dirt

I got the call this morning around ten. Tom was very gracious - he said that the decision had been a hard one, but that another applicant had an edge in farming experience and they ended up going that way. I saw it coming - I had a feeling that my lack of concrete hands-in-the-soil farm work would count against me in a close race. I am still planning on volunteering at the farm this spring and summer (to rack up some of those dirt hours, for future employment ... but mostly because I love watching unsuspecting ten year olds bite into sorrel.)

This week has been so full of other unexpected things (most of them bad, none of them unmanageable) that this just runs with the swing of it, and I'm taking it in stride.

Looking at the bright side, I will be able to get through more of the masters program quickly and will also be relatively free this summer to enjoy all the crazy wilderness we moved up here for. Maybe now I can justify getting that Cape Horn. At least, that is what I am telling myself this afternoon. The reality is we're back to Plan B. Substitute teaching. Ick.

jinx

Last November, I put in an application at a place called Calypso Farm & Ecology Center. It is a little CSA farm outside of town, near the old goldrush-camp-turned-trendy-hamlet of Ester. I have avoided writing about this application, for fear of somehow jinxing the process. However, now that interviews are over and I have (purportedly) made peace with either decision on their part, I am breaking the silence.

When we first arrived, we spent quite a bit of time trying to get our bearings in this busted-up, beat-down city (University and Farmers Market, excepted.) The name Calypso kept popping up, and when we finally found free WiFi at the library, I looked it up. Turns out, they needed volunteers for their fall field trip program. I called, and was immediately conscripted to help kids make goat cheese and harvest chamomile. It was hard to contain my joy!

The current educational coordinator is leaving the farm, and when her position officially opened up, she encouraged me to apply. In light of my many misgivings about a possible role in the traditional education system (and by extension my current graduate pursuits) I thought this might make a pretty good match. Because of Fairbanks' brutal winters, the farm is shut down for two of Drexel's four quarters, leaving me open to take a heavier load of classes and complete my student teaching over the cold months. Also, we get lots of fresh, free produce all season. Also, there are goats. Need I say more?

Peter and I debated on what one wears to an interview at a CSA farm in the dead of winter. After some discussion, we landed on: Snowboots. Clean Jeans. A sort-of frayed red sweater. Also, I went to town and showered.

I arrived at the farm happy for the snowboot decision. The "office" is about a quarter mile uphill on a very snowy (not drivable) road, smack in the middle of the 20 acres of developed farmland. The office is in a yurt. Thankfully, a yurt with a rather large and well stoked wood stove. Inside, I met the farm co-owner Tom, who was wearing a pair of busted up work carharts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt over longjohns. All of my misgivings about the frayed sweater were immediately dismissed.

The interview went well (as well as a follow up phone-interview with another farm employee.) My favorite question - one I doubt comes up in most interviews - was "If you could be a vegetable, what vegetable would you be?" (Sorrel. Looks like plain old lettuce ... but bite into it and you get a lot more flavor than you bargained for!) The rest of the interview questions were predictable: What teaching experience do you have? What large-group-of-unruly-kid-herding experience do you have? What ages have you worked with?Organizational experience? Programs facilitated? Ad Nauseum. Regular interview stuff. But it was a very relaxed experience (lulled, no doubt, by the roaring wood stove.)

I know I made the first cut, but I haven't heard back about the final decision yet. I have my fingers crossed both ways. The job is pretty huge - they run a lot of field trips for a lot of kids throughout the farm season, and are expanding - which is (I hope) understandably overwhelming. Especially since I haven't had a 'real job' (does this even count as a real job?) in over a year. But it is also exactly what I am excited about; it is experiential, hands on learning that brings the community - kids and adults - into a closer relationship with the land they live on and the food that feeds them, ultimately with themselves.

More than anything, the process of thinking through and applying for this position has solidified the kind of education I want to be involved with in the future. I know that for all the slogging I am doing at the moment to get through the MS degree, this kind of thing is what I am doing it for. Focusing on this possibility (even if it doesn't turn out) has given me a lot more focus to keep slogging.

So I am waiting for that phone call.

tag

Amba over at Ambivablog tagged me last week. Its my first tag as a Blogger, and I got that rush she wrote about, first felt playing tagging elementary school games. Since Solstice, we’ve been traveling and now, ramping up with a new semester’s course load, I’m starting to get back into the rhythm that allows time for at least sporadic blogging. This tag is a great one, though. I’m happy to (belatedly) throw in and pass it on.

1) Name a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving away copies.

The Sweet Everlasting by Judson Mitcham. I started this book one evening after supper and came to at four am, heart racing, reading and re-reading the last pages. I never did fall asleep. I gave the (borrowed) copy back and immediately ordered two for myself. I have managed to keep my hands on one. It is a beautifully woven story of growing up and being grown up in the old deep south, with all the scents and sounds and beauty of that landscape, and the brutality of it.

If they were easier to get hold of, I would give away copies of George MacDonald’s The Golden Key to everyone I spoke to. Unfortunately, the most accessible copies are abridged, and I have yet to find an in-print volume containing that single story. If you can get your hands on it, do. There is a link to the entire text on my sidebar, but I am loathe to recommend reading such a jewel on a glowing LCD. It needs a fireplace, hot chocolate, thick quilts. And most of all, it needs to be read aloud.

2) Name a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music.

My musical tastes aren’t very high-brow. In fact, I don’t really listen to all that much music. I never have. I was sheltered from everything except Beach Boys and Mannheim Steamroller Christmas growing up, and had very limiting obsession with CCM in early adolescence. My junior year, a friend lent me an Indigo Girls album. The Wood Song struck an angst ridden adolescent chord, and that lilting violin riff forever changed my understanding of what music was about, why people listen to it, make it, and how it can change them. It also gently nudged me into the understanding that secular music isn't actually evil.

3) Name a film you can watch again and again without fatigue.

I am a sucker for coming-of-age stories. Especially those of kids from the Western world learning about the rest of it far from their homeland. It doesn't take much to analyze that one. For a long time, “Empire of the Sun” was the only movie I would watch repeatedly. Since “Nowhere in Africa” came out in 2001, I have watched it at least six times.

4) Name a performer for whom you suspend all disbelief.

Daniel Day-Lewis. Christian Bale.

5) Name a work of art you’d like to live with.

There is a piece I saw in college, at the Art Institute of Chicago, that I wish I had now. It was an installation of waves, photographs of waves, all monotone with the ripples reflecting the faces of the viewers, almost moving in the glass. I miss the ocean.

6) Name a work of fiction which has penetrated your real life.

I read Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible while on an airplane flying out to work for six months with street children back home in Jakarta, occasionally (and horrifyingly) alongside missionaries nearly as insane and insidious as those in the book. It threw those I had to deal with in sharp relief, while giving me a story to work from in my own explorations of, and eventual dive into, the world the street kids inhabited. A world so physically close to yet so very far from my own TCK upbringing, I needed that nudge to get in with both feet.

7) Name a punchline that always makes you laugh.

“So you’re saying I’m fat?!?”

Well, it’s not exactly a punch line. But enough of a long-running college joke that we’re still using it, and laughing, years later.

I’m just going to tag the two regular readers I have, who I know have blogs themselves. Mama Hen over at At A Hen’s Pace, and Dan. Oh, Dan. I am so not saying you're fat!

turn

I usually don’t listen to NPR after Marketplace is over. Not that I have anything against Afro-pop, it’s certainly better than the horrid Baroque selection they play during the day on KUAC. Around ten last night, I decided I needed some dishwashing music. This is a task I usually can’t get through without some kind of background noise (usually Seeger Sessions or some old Dylan) but when I powered up the stereo, NPR piped through with some not-too-annoying Christmas music. I shrugged and left in on. We finally put up holiday lights last night, after all. Just as I was finishing the dishes, the DJ signed off with her “favorite Christmas song of all time.” When the drunken country drawl and teeth wrenching steel guitar twang came through, I was suddenly filled with some serious Christmas cheer. It was a live recording of Keen’s “Merry Christmas From The Family,” compete with a stadium full of drunk southerners screaming along with the chorus. It is truly a white trailer-trash classic, and always reminds me that no matter how bland my accent gets, I was born in the Republic of Texas and that doesn’t come out in the wash.

We are headed there to thaw out next week. I am looking forward to the sunshine. When we moved here, I was worried about two things: Cold and Dark. Honestly, the cold hasn’t been that bad. Besides giving you a serious adrenaline rush, -28 (we were expecting -40 by now, Thanks Global Warming) and making you hack like a terminal TB patient when trying to breathe, it is certainly livable. You come inside and park by the heater. Eventually you do stop shivering. Given this early success, I thought the dark would prove no big deal, either. I cheerily posted about the short days and low solar profile over at NFSC back in November. Two weeks ago, though, we stopped getting any direct sunlight in the cabin at all. And then it got overcast. The last two weeks have been a haze of grays and blues. The sun supposedly comes up around eleven. It lights the sky but nothing on the ground, and isn't visible from where we are. It heads down again sometime before three. I could (and can) feel that lack in a thorough and fundamental way that I am still having trouble pinning down. It’s trying to catch your breath after being under water for too long; even with your nose and mouth clear, there is not enough air.

But today is Solstice, the Long Night. The sun will rise at 10.48 and go down again at 2.49. At sunset this evening, everything will turn. It will send us into 21 hours and 19 minutes of night. Tomorrow, the sun will hang above the mountains for nine extra seconds. Saturday will give us twenty nine more. By mid January we will be gaining nearly ten minutes of light every day. There is so much hope in nine seconds.

Thinking about today brought me back to Summer Solstice. We have come so far from that long, rainy day, from watching a perfect sunset, ourselves perched on the rippling back of the Atlantic. We are nearly ten months married. We have put over 10,000 miles on the car. There is now an orange kitten and a line of heavy boot liners drying by the heater. Numbers for take-out Chinese and pizza, the menu of a Thai place we haven’t tried yet, a cup of quarters on the windowsill for laundry. I woke up this morning to discover the door had frozen closed. I woke Peter to break it open so the dog and I could go out.

It is light now, at eleven thirty, the sky pink in perpetual dawn, clouds broken up enough that some baby-blue sky is showing, trees blanketed thick with the snow we got last night. I am glad to fly down to Texas, to laugh with family and eat spectacular Mexican food and be chased by my uncle’s errant cattle. I need the thaw, the long late nights with my sister, the time with friends who have known us longer than the five months we’ve been here. But I will be glad to get back to this life, with all its uncertainties. There will be more light then, after all.

pacing

Back in high school, I was on the cross country team. We would run ‘interval’ trainings, doing a specified pace over a short course and (after a rest) repeating it, to exhaustion. The goal was to hit the exact same time – to the second – each round. At first, it was easy to hit the mark. The challenge was slowing down to get the timing right. In the middle, it became a game hitting the second on the nose. By the end, it was about pushing tired legs and burning lungs hard to get there without going over. We would run in groups with other runners bunched by speed. In my group, I was always the pacer. I had an innate sense of how fast we were going, and always had us in within a second or so of our goal. I took quite a bit of pride in my ability to hit these arbitrary marks, set by coaches with championship dreams dancing across their vision. In a way, I had to take pride in my good timing. I made last place in every single race I ran the first two years.

I only wish I ran, anymore. I make plans to start again, and my shoes sit perpetually by the front door. It is cold here, and starting a running program from scratch when my eyelashes freeze together if I am outside for more than five minutes is a little more than I am willing to deal with at this point. I think my sense of pacing has gone too.

I am not proud of this, and not just because my generation’s demand for instant gratification is grounds for much scorn from our elders. We want what we want now, and fast, and damned if that means there won’t be any for later. I try to pretend I am above all this, but I have been bitten by the gratification bug and at this point the wound is rather infected.

Two things I’ve done recently clued me into how far I have strayed into this way of thinking.

The first is my new exploration of Yoga. I’m taking a class in the Iyengar method, which for the (as I) uninitiated, involves slow movements, a focus on balance and form and posture and breath. It is not, in the traditional American sense of the word, a workout. I do not leave the studio limp and depleted, clutching a Gatorade for dear life. I usually leave feeling limber and peaceful and don’t need to hit the showers before going out in public. After my second class, I mentioned to Peter that I finally understood why I had never been able to ‘do’ Yoga from books. I was always in too much of a hurry:

I examine the instructions and picture for Mountain Pose.
I think, “Ok. You stand up straight with your feet a little apart.”
I stand up straight with my feet in the appropriate position.
I walk back to the book for the next pose.
I don't get much out of it.
I wonder why?

In class, we spend five minutes getting into “Mountain Pose” (which involves a lot more than standing up with your feet apart, I have learned) and return to it several times over the course of evening. We spend lots of time adjusting hands and spines and chins. When I bring these things home I find I am still rushing. It is hard for me, straddling the kitchen rug, to hold a pose for five breaths, much harder to move between poses with the slow deliberation forced on me by the careful pacing of the class. I want to do the thing, have it done and move one. The thing is, I enjoy and get more out of the yoga class than I have yet to manage in the cabin.

The second practicum in pacing has been through pottery class I am taking at a studio in North Pole. I quickly learned that rushing through my hand building projects left me with uneven walls and cracked rims, and more pointedly that not sitting down to think through a multi-stage build would invariably end with a botched creation. Thankfully, glazes are forgiving, but those early lessons were driven home further with my first (comical) attempts to throw. Working with a wheel, I found that speed is the enemy. I discovered through several rapid-fire disasters that trying to shape a bowl too quickly leads to structural weakness and botched form. Even if one slows down enough to start a good form, spinning the wheel too fast, especially once the bowl begins to take shape, flings the walls out with centrifugal force, thinning and weakening them beyond saving. I went through several pounds clay before I had anything resembling a vessel to show for it.

From yoga and clay I am taking very tangible lessons on process. Yoga is a lifelong discipline, with even its most dedicated and renown practitioners constantly honing their own skills. Pottery, being of the arts, is a skill that begins with a fist-sized pinch pot and can build through a lifetime of practice, experimentation and literally hundreds of tons of clay. And clay is a most forgiving medium.

Practices from one part of life bleed into others. I hope that fostering these things that require slowness and patience might help me where I rush and fret and demand. I need to start to walk again, before I try to run. But for now, I’ll be on the kitchen rug, learning to stand with my feet apart, and breathe.

edge

I spend a lot of long nights alone here, when Peter works second shift. They are especially long now, as he leaves at three and the sun goes down about twenty minutes later. I love our cabin, now that it has turned into a home with its perpetual sink full of dishes, scatter of boots at the door, stacks of junk mail and half-filled shopping lists and little whorls of kibble that have escaped the dog bowl and been batted across the floor by the kitten. The ice that forms on the inside of the windows and sneaks in under the door and around the hinges actually makes me feel cozier. It can’t get to where I am snuggled with my furnace dog and warm motor-purr kitten on the couch or up in the much warmer loft.

But sometimes those endless cozy nights take a turn. Nouwen wrote eloquently about the dark side of solitude in The Way Of the Heart, and I think am finally begining to understand where he wrote from. The quiet and dark and lack of human companionship drive my mind to places than I’d normally choose not to go. I get caught up in the little internal cycles of mental destruction that I’m still working up the strength and discipline to break out of on my own.

Last night was one of those nights. I had satisfied myself with leftovers (jerk veggie amalgam over rice with atomic yogurt tahini, I *love* being a vegetarian,) I had written e-mails, done some work … and managed to squeeze in several hours worth of procrastination bouncing around on the internet. This is usually where things tip downwards. My mind drains of autonomous thought, my body hunches into itself and my back begins a growing ache of protest. The glow of well-being from an earlier mini-yoga practice with Peter before he left for work had long since been worn away by flickering screen and hunched shoulders. I finally tried to force myself to write, hoping that would break the deepening spiral, but found I couldn’t even manage a sentence. I felt like that horrid little deadline icon that keeps popping up on writers’ blogs and turns my stomach even though I can never turn away from its bloody destruction.

It was almost midnight. I took a deep breath. In a moment of awareness, I heard the sled-dogs down the road begin to howl. There was a timbre to it that was unfamiliar and in a way more primal than their usual dinner-time clamor. I experienced a rare intuitive click, understanding suddenly that they were howling at the Aurora. I stumbled downstairs and into several more layers, zipping fleeces, wrapping scarves, adding hoods to hats, cramming already cold feet into wet snow boots. I walked out to the road, and looked back towards the cabin. There, right above the ridge of our roof was a stray shimmer of bright green, folding down towards the trees and up again, slowly fading back into the sky and revealing the explosion of stars behind.

The rest of the band was on the northern horizon. It was green, but more of a glow than a dance, no sharp edges, no shimers. After the overhead band faded out I watched this bubble of light. It looked a bit like the glow that cities put off from a distance in the night, albeit much greener. I thought about what lay under that vast pulsing blanket of light. North of us there are only scattered cabins, mostly just running up the south faceing side of the next hill. Past that, a few homesteads. The end of the pavement. A handful of tiny roadless native villages scattered over thousands of square miles of snow and ice covered wilderness. Follow Polaris for five hundred crow miles, and there is the ice ocean of the Arctic, smashed up against the shore and stretching on into the infinity of north.

I was suddenly aware of where we are. It was a moment of presence that I badly needed, with everything that has been fighting for space in my head. We sleep north of the northernmost city on earth, in a forest of spruce and birch on a bed of ground that has been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years. We live and breathe in a log cabin covered in snow, whose lights warm the windows through the lengthening nights towards solstice, where a kitten is watching me through the glass, where my sleeping hound chases ghosts of deer through her dreamworld. We live in a place where cloudless nights are filled with an unfathomable vision of stars.

I shivered on the road, watching the dome of light fade into a thin river of streaming green inches above the trees. I heard the phone ring, Peter on his way home. I forget sometimes, too often in fact, how long these things were hoped for, and how little faith I had that they would ever come into my life.

I have a lot to be thankful for.

aurora

I don't have good Aurora photographs yet (hoping for a tripod for Christmas) but found this a couple of days ago. It's mellower than some of the crazy videos out there, but much more like what we see up here on good nights ... so far.



After you watch the lights, go back and watch the big dipper slide up into the sky.