Intuitive Painting (aka BYOB, we provide the tempera)

Friday night me and Sarah went to an intuitive painting workshop. There was a DJ, people brought snack food, we brought a bottle of wine, and the girl who ran it provided big sheets of paper and big bottles of tempera paint. And then you just kind of went at it. The only rule was that you weren't allowed to say anything, good or bad, about anyone else's work. The idea was to paint for the process, to enjoy the act of painting, and not worry about the finished product. I always worry about the finished product, so it was hard to turn that off, but I really enjoyed playing with goopy tempera on big sheets of paper.

Oil painting is so high-commitment, in that canvas is expensive, paint is expensive, and set up and clean up take a while. If I don't have several hours to devote to painting, I don't do it at all. Which means I haven't painted anything since I made a couple paintings for Christmas gifts this past December. It was really, really good to put colors on a sheet of paper and just enjoy how they looked.

The girl running it would come around and offer suggestions like, "Okay, now if there is one color that you're really feeling pulled by, where you're really feeling that energy draw you in, which one would it be? What would you do with that color?" And things like that. It was awesome.

We had a great time painting, and I was actually really happy with how mine turned out! I'd been wanting something more colorful than my "Girl with the Pearl Earring" print to hang in my living room, and I got it! I might just go out and buy myself some tempera, and leave the oils for the nice Christmas gift paintings. Hooah!

A month of summer condensed into a paragraph.

I haven't written in over a month, it seems. A record, of sorts. I'll give you all a quick rundown of the last month. Ready?

Drove to Florida with my family, saw cousins, giant spiders, drove down nature trails on a golf cart, beach, pool, pool, food, 12 hour drive back to Charlotte, AT for hike number two, Blue Ridge Parkway, hike, sleep in a shelter with a family of bats who dive bomb us, hike, feel like dying, hike hike, EAT MORE FOOD MOLLY, hike hike, get a call in the middle of the wilderness that I have a job back at West Meck teaching Honors Civics and AP Psych, hike, views!!!! sunsets!!!! beautiful!!!!! hike, get a ride to Buena Vista, eat half a delivery pizza, a mexican combo platter, a hotdog, a fried bologna biscuit, and a bag of nachos, drive back to my car through a cloud on the mountain, then back to Charlotte, hurt my foot running, gain five pounds, join the YMCA, Teach for America training, CMS teacher workdays, move my stuff to a trailer classroom, plan like crazy, live at Amelie's for two weeks, wake up at 4:30 this morning, chase a cockroach behind my classroom whiteboard, bell rings, kids arrive!

Whew!

My first day back to school was great. I'm teaching solo this year, which I'm excited about. I'm teaching Honors and AP kids, which is going to be very different in some ways, but I'm excited about it. I'm actually organized to start the year, like, I have binders with all my papers, I'm in the process of making files for each student, I've got my computer file structure all nice and tidy. If you know me you know what a feat this has been. I saw a bunch of my kids from last year at school today, and was reminded again of why I love this job... I love those darn kids.

I'll get some pictures of my classroom once I get my new posters up. And I'll have a new wealth of wonderful student quotes to share, no doubt, although I don't know if anyone can top some of my students from last year for saying the smartest funniest things. A kid today wrote about Civics and Economics, "I thought this class was about cars. But government sounds interesting too."

I love my job. Every so often I just stop and think about leaving Chicago and my hedge fund job and all of that...and I think "Damn.. Best. Decision. Ever." Bring it, school year. I'm ready for you.

Moon lodges, space amoebas, and bare feet

My sister Hannah and I went to the Firefly Gathering last week. It's basically summer camp for hippies (and their kids!) Here is their website. Overall, it was a pretty cool way to spend a couple of days. I didn't ever quite feel like I fit in with most of the crowd, but most people were super friendly and I learned a lot of cool stuff, and more importantly, I think, I'm inspired to go out and learn even more on my own. I had an idea of the crazy hippie vibe I'd be stepping into for a few days, and I tend to veer that way in some things some times, but this was easily the most surreal couple days ever. I'm not quite sure how to sum it all up, so I'm going to try a series of lists. I didn't take a lot of pictures, as it wasn't really the kind of event where people are taking pictures of everything, but I'll share the ones I've got.

List Number One -- Things that were inspiring, refreshing, fascinating, or otherwise really cool:

1. Not wearing shoes for four days. I left them in the car and went barefoot.
2. Little kids running around naked and playing in mud without being told to put clothes on or wash up.

3. Sleeping in a tent in a pine forest.
4. Earthy looking mothers breast feeding infants (and almost-two-year-olds) without anyone being uncomfortable or insisting they wear one of those little cover-yourself-up-lest-we-be-offended breastfeeding capes.

5. Meeting and learning from people who could go out in the wilderness and live entirely off the land, trapping and fishing and hunting and finding water and building shelters. Civilization hasn’t left many of these folks around, but I’d like to count myself in their number some day.

6. Being able to learn and experience skills and knowledge our ancestors had for thousands and thousands of years but that in the last two or three hundred years we’ve lost, like making fire or tanning hides or identifying medicinal plants.

7. Men in kilts. Men without shirts. Men with beards!

8. Un-judgmental hippies, like Natalie Bogwalker, the woman who runs the camp and who taught the hide tanning class I went to. She’d make comments like, “Yeah, I used to think ‘Oh, I need to do this the primitive way! But I’ll tell you, this PVC pipe has made my life so much easier. I figured my 20s were for idealism, and now in my 30s I can be realistic.’”

9. Kids running around fighting with sticks and swimming in the lake and climbing things, with no parents in sight. Parents looking for their missing children calmly and without panicking, knowing they’d find them eventually and that kids are supposed to run around and play without their parents. I hope I can be that kind of parent.

10. Natalie Bogwalker, the hide tanner, told us that she had recently butchered a lamb for her friends’ wedding feast. I just loved that it was a ‘feast.’ People in the Bible always seemed to be having wedding feasts, and doesn't a feast sounds so much more joyful and exuberant than a ‘reception’?

11. I went to a class called “When the Shit Hits the Fan” that was supposed to be about how to survive after we reach peak oil/find ourselves in a massive economic collapse/reach the earth’s carrying capacity and suffer a severe drop in population/the apocalypse happens/other nasty disaster scenarios, etc. etc. It was supposed to be about all this before it veered into batshit crazy land (more in List Number Two), but the point is that I realized how woefully unprepared I am to survive without all the infrastructure and services we take for granted. Like if my water and my power went out, and we ran out of gas so I couldn’t drive and the grocery stores were looted and empty, what would I do? I’d like to not feel so helpless, so this list item falls under the category of inspiring/terrifying me into learning more on my own. It also made me want to buy land and learn to shoot a gun.

12. Learning about some edible and medicinal wild plants. This is something I totally am going to learn more about on my own. (This is Indian Tobacco, or Lobelia. You can use it as an anti-spasmodic if someone's having an asthma attack.)

(Not my photo. http://www.prairiemoon.com/image.php?id=2480&type=D)

13. When (part of) our culture puts so much effort into pretending that men and women are exactly the same and should do exactly the same things (What a waste if a woman chooses to stay at home with children! She could be doing REAL things with her life!) because the only real difference between the sexes is genitalia and the habit of leaving up the toilet seat, it was refreshing to hear people acknowledge (even celebrate) that traditional cultures have always had a division of labor, and that women are designed to care for children (hence the breasts) while men then tend to feel more driven to go hunt and fight and things like that. Not that I plan to spend my life barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, but when so much of our culture insistently ignores real life because it's contrary to one ideology or another, it was nice to see a value system/ideology/what-have-you that is actually BASED on reality, instead of trying to deny it.

14. I made a blanket pin out of copper. It started out as two pieces of copper wire, and look how it turned out! Ha!


List Number Two -- Things that were silly, a little obnoxious, straight up crazy, or otherwise less cool.

1. Hannah and I accidentally attended a moon lodge (we were told we were going to a discussion group). There was a fire, and a woman called Sangoma leading the circle and asking people to “bring things to the fire.” We sang songs (“I have the infinite eternal inside of me…!”) and people talked about their chakras, or about having too much empathetic energy, or about African traditions surrounding the moon goddess. Hannah and I wanted to be respectful, so we sat and nodded and held hands when asked. There were ten or twelve women there, and everyone was incredibly serious and sweet. After we “released the directions” by turning to face North, South, East and West and addressing the spirits (or something) of each direction, I walked away being really thankful that my faith is so much simpler than all the ritual and chant and ceremony and complicated collection of goddesses and spirits and energies that these women looked to for meaning. I can’t imagine going through every day feeling like it was up to me to piece together a spirituality for myself, or to tap into the spirit of whatever, or that if I didn’t do this cleansing ceremony or that healing ritual, I’d be trapped by thus and such negative energy. That’s the great thing about being Reformed though. No having to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, no earning anything, no brownie points with God. As the song goes, grace is an amazing thing.

2. The guy who led our “When the Shit Hits the Fan” class veered off at one point from talking about bug-out bags and strategic community building, to talking about the reptilian humanoids who are ruling the world. Basically, there are reptiles that shapeshift into humans who control everything. The Bilderberg Group? The Illuminati? All put in place by the reptiles. The reptiles came from another dimension, or from space (or both?) and they pull all the strings. You can wikipedia a guy named David Icke to get the full story. It’s basically insane. The wikipedia article suggests that the whole idea is perhaps “Swiftian satire.” I hope to god that’s true. We also learned that space is like an ocean with giant miles-long amoebas living in it that suck our energy. Before he could tell us about the space amoebas though, we had to imagine a white protective bubble around us. To keep out the space amoebas, obviously.
3. There was a lot of jargon at Firefly. I could go on about other kinds of jargon that drive me crazy, like the church jargon that says things like “The Lord placed it on my heart…” or uses the single word “walk” to mean “Christian faith, life and daily experience.,” or using “gift” as a verb, as in “God has gifted him with so many talents.” To be perfectly honest, the Church has a ton more awful jargon than the good hippie folk I met, but there were two terms I heard more than once that just made me go “Eh?” One was referring to a woman as a “female-bodied person,” which was odd to me because I heard it from the same people who were talking about women caring for babies while men went out to hunt. Can’t we just say ‘male’ and ‘female’? The other one that I heard a LOT was people referring to their husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, as their “partners.” Straight people with wedding rings on. If you have a wedding ring, I assume you have a husband or a wife. I don’t want to be someone’s ‘partner.’ That makes it sound like the person you’ve committed to spending your life with is on about the same level as the guy who owns the other half of your real estate business. This is why I totally understand why gay people aren’t satisfied with “civil unions.” You want a wife or a husband, not a partner. So I don’t understand why straight people, who CAN ACTUALLY GET MARRIED, would insist on using a lame, businessy term like “partner.” Is marriage just too mainstream?

4. Judgmental hippies. A lot of people seemed to have a constant need to insert into conversations or discussions the things they DON’T do. As in “Well, I don’t eat canned goods, but if I did I bet that would be tasty.” Or “We don’t have electricity, so we lit candles for the ceremony.” Or “I don’t shop at the grocery store, so I haven’t eaten cereal in a while.” There are some situations where, sure, that’s relevant. But mostly nobody else needs to know that you don’t eat canned goods. Just say “That sounds tasty” and leave out the not-so-subtle judgment.

5. This could go into the jargon category, perhaps, but there was only really one person I heard use these terms so I didn’t want to blanket the whole hippie community with the embarrassment that SHOULD come from making up words. “Shero” instead of “hero.” “Herstory” instead of “history.” Please, please please, just use the English words. I’m all for referring to humanity as “humankind” instead of “mankind,” and I appreciate when pastors say “sisters and brothers” instead of always “brothers and sisters,” but there comes a point when you just sound ridiculous. Please just use the language we already have. It works just fine, as is.


I totally want to go again next year.

White blazes in my own backyard!

Or at least they're within two hours of the backyard I grew up in.

I'm at home in Delaware for a short visit, and since everyone had to work today, I drove out to Berks County, Pennsylvania this morning to find the Appalachian Trail and do a short little hike - only five miles total. The trip served two main purposes. First, after spending a lot of last week in a car, I felt I needed to remind my legs what it's like to hike so that when I set out in August to do another week or so (this time up in VA/MD), I'm not starting from scratch and hating the first 20 miles like I did last time. Secondly, I took 476 up to PA, and 476 conveniently runs through Conshohoken, where the closest REI is located. I wanted to pick up a couple things before Hannah and I venture to the Firefly Gathering on Wednesday.

I also picked up trekking poles!! On my hike two weeks ago me and Jill scrounged up walking sticks after seeing everyone else happily chugging along with fancy-looking trekking poles. I'd always thought the poles were for old people and Europeans (I remember the Austrians walking around parks with them). I was totally wrong. Having four points of impact, essentially four "legs," makes climbing up and down mountains a lot easier. You have better balance, better shock absorption, you get a good rhythm going, and your hands don't get all puffy and swollen from hanging useless at your sides. I got the kids' version. They were 30 bucks cheaper, several ounces lighter, and have a cool snake painted on them.
My mini-hike was lovely. The point I hiked up to is at a relatively low elevation (1200-something feet, I think?) and the forest was more open to sun, and drier, and it was 80-90 degrees out - so it felt really hot. The stretch I hiked went past the Windsor Furnace shelter in Berks County Park. I missed the darker, cooler forest I found in NC two weeks ago, but it was also kind of cool to hike in landscape that looks a little more like the area I grew up in.

It was unpleasantly hot and sunny at Pulpit Rock, but the view was worth it. I ran into a couple south bound thru hikers. We traded taking pictures of each other. One of the guys was just settling into a mushroom trip, after having been given some by "some random guy down the trail." He was enjoying his afternoon.

Some kind soul thought to install an umbrella for shade.

3000 miles in 12 observations

I've been procrastinating writing a blog about my road trip because there is SO MUCH I could write about. We drove through eight states, slept in six towns, covered over 3000 miles, and watched the landscape change dramatically again and again and again. I am not about to give a blow-by-blow account of 3000 miles, so I thought I'd distill the trip down into a few of the biggest things that stuck with me, accompanied by photos. (The full photographic story is on facebook.) These are listed in the order they occurred to me, not in order of significance.

1. As far as I'm concerned, the Appalachian Mountains are still the most beautiful part of our country. I've been thinking more lately about how I can live closer to them.

2. I can never reclaim my five lost years as a vegetarian, but there is something wonderful about a giant pile/sandwich/bowl of meat.


3. I don't think sunsets will ever stop making me feel like I might explode with the crazy beauty of the world God made. And until I stop feeling that way, I will continue to take far too many photos of them.

4. Memorials with sad little personal memories make me cry. We visited the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. This is an Narcotics Anonymous keychain: "Clean and Serene for Eighteen Months."

5. The Texas panhandle is really flat and really dry and I could never, ever live there.

6. Although I don't know about actually living someplace so dry, I can see the appeal of Santa Fe. There are mountains in the distance, cool art and architecture, and their local brewery makes a fine IPA.

7. The desert seems like a hostile and forbidding place to me, but when it cools down and gets windy it feels a little more exciting and makes you want to just stand in the breeze.

8. The next time I visit the Grand Canyon, I want to hike it.

9. I could never have the patience to be an archaeologist, but Native American rock paintings are totally freaking cool in person and in situ.

10. Several years after an unpleasant falling out, gin and I have settled our differences and decided to be friends again.

11. California beaches look a little bit different than Delaware beaches.

12. Just like I finished my first Appalachian Trail hike wanting to hike more of it, I finished my this trip wishing I could spend another couple months driving across the rest of the country. There's so much out there to see!

Westward bound!

Last week I hiked 56 miles at a little over 2 mph. This week I'm driving 2500 miles at 60 mph. If the road trip is anywhere close to as cool as the backpacking trip, I'll be in good shape.

Our departure time was pushed back to tomorrow evening, so we had to make some adjustments to our itinerary. Roswell didn't make the cut, but it was replaced by the Grand Canyon, which I think is a more-than-adequate substitute. I've never seen the Canyon, or anything remotely resembling a desert, or any of that other red-colored landscape I've seen pictures of out west, so I'm really excited. If we get a chance to hike around a little bit, even better.

Just like the last trip, I went out and bought a few new things. Difference being, I went to Anthropologie instead of REI, and the weight of my purchases was not a consideration. It's nice to not have to think about carrying all my stuff. I am a little worried though about feeling really fidgety and lazy sitting in a car for so long. I ran yesterday, and ran again today, and will run again tomorrow before we leave, but I feel like I'm in better shape now than I have been in a while and I know my tendency to eat massive amounts of fast food on car trips.

My arthritis was entirely absent for my hike, and despite splurging on biscuits and white gravy and waffles on the last day, has continued to stay away. I'm hoping this means I can have wheat in small amounts every now and then without causing everything to flare up. Because damn do I love some biscuits. It is a really good feeling to have such a long, solid stretch of feeling like my body can do what I want it to, and that I don't have to worry about what joint will be sore in the morning. That said, I'm willing to deal with a stiff knuckle or two this week in order to enjoy food. I will be eating whatever Route 40 puts in front of me with no regrets.

Ah!! I'm really excited!! I'm going to get to camp in the desert, and see beautiful nature, and swim (well, okay, I use the term loosely) in the Pacific, and eat new food, and see a lot of America I've never seen before! I have a feeling that, just like the AT hike, this is only going to make me want more. Next time I'll just take a different highway, maybe camp along the way... but okay, first things first...Nashville tomorrow!

Little Laurel Shelter to Devil Fork Gap - The last two days!

I slept great all night, and woke up feeling energized and ready to get going. Everyone we met had been telling me that it takes about three or four days before your body starts getting used to the level of exertion and starts feeling better every day instead of worse. I felt better on day four than I did on day three, and a LOT better on day five than on day four. We had initially planned to only hike 6.8 miles this day, but we realized if we pushed through an extra 6 miles, it would leave us with an easy 2.7 mile hike to the car the next day. Jill and I figured we could handle 13 miles now a lot easier than we handled 13 miles three days ago, so we decided to go for it.

This day’s hike was easily my favorite. Partly because I was finally getting into better shape than when I started, so it was physically less difficult and I moved a lot faster (still not very fast, but relatively speaking), and partly because the terrain was a lot more varied. The day started out with the usual uphill through the woods, but also included big gorgeous stretches of meadow, lots of clambering through rocks, and the most amazing views we experienced the whole trip.

Before we left for the morning though, we discovered a little red salamander hanging out on a log behind the shelter. He was completely unafraid of us, and he let us pick him up!  I looked him up later, and have learned he was the juvenile stage of the red spotted newt. Like all amphibians, he started out as a little aquatic larva, but then turns into this bright red, terrestrial juvenile for two or three years before making his way back to the water and turning into a greenish-colored adult. Wikipedia even tells me that the red juveniles use magnetic orientation to find their way home. Nature blows my mind sometimes. We hiked up through a lot of rhododendron, and over a lot of rocks. As we got higher, there were side trails leading out to rocky cliffs, so we followed one out to take a look. Completely worth it. When you’ve been hiking up and up through pretty dense forest, and then the sky starts to open up a little, there’s a little more sun, the air feels a little cooler, and you finally step up and out of the tree line and can see everything below and around the mountain you’ve just climbed, and you feel that first gust of a breeze as you step out from the cover of the trees…my photos are completely inadequate to capture that, is all I’m saying.

The top of our rock climbing hike was Firescald Knob. We took our packs off and took it all in for a while. The views were breathtaking, but like I just said, the feeling of having climbed five miles up to see them is not something I can convey in words or pictures. The breeze felt so good, and the sun felt so good, instead of being exhausted like I had been most of the trip, I felt exhilarated and giddy.

There were significantly more rocks on this day’s hike than on any other day, which although it meant using your hands to climb in parts, was a welcome break from the endless straight shots up and down hills in the woods. They also provided some nice seating and shade.

We took a rest in a clearing where there were some Civil War memorial stones. Some family had joined the Union army (we’re hiking through the South, remember) and had returned back to their cabin to be ambushed by the Confederates. Or something like that. It was a beautiful clearing, with grass and logs to sit on and beautiful low sunlight through the trees.

Our initial plan had been to stay at Jerry’s Cabin Shelter. Since we’d decided to push on to Flint Mountain and do the 13 miles instead, we took the shelter as a halfway break and relaxed for a few minutes before moving on. Grace and Kathy caught up with us, and they stayed at the shelter for the night while we headed on to Flint Mountain. We were glad we weren’t staying there, because it was easily the buggiest and most run down shelter we’d seen so far.

We finally got to the Flint Mountain shelter to find a giant campfire being tended by two men dressed in camo. Two slightly awkward college guys were sitting at the picnic table; we'd met them briefly the day before when they'd hiked into camp in the dark while we poked at the fire, but they'd gone off to camp elsewhere. But the guys in camo, Joe and Will…they were something else. They were out hunting ginseng, they told us. And they had the most extraordinary Tennessee mountain accents I have ever heard in my life. Ever ever. Will’s was the best, and as hard as I tried to watch his mouth move to pick out the words he was saying, I felt like there were just a whole lot of extraneous southern-sounding noises that he was mixing in with the actual words, which meant I maybe understood half of what he said. But he did explain the ginseng hunting.

Apparently, wild ginseng is native to the forests in Appalachians down here, into the Smokies, and up into NC. Apparently it also gets $400 a pound. You dig up the roots, which are small tubers. It is also illegal to collect it in national park land, a point which Will and Joe were quite open about. They had tales of evading park rangers and told us tricks to avoid getting caught (put the top of the plant into the hole and smooth over the hole with leaves...no one will ever know there's a plant missing!) Will and Joe had parked at the road 3 miles away (they told me my Camry was safe and sound) and hiked up into the woods to dig up ginseng roots. They’d come equipped with cigarettes, Mountain Dew, and cargo pockets to smuggle out the plants. The conversation around the camp fire was one of the most entertaining I’ve ever been a part of, in that way where you’re sitting there just astonished that this is real life. Friendly guys, but a little rough and tumble. Will told us the story of how some guy had let the air out of his tires (in retribution for some slight) and so Will had sprayed him in the face with bear spray. Serious pepper spray in a giant ass can. He had no qualms about it at all. “Motherfucker shouldna gon and messed with my damn truck. You don’t go messin’ around with a man’s veehicle.” Fair enough.

We settled in for the night once it started getting dark. The ginseng hunters stayed out by the fire until after it was dark and we’d fallen asleep, but they kept turning lights on and talking and waking us up and we couldn’t figure out what in the hell they were doing. At one point, Will popped up from the other side of the shelter and asked, “Y’all still awake over there? Goddamn I can’t sleep in this rat hole!” A normal kind of observation, because as usual, there were mice, except we had no idea he was there to start out so it was startling to hear him suddenly call out from the pitch dark. His buddy Joe was snoring outside someplace, but we’re still not sure if he just passed out on the picnic table or set up a sleeping bag or what. Eventually Will and Joe packed up and moved out of camp. We assured them that they could hike the three miles back to their car in an easy hour.

The mice left me alone that night though, and I went to sleep starting to be a little sad to be heading home the next day. The next morning I woke up with more energy than I’d had the whole trip. The 2.7 miles back to the car was easy and maybe took an hour and a few minutes. The best thing about getting back to the car was being able to put on a dry t-shirt I found in my trunk. We packed up the car and went to find the biggest meal we could in Erwin, TN, the closest town that was likely to have restaurants. It was Sunday, and apparently southerners don’t eat on Sundays, but we were able to find a Huddle House that was open. My arthritis had been non-existent all trip, so I figured I’d splurge and eat some biscuits. And part of a waffle. And white sausage gravy. And bacon and sausage and cheese and eggs. It was the grossest, biggest plate of breakfast food I’d ever seen, and it tasted amazing.

We got back on 26, and three hours later were back in Charlotte, taking showers and putting on clean clothes.

I could write a little paragraph summing up the trip, or giving my reflections on the whole thing, but it would be pretty weak, I think. I'll just say that I’d never done anything like this before, and over the course of six days went from being miserable to being hooked.