Blog-azic

I bent down on my hands and knees, put my nose to the stump, and took the last thing the tree could give me: the scent of live, fresh wood, it’s dying breath. Part of me wondered at the morbidity of the scene , the chainsaw carnage, the massacre of a mature forest community. "Here I am romping in sap blood and drinking the smell of rotting flesh," I said. All the same, I had to understand the extent of the damage. Years ago, I walked into this same stony woods alone. I was young, yearning for forest solitude, wanting to explore my new home. By a vernal stream in a little fold of the land, I harvest yellow poplar bark and made a basket. A wild hare hopped along the stream. The moon was up early, waxing gibbous, chasing the Sun, which lay on the western horizon. The sky was a perfect Carolina Blue dome, unbroken by clouds. Benji and I drifted our separate ways in the cut. Soft mud swallowed my boots. Dusk descended as I regressed. The world was shadow. I found my ...

A maple moon rose low in the east. Its watery light filtered through sleeping trees, diluting the cool, humid dark. The night tasted sweet in my mind, but it was also bitter. A familiar taste, sure. I chase the bitter sweet because it’s where I feel most alive. But now, there was a presence in the space I never knew before. I walked these dark paths fifteen and more years ago, longing to fade away into my private vision of nature. Now, I could remember the longing, but it was old. I was outside it looking in. A new perspective. Is this the wisdom of age? Susan and I were walking the college green, past Cutler Hall on the north side. I gestured to the thin redwood, bearing a new gash. The spreading maple was gone, with a young black gum in its place. A trio of sycamores arched over head, spread out long glowing arms, and made a cathedral. The kind, old Norway spruce still watched Scrips Amphitheater. I wanted to stop and converse with all of them, but we walked on, sipping a decaf ...

In the heart of the Red River Valley, in the city of Winnipeg, CA, before winter had even officially begun, Hafed and I braced against a biting wind. The stark streets (purely northern their utility) offered no hope against the sting. We trudged by the art museum. Large black statues outside were unimpressed by the cold and unsympathetic to our plight. They sat like pharaohs, almost facing each other but really looking over one another’s shoulder to eternity. They are stone, after all, and unflinching, generally unconcerned with here and now. In contrast, We are flesh and crumpling in the wind. We are shedding and wearing down, and our bodies exert their all trying to repair the damage, to stave off inevitability. They fail, as a matter of course, and they fail quickly - the blink of those statues’ stone eye. Of course, the same happens to stone. It just seems that the statues understand something more than I about the metamorphosis of wrought time on flesh. We are ghosts, fleeting im...

Age, not the physical grinding of bone; not the deep fatigue of flesh wanting to shed away from a soul; rather, age, the loss of that youthful gleam that once made days feel mysterious and new, creeps in, I think, when you stop caring enough about the details around you to act on them, when questioning becomes an end in itself and not a means toward exploration, when life (the minutiae of it) can’t move you anymore. I walked back barefooted from the compost bin head down, watching the sandy, scrub ground pass me by, and I saw an upturned mushroom, white stem, white cap, laying on its side knocked down or half eaten, or something. It was an opportunity for questions and speculation and field guides and a tiny measure of adventure, but I walked by, maybe satisfied in having noticed it all, and I knew in that instant I was old. I took my annual mortality walk at Morgan Creek. High water forced me to roll up my pants, hike them above my knees, and wade my sun-starved, hairy thighs...

Early morning breakfast was waiting for me after a shower. What was it? Peanut butter and bread, coconut flakes, chocolate and dates, decaf coffee. Then, out the door, on the bus, to the Reykjavik domestic airport to pick up a rental car. It was cold, windy, wet, and grey. We took the car into the Golden Circle, passing through a gauntlet of roundabouts, then reaching the desolate, black ash and boulder hills. An hour more, and we reached Thingvellir, the traditional gathering place of Icelandic governing councils and the tectonic edge of North America. There a cliff rears up over a boggy plain. Crystal blue water runs through rock gashes, and the bottoms glitter with kronor coin. We stopped to sit at an old church and warm ourselves before we crossed the road to find (after a bit of searching) a trail out into the bald wilderness. It runs over hard, grooved stone, and thick moss carpets. It leaps over a tear in the earth’s crust. Stone pilings or cairns marked our progress. ...

Our City Cards activated at 9 am. We were in the bus by 10 headed to the culture museum where we learned about the thousand year history of the island, it’s remarkable peace, and its importance as a preserver of ancient texts. We went back the the apartment for lunch. Then, we planned a couple adventures in the northeast part of the city. We walked to the Sveinsson Sculpture museum, set amidst the Laugardalar neighborhood. With the sun and the cool air, we and strolled about the grounds and touched and photographed the organic, feminine sculptures: a suckling babe, the nude shapely female form, a broad shouldered person carrying water. The facade of the bounding was white plaster and ancient looking, like the pyramids, and domed in one part. Inside, marble floors and a broad foyer with coffee and a mock workshop. We were through the museum (with its paper weight models of Sun Voyager) and starting down the arching steps into the rotund hall when a short dark man interrupted us...

Back in Reykjavik, we planned to see the downtown and museums. We waited for Adam to arrive and let him use the air BnB’s shower. The we drove downtown, meandered, and finally grabbed lunch. We walked afterwards, window shopped, picked up City Cards at City Hall, shopped, and decided that we’d save the museums for the morrow. I snapped pics of graffiti in-between ogling the wool products. We stopped for coffee and finally found some decaf with a free side of snobbery. We walked along the water before dinner, paying a rather solemn visit to the Sun Voyager sculpture. For dinner we decided to eat out at the Old Iceland restaurant. As Adam dropped us off, we exchanged dollars and kronor for a gas card, which we never used. That night I drank hot chocolate and fried my brain researching Icelandic wool.