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Landing in Calais
Sometimes a memory surfaces of an experience I had while backpacking through Europe, at age 19. I carried the same heavy Mountainsmith 65 liter backpack I’d used to climb Mt. Rainier and lead backpacking trips at a summer camp in the Colorado Rockies, and the same attitude of exploration and desire for new vistas, carrying
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Lifting the lid of the termite farm
I recently had a disappointing experience where I got some disturbing clarity about a number of things. It’s painful to realize that others have used you and your private expression over a number of years in order to support their own psychodrama, casting you, baselessly, as a perpetual villain while they get to take turns
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A Culmination / mythologies / Maybe being jaded isn’t so bad
Some life points are more pivotal, more decisive than others. Things build over time, a culmination of moments, hours, days, weeks, months. Sometimes things can brew. Sometimes fragile things grow. Sometimes there are thin spots, where every moment feels intimate, fleeting, leaving one in gratitude. Moments that only happen because of a drooping openness, a
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the mess
The first time I had ankle surgery, it was on accident. I had had no choice but to trust the medical personnel taking care of me, at a point when my trust in institutions and helping people in general was pretty low. I was really lucky to land in excellent, compassionate hands with my surgeon.
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the brain as it is
Sometimes one rolls all the way back down the mountain in a snowball of old junk, into old realities which block out the new and sabotage hopes of renewed peace. What I’ve had to acknowledge is that through some of my experiences, my brain changed and I have to be continually mindful to manage it
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hollowed pride
The above image chronicles the last time I played chess with my dad. I was almost 9 the day that I beat him. He snapped a polaroid, bragged about it to others, and never played with me again. Eventually I found other people to play with, one friend who was a boy, and mostly boys
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“intersubjectivity”
I’ve attended several virtual events this past year, and some have stuck with more more than others – those that have inspired me, or, alternatively, provoked me in uncomfortable ways that have continued to bother me or simply make me want to gag; as they say, if you see something, say something. So I am
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Freeze / Melt
The ice storm of a week and a half ago turned out to be the most destructive weather event here in the last 30 years. I didn’t ever really have a moment where I felt endangered, but going through the motions of survival was probably good earthquake preparation. Being disconnected from the internet was a
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Search for Clarity
Even now I still search for clarity. Where did I go so wrong? Where was the point at which I stepped from safety into all the danger. How might I have kept myself safe, how might I have survived all that. What didn’t I see, and still don’t see? What didn’t I understand then? Not
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candy
In order to get my graduate degrees in the program I had been admitted to and chosen, I had to take classes in my department. I had no reason upon enrolling to believe that this would be a problem. But it was. It was the kind of abuse which is very difficult to describe and
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Interregnum
Autumn is usually when a deeper, bereft sadness and sense of uncertainty and out-of-jointness has tended to surface, it’s just the time of year when hard or stressful things have tended to accumulate over the years and leave a heavy residue. Usually I don’t get through it without buying a few school supplies (though I’ve
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just passing through
I recently attended an online conference that was enormous, but the online format at this time allowed for a much more paced digestion of the content and general exposure. The experience has been valuable in understanding more about the structure of the field and academia, the current questions and the work being done. Some of