Chautauqua Institution in January

 

The Fine Art of the Slow Amble

I move slowly on my hike today around Quaker Lake. I watch the whirlwinds raising ice devils on the frozen lake and think about the poetry of Adelaide Crapsey.

Moving slowly has always been difficult for me. I have always had the energy and the enthusiasm of a lab puppy, but the doctor has told me to slow down lately and take care of my heart especially when it’s cold. 

And so I am moving slowly through my hikes lately. I’m less concerned with reaching some grand vista or new rock formation I’ve never seen before, and more focused on simply being where I am and watching the world and my thoughts as they pass before me and through me.

I’m on the frozen banks of Quaker Lake in Allegany State Park, and it’s about 3 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind has kicked up, and I’m mesmerized. I’m drawn back to my 18 year-old mind. 

All through high school, my teachers had us memorize poetry. I kept it up after I left for a little while. I came across the work of Adelaide Crapsey in my first year of college and committed this one to memory. It keeps coming back to me:

Triad

These be 

three silent things: 

The falling snow . . . the hour 

Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one 

Just dead.

I’ve always loved Crapsey’s cinquains, also called the American Haiku. She invented a form that was often purely imagistic. I love how she captures moments and things. 

There might be, I admit, a level of morbidness if you think of this poem in the wrong way, but I prefer not to think of it in that way. I prefer to think of it as just observation.

Anyway, it occurs to me today out here in the cold. The snow has just fallen, and it was silent. I was up in the hour before dawn to watch it, and that was silent too.  I can’t say anything about the mouth of one just dead. I haven’t seen that. 

I can say, however, that there is great beauty in silence. There is great beauty to be found in slowness.

Quaker Lake in January

 

This Latest Heart Attack

The Banks of Quaker Lake in January

I’m standing on the edge of Quaker Lake in Allegany State Park in Western New York. Snow is falling around me and the lake has iced over. Way out in the middle of the ice, crows huddle together in the safety that can come from being able to see all around them, and being ready to fly, and I am feeling as unsafe as I have in a very long time.

Today, I am resigning from my professorship at Mt. San Antonio College where I have worked for twenty-five years. Today, I am moving past that security into this new world without a clue about what’s in front of me. Today, I am thinking about California and my family and friends who still live there. Today, I am thinking about a heart attack that I didn’t know I had, but my cardiologist could see in the readout from an EKG.

I think a lot of people took a deep breath and thought about who they were and what they wanted during the pandemic. I did. I can remember telling my wife that I didn’t know what was ahead of us except that something inside me told me that if I didn’t quit, I wasn’t going to live until retirement. 

It turns out that I was probably right. 

And I think I know when the heart attack happened. I remember the pain and the feeling of electricity shooting through me at the end of a particularly hard semester. The demands of the semester had been relentless, and the needs of the school, my colleagues, and my students came before my needs or my family. That was the culture of the college, and it’s the culture of so many places people work in the United States. It was a culture of 70 hour work-weeks and endless needs and complaints. It was a culture that drove me every evening to alcohol and inevitably to poor health and a heart attack.

But today, I am standing on the edge of Quaker Lake doing nothing but watching the snow settle on the ice around those crows, and I am unmoored from the constant crashing through life.

In my life, in a lot of working people’s lives in the United States, security leads to a heart attack and insecurity leads to mindfulness. And still, I was lucky, and I feel lucky to have had my profession. So many people in education, so many incredibly talented professors, do not have that security. They are asked to work at the same level without decent pay or benefits. They can be fired at will. 

So many people outside of education have lives that are much more difficult. They work endless hours too and kill themselves. The thing is that I don’t think it needs to be this hard on this many people. I don’t know why we have created a world of competition where we feel besieged. I don’t think it’s necessary or natural.

At least, now it doesn’t have to be this hard on me.

If I feel unmoored, if I feel that I’m drifting, at least that beats the driving that used to define my everyday life. I know that I will miss Mt. San Antonio College. I went there as a kid and then as a young man and then I worked there as an adult. Most of my life has been defined by my relationship to it, but now my life is going to be defined by something different. 

It will be wild and unmoored. 

I’m going to find it in my ambles through the woods.

Stay tuned.

Easiest Vegan Bread to Make Ever

 

Chautauqua Rails to Trails in January

 

Ambling

                                                            

Red-Winged Blackbird by Ann Brantingham

In early December of 2023, I got two pieces of news: New York State’s Arts Council was giving me a grant to write about the wilderness of Western New York, and I have a genetic heart valve defect that’s eventually going to require valve replacement surgery.

The heart thing sounds frightening, but it shouldn’t. That is not to say that heart problems aren’t dangerous, just that everyone who is lucky enough to still be alive is going to face their fair share of medical problems. I have heart issues, but it might have been a bad lung, cancer, or diabetes. 

What the heart problem reminds me is that I am no longer 20 years old, which is a fact that I probably should have understood 32 years ago when I turned 21, but I’ve been living life like I was 20 this whole time. The problem with living like you are 20 (at least for me) is that you are always crashing. When I hiked, I crashed through the woods, and when I worked, I crashed through my teaching day, and when I slept, I simply crashed.

Now, my heart is telling me that it might be a good idea to amble rather than crash.

Ambling isn’t a bad idea at any stage of life. There is a certain joy to crashing, but you miss things when you do, things that you might have seen if you just ambled. 

I think about those moments of exhaustion in the past when I was forced to rest, and the forest put on its slow motion show.

I think about the time I sat reading alone and a pine marten wandered into camp not seeing me because I was motionless. I had never seen one and had always wanted to, but I’d been laughing or talking or walking along the ridge of a mountain crest. All of these are wonderful experiences, but so was cocking my head and watching this nervous animal looking around to see what he could see.

I think about the magic of being outside alone in the backyard at night and seeing a satellite flying by for the first time. No one had told me that you could see satellites, so it took me a minute to realize that what I had thought was Venus was on the move, and without an idea of what it might be, I constructed the kinds of mythologies that kids do, that it was a meteor or a space alien. Finding out what it actually was made the experience no less mystical. The next thing I did was beg my parents for a subscription to Astronomy magazine.

I think about what it was to hike up to a pass in the High Sierra and sit on the crest and simply watch as hawks circled below me and little creatures went about their lives around me.

I think about what a blessing it is to have a heart defect and to listen to its message. Crashing through life can be a pleasure, but ambling can make you aware of the miracles that populate our universe. 

It has moved me toward whole-food veganism too, which is something I have always wanted to do. My heart is telling me to slow down and cook and eat differently to bring down my blood pressure. I’ve been a vegan for a month now and love the experience of new foods and a different way of cooking.

So while I am thankful for the grant to write about Western New York, I am thankful too for my many weaknesses, this heart defect just being the newest that I’ve learned about. Each one asks me to see and resee the world and to understand myself and my place in it.

And it turns out that I might have already had a heart attack and not realized it, but more about that in a later post.