I’m pretty sure I had a clever title earlier

As these things go, however, it has vanished. I’m not even sure what I was going to post about. Seriously, if you people want to get something clever out of me, you should figure a way to get me to write posts while walking home after work. But right now it’s 10 pm, so my brain can only offer up the dregs from a long day of the usual daily fare.

It’s the daily routine that concerns me today. Life amazes me in its infinite variations on the unchanging daily routine. Today I woke, went to work, walked home, cooked and watched TV. Three years ago, when this blog started, I had the same daily pattern. Now I have the same job, same husband, but many things have changed in that unchanging routine, and I have changed along with them. It seems that life is a type of evolution, the constant incorporation of new ideas and knowledge into life, and the constant response to what we encounter.

Now for an apt aphorism: change is the only constant. I have often created change in my life when it was not otherwise forthcoming. I was an impatient young woman, and did not appreciate gradual evolution. When I wanted something to change, I wanted it to happen RIGHT NOW. I still struggle to appreciate/acknowledge incremental patterns of change. I suspect that, when I am older, I will conclude that gradual is a great deal more powerful than sudden change, no matter how dramatic it might be.

An example. Today I cooked zucchini-basil soup: I sauteed a mirepoix base, then stewed it with zucchini and vegetable broth. Finally I pureed it with fresh basil and silken tofu. We ate the soup with spicy kohlrabi and green garlic latkes with mint-yogurt sauce. Except for the tofu and yogurt, it was all vegan and all farm fare, down to fat little carrots from my MIL’s garden. Four years ago? I was likely to be found eating a BLT from a sandwich shop, and didn’t know what a mirepoix was. Why the change? Mostly, because my encounters with my own and others’ illnesses during the past four years inspired me to be conscious of how I treat myself. I know now that my body believes in tit for tat: it treats me as poorly as I treat it. And I figured, while I was at it, I might as well figure out how to make healthy = tasty.

Food is but one example. I still have a cat and dog, but not the same ones. Caring for my sick dog and cat through their long illnesses … I don’t even have words for that experience. I now live in a house half the size of the one I used to, and have about 40% less stuff. I have taken interesting trips and seen new places. Valued colleagues have come and gone. I defied Texas and chose to walk a lot of places now instead of driving. I think much differently about my crafting now and the place that making stuff has in my life. I have new skills, new ideas, and new confidence. I have learned more about myself.

The discipline of staying put is hard for me. I can be mercurial and unpredictable. On the other hand, assuming that life stagnates if you’re not on the move is just dumb. Although I still believe in forcing change to avoid habitual ruts, at nearly 35 I am starting to appreciate how the small things cause transformation as surely as tiny roots break apart huge rocks.

A note on photos: I am starting a small container garden. Plants, I think, are a great metaphor for incremental change. Take the last photo, for example, of roots I’m growing from an ivy I bought nearly 10 years ago. It joins an older sibling I started growing three years ago that is now taking over a windowsill.

Comparisons, Emptiness

I’ve been back from Colorado for a week. Upon my return, while doing simple things like grocery shopping and dog walking, I became uncomfortably aware of an incredible cacophony assaulting my eyes and ears. It was, of course, no more than the noise and motion of a city surrounding me once again. I had rather expected the silence where we went to be deafening, but instead it just made more room for the sounds of birds and wind and water.

But before we get to the rest, I was meaning to give you a comparison, ask you all if you thought my quilt was a good representation of aspens. I was up in the heights among them again so I took a picture. If you haven’t been around aspens, they grow in groves at very high elevation (7000+ feet, I think). These particular ones were sunning themselves across the road from my cabin near the Continental Divide. I like aspens no matter the weather – they seem very graceful to me – but I did miss hearing the sound of the wind fluttering the leaves.

Again, it seems, my idea of peace will be tied up in an aspen grove, in the mountains, near running water. That very sort of quiet and happy memory, of sun and wind and water, is what prompted me to create my small quilt in the first place. It’s a good memory to have sewn.

High altitudes slow you down. They remove the distractions of cell phone and internet, for we had no signal, no cable where we were for a few days. Altitude also requires that you move rather slower than usual. Not an altitude for jogging if you usually live at sea level. At 10,000 feet, if you’re a flat-lander, you might very well run out of air before you finish an entire sentence.

I wish my camera had a better light sensor, because I’m always amazed at the colors I see in the forests and desert. I never feel as if I capture how the colors look to my eye, although I want to bring them home and find fabric that reminds me of them. The wash of reds and oranges and browns in a scrubby bush that grows along a river. The rust and deep green and silver of evergreen forests. The sudden inner pink sparkle of a rock split in half. The striations of limestone and sandstone where it has been cut away for a road. The gold and orange of dried flowers waiting for spring.

In large or empty places like northern Colorado and southern Wyoming, often cameras fail to capture the sense of where you are. You are left instead with occasional geese and bighorn sheep and moose–and good luck convincing them to be photogenic!  But at least they are subjects that will agree to fit entirely within your viewfinder, when the mountains to your right steadfastly refuse to captured in their entirety.

After my train trip through the Midwest, I mentioned my love of not only seeing the place I’m going TO, but also the places that are between me and there. The long road and I have always had a bond. I have seen an obscene number of the highways of this country. I have seen many small byways as well. I do not love them all, but I’m happy to visit most of them at least once.

I’d still prefer a train ride.

It’s hard, coming back to life, to maintain a sense of where I was, and how my shoulders decided not to live up there near my ears for a while, amid the busy day-to-day of everything. I envied the three who owned the cabins in which we stayed for their lack of distraction. I wondered if I could do that. It’s peaceful, yes. Would it become too remote without benefit of all my wires?  Would I become bored?  Does the constant sound of the wind over the mountains drive you crazy after a while?  I have no real idea what it would be like, so it’s all romantic notions, since my life is so far removed from there.

But it’s definitely nice to visit sometimes.

Monarch Season in Austin

There were a dozen fluttering on this bush all around me. Gorgeous!

(mostly) Wordless Wednesday