Field Notes

Notebooks, books, courses, and anticipated hiking

New notebook in green

• I bought a notebook a couple of weeks ago at Storyhouse Bookpub while passing through Des Moines, IA on our way home from visiting my partner in the little community where he works. I am not a journaler, diarist, etc. In the past, when I’ve tried to keep a daily record of my thoughts and doings, the task (it was one) always felt tedious at best and depressing at worst. For a few years, when I had small children, was chronically ill, and living with undiagnosed anxiety and depression, I kept a gratitude list. It was my weapon against death, each entry a stubborn refusal to succumb. But this new notebook is not a forced chronicle or stubborn defiance. Instead, its big unlined pages hold my creative wanderings - parts of poems, lists of books I’d like to read, newsletter ideas, events, places, happenings that open my heart and bring me joy, noticings about myself. This green book (a fitting metaphor for growth and the generative) contains possibility, evidence of a marked shift away from plodding record keeping and antidotes to drowning. What will become of what’s inside? The question makes me childlike with excitement.

• I’m about half way through Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Managment for Mortals and am finding it a relief. I’m grateful to Burkeman for reminding me that I will never have time to do all the things I want to, that I will never get everthing on my list done, that I’m temporal, and therefore, free to concentrate on what I can and want to do, and much more importantly, notice the fact that I’m here at all, and how such awe inspiring knowledge changes my perspective on myself, my children, the birds at my feeders, the food on my plate, pretty much all of it, not to mention time.

Books and a pencil

• This stack of books is evidence of what I’ve got going in my green notebook. I’m reinventing a course I facilitated via Zoom during the pandemic. I like the word “facilitate” rather than “teach” because when I create and host courses, I make space and provide materials, but I don’t dispense much information. Instead, I help participants find their stories in the words we read, then give them opportunities to share what they’ve found - themselves - with the group. Anyway, the working title for this offering is “Embodied Edges: Feminine Mystics and Prophets.” I’m hoping to offer it online this Fall.

• After reading Katherine May’s semi-recent post about walking, I’ve reflected a bit on my relationship with that activity. I’ve walked and hiked for years, often very quickly while engaged in a violent struggle with some intractable part of me, exhausting myself as therapy. I used to tell people that I liked hiking because I could talk to myself (yell, cry, have long heated conversations with God) out loud without anyone (except for the occassional surprised fellow hiker) paying me any mind. I’ve taken very few trips to the woods this year, but as the weather begins to cool, I find myself looking to the forests and prairies around my home and making plans to be in them. Winter hiking always draws me, partly, because it requires gear and therefore, makes me feel like a “serious” outdoorsperson, and partly, because the trails are mostly mine when the snow is heavy and the wind is blowing. My hikes generally contain less mental and emotional exertion than they used to, but I do find that the natural world gently, imperceptibly, takes what I carry, and I am lighter when I leave the trail.