Neruda, and the first poem I read while waiting for the bus a few minutes after I bought it made me sit back on the bench and smile a deep smile. Neruda's Spanish melts away superfluity, and leaves us with emotions of lucid simplicity.

From time to time I think I will post some passages from his poems that strike those membranes deep inside and sound the depths I have been searching for years.
---

from 'el pozo'
-
Mi vida, no hallaras
en el pozo en que caes
lo que yo guardo para ti en la altura:
un ramo de jazmines con rocio,
un beso mas profundo que tu abismo.

This poem is part of 'el pozo' the rest of the poem is beautiful as well, but this section made me sit back and think.   I keep for you a kiss deeper than your abyss - what a wonderful use of words to show someone how you feel you could fill any abyss within them with nothing but the love in a true kiss.  

A bouquet of dewy jasmines - what a beautiful image. I have no clue what it could have meant to Neruda, but how beautiful.  I love dew.  It evokes for me a sense of morning awareness, and a freshness that only a new morning can bring. 

In English:

---

from 'the well'
-

Darling, you will not find

in the well into which you fall

what I keep for you on the heights:

a bouquet of dewy jasmines

a kiss deeper than your abyss.

Twitterpainted 2009

Well, my silence lately has been a good one. There has been much going on since returning to the states, and all is well. I haven't been able to take the time so much lately to sit and update my blog, but nonetheless I am writing a ton in my journals, doing a ton on the trail, and living an all around inspired lifestyle on the Olympic Peninsula.

However, at the moment, I am in Winston-Salem, NC visiting a friend I met in Peru. I turned 26 yesterday. The past several years I have taken pictures of all the flowers I can find, but yesterday we drove on the Blue Ridge Parkway, winding through early spring in the oak and pine ridges of Appalachia. We stopped at Mt. Mitchell, highest place east of the Mississippi, where at roughly 6680 feet we had a 360 degree view of the surrounding mountains for long distances.

Spring awakens my spirit every year reminding me who I am, and how vibrant life is. A new leaf, delicate and bright green, slowly unfurling as it bounces around in the warm spring breeze stirs something within me as I stare. It is a feeling that, to me, just feels like perfection.

After several weeks of watching the catkins growing and swelling to an arousing shade of red on the alders along the lakeshore, it finally happened. The leaf buds swell as the pollen tassles lengthen. The chickadees dangle from the branch tips inspecting for larvae poking their black heads from the buds. Then, one day a memory of a song echoes across seasons, and spring is really here. I hear the first excited song of a yellow-rumped warbler coming from the top of a doug-fir standing high next to the lakeside alders. After arriving from somewhere in California or further south, they begin blocking out a territory with their ethereal voice while frantically gleaning larvae and hatching insects from the awakening alder trees.

Within a few days of their arrival, the catkins open, casting powdery waves of condensed sunlight through the warming air. The wind gathers the pollen in streaks across the lake, sometimes reaching several miles unbroken. This year, the catkins on the large alder next to the boathouse opened the day after the warbler arrived at Lesage. I live on the North shore of the lake, where sun is much more abundant, and spring comes a few days earlier. On the South shore of the lake where I work on Barnes Point at OPI, winter holds on a little longer in the shade of Aurora Ridge and Mt. Storm King. The warblers didn't show up there for another 5 days.

With each free day I have, I sit for hours on the deck at Lesage, watching the awakening. The kokanee snatch stoneflies from the surface of the water, while those that escape into the air glitter in the sunlight like snowflakes returning to winter clouds. Stellars Jays hawk through the trees, and tear clumps of moss from the maple branches in search of the recently emerged large black beetles that I have yet to identify. Sometimes I think that I could live forever in the vibrance of this season.

Discerning Circles

At the edge of the peninsula, waves lick away the feet of mountains. In the center of the peninsula they reach far into the clouds and pull some of the most abundant life out of their misty heights. It seems that here on the Peninsula I can always find a landscape, an ecosystem, a nook or cranny that suits my emotions perfectly.
Some days I may be drawn into the forest, and find myself staring at a moss-laden conifer wider than my childhood bedroom that towers above from a rooted foundation that predates the ‘discovery’ of North America. These trees teach me a lot about true steadfastness in life. Other days, from a canoe I may watch a small yet zealous stream plunge into the lake, spreading rocks it washes from the mountainside into the lake, rocks that were previously washed into the oceans some fifty million years ago. Then after ages of slumbering below the ocean floor, an ongoing dispute between two tectonic plates scraped these sediments back up onto the edge of the continent some twenty million years ago, leaving the Olympic Mountains. Streams like this remind me of what immense growth can come with change.
Today, I find myself staring out the window of the café where I sit overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and watch a small sailboat bob like a tired seagull in the tide. I scan the restless water for aberrant signs of life. I track the birds cruising in the ebbing tide in hopes of seeing one previously unknown to me. Turning from the window after many minutes, the empty seat across from me momentarily takes me back to where two years ago I sat sharing this view with someone who is no longer here with me. I flinch, and stare back out the window, wondering what place pain has in all this...
Punctuated by sweet sips of white lavender tea, I watch movement around me, but eventually I notice my attention lapping back to the bobbing hull of the small, solitary green and white sailboat as it circles around its mooring a hundred yards offshore. It circles, and circles, never discerning, just circling. In these moments, I am glad I have friends on the water, for they help me realize many things in this world are forever adrift. We may have some say where we go if we are aware of the world around us, but the flow is there to take us along, not to be controlled.

The Lesson of Experience

The last two months have been an amazing transition to living back in the States. I realized finally the reason I wasn't writing so much was that I was finding it more important to just roll with the flow of life here again, and not to question or reflect too much until I felt ready. I feel wonderful, and, as always, this land and this life on the Olympic Peninsula never ceases to divine the depth of my daily interactions, unearthing a well of inspiration that calms the rapid of life's experiences into pools of calm discriminating currents.

I will get to posting some reflections soon, but until then, there are some words that I read back in high school, again in college, and were shared with me again back in June that now encapsulate some of the pinnacle views I have been experiencing for awhile now. More coming soon! Oh! These words are from the Bhagavad Gita. Read it!

~
Thinking about sense-objects
Will attach you to sense-objects;
Grow attached, and you become addicted;
Thwart your addiction, it turns to anger;
Be angry, and you confuse your mind;
Confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience;
Forget experience, you lose discrimination;
Lose discrimination, and you miss life's only purpose.

Renaissance: A Long Awaited Arrival

Renaissance. This is the word that rang clearly through my mind this morning as I sat in a room of peers out here on the Olympic Peninsula listening to Obama’s Inaugural speech.
Today marks one month that I have been back in the states, and all that matters is after spending 4 very important weeks with family and very dear friends across the country from Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Colorado, to my home here in Washington it is clarity I see surrounding me. It is a clear vision of who I am, and what I want for this life, and this world.
I do not know why, but I have always felt inspired to live a life experiencing new things, from braiding bracelets as a 6 year old, to catching my first native trout as a 15 year old, to throwing pots on a pottery wheel after my science classes at Bucknell, to shooting my first deer with a longbow on my terms in Colorado…There is always something more to learn, something compelling me to search for something that doesn’t bore me in short order. For most of my life, renaissance has meant something much different to me. It has meant simply amassing skills to create things that are useful in my life.
Now, with Peru in memory, I do feel very much like I have been reborn into my country, and I am in love with this life, this opportunity, each moment, every blink. It feels like a true renaissance. Not a sea change, but a long awaited arrival.

I do not know what I will write on this blog this coming spring. The only culture shock I am really recognizing at this point in my readjustment to the U.S. is how I view communication and communicate with people differently than I used to. So, I am going to take some time to think about how I use this website and my writing to communicate this sylvan dream. There is much to come. I am living in a place where my life feels balanced between my mind, body and spirit, and in the balance of these three elements of my life, I feel my light, my love, and joy becoming amplified into pure energy, shining on my surroundings. I wake up in the morning excited to throw back the cover of my sleeping bag, and watch the coming of another day fade from the stars that glitter on the shimmering lake outside my house.
I am also having trouble keeping in touch right now. A phone feels useless to me, and my energy for writing e-mails has waned. It will return, but for now, I hope you all will contact me, and not take my aloofness as nothing more than an indication of how content I am in each moment right here, right now. I want to share this place with you all, but e-mail is not going to do the job. Come out here and love a little bit of this life with me.

Wow, It's the end...

Well, tomorrow night it is back to the States.

I have been fortunate to watch six full moons in Peru, the last one being just a few days ago in Cusco, during an early morning walk back from the discos as the night was fading to twilight. For awhile, staring up at each moon only made me feel tied to the places on which I could envision that same moonlight shining down - back home, the people, the places, the memories...Until my fourth moon, after a walk on the trails around the research station. Once the other guys climbed in their tents, and ceased rustling around as they wriggled into their sleeping bags, I looked around the moonlit valley, and traced the clouds up to where they just looked like ghostly feathers streaking across the full moon. I felt a fullness in my feet that hadn't been around for awhile. I was rooted there and then.

It is just a simple and trite thought to be truly present in a moment, but it is a thought that I feel constantly challenges me. Finally, I could feel the full weight of where I was, and knew that I was in the right place. That night, it was only once I felt this perfect sensation of placement that I then felt my heart reach back to the places I missed back home, and I know some of those places felt my happiness that night.

Of course six months abroad, living like this has changed my life, taught me much, and given me ample thoughts on how to change my life and those around me for years to come. However, suddenly in less than 30 hours, all I have grown familiar to in the past 6 months will be gone, and I will be dependent on my memories and writings to remind me. I am excited to get back to the life I know I love back in the states, and I am equally excited to see how the life I have developed over this long long trip will complement the coming years.

I will definitely miss Peru extremely, and if I do not return here in the coming years, I will be very surprised. See you all soon.

On the right path...

I have arrived in Paucartambo for a day to catch up on some e-mails and what not. The following are two journal entries from the recent weeks.

11/8/08
There are days when ya just know ya just got it right, when things seem impossibly good, and then they get a little better.
After a few hours of searching for nests up and down this mountain creek a few miles from the station, the sun finally crested the edge of the deep ravine and cast brilliant blue light into the booming pools of water tumbling past me. There was nothing else that made sense in that moment other than to just get in. So, I laid my backpack, binos, clothing, and boots along side the river on some rocks, and jumped in. Well, no, I eased in, sat down in the water and managed to hyperventilate in the frigid water for about five seconds before I jumped up and out. Some exclamations escaped my lips, who knows what. After a few more minutes in the sun, I felt I was ready for the real shock of swimming up in the rapid where a small torrent fell two feet into the pool that swirled and spit splashes of icy water on my bare skin.
I quickly walked into the edge of the sandy-bottomed pool, jumped into the deepest part, and swam like a frog in the current for perhaps ten seconds before running back out. The pool was just large and deep enough to swim in. The icy water rushing over my eyes, the clarity of the rocks around me - all was perfect. The last time I felt a moment like this in such frigid mountain water was several years ago now, back in Quilcene, Wa. I would ride a borrowed bike down Linger Longer Rd. a few times a week after work and go for a swim in the Little Quilcene river. At the bottom of the deepest hole, I would cling to an exposed tree root, holding myself on the cobblestone creekbed as I stared up at the blue summer skies. A few times swallows glided in the air above, and something seemed oddly perfect to be staring into that realm while kidding myself into feeling aquatic for so long as my lungs allowed.
After laying on the rocks for a few minutes, I decided to hike up the creek and look for some more nests along the banks, and left my clothing behind. There is something about being drenched in frigid water while bathed in intense mountain sunlight that made me stand there smiling, dripping wet and naked, wondering how things could feel any better at that moment. Once I sat back down to warm up and dry off an hour later by my clothing, a few butterflies landed on my legs, probing for salty sweat. Their violet-blue wings mesmermized me as they winked in the late-morning sun.
---
10/28/08
Ever so slowly, I think my travels are revealing to me that I have people in my life, people who influence my thoughts on a daily basis, people I miss when I am away, everyday people I truly love who make me feel at home. For awhile in my life, I felt alone to the point that I felt accustomed to thinking I really was alone, and that I might not be able to find other people who felt the same about life as I did. But as I stare over the mountainside at the misty clouds that blow condensation into my hair, I am finding the elation I feel in seeing such beauty generates an undeniable longing to have some people here with me now. Someone with whom I can argue over the intrinsic value of such so-called nature, someone to share a barely noticeable grinning glance with as two squirrels pass by unaware of us watching from our treestands, someone to lay in a cozy bed with as we lazily watch the sunrise on the mountainside, someone to lay on a blanket with in the sun as the spray from a nearby fountain kisses wispy drops of rain on our bare skin, someone with whom a normal commute to work can become one of the most memorable mornings of the year...
From shadows of such self-imposed times of youthful loneliness, I am finally acknowledging that I have never really been alone at all, and I am beginning to see it´s not only places so far from man´s hand that I need to see, but I need others at my side in whom I know resides a similar glowing ember as green as these forests through which I am so lucky to roam each day. It may be the path less travelled, but that does not make me alone or unique on this path.