by susan | Aug 19, 2015 | what I'm reading
I love to learn, but I, alas, need a bit of entertainment along the way. diatribe, argument, and philosophical discussion can quickly drown me, whereas metaphor, a titch of light-heartedness, allegory, and surprises work to keep me engaged and sometimes even engrossed. the following books kept me hooked while not only educating me, but also creating a sense that I would enjoy coffee or dinner with their authors. (watching elizabeth kolbert on the daily show with jon stewart affirmed that sense.) if you haven’t read these, I recommend you do. kolbert’s book is especially relevant in our changing world ~ start there.
the sixth extinction, elizabeth kolbert. kolbert hopes that readers will “come away with an appreciation of the truly extraordinary moment in which we live;” I can’t imagine the reader who wouldn’t.
the social animal: the hidden sources of love, character, and achievement, david brooks. how our unconscious mind guides us… both fascinating and enlightening, and filled with story, allegory, and eye-opening fact.
quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking, susan cain. I can’t help but like a book about people like me.
the swerve: how the world became modern, stephen greenblatt. a story about lucretius’s “on the nature of things” and how its discovery, centuries after being written, had a revolutionary affect on great thinkers, artists, and scientists.
a brief history of everything, bill bryson. “how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us.” like kolbert, bryson is gifted with the ability to clarify scientific complexities for those of us unfamiliar with that realm.
as I stated, I love to learn: please share your list!
by susan | Aug 7, 2015 | what I'm reading
everything I encounter changes me in some way ~ from hummingbirds pausing to sip at my feeder, to a daughter’s tight hug, to that first stimulating cup of coffee each morning ~ but these five books changed me in deep, provocative ways, and though I first read all of them years (sometimes decades) ago, threads of their offerings have woven themselves into my core self.
they enticed me to see the world differently ~ by offering ideas foreign to me, by validating my own experiences, by encouraging me, by widening my views. and, in each one, through the magic gift of storytelling. by letting me into the author’s world, either directly through experience, or more subtly, via the lives of their characters.
here are five:
a tree grows in brooklyn, betty smith
angle of repose, wallace stegner
atlas shrugged, ayn rand
bird by bird, anne lamott
the artist’s way, julia cameron
I’d love to read five of yours!
by susan | Jul 29, 2015 | Uncategorized
When we make something with our hands, it changes the way we feel, which changes the way we think, which changes the way we act. ~ Carl Wilkens
I am surrounded, here, by art—natural, and human-made, and human-created collections of the natural. To my left, photographs of trees, a tortoise, a spider’s web of Amazonian girth (which, I’ve learned, one can use to staunch the flow of blood, heal a wound). Behind me, a painting of two arctic graylings surrounded by a thousand words–three hundred more–a commitment, a project of inherent tedium and unending, painstaking, attention. Across the street, framed and hung on a wooden wall, fly two trumpeters painted upon an abstract background that captures every minute and extravagant aspect of the beauty of this singular place. I am in Montana’s Centennial Valley.
I, have only words. Made of spindly lines and curves, each one, like a single brush stroke, carrying little significance. There are more words than colors, more words than tools to place color on a canvas. Infinite, meaningless words, that wander across mind and page and only by sheer luck or through great fortitude tell a story nearly as purely as a painting.
I want to paint the trees and birds, the flat lake and its impossible line of light, the bulging clouds, the rainfall during the night. The moon, growing fat, yet full of dips and holes, places I risk being swallowed.
A brush in my hand, plump caterpillars of color on my palette; anything but dark pen, white paper, the shapes I’ve carved a million times, will carve a million times more.
My desk, in this cabin, is a hingeless door, black metal table legs bolted to its belly, propped on seven-inch blocks of wood to align its height with the window ledges, rough gray boards knotted and chipped, dry and splitting further with each shift of wind. My tall chair, a throne. Gentle brushstrokes, the paint green, indicate the place where someone here before me painted–a small piece, the size of my own paper–on the left side of the desk. The green tells me only of its border, and I am left to imagine the rest—the vision, the story. For what we do is the same, we ache to tell a story, it wrestles us until it wins, whether by paint, by pen, by pencil, by arrangement of rock, feather, moss.
If I could only paint, use my hands to do more than wield a pen, I’m certain my stories would sing.
I would paint a grayling, a tamarask, a cormorant–sleek and black and curved of bill. I would paint on wood, let it dry and crackle and tell a story all its own.
I would sketch my story, trap my words inside the paint, daub and brush and seal them all, and with this, change the artist herself.
by susan | Jun 17, 2015 | Uncategorized
there once was a man whose feet hurt. everywhere he stepped, prickly things stabbed his skin. if not thorns and briars, it was sharp-edged rocks and gravel. when it snowed, the cold burned. when sun poured over the land, the heat seared. he was tired of blistered, aching, sore, painful feet.
so he covered the world with leather.
it stretched over the prickly things, the broken pieces of what were once great boulders, the icy snow, the desert sand that held heat long after the sun sunk beneath the horizon each day. he walked everywhere he wanted, his toes relaxed, his heels gently rolling with each step. the land was now predictable and safe, and never again did his feet blister, ache, suffer wounds, or cause him pain.
no more arrowleaf balsamroot with its sharply pointed leaves and bright yellow petals, no more pungent sagebrush or leafing lavender. river-worn stones and ragged rocks now lay beneath the leather, springs and creeks and glaciers, too. the world was smooth and even.
the man walked until he stopped. he sat on the leather, and thought about what the world had looked like back when his feet hurt. he thought about how it felt when his feet hurt, and how it felt when they healed from the hurt. he thought about the tickle of lichen on his soles, and of trillium leaves against his ankles. the rub of millions of grains of dry sand, the shock of snow, the hypnotic caress of warm rain puddling around his feet. he thought of his many scrapes and bleeding cuts, how the skin had gradually come back together, how the scars were now fine lines of stories, poetry on his toes. on his insteps. on his rising arches and on the shallow indentation between ankle bone and achilles tendon.
he thought about what lay beneath his leather. he contemplated his feet. and then he took his knife, and split the leather. he peeled it open, and uncovered the springs and talus, the glaciers and rivers, the pine needle covered trails, the thorns and thistles and waving lupine. he stepped onto the pebbly soil and grimaced. stepped again and winced. moved more firmly onto his path, and felt the needles, the rocks, the shells and twigs and heat and cold, the wet, the tickle, and then he felt a stone slice the bottom of his foot and he smiled.
(with gratitude to kim dastrup and bob rolfs, and to shantideva, from whom the roots of this story come.)
by susan | Feb 19, 2015 | Uncategorized
and two elbows.
forearms, hips, teeth, wrists. five toes on each forefoot, and four toes on the hind.
twenty months ago I knew almost nothing about wolves. today I know a great deal, but I didn’t learn they have knees until yesterday.
and something about this matters to me.
wolves, canis lupus, are the long-ago forebears of man’s best friend, the dog. everyone knows this. we humans love our dogs. twenty or more are walked past my windows every day. one, a jack russell terrier, runs out in front of his master, who rides his bicycle behind. labs, boxers, bulldogs, mutts, shepherds, and little teeny yippy dogs trot past, tugging their masters. it’s difficult to envision the evolutionary process that led from wolf to shih tzu. inbreeding, mutations, selective breeding: the answer to how (and from where) today’s dogs actually came to be are still being studied, and argued about.
the connection between man and dog, though, is rarely fodder for argument.
and it’s part of what draws so many of us to wolves.
but there are also those who fear wolves. who consider them vicious and violent, an unnecessary, destructive species.
the marshall family, in the 1950’s, spent years living with a tribe of kalahari bushmen, in southern africa. the bushmen lived, at that time, basically as their ancestors had lived for the past thousand years. the apex predator in africa is the lion, and the bushmen had an understanding with it, as one explained to the marshall’s daughter elizabeth: “where lions aren’t hunted, they aren’t dangerous . . . we live in peace with them.” lions and bushmen had coexisted for so long, they “knew” each other, and appeared to respect each other. bushmen were cautious and protective–they stayed in community at night, and didn’t place themselves at risk–knowing that lions were capable of ripping them to shreds. but the two groups shared the land, each recognizing and accepting the other’s existence.
the bushmen hunted with poisoned arrows, and by the time the poison took effect, the animal was often far away from the hunters. at times, the bushmen would reach their prey only to find lions already at feed. the bushmen would neither shoot arrows at the lions nor abandon their kill; instead they would calmly tell the lions to leave, that the animal wasn’t theirs to eat. reluctant lions might be encouraged by handfuls of soil, tossed lightly in their direction. and this was enough to make the lions leave.
it is possible for man and beast to share the land. what’s required are firm boundaries, and respect.
wolves are not dogs, and they shouldn’t be treated as such. however, they are animals that belong on the landscape. it is our job to determine how to set and enforce appropriate boundaries, and to respect the wolves’ nature, behavior, and right to exist.
like all top predators–lions, tigers, great white sharks, grizzly bears–we share many traits with wolves.
among them are that we like to choose our territories, we will defend them. we reproduce and raise families. we like to choose our own meals.
and we both–wolves, and man–have two knees.
Photo Credit: The Wolf Almanac by Busch, Robert H.
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