Life Happens

Wearing a moss-stache inside Seattle's Interlaken Park, photo taken by my Mom. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

And I step away from the computer more often. Because I don't have editorial work to do every day, sometimes I don't turn it on at all. Since last writing here, I've been working harder at two jobs; staying up til dawn shaking a maraca with friends (what I like to call "Summer Madness"--your license to act like a teenager a few times when the days are long); cooking eggs and bacon on the hood of a rental car, deep in the Mojave with Lucianne; pet-sitting; drinking Guinness milkshakes in Hollywood and Mai Tais in Vegas; readying for grad school; wandering around houseboats and the harbour of Victoria, B.C. I've been wearing summer dresses in defiance of our cool season, trying to invoke the sun that everyone else in the country has had enough of. And being kind of a hippie, what with the lavender in my hair. Did I include working? Sometimes it hardly feels like it.

This morning I had a dream about surfing (not the first) and also climbing out on the limbs of a tree to watch another mighty one get cut down. It may have to do with the book I picked up last night, David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous.

It's just right for my current mindset. I'm a huge Diane Ackerman fan and have lately been trying to dig deeper into such material. Realizing there's a whole genre of philosophical nature writing, I'm pretty stoked.

I often fantasize about dropping out. After reading Lev Grossman's article on the Singularity in Time earlier this year, I got real excited to celebrate the mid-21st Century--the hypothesized merging of human with machine and the end of my lifetime--by selling popsicles by the roadside in Bali. And Lucianne's got a great idea for retirement in Hawaii, which I'll let her elaborate on.

Abram's book is only going to fuel these fantasies further. Or at least get me to plan two trips I dream about: to sit in the geothermal pools of Iceland and see the northern lights in Tromso, Norway; to learn to surf in Central America. I've been talking about these trips for years!


Here are some quotes from The Spell of the Sensuous and one that I've come across so far:

Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.