Darkness, Darkness Be My Pillow

We were having such a nice dinner. Portabella mushroom in ginger, soy, and hot sesame oil marinade, basmati rice, and homemade red cabbage slaw with homegrown carrots. We were deep in conversation about something, more than three fourths of a bottle of Cabernet already imbibed when the lights suddenly went out. There wasn't even a foreshadowing flicker, just sudden and absolute darkness.

We laughed.

The weather reports had been promising this storm. The winds had been blowing fiercely all afternoon. Big gusts, the kind that keep the ferry from docking in town. White caps chopped the bay. But it all seemed to pass without much fanfare. In fact we had been talking about it at dinner, how the weather reports must have been slightly overblown just to cover their forecasting reputations. The last few storms had kicked Seattle's collective butt. So, everyone needed to be on high alert for this one, according to the news folks who call themselves StormTracker (dramatic flourish here). I had photographed the approaching storm in the afternoon, but quickly the sky behind it had turned a brilliant blue, and everything seemed to melt into a lovely sunset and dinner.

We wondered, while we were eating, if we were really going to have snow in the morning and the freezing temperatures that have been promised for the next few days. We love the cold temps, the icy landscapes, the sensual snow-covered earth. We were hoping we would find such a thing in the morning.

Then the lights went out.

Somewhere the storm was brewing and blowing enough to absolutely isolate us in our warm and cozy abode. We scrambled for our backup systems-- candles, lanterns, flashlights, and ...

Roger went to the big garage and pulled out our brand new 5000 watt generator. We'll be able to post this silly post. We'll watch a movie on our laptop dvd (luckily we had rented "Thank You For Smoking"). We're not going to be utterly marooned. Just quietly and comfortably in the dark, waiting to see if there will be snow in the morning. We promise we'll let you know.

It's dark, but we are online.

The promised update:
Just as we suspected, the weather newsies completely went overboard on this, at least for our side of Puget Sound. We got our power back fairly quickly and there's NO SNOW ON THE GROUND. 7:40 am PST.

Violence: Our Inhumanity

I've been thinking about violence...

...ever since I read Phantom Scribbler's poignant posts about a woman named Helen Hill, but also because Roger and I have become addicted to the HBO series Six Feet Under. Normally we would never describe that show as violent, but on Saturday night we watched Season 4, Episode 5. It's the one where David, one of the lead characters, is brutalized and tortured by a psychopath for several harrowing and unsettling hours.

Roger and I don't watch much TV. But when we do take a trip around the dial on the remote control we are often dismayed by the amount of violence we see. Violence is everywhere-- the news, documentaries, drama. In one format or another there is both the shock and celebration of it in our culture. We even saw an advertisement for a violent Christmas movie. (WTF is that about?) We click along, never stopping long enough to see who is behind the gun, the knife, the bomb. It's simply everywhere, on every channel. Murder and mayhem.

On Saturday we settled in for a little DVD escapism. We had already spent the rainy afternoon watching the original version of The Manchurian Candidate (excellent, but strangely, purposefully, and impersonally violent). By 9:00 pm we were ready for our Six Feet Under fix, but fifteen minutes into it, the horror of random personal violence came trampling through in the role of unbidden apocalyptic marauder. Through David's character we see how unsuspecting innocents always are, not believing what is actually befalling them, and how hopeful that somehow rational thinking and appeals to humanity will spare them. But isn't it the epitome of violence that the victim be utterly de-humanized, that pleasure be derived from inflicting suffering on others.

I left the room. I could not watch. Roger was able to sit through the entire episode albeit with trepidation and horror. Afterwards, we wondered if the fact that I am a survivor of a violent crime simply leaves me less able to watch the kind of violence inflicted on others. But I don't think that's it-- because I have always responded viscerally to depictions of violence, long before I myself fell victim.

Roger adds:
how could i watch david be assaulted, battered, and terrorized?

the first idea that occurs to me is that i have never been in such a situation. the last fight I was in was in the fourth grade. since then i have not been threatened physically in a way that left no out. i have encountered very bad people, but never in a confrontational way. while it was scary to be in their presence, and i slid away as fast as possible, nothing bad happened. i have no "sense memory," as the actor's studio says, of being scared shitless in the face of a brutal psychopath, or even a bully, to say nothing of being punched and kicked, so i think i can watch some forms of violence in a semi-detached way. not that my heart doesn't race, not that i don't feel fear and anger, and not that i enjoy watching, but i can hold back from investing myself entirely. my compassion for david and my curiousity, or need, to find out what happened, carried me through the scenes of physical violence.

i like drama. not melodrama. i appreciate that someone, mostly a large group of someones, goes to the trouble of producing a story, a play, a movie. it's a lot of work, so i try to "take the trip" with a willing suspension of disbelief. modern film and television portray "realism" quite well. the illusion of violence works, so i pick my "trips" carefully. i would survive a viewing of a slasher movie, but for what? an adrenaline rush? a bad one? and the hangover? i'll take my adrenaline rushes from my own physical adventures that don't involve hurt or pain or humiliation on anyone's part, thank you.

But we wonder, what role does theatrical depictions of violence serve in our culture? Why do you suppose there is so much of it? It is truly baffling to us, and we would love to hear why you think it is so ubiquitous. We may have been watching a two-year old episode of some HBO series, but it coincided with the real-life violent death of a fine woman, wife, and mother. What does it mean for all of us to live with the subtext of violence that permeates much of our life and popular culture?

When I left the room where the DVD was playing, I turned on the stereo and played old Moody Blues singing "Om." It just seemed like the right thing to do.

The Lettering of the World

We went out and walked along the beach on Sunday. It was a low tide, but not a minus tide, so we encountered and climbed under and over these fallen limbs, trunks, and trees that had been laid low by erosion, wind, and time. The entire mile of beach was covered like this. Most of these views were taken looking back at where we had just been. We returned the way we had arrived. It took hours.

We're avoiding politics right now. We're waiting for the first hundred hours before we have something to say. But in case anyone is wondering: We don't think there should be a surge, but see fully the politics behind the calculations. We didn't think we could despise Bush any more than we do, but we do. We are looking forward to full congressional oversight. We are ecstatic to see the first woman Speaker of the House. We're waiting to see if we get our country back. What do you think? Will we?

back away from the groceries

we went to the supermarket yesterday to buy some food. milk, bread, and mushrooms. as we were checking out the checker was advising the woman bagging our purchases to go home, or perhaps take a lot of vitamin c, because she had just told him she was still feeling very sick. robin and i looked at each other askance, paid, and walked out. we talked about how awful it was to have our food, packaged tho it is, be handled by someone who knows she is sick. so i went back in, found the manager, and told him i'd like to replace the items as i don't appreciate having a sick person handling my food. i added that such practice seems bad for a grocery store.

he nodded assent, perhaps a bit ruefully. so i took a basket and picked out replacements. when i returned with my hopefully at least slightly more sterile packages he was in conversation with the sick woman, who shot me a hostile look. he started to check me out again, thought better of it, bagged the stuff and bade me good day.

i know that working life isn't easy for people who may have little or no sick leave. and she wasn't preparing food or serving it. but still. how would you feel accepting your bag of food from someone ignoring you to carry on a conversation about being sick? i imagined a faint, ghastly green glow coming from the bag. i'm hardly a fanatic about germs and cleanliness (although robin is). in fact, mostly i don't even consider germs. i'm fortunate enough to be quite healthy, but i am aware of the hotbed of colds and runny noses that grade schools too often are, and robin's tales of sick students at the big university where she worked are sobering, so i know that we avoid most contagious stuff because of our semi-solitary nature. i'm not up to volunteering to find out how easily germs migrate from hands to packages to food to me.

what responsibility do we have when we're ill to keep our germs to ourselves?

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I hope you have been saving your spectacular good earth shots to send to January's host, the incomparable Laura of Somewhere in NJ. Please send her your photos depicting the beauty of our planet for this Saturday's Good Planets. Her email is lc-hardy at comcast dot net. Thanks everyone!

Reprieve

So, anyway, when you live in the northwest you have to give yourself permission to rant and rave about the weather. We knew exactly what we were getting into when we moved here. It's the pacific northwest, after all, we'd heard all the stories. They're the same ones you've all heard, and they're all true. But here's the other thing--the thing that doesn't make it into the atmospheric reputation-- when it's beautiful here, it's drop dead beautiful.
The winter skies part at sunset. The colors are more vivid than any words in my lexicon to describe them. We are so glad for the light, the depth of the horizon, the far reach of sky into the bigger universe. We are free for a moment, not trapped beneath layer upon layer of cumulus, stratus, cirrus, and nimbus. Once we see the sky, we remember how far into the distance our eyes long to look.
As if on cue, an eagle flies from the west toward us. It's so far away it looks like a moving speck of blackness against the raging color. I zoom in and try to photograph it, despite the distance, because of that magnificent light. I think even a failed and blurred shot hints at the wild beauty of a winter sunset after days and days of rain. We wait for the moment, and it always arrives.

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I hope you have been saving your spectacular good earth shots to send to January's host the incomparable Laura of Somewhere in NJ. Please send her your photos depicting the beauty of our planet for this Saturday's Good Planets. Her email is lc-hardy at comcast dot net. Thanks everyone!

Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Global Warming

Yet one more storm approaches

It's still raining.

I should think by now we would have grown gills and fins, and found our way down stream into the choppy gray sea. I actually stared at live-cam photos of Yosemite yesterday. The blue sky over Half Dome looked surreal, like a fantasy painting of unreal and unbearably beautiful colors.

How do we live with this constant gray? How do we summon from our own interiors the warmth and light needed to sustain life? We have no choice, but it is a constant challenge. One morning last week, I woke to the sun rising in a clear sky. It was exhilarating. I went and filled the tea kettle with water, set it on the stove to boil, and on my way back to the bedroom walked past a window only to see a heavy fog was blowing in. That relentless and endless gray stared back at me with its vacant, pitiless gaze. FOG. I wailed. I took it personally. It was blocking my sun and my blue sky. I shook my fist and cursed the outdoors, then went about the task of summoning warmth and light from memory.

We turn the sauna on when we need the extra heat to soak deeply into our bones. We bring the iPod out there, listen to tunes, and stretch out while the temperature soars. We're thinking about getting a full-spectrum light to put into the sauna, so we can have both the warmth and light that we are craving.

My older brother who lives in Virginia has been telling me how lovely the weather has been. He's been out playing lots of tennis and taking long walks on his 50 acres. He says, "Robin, I hiked in tee-shirt and shorts today. How's the weather there?" We laugh. Mine much more hysterical than his. We laugh again about how our father would have responded to the pacific northwest. He would have said, "You like this weather?" Asked with absolute incredulity. I read somewhere that Washington D.C. is the new North Carolina. What will the northwest ultimately become with these weather trends? Can I put in my dibs for the clear skies of Yosemite? Or the pleasant temps of Santa Barbara?

The weatherman said that this winter's El Nino will be bringing us moderate warming temperatures soon. I apologize to all of you, but if global warming brings us this warmth, I'm going to turn on every fossil-fuel guzzling thing we have. If you love me you'll do it too. I have a personal stake in this. The earth is my toy, here to entertain and please me. So, warm me up. Please start your engines.

It Looks A Lot Like Last Year

eagle perspective

time without calendar
days of hunt and hunger

soon a mate in talons clasped
falling toward the sea
new year imperative

Hope you all had a fine New Year's Eve. We celebrated with good friends, food, wine, and a movie. Lots of good cheer, talk, politics, laughter and sadness.

For a sobering moment -- take a look at the New York Times moving tribute to the 3000 American soldiers who have lost their lives in combat. Go look at those faces and remember.

Also, a compelling read can be found over at Staying Alive.

It may be a new year, but unless we all work for peace and environmental health, it's going to look a lot like the old one.

Happy New Year.