Galveston

Posted on May 23, 2024 by marybethrew

I attended a training in Galveston in early May, to become more skilled at boat stuff. It just so happens I spent a semester there almost exactly twenty-five years ago. I was quite excited to see it again, this place from my past.

Looking down on earth from the sky – over Seattle, or the Cascades, or the Rockies, or Houston, or Phoenix, shapes organize themselves into assemblages, groups of this or that. Green crop circles or brown crop circles, large or small. Suburban housing, skyscrapers, mountain peaks. Rivers with their feathered fans of tributaries still as statues, the flowing only implied from so high up.

When I got to the Galveston seawall and walked along the beach, the assemblages were spirals. Moon snails, channeled whelks, knobbed whelks, many other snails. Moon snails whole and intact. Moon snails cracked laterally– the spiral exposed. Moon snails cracked on the side – the spiral spilling open. The top taken off a whelk – a spiral self-contained, but having lost its depths. Another with the top gone, only the deep center groove remaining – uncontained and open to the infinite. Spirals with multiple injuries, cracks and gouges, jagged edged and hard like shards, like knives ready to inflict instead of being inflicted upon. Some whose edges are once again smooth, ready to soothe, ready to scoop sand and shimmer. Some broken crosswise, revealing compartments, but the segments taper, the spiral is implied. Windows into spirals, where water and sand can enter, cannot be kept out. But where water and sand can also empty out, can be given and taken, a portal, a conduit. Holes drilled by predators. Neat, symmetrical, belying their violent origin. A whelk unearthed from long buried under sand, where no oxygen reached until the shell blackened. Having risen to the surface where there is all this air to breathe.

I like that birds exist and that birders are a known type everywhere, so that a woman carrying around a zoom lens is quietly accepted as “probably a birder” and I can go on taking pictures of whatever I want, including, sure, some of the birds of Galveston.

On my last day, I asked two of the local women involved in the boat training for the most reliable place to see dolphins off Galveston. I wasn’t sure they’d have an answer, but oh, they did. Go to the ferry, they said. Walk on and ride it across and back. They told me it was free for walk-on passengers, and that you are guaranteed to see dolphins.

My hair was already a tangled mess from the day on the small boats, so I stood on the ferry’s upper deck near the bow, camera at the ready. I started seeing dolphins right away, surfacing and milling and feeding at the terminal. Pelicans, a frigate bird, an ibis, lots of seabirds I cannot name.

I zoomed in on cargo vessel bows coming in and out of the shipping channel, but saw no bow riders on the way across to Port Bolivar. A few car passengers filled in along the balcony rail while the ferry was underway, then they retreated to their cars below as we docked. I stayed on the ferry at the opposite end, walked to the stern which would be the new bow, and watched groups of dolphins feeding at that terminal, concentrated at the end of a jetty. Then I caught one leaping in the distance. I could not stop smiling, alone on the deck.

The ferry emptied out of cars and filled back up again, and we retraced our path. This time we were headed upwind, made more intense by the speed of the ferry, and I felt like I could lift right off the deck. I managed to stay on my feet and keep watching the waves. A tugboat was crossing in front of us in the shipping channel, so I zoomed in on its bow where a dolphin was bow-riding. I caught it leaping and spinning and frolicking in the splashy bulge of water pushed in front of the rounded bow. My whole trip felt complete.

I did not know until I scrolled through my photos later that the tug was named “Dolphin,” how very on the nose. And another kind of spiral, life folding back on itself, like the dolphin spiraling in the bow wave, like reappearing in Galveston twenty-five years later to visit an earlier version of myself.

a boatswain’s crepuscular ditty

Posted on February 13, 2021 by marybethrew

“Aye.” Bioluminescent waves streak past the hull of the ship as you make your way forward. Carrying out the order, you climb into the headrig to furl the inner jib. Dousing it was smart in this wind, but the swell is big enough to dunk you if you stay out too long and your stomach swoops as the top of the waves skims just below your boots on the footrope. Easy enough to accomplish in daylight when the sea is calm, but another matter entirely in the dusk, with the bowsprit reaching such peaks and troughs of motion. Furling from the peak to the clew, you don’t take time to stretch each flake of canvas into a fancy zigzag like you would to show up in port, but instead grab loops and hunks of the bulky billows and wrap a daisy chain with the downhaul line, giving a good tug to keep the peak from creeping back up the stay in the wind and resetting itself, looping over and under the mass of canvas, wrestling and hugging until it is subdued, interlocking loops of rope creating a net to contain it, and you reach the clew, secure it to the jibboom, and spider climb back inboard. Grasping the jib halyard, you take out the slack, resecure it on the belay pin. Halyard coiled and hung, you make your way aft to the quarterdeck. It’s a new feeling to be on a broad reach with a following sea of this magnitude. Just off the starboard rail, dolphins surface. Knives slicing through the waves, flashes of silver, going ten knots like your ship. Long rollers come from behind, the ship surfing over each one like a hill passing ponderously under you. Motion completely different from the Atlantic, but even on the Pacific it’s different from when the swells are on the bow. Nobody leaves the deck, though it is after dinner and your watch is on duty. Only the right combination of conditions let you sail this swiftly on your wooden ship, without the engine, though the lack of a shaft brake means the whole deck vibrates from the freely spinning propellor. Propelled instead by wind, and a powerful push from the sea. Quiet has so many different connotations on the ocean, but the most significant for you is the silencing of the inner voice. Rising and falling, watching constellations of students form and ungroup, filter below to their bunks. Slowly, the deck clears, and just the standing watch remains. Turning over the helm to you, the second mate heads below to chart a position. Up on the bow, one of the students is on lookout. Vessels begin to appear on the horizon as night falls, tiny lights in the far distance, but none come near. With your mind empty and clear, individual words roll under you like the waves. Xylophilous, to grow or live on wood, which you think is meant to refer to insects or fungus, but you like to think could refer to a person who spends days barefoot on caulked planks of oak. You tuck that one away for later, perhaps the next line in the journal swinging in the hammock where it is stowed over your bunk. Zodiacal constellations march a glittering parade across the deepening sky, the night just begun.

~thankful thursday~ in which we sing the last verse

Posted on November 30, 2018 by marybethrew

11/23/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

today i am grateful for a full day to relax and cook only with my microwave.

11/24/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

i am grateful for color; the rainbow veggies of market, the orange and yellow leaves of the vine maples, the red violet of my strawberry-beet smoothie and my rose elixir. i’m a rainbow person, but red violet-colored lenses help me see the world with an attitude of gratitude.

11/25/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

today i’m thankful for animals, who remind me that it is important to play.

11/26/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

last night after a wonderful spontaneous mid-day date of doing nothing, which turned out to be some of the very best something, watching seals and whales play in the ocean surf, rich and i watched christopher robin. i was reminded how grateful i am for winnie the pooh. i loved pooh as a kid, and i remember re-reading pooh when i was a teenager and realizing there was more substance layered in those stories than i had realized. which paled in comparison to how i felt when i started reading the same book to my two-year-old, who gobbled up chapter after chapter. when he had reached the limit of his attention span, he would shift into incorporating pooh stories into every aspect of his imaginitive play. we played pooh sticks whenever we found a nice bridge over a stream, we hauled piglet up to the letter box, we found a new house for owl, we pounded eeyore’s tail back on, we hunted for heffalumps and woozles. the hundred acre wood took up a good percentage of his internal landscape from an early age. i of course had tears rolling down my cheeks over the movie last night, not necessarily sad ones, but the ones that have everything to do with the inevitability of little boys growing up.

11/27/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

i am grateful for all of the twinkly lights bringing light into the lengthening darkness.

11/28/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

today’s facebook memory was an all-photo post about dolphins from gratitude 2016. it reminded me of my gratitude for their existence in this world, and how they’ve been a symbolic guide for me this year. i chose the word “streamline” for 2018, and of course, there is no better mascot.

i wrote about this on my 40th birthday, as the days were lengthening rather than the nights, and as the first trilliums were blooming, rather than the last blossoms drooping.

“…in a more metaphysical sense, streamlining is a term that makes me think of the ways i spend my life energy, and ways i could conserve it more efficiently. dolphins have been friends of my spirit for more than half my life now, and provide the perfect mascot for becoming more streamlined. some of the definitions of the word focus on how the motion of the fluid around the object is smooth, or the condition of being free from turbulence; however the more i think about it, the less it has to do with the status of the flow of life around me, and more to do with shaping myself in such a way that i present less resistance to the flow.”

this was only part of what i wrote, but i’m focusing on this excerpt because out of all the ways i intended to use this year to streamline, the part about getting out of our storage unit and finally getting all the way moved into our house was not the part i achieved. however, i think i’ve improved on the part about presenting less resistance to the flow. so i’m grateful to my spirit friends who’ve helped inspire me in that area this year.

11/29/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

it’s penultimate post day! it really flew by this year, it doesn’t seem possible that november is already coming to an end. it seems like i’ve only just begun to notate the things for which i’ve felt grateful recently. some of the ones i may not yet have mentioned:

i am grateful for saving 13% on my groceries today because my fairy mother-outlaw snuck a handy coupon onto my passenger’s seat. best outlaw mother in all the land.

i am grateful to feel like a real adult, depositing my little supplemental income paychecks from my farm job into my son’s savings account. i think the two dudes doing their banking were slightly jealous that he has almost earned enough scottie saver bucks to get the light sabre!

i’m grateful my husband is always burning holes in his clothing so my sewing machine motors don’t seize up due to lack of use. mending isn’t my favorite sewing to do, but for that smoking hot guy i’ll gladly zigzag his clothes back together. i am also grateful to have learned a useful skill set such as sewing from a panel of very talented women while i was growing up.

i’m grateful when the sparks only burn the clothing layers, not the man. (he barely notices, but still.)

i’m grateful for kitties! and wood stove fires!

okay, maybe i’ve mentioned some of these before, but are you sure it was this year?

finally, i’m grateful my son comes home to me tomorrow. i’ll give you three guesses what we’ll be having for dinner on gratitude day 30!

11/30/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

gratitude is powerful stuff. three years of doing this have taught me that gratitude is a self-perpetuating spiral; i keep being pleasantly surprised how many times the words just flowed, because the feelings were so easy to access, because… practice. you get to where you’re just so darn grateful for gratitude.

but now it’s time to sing the last verse of the song for this year. the part of the song where it all comes together metaphorically and the sound waves ripple through the air to touch your heart, and though it has the same melody as before, there are several strains of harmony woven in now, and when you get to the chorus, you reach down to your toes to send the last few notes up a third or a fifth or an octave. you take it higher, you take it on home. you know, that part of the song.

(30 days isn’t long enough if i haven’t been grateful for music yet! good thing we’re squeezing it in before the finale.)

this is where i stall briefly in writing today’s gratitude, because PRESSURE! because finishing a song is something to take seriously and anyone with a perfectionist side can find this to be an obstacle. i believe i finished day 30 sometime in january last year, but i promised myself i’d end on time this year.

so i have been thinking about it for days, and i can’t think of a better way to close the circle on this 30 days than by coming back to where we started, with a certain navigational aid called Buoy. Buoy was stationed in one spot in the sea, but sometimes when he was ready for a nap, he would travel in his mind down the long chain that anchored him all the way down to the sea floor… each color of the rainbow would fade away as he dove deeper, until only those creatures who could create their own light dwelled…

“then down the chain. to the seabed. and there, rooted in the depth of the Sea, Buoy felt a humming. a hum that seemed to come from deeper than the Sea. it reminded him somehow of the song of the Whales. but he did not hear this song. he felt it. it seemed to be a part of who he was. he did not understand that it was he who was a part of the song.”

thanks for singing along, friends.

a pirate looks at 40

Posted on April 14, 2018 by marybethrew

i’ve been spending hours each day in a walk-in freezer, straddling two different lab jobs which is marginally better than a lapse in funding. the arctic cod eggs in my care are beginning to hatch, and the spring equinox felt like an auspicious occasion for their entrance. when i emerge each day from 2 degrees celsius, i am grateful to retain the use of my extremities and to be useful and efficient.

at the dragon house, we’re excited about the return of longer daylight hours, so we can take our after work bayou walks. my birthday blossoms are in bloom, it’s the season of trout lilies and trilliums!

as life seasons go, i am ready to fully embrace my 40s. as i embark on a new decade, i would like to write more, complain less about not having time to write, and streamline….

streamline is my word for 2018, by the way, but i never had time in january to write about it. i’ve been doing a terrible job of implementing it in certain areas, but making some headway in others. in the physical realm of streamlining stuff, i have donated lots of books and other unneeded items, and created more physical space, which i’m realizing i value more than even books. my goal is to have my household reflect those values one day, but it may be a work in progress for some time. in the cyber realm i’ve unsubscribed from any email subscriptions i receive and promptly delete; i figured there might be around 10, but i stopped counting at 50 and i do a lot less deleting these days. i kept a small handful of subscriptions i actually click on and read, and this streamlining effort allows time for that.

in a more metaphysical sense, streamlining is a term that makes me think of the ways i spend my life energy, and ways i could conserve it more efficiently. dolphins have been friends of my spirit for more than half my life now, and provide the perfect mascot for becoming more streamlined. some of the definitions of the word focus on how the motion of the fluid around the object is smooth, or the condition of being free from turbulence; however the more i think about it, the less it has to do with the status of the flow of life around me, and more to do with shaping myself in such a way that i present less resistance to the flow.

2017 was such a momentous year, that my only resolution for 2018 was to have a very mellow year, one in which i can take moments to reflect on the year just past. so far, 2018 has been intense in its own ways, with little time for reflection, but with spring, often comes more energy for me, and i anticipate a flurry of wedding and family visit catch-up posts soon. in fact, my intent is to carve out some time for that as a birthday present to myself!

i expected turning 40 to feel like a bigger deal, a little more biblical in proportions. you know, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights… take a walk in the desert for 40 days and nights, hike up mount sinai for 40 days and nights, etc. it turns out that 40 may just be a biblical way of saying, “umpteen,” and not necessarily a numerical value. which seems to more accurately describe how old i feel. a vague, abstract, age that is not quite eleventy-seven and not that much older than my teens, yet with a sense that a lot of years have gone by. and i’ve developed the ability to nap on cue (40 winks?), which i think is a good sign that i’m ready for my 40s.

in other areas of cultural significance, 40 is the highest number ever counted to on sesame street.

a glance back at four decades…

1988: when i turned 10, i had a birthday party with all of my friends. i was allowed to get my hair permed and start growing it out. my favorite color up to that point was pink. i was into art and music. i was counted on for my work around the farm. i had one of my favorite teachers of all time for fifth grade.

1998: when i turned 20, i was on a tiny island called rum cay in the bahamas which i reached via schooner! this was during my sophomore year of college, the spring term of which i spent on a semester-at-sea. the title of this post is also the title of a jimmy buffett song i first heard at that time, half my life ago: “mother mother ocean, i have heard you call; wanted to sail upon your waters since i was three feet tall.”

2008: when i turned 30, i was mama to a beautiful one year old boy. i was looking for jobs on the oregon coast so we could relocate here, and spending the rest of my time being a mama and busing around portland with my little guy, managing to work part time sequencing dolphin dna with him strapped to my back. within months i was moving, with a restraining order in my hand, my baby helping me keep my integrity as my compass bearing and my course set resolutely to onward and upward.

perusing the hieroglyphic dictionary

hexahexaflexagon!

2018: now i am 40. i am married to the most wonderful man in the world. i’ve grown my son to age eleven and 5’1” tall, and we really like spending time together, currently studying such fascinating subjects as hieroglyphics and hexaflexagons. though i’ve become paradoxically both more cynical and more hopeful as time has passed, the bottom line is that i’m filled with gratitude each night as i climb into bed.

~thankful thursday~ sailor hair don’t care

Posted on December 2, 2016 by marybethrew

11-25-16 day 25

i am thankful for an unexpected extra 24 hours with my boy today, which was made all the more wonderful by his getting to spend time with rich’s daughter. we are missing some family members this thanksgiving, but having a couple of “our kids” together made it very special. i was reminded of when these two of our kids met for the first time almost 5 years ago, and the way they automatically struck up a friendship, regardless of their age difference. these two pictures, one from the day they met, and one from today, represent how it’s been between them all along. quinn has always taken it for granted that rich’s daughter of course wants to play with him, whether it was coloring dinosaurs, or comparing pokemon go stats, and she is a great sport and always makes an effort to give him attention when she visits. one of my favorite things about rich is what sweet, wonderful, genuine, kind people he raised, and i’m happy to count them as a part of my family!

11-26-16 day 26

i am thankful that i have at least 3 buyers of the book i haven’t started writing yet. that is going to buy me several batches of nacho ingredients, if this whole science career thing doesn’t work out, and certainly the current political climate doesn’t bode well for a long term biology career. it’s good to have a backup plan! i’m super qualified to write books, because i beat my little brother in words with friends at least as often as he beats me.

i’m also thankful for words starting with the letter q, namely quinn, and quilt love from grammy. and qi, because it’s worth lots of points sometimes. plus, you know, life force/energy flow and all.

11-27-16 day 27

today i am grateful for role models. i have spent the weeks since the presidential election not knowing what to say about it, and i am still mostly finding myself adrift in that unknown. it has been a struggle to write on many of the days of this gratitude challenge, not because i don’t have a million things to be thankful for, but because i know that at least a few people will read what i write, and therefore have been feeling convicted to write about Important Things.

in little ways, i have snuck in references to Important Things in my thankful posts, but tonight my “about” description on my fb profile page caught my eye, and it still says what i originally wrote, back when i first opened the account:

ecofeminist pacifist radical mama
“the world is absurd, and beautiful, and small” – ani difranco

i’m not sure i’m living up to my self-given label, if i’m only hinting at the Important Things.

luckily i have some role models i look to in times like these, ani being one of them, who recently was photographed holding a sign reading, “i am no longer accepting the things i cannot change. i am changing the things i cannot accept.”

jane goodall and barbara kingsolver are also women i count among my heroes. jane recently posted a remembrance of elie wiesel, another person i’ve admired all my life, and mentioning him at a time like this, amidst a turbulent sense of anti-semitism (and anti-islamism, racism, etc.) on the rise, feels appropriate.

finally, barbara kingsolver so graciously offered to “go first,” and so i will quote her here and her reluctantly radical mention of many of the Important Things.

“With due respect for the colored ribbons we’ve worn for various solidarities, our next step is to wear something on our sleeve that takes actual courage: our hearts.

I’ll go first. If we’re artists, writers, critics, publishers, directors or producers of film or television, we reckon honestly with our role in shaping the American psyche. We ask ourselves why so many people just couldn’t see a 69-year-old woman in our nation’s leading role, and why they might choose instead a hero who dispatches opponents with glib cruelty. We consider the alternatives. We join the time-honored tradition of artists resisting government oppression through our work.

If we’re journalists, we push back against every door that closes on freedom of information. We educate our public about objectivity, why it matters, and what it’s like to work under a president who aggressively threatens news outlets and reporters.

If we’re consumers of art, literature, film, TV and news, we think about what’s true, and what we need. We reward those who are taking risks to provide it.

If we’re teachers we explicitly help children of all kinds feel safe in our classrooms under a bullying season that’s already opened in my town and probably yours. Language used by a president may enter this conversation. We say wrong is wrong.

If we’re scientists we escalate our conversation about the dangers of suppressing science education and denying climate change. We shed our cautious traditions and explain what people should know. Why southern counties are burning now and Florida’s coastal cities are flooding, unspared by any vote-count for denial.

If we’re women suffering from sexual assault or body image disorders, or if we’re their friends, partners or therapists, we acknowledge that the predatory persona of men like Trump is genuinely traumatizing. That revulsion and rage are necessary responses.”

i highly encourage you to read her full post linked here.

if you, like me, are feeling overwhelmed with figuring out exactly which actions to take, here is a handy document that i plan to utilize as a jumping off point for this week, to help stave off the paralysis.

i have no intention of compromising my integrity, and therefore it is only after careful consideration that i share other people’s content on this here public forum, erring instead on the side of saying my own clumsy piece, where i can do my best to ensure that i am not, as charles eisenstein put it, “smuggling in hatred” in the form of name-calling, othering, blaming, belittling or shaming.

but remaining silent right now would also compromise my integrity. this was something i had to learn as a domestic abuse victim, because staying silent was often a survival mechanism, but when my survival was not in question, my silence only gave permission to the abuser to continue his rants, and by remaining silent i was complicit in the problem. i do not wish to suggest by my silence that i agree with anything that man is doing in the name of my beloved country and my beloved people of every race, religion, ability, sexuality, and gender. i’m one of the women who experiences his every word as a trigger, having listened to someone close to me speak in exactly the same abusive manner, and as such, i believe every threat he made during his campaign, because, as maya angelou (another hero) said, “when someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

also, i am thankful for you sweet, generous people for continuing to read these incredibly long-winded gratitude posts. you’re all great. thank you.

11-28-16 day 28

i’m thankful for dolphins! it’s day 28 and i think it’s time for a dolphin break. they make me happy. i’ll save the long-winded dolphin stories for the book.

11-29-16 day 29

the penultimate gratitude!

i didn’t really mean to extend these last two days of the gratitude challenge, but yesterday i admit that i was not feeling thankful. i could still sense out in the periphery that i have piles and piles of things to be thankful for, and in a distant way, i was still thankful for those things, but in the more immediate sense, i was under a dark cloud, and my thankfulness gland wasn’t functioning properly. i had a vague a feeling of “at least i don’t live in aleppo,” but that just made me feel guilty that i wasn’t getting an A in the gratitude challenge when i should, since i don’t live in aleppo. imagine being ungrateful for all the nachos i am blessed to be eating lately.

i’m thankful that one can become increasingly aware of the shoulds and have to’s, and begin to reject them as needed in order to preserve one’s sanity.

i’m thankful for lau reminding me that it’s possible to feel like crap when things are happening that are less than ideal but minor, and also possible to feel well-adjusted and resilient when really shitty things are going on, and for reminding me that she’s seen me do the latter. which helped me not be so fearful of feeling crappy outside of aleppo, and stop playing the what-if-shit-moves-fanward games with myself.

i am also thankful for long hugs from the person who puts up with my insecurities even though he’s never given me one miniscule particle of reason to doubt his love.

and finally, i’m thankful for e. e. cummings.

you shall above all things be glad and young

For if you’re young,whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad

whatever’s living will yourself become.

Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:

i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man’s

flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid

and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:

for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave

called progress,and negation’s dead undoom.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

11-30-16 day 30

day 30! no pressure or anything. i guess i can’t do a one sentence post tonight? for some reason it seems like i should go out with more of a bang.

today i’m thankful for providence.

it’s a bit of an abstract concept, maybe not as tangible as nachos or fires in the wood stove. but i think it’s the best way to summarize the list of things that have come to mind today for which i feel grateful, many of which i forget by this time of day, given my penchant for short-term memory loss.

i’ve never been out to become wealthy or famous or get far ahead in life, i’m not a big competitor, i’ve always really valued a quiet, contented life, and i’ve always wanted to have the basics covered, to have just enough of everything i needed. i am not foolish enough to think i brought this all upon myself, instead i like to think there is energy/life force (qi? higher power of your choice?) that i can direct this thankfulness towards, for providing a $150 check when i had a $149 bill i needed to pay. when i say providence, i do not mean there is excess, but i do mean there is exactly what i need. and that pretty much describes my life, and i’m so grateful to be able to say that i have what i want, and want what i have.

i am going to borrow from past things i’ve written again, because i’m tired now, and because they capture what i want to say. while i’ve been feeling down, i’ve had the best possible support. this is something i wrote last year that explains why the person i’ve been given to go through this life with, and his mechanical analogies about flipping switches, is absolutely the right person for me:

now i have a man who validates and supports my whole being and loves all of me, containing my feelings by refusing to allow my self-loathing neural pathways to open back up. this is truer to the core of how i see myself (a person of integrity) than any desire to have my self-loathing “validated” in the ways someone else would “validate” it, by encouraging that self-loathing and feeding that monster.

“darling, you will not find

in the well into which you fall

what i keep for you on the heights:

a bouquet of dewy jasmines,

a kiss deeper than your abyss.”

-pablo neruda, except from his poem the well, from the captain’s verses

thank you all for following along on my impulsive, long-winded, rambling, gratitude practice extravaganza; see you all again next november 1^st! and finally, i’ll close with this little ditty i wrote almost 5 years ago, about the things we envision for our lives, and the way the energy of the universe works its magic and manifests them; tonight’s gratitude was brought to you by the number 11 and the color red violet:

quinn’s favorite crayon at the moment is red violet. he has been choosing to color in bed before going to sleep most nights lately, and over the weekend i went in to turn off his light and he had red violet laying directly in the center of his chest, safely tucked there for sleep. it was always my favorite, too. i think i know why, now that i see it lying next to the heart of a sleeping child i love enough to burst my own heart wide open. red violet, the color of love.

i look up and see my man pull the almost-empty jar of pears out of the fridge and open it up with his big man hands and take a swig of the juice that’s left… getting to watch that sure beats my default method of tossing the dregs into the next smoothie. i don’t know how to say this, and it feels vulnerable to admit that all this time i’ve been writing about me and what i’m doing and what i want out of life… this was right up there on that list. it may have been unspoken… i may never have admitted to wanting someone who appreciates, as he calls it, my goofy hippie food. i know i did admit to feelings of loneliness a time or two, in rare instances when i paused long enough in my manic food-gathering endeavors to experience them, but underlying all the gardening and canning and fruit picking and cheese making and skill learning has been a secret longing for someone to share all of it with. i would never undervalue how important this process has been for myself, and in no way has man-getting been my primary motivation (there are many other motivations including my own health and sanity and quinn’s health and education being biggies, not to mention simply feeding ourselves sustainably, literally obtaining the calories needed to maintain homeostasis) but i find now that i am settling into this new phase of life with an enormous appreciation for the extra harvesting i did last summer and a permanent smile when i get to feed it to someone who has been on a vacation from cooking for some time. (surely he won’t be embarrassed if i publish on the internet that i removed a box of falafel mix from his cupboard with a sell-by date sometime in 1997, a bagel from 2008- can i say wow to the ingredient mold inhibitor?, and other items scattered throughout the decade in between).

i know i’m not the only one feeling this way… in a rare january occurrence of nice weather on a non-work day, i spent saturday afternoon pruning blueberry bushes, grapevines, and trees, and hacking away at blackberry canes in one of the garden patches that has been waiting for me to come along… next to a guy who has been waiting for me to come along and do this with. there were years and years of preparation leading up to us being in the same yoga class on the same night… years of fixing his own cars, to get him ready for when he would get to fix mine (and give me rides to work when the mechanic had to fix it more- hard to describe the weight lifted off my shoulders on just the one subject of mechanical stuff). years of me waking up to the farming instinct i’ve harbored since birth, to get me ready for when i would have space to let it loose on. years of us both getting ourselves sorted out and secure and in all other ways ready for this big love. i find myself gently detaching from the need to be entirely self-sufficient. i find myself able to lean on someone who is also gently leaning on me, because we can both stand up straight on our own two feet and have been for quite some time… the give and take is easy to open up to, and i couldn’t have seen that coming, for all my self-sufficient feminist single mama superwoman-ness.

a little over ten years ago, i got to do a retreat where we visualized our future self, ten years hence. my future self was alone, and the leader of the exercise remarked on the rarity of aloneness in that particular exercise. she said most people visualize their future family or friends around them, and i was just me, in a small room/house/yurt, feeling self sufficient and “just enough” and “whole” (words that resonated at the time and ever since that are still written in a prominent place above my desk) and yet with a sense of loved ones nearby (though they were not in the picture). when i left future me, i gave her a kiss on the lips and have wondered ever since, why i was to be alone all my life… why was it that i somehow had to do this whole life thing by myself when everyone else gets to find a mate and settle down happily ever after? you know, it never occurred to me one single time, in all the many times i’ve thought of that visualization (which has clung to me like water ever since), that year eleven would come along. but now i suddenly see the red violet writing on the wall…

38 is great!

Posted on April 6, 2016 by marybethrew

my 38th birthday started off a little bit earlier than i might have preferred, but it was for a good reason. i needed to feed my 32 tanks full of larval herring their breakfast, which is a 2-hour process each morning, and i am the sunday fish feeder… and instead of doing that work from 8-10, i decided to do it from 6:30 to 8:30 and go pick up my boy.

rich got up with me at 5:30 (yes, it is true love), and we ate granola and strawberries and drank coffee together, and then i made myself a quart jar full of fresh mint tea (first mint harvest of the spring season from my farm that i brought home the day before) and off i went to work.

the place i work is really quite lovely. i noticed there are these delicate lilies growing along the walk between the lab where i keep my fish and the other labs where i grow their food. lately i’ve been walking in excess of 10,000 steps, just during my work day. it’s keeping me in shape, and the fresh air and flowers are nice.

as soon as i was finished, i drove south to the boat ramp to pick quinn up from his dad. we used to meet at the boat ramp all the time, before we moved from dragon house 1.0. this time i knew we would be heading even farther south and since his dad was doing me a favor by letting me have some of his hours, i had offered to make the drive.

quinn and i had some time to ourselves before rich’s son’s alumni basketball game started (yes that’s right, first pancake visit in a year! lucky birthday girl!). quinn and i made a pit stop for a mexican mocha, a soy milk, and two homemade maple bars, then headed to one of our favorite beaches to enjoy our treats.

quinn gave me “a yard of fluffy purple fabric. i didn’t know what to get you and dada told me to think of things you like and put them together. i thought of sewing, whales, dolphins and purple. when i put them together, i thought of purple fabric! they had one that was not fluffy, and one that was fluffy, so i picked the fluffy one.” i may have to make a fluffy stuffie dolphin or whale out of my yard of purple flannel!

the beach offered up some birthday treasures.

the basketball games were fun to watch, and rich’s son’s team won the alumni tournament again, as they often seem to do. quinn and the pancakes got to eat cheet-ohs and cheer for the red team and play on the playground together in between games.

i consider this rocketship with red violet curtains to be part of my birthday present from b pancake.

when we got home, i got to work making my chocolate mousse, a dessert i used to watch my friend effortlessly make in a blender. it took me some effort, and i was concerned it would not set, but it turned out just fine in the end! it was a very d-i-y birthday in some ways, but this year i just faced that challenge head on and came up with some good ideas, like mousse.

the second good idea was given to me by my housemate, who mentioned a roll-your-own spring roll party she had once attended, which sounded brilliant to me, especially for an early spring-born girl’s birthday. and now that i’ve done this, i think it shall become birthday tradition, because they were soooo tasty!

these were my ingredients:

rice wraps

rice noodles

mushrooms

carrots

radishes

salad turnips

purple broccoli

wasabi arugula (new variety! inspiring lots of creative sushi/veggie wrap ideas)

basil

mint

cilantro

green onions

sprouts (been on a sprouting spree the past few weeks! it’s a spring thing.)

shrimp

peanut sauce: pb, coconut milk, sweet chili, garlic, ginger, lime juice, soy sauce

speaking of sprouts, quinn objects to eating sprouts (or even trying them) on the basis of “i feel like i’m interfering with nature.” he gave me the example of eating the peas from the plant but not the plant itself, before he articulated his nature-interference postulate.

he apparently has no objection to eating chicken. (far be it from me to point out the irony to a growing boy who needs the protein!)

birthday flowers from pancakes!

i got a few other fun presents….

dolphins, post-its, and music, so very me. how wonderful to feel known and loved.

bart patiently awaiting his turn in the bag

after my afternoon fish feed (which only took me a half hour), i passed a pair of deer coming home. there were so many little treasures strewn throughout the day like this, though none of them were out of the ordinary, all combined they made for an extraordinary day.

i had a nice evening with family, watching the pancakes play with gears, and having them request that i take another picture of them each time they made an improvement to their designs. i think i was unconscious before my head even touched the pillow that night, and off to a peaceful, albeit exhausted, sleep.

camera shy

Posted on July 11, 2012 by marybethrew

i took a lot of pictures while i was on a boat for ten days. if you had to scroll down through every photo i took of water while attempting to get a dolphin photo, you’d be here for a few hours. i’m only giving you a few of the water shots, so you have an idea. basically, for every photo below with a dolphin in it, there are 10 photos in a folder somewhere of nothing-but-water. these few are actually the more interesting water shots, where you can tell there had been a dolphin there seconds before. a footprint.

a wake.

a breath.

a splash.

then there are such developed world problems as: the dolphins are too close to my camera for me to be able to focus on them.

we had a group of Lagenorhynchus obliquidens, commonly known as the pacific white-sided dolphin, play around our boat and check out our bongo plankton nets while we were towing them. just above, you can see the reflection of the tow cable across the blurry lag streaking by just below the surface.

i did catch a few shots worth sharing…

(keepin’ it real for our live studio audience: this would be long line fishing gear with dolphins playing gleefully around it.)

after a couple thousand frames of very well focused water droplets, or very out of focus partial fins, there is sometimes at the end of the day a single photo that made it worth standing there for hours, rocking back and forth, letting your arms and shoulder blades get sore holding up a 400x lens.

at least, if you’re me.

gratuitous dolphin photo ~ i’m home!

Posted on July 2, 2012 by marybethrew

my posts will be short and infrequent this week as i readjust to life on land. xoxo

dolphin day

Posted on July 11, 2011 by marybethrew

photo-heavy post in which i attempt to recreate a once-in-a-lifetime experience for my readers. you kinda had to be there, but… this is my best representation of what it was like, to see them coming from the distance, from far away off the port side. wait, what? we’re 21 nautical miles offshore, it’s supposed to be all empty and blue out here. but they kept coming, and coming, and coming…

then there were hundreds of dolphins crossing our bow

when i worked on schooners, there were standing orders to “wake mb if we see any whales or dolphins.” i was only 4 days into this trip a decade later, and a half hour earlier the mate had called down “where’s mary beth? there’s a whale breaching!” ha, i guess it’s written all over me. later, after the dolphins interrupted our trawl work twice in a row, i was dubbed “mammal magnet” and sent below with my camera so we could get some work done. 🙂 anyway, since i happily already had my camera strapped around my neck due to the humpback whale’s performance (i’ll show those eventually i’m sure), i was able to catch these photos. because goodness knows i would not have left the deck to go and fetch it! i know once-in-a-lifetime when i see it! (though i’d love to see that many more times!)

did i say from the port side? why, these dolphins are coming from starboard! ahh yes, then they doubled back. on us, on each other, it was insane. what does it look like when a thousand dolphins change direction in near-synchrony? oh, the things that can’t be captured in photos. the movement, the over and over again-ness of their leaping. the way the sound increases until there is splashing right below you and you can clearly tell the exhalations apart from the splashing… the feeling of magic in the air… you know, those things. (the photo above is the one i posted friday, it just seems to want to be posted in very large format!)

for those of you keeping score, you are looking at pacific white-sided dolphins Lagenorhynchus obliquidens, and northern right-whale dolphins Lissodelphis borealis. the huge group we saw contained several hundred, maybe a thousand (the other mammalogist on board and i both arrived at the same estimate, so we think it’s pretty sound) individuals, and apparently it’s “common” to observe these two species co-occurring. that sounds so sterile- co-occurring? a colleague supplied a term i like a lot more: a jubilee. it (and the humpback we saw moments before, and all the anchovies we were catching in our own nets nearby) indicates good feeding grounds. the above photo shows both species in one shot, with the white-sided dolphins in the background and a mama-calf pair of right-whale dolphins in the foreground- they are the ones sans dorsal fin (smooth back) and darker in color (shown again below, cropped).

which brings me to one of my favorite shots in which a white-sided and a right-whale dolphin are jumping side by side. the group consisted of far more white-sided dolphins (or that’s what we could see at the surface), who all seemed to be jumping in formation, while the right-sided dolphins would sometimes break into crazy acrobatics (none of which i really caught very well on film). i just love this inter-species pair leaping in synchrony (cropped):

that’s the only acrobatic stunt i managed to capture, but believe me, they were doing a lot of it, and much more twirly and magical. you know, because they were moving and stuff. (still photography has its limitations…)

a cacophony of free beings at play, as far as the eye could see. ok, i know that’s very anthropomorphic of me. do i look like i am going to take that back?