~thankful thursday~ light cone

Posted on December 3, 2024 by marybethrew

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/24

I was full of gratitude moments yesterday, but was not on social media to share, so please accept my belated day 22 gratitude. I accompanied fifty-three high school students (band and friends) and two teachers to Portland for a very full day (from an 8:30 departure Friday all the way until the kids said “we’re at school on a Saturday” when we got off the bus at 1:30 am.) I have written about band kids before and my love for them. Yesterday, being with them as they visited the music department of PSU, I loved the tiny insights into their psyches revealed by the questions they asked and observations they made aloud. As we took a self-guided tour of campus, I loved how they looked up and took pictures of tall buildings. I loved watching them arrive on the rec field and expode into activity: run, skip, hacky-sack, jump for the goal posts, race, climb, kick a water bottle, manifest a soccer ball out of the bushes, flop on the ground and be with each other. As we ate pizza at an arcade, I loved filling the water pitcher eleven times and hydrating them as they refueled, cheered each other on at silly games, discovered infinite ways to play with a rubber chicken, sang a friend happy birthday, and in the case of Quinn and his friend, performed a good chunk of the Hamilton score a cappella and in harmony. I loved helping a student who wasn’t feeling well feel better, and I loved sitting in the very last row of the Arlene Schnitzer’s upper balcony and seeing them absorb Mariachi Sol de Mexico perform a phenomenal show. I loved the way some of our students glowed to have their first language predominate the show, the way they knew the call and response parts of the songs, when to clap to the beat, the way they got up and spun each other at the back of the hall like it was their own quinceañera. I loved the way some of our students cheered and laughed, remarked how they understood none of the words, absorbed that moment of empathy for the students who feel that way most of the time instead of only on a field trip. I loved how all of our students instantly lit their phones up when the band called for the crowd to do so. I loved watching them sway back and forth, combining their individual tiny lights and reaching for the sky.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

11/23/24

After one friend (and gratitude reader) I saw today remarked that it might be a good nacho night, my bestie sent me this photo. Even though it’s hot dogs and mac-n-cheese tonight, I’m grateful for easy dinner and friends who celebrate mediocrity in the kitchen.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

11/24/24

I am grateful for a weekend with Quinn during which he designed a fleet of fantasy ships he can use as D and D shipboard adventures. He knew I might have a small clue about ships, having lived on and sailed them for a couple of years long ago, so he asked me a zillion questions. Types of ships, names of masts, how many decks, how many crow’s nests (he was disappointed in the answer), what is a stun’sl, below decks configurations, how many crew, what was that word again? (The word was bulkhead.) I taught him beam and draft, fore main and mizzen, topgallant and royal, that the lazarette would be an ideal location for a character to stow away, and we even discussed skysails. We talked about the shapes of hulls, the lines to control sails, and how the rig is meant to flex. He decided “difficult terrain” would be an appropriate penalty for pretty much any character without high dexterity, anywhere on board a ship, and I agreed. It brought back a lot of memories, but mostly just made me grateful for every minute I get to spend with him.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

11/25/24

I am grateful for a dinner of bbq brisket and ribs made by the same guy who catered our wedding. I am grateful for my fabulous mother-in-law who picked up the food for us and kept us company while we feasted.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

11/26/24

I am grateful for my birthday boy brother B, and my unbirthday boy brother T. I always do this on B’s birthday and I’m not going to start bucking tradition in the ninth year. Instead I’ll find the photos that make me smile the widest from our visit this past June: T at my nephew’s baseball game keeping the sun off his delicate skin with a dainty pink umbrella; B and Dad standing in the potato field they’d just planted. My reasons are still the same: they are great brothers, great dads, great uncles, great men, great at doing specific things like punk power chords or defragmenting your hard drive. I am grateful for their sporadic text messages, whether they feature roman numerals or not. I heard there was quite a bumper crop of potatoes this year.

~30 days of gratitude~ days 27 and 28

11/27 and 11/28/24

Two quick gratitudes for two very good, full days. I choose kitties and pie.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

Observed 12/1/24

I’ve been both busy and full of sinus pressure for a couple of days, so I’m getting to penultimate gratitude a few days behind schedule. Luckily, I’m still not taking this class for a grade. Indulge my semi-lucid gratitude musing for today.

Sometimes Quinn talks to me about physics.

“Picture a flash of light above your head moving out in all directions. The second that flash begins, it is impossible for you to ever get outside of that light, because to do so you’d have to travel faster than light.”

“Mmm.”

“That’s your light cone. It gets bigger as time progresses, and a greater area of the world is illuminated in that light. You also have a past light cone that defines all the area where anything can travel at up to the speed of light to reach where you are right now and give you information about the past, so anything you can have ever experienced is also defined by where you are right now.”

“Whoaaa.”

I told Quinn I thought this was a great metaphor. He thought that was silly but I’m sticking with my metaphor assertion. Because I have so often found light to be a part of the conversation about gratitude, I think they are intertwined. I can picture the act of choosing to pay attention to gratitude as a type of light, and maybe this gratitude light, too, moves outward, maybe it defines a cone of experience around me, maybe it informs and enfolds within itself everything about my past, everything about my future. Maybe all of it comes back to this moment I am in right now.

And even if I am a glow slug in the midnight zone of the high-pressure, chilled-to-the-bone, fully dark ocean, I can make my own light, a flash that moves outward, a pulse that grows and expands and defines an area around me.

I learned a few more things about the glowing nudibranchs. The research carried out on this species was based on none other than the research vessel Western Flyer. Iykyk. But on the nudibranchs themselves: They are a marvel of evolution: they represent the third independent evolution of bioluminescence in nudibranchs, and they swim and evade predators, unlike their nearest known relatives who typically crawl on the sea floor. They are so evolved that they have created their own family, like a lot of us are known to do when we don’t fit easily into the classification schemes of others. They are growing on me, these dark-dwelling light-makers with their soft, transparent hearts.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

Observed 12/2/24

I am grateful for paid sick leave and a day of Tea, Tay, and Turkey Broth (shoutout to bestie for the playlist and we are grateful for music in case we haven’t said so this year).

I am grateful for several days in a row of sunshine! I am grateful for all the forms of light that have shined on this November. A non-exhaustive list might include:

Friday night lights

clarity

light cone

sunrise

stage lights

cousin Rita

head lamp

sunlight on water

sunlight on kitten fur

glow slugs

cell phone lights in the hands of teenagers, swaying

you, and you, and you.

I am sincerely grateful for all of you and your comments and hearts and grocery store acknowledgements. Thank you for beaming your lights my way, too. If you are among those for whom the light has seemed dimmer than usual this November, I am sending you as many beams of bioluminescence as I am able.

When Rich was driving me home from the funeral I mentioned earlier this month, one of the darkest days of this November, we noticed someone’s not-put-away-yet Halloween decoration, a skeleton perched as though it was driving an antique tractor alongside the highway. It was too dark to get a good photo, but the image has stuck with me anyway. No matter how lovely and wonderful a life we might be privileged to enjoy (and I am so lucky, comfortable, and privileged), it does feel as though the whole machine we are rolling forward on is an antique and that there is a reckless skeleton behind the wheel. No ocean of gratitude, no arena of swaying teenagers with their phones lit up, can change that. Loss and death and grief, we do not get to escape them.

I have thought about it a lot, and without veering into the toxic positivity lane, I have decided to keep myself hitched to the gratitude wagon. I will strive for mediocrity and honesty in this practice, always.

Thanks everyone, for climbing in the wagon with me again after all these years.

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.

~summer shorts~ reclaiming

Posted on July 28, 2020 by marybethrew

Have you seen me lately? is the title of one of my depression songs. I hardly ever listen to the Counting Crows anymore, but the feeling that I have gone missing lately is a little bit accurate.

When I go missing, when I need to retrieve myself, the ocean is where I go. During a pandemic, it may mean going to the ocean at 6:30 am on a Monday, and it may mean going less frequently, but the ocean is still where I go to collect myself and bring myself back. Here I am, standing, kneeling beside the crowded tidepools of my inner world. There beside them, soaking in the brine, is the end of a long strand of mended rope. I pick it back up in my hand, ready to start adding to the storyline, twisting new strands, threading on new beads and seashells, eventually stringing more cranberries and popcorn once it is a little less soggy.

How does it happen that I would ever set this rope down? I know better. I repeat to myself like a mantra why I write. I repeat it enough that others know it, can paraphrase it. The fragmentation that once characterized my inner experience was the result of mental health crisis – major depression brought on mostly by emotional abuse (gone), but also a little bit predisposition (still there). Fragmentation, a broken storyline, allowed me to lie to myself, disconnect from myself, betray myself, something I remain committed to never do again. Writing is my best tool to maintain a cohesive storyline, to integrate the various pieces of myself into one narrative that I can keep my grip on, so that I can see the connections between one segment and another, so that I can tell if I am being true to who I am and so that I can tell if I am deviating from my truth or forgetting crucial pieces of the story.

Too much slack in the line is a different problem from fragmentation, but tangles are not conducive to okayness either. Winds will blow on me, waves will continue to endlessly pass, and if I am not doing the steady, dynamic tending this line of mine requires, it can become knotted and snarled. These posts piling up behind the scenes, where I keep second guessing myself and saving to drafts, need to start being eased out before they accumulate further. Like the sheet that controls the business end of the sail, my line works to keep me on course, to keep the wind coming across my sails in the most efficient way to maintain forward progress, to keep me from capsizing, to keep the sails full not flogging, to keep me from wallowing in the doldrums.

There is a certain amount of tension required to keep ahold of myself, in other words. The danger is there to become too tense, to hold on rigidly, which can also rock the boat. When my shoulders start to reach my ears, my hands are clenched, and I am holding my breath too often, I need to loosen my grip, inhale, exhale, and observe what the ocean is doing. Take stock, adjust course.

You can sail forward even when the wind is close to your bow, but there is a reason why they call it “beating to windward.” Heading into the oncoming wind and seas (usually they are coming from a related direction to one another, though not always) can feel like a beating. The motion of the vessel is more jarring, the force of the impact coming down from the crest of each swell causes the whole hull to shudder and the rigging to vibrate, and the ship is heeled over at quite an angle. The ship must be tacked much more frequently to maintain course, an act which by its very nature strains every line and piece of hardware, every tired seam and joint. Changing direction frequently just to keep going forward is exhausting, and you must ensure the coffee pot is lashed in the galley, the deck gear all stowed.

Still, it is while sailing to windward that I have most often encountered dolphins riding the bow wake. It is also only in the dark of night that the bow wake glows with bioluminescence. Remembering my study of the word “streamlined” a couple of years ago, I recall my conclusion that the status of the flow around me has less to do with turbulence in my life, than what shape I present to the flow; that if I present less resistance to the flow, I have a more streamlined experience. Salmon use the energy of the current to propel themselves upstream; adversity is not a direct line to crisis, in fact it can be a force of energy that is harnessed for good.

I feel as though, right now, I am swimming upstream against a strong current, or sailing into a strong wind. I am okay, but I am on watch for signs of slipping down the current too far towards the waterfall’s edge, or letting the wind get around behind the wrong side of my sails. I am okay, but I am swimming hard with nothing in reserve, I am beating to windward and taking a beating. I am okay, but I am only okay because I know firsthand the consequences of slipping downstream, of capsizing.

At market one recent Saturday, a lovely woman handed me a bundle of braided sweetgrass. She grows it herself, and she said she wanted to give it to me because I inspire her. I am using it to smudge this space and reclaim it, to clear out any traces of energy that would keep me quiet, that would turn down my voice, that would ask me to be smaller, less than fully me.

~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…

earth as schooner ~ a permaculture analogy

Posted on April 26, 2011 by marybethrew

in my personal unschooling adventure, as in, my own studies on what is most salient to me right now, i have been absolutely smitten with permaculture. i’m immersed in the literature currently, have joined a permie internet forum, and have been networking with people locally who have used the p word within earshot of me. completely geeking out. and although i haven’t even finished the basic textbooks and still feel kind of fuzzy on just exactly how to define permaculture, i’m ready to start to formulate what i think it is, and put the pieces together into a working definition for myself. since this concept/discipline/thing has been so hard for me to wrap my mind around, in spite of my delving head first into it, i’m guessing there are a lot of people who have no clue what the p word is all about, which is one reason i’m sharing it here.

here are the basics: permaculture is care for the earth, care for people, sharing of the surplus, and an emphasis on cooperation and optimism.

designing with nature means observing what nature does and following suit. i planted the iris, but not the strawberries or baby spruce tree...

it’s interdisciplinary, it is aimed at designing sustainable human habitats. i think it started out as “permanent agriculture”, but quickly expanded to “permanent culture” due to the realization that sustainable human environments are about much more than food production. some of the things permaculture design focuses on are: sustainable food production (organic/local/perennial food forest guilds using no-till cultivation methods vs monoculture machine-intensive row crop agrobusiness using subsidized fossil fuels to distribute, um, the “product”); energy efficient building/living- capturing and storing renewable sources of energy, reducing energy consumption via smart design as well as mindfulness of what our needs really are; recycling, reusing, gleaning, making use of the waste outputs as inputs for other elements in the design; wastewater treatment, greywater recycling, dealing with humanure (blackwater) sustainably; taking care of the land- the earth is our home and our mother and we are in the role of stewards; and the people part of the system- we need social justice and a decent economy as part of the design, too.

(psst. it’s not just us. i just had to educate my spell check that permaculture, greywater, and humanure are all legitimate words…)

input? output? all depends on how you look at it.

each of these elements has needs, and each of them performs its role, providing its gifts to the rest of the system. looking at these outputs as resources helps close the loops that are currently leaking like crazy. one chicken’s poop is another vegetable’s treasure, in other words. vegetable scraps make chickens happy, by their turn, and the cycle becomes a cycle again, instead of linear and unsustainable (buy fertilizer from “somewhere else” to grow veggies; throw veggie scraps in the garbage and send them “away”). designing the system to balance out the inputs and outputs both reduces the waste going out of the system, and increases the abundance of the good, tasty outputs.

why have closed loops? here’s where the schooner comes in. the first time i ever heard the words “greywater” and “blackwater”, i was 19 years old on a semester at sea. it was the first time it really entered my awareness, just exactly what it means to have finite resources in a closed system. (for a piece of knowledge so essential for survival, i would propose that people ought to be aware of it at a much earlier age!) when you drive your schooner out into the deep blue sea, you only have what you’ve brought with you (that’s what it means to have a closed system- nothing coming into or going out of it). you can only pack what the ship can hold. our 500 gallons of freshwater, several hundred gallons of diesel fuel, storage tanks (whatever their finite capacity was) for grey and blackwater, storage space for garbage and “recycling”, food that we could carry and that wouldn’t spoil before we could eat it- that all had to last us (all 34 of us) for the duration of whatever leg of the voyage we were on. (when the voyage ended and we were on or close to land, we ceased being a closed system again, could pump out our wastes, and refuel with new inputs, if they were within reach). it really hit home on one leg when we thought we were going to be able to fill up our nearly empty freshwater tanks at our last stop in the bahamas, only to find out we were headed out for a 6 day trip back to the mainland u.s. with faintly brackish (3 ppm salt) water. in which case, whatever tang we had on hand (and that didn’t even mask the saltiness) was all we had on hand to attempt to make it palatable!

as big as the earth may seem, we can think of her as a schooner. a big one, with lots and lots of capacity, but a closed system nonetheless, and without the option of coming into port. once we run out of our finite resources, there is not going to be a way for us to swing by the moon or mars and pick up some more, nor can we feasibly send our garbage “away”. what to do? i am starting at home, treating my home as a place where all the needs, inputs and outputs are going to have to be handled from within that closed system, and i am working on creating a space where that is the reality. outward from there to the neighborhood and community level. apparently what i’ve been attempting to do is permaculture design! it’s nice to have some terminology.

it’s a discipline with amazing amounts of uncharted territory. it’s a super big picture mind bender, and perfect for an unschooler. it covers just about everything that matters for me. it feels like a new home sweet home for my brain, where even my wacky law of attraction approach to life is part of the program. earth, people, abundance, interconnectedness, sustainability…

does any of this ring true for you? are you hip to the p?

bioluminescence

Posted on March 5, 2011 by marybethrew

"hey, baby"

a portrait of the artist as a ctenophore

i have been fascinated by bioluminescence since long before i knew it by that name. one of the best things about growing up in the northeastern united states on a farm with big grassy meadows was the abundance of fireflies- a nightly summer sight that will always top my list of things i miss most about the east coast. as an undergraduate, i learned that unlike the handful of terrestrial species (such as fireflies) that glow at night, the marine environment is home to thousands of species that produce their own light. mind blowing! more important than the facts i learned, however, were the many experiences i was fortunate to have involving some of those creatures. again, i managed to matriculate in an area (long island’s east end) where fairly often, there was low enough ambient light and high enough concentrations of bioluminescent critters in the sand that night time walks on the beach (taken with great frequency by procrastinating college students) were often a dance workout, wherein groups of us would drag our feet and hands along the wet sand on the edge of the ocean in order to watch the streaks of glowing light.

as a SEAmester student, i was immersed in bioluminescent experiences figuratively (almost nightly our schooner created a glowing bow wake, just from sailing through the water and disturbing the dinoflagellates swimming there, causing them to emit their glow) and literally (we took a swim in a bioluminescent bay in la parguerra, puerto rico, and got to watch our own bodies glowing head to toe from the plankton adhered like dot-to-dots along our skin and swimsuits). one of my favorite visions of all time is watching dolphins race along beside the boat, the night too dark to actually see them, but knowing their presence from the way the water was streaked with light and the sound of their exhalations each time they’d surface. i continued my love affair with bioluminescence later on when i was employed as a professional mariner (doesn’t that sound more awesome than “deckhand” or “schooner bum”?) and have been known to jump in the water at night, right off the side of the ship in port, even in places (filled with ctenophores) as unlikely as new jersey.

glowing ctenophore in watercolor, tweaked in photoshop

shine your light

“the question of why so many animals are bioluminescent still does not have a satisfactory answer.” – S. Haddock (et al.) bioluminescence in the sea (annu. rev. mar. sci. 2010 2:443-93.) (gotta love the open access movement in the scientific literature… you, too, can read this review- all 50 pages! i know you’re as excited as i was!)

translation: “we dunno.” -me

what do the leading scientists in the field mean, they don’t know?! let’s break it down. we are talking about generating light on a cellular level. light, radiating not from the sun, not from electrical current…. but from reactions that take place within the very cells of the organism. light from within living beings. and get this, according to wikipedia, “all cells produce some form of bioluminescence within the electromagnetic spectrum, but most are neither visible nor noticeable to the naked eye. every organism’s bioluminescence is unique in wavelength, duration, timing and regularity of flashes.” all cells! that includes mine, and yours, and everyone else’s! we all have the ability to generate light from within, and illuminate the darkness surrounding us. now if that’s not a sacred truth brought straight to you by the natural world, i don’t know what is.

so it turns out, science can unlock all sorts of mysteries of how the chemistry and physics and biology behind this phenomenon work, what enzymes catalyze which reactions, and so on. but science isn’t satisfied with the explanations of why these things even happen (though science assumes it will someday know…) for me, the question itself is where i find satisfaction, i am just as happy as a bioluminescent bivalve that these mysteries exist and even happier that yes, it is possible that some questions will never be answered by science. i think it is important, as scientists, as human beings, to hold that space for the possibility of mystery.

but before i get carried away with the spiritual aspects of bioluminescence,

a few definitions

bioluminescence, simply put, is the emission of light by living organisms, and it also refers to “the light so produced”. either way, what we have here is a noun. creatures are said to be bioluminescent (adj.) if they are capable of pulling off this amazing feat. as mentioned, we are all bioluminescent- it’s just that the particular wavelength we emit may not always fall within the visible-to-us portion of the spectrum.

not to be confused with some related phenomena:

fluorescence: light produced when external energy is absorbed by the organism, and then emitted again by it immediately.

phosphorescence: a form of fluorescence where the energy is absorbed, stored and slowly re-emitted (in this case, we’re still getting energy from an external source. think glow-in-the-dark star stickers on your ceiling- they need to be charged up by having light shined on them.) the term phosphorescence was in vogue for a long time, and often used interchangeably to refer to what we now understand to be bioluminescence.

“PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to…to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that’s the genius behind poetry.” ~ Emily Dickinson

noctiluca scintillans, a bioluminescent dinoflagellate (roughly 1 mm in size)

bioluminescence, on the other hand, is light actually produced from within the organism. no external energy source! ok, technically we’re all solar powered either directly through photosynthesis, or indirectly through eating photosynthetic beings, but the light in this case is not just re-emitted sunlight, it is generated by a chemical reaction within the cells of the organism.

light, in general, is produced when an electron absorbs energy, is excited (moved) to a higher orbit, and releases a photon (packet of energy) as it falls back to its home orbit. in bioluminescence, that excitation happens due to a chemical reaction. luciferins are the chemicals involved in making light. luciferases are enzymes that catalyze the oxidation reactions that produce the light (via the oxidation of the luciferins).

in many cases, the organism does not produce its own luciferins, but obtains them through “trophic interactions,” in other words, they have to eat the right thing to be able to shine. (can you relate?) because, get this: some luciferins are related to chlorophyll- some of them only require the rearrangement of a few metal ions in order to switch from chlorophyll to luciferin. scientists speculate that the organisms at the bottom of the food web who are capable of making this compound may actually convert back and forth between the two on a diel basis (opting for chlorophyll during daylight hours when the absorption of sunlight is key, and switching to luciferin after dark when it’s time to emit light instead). wow, neat!

shine on you crazy diamond

now i am going to attempt to think across disciplines and touch on the spiritual significance of these crazy light makers. filling our heads with a bunch of data is all well and good, but what about tapping into some of that dinoflagellate and firefly medicine? what can we learn about our own souls by dwelling on the attributes of ctenophores and cephalopods? spirit guides (or in quinn’s recent terminology “spirit guys” as he announced of the dinosaurs he was drawing the other night) are our animal and plant brothers and sisters, to whom we can look for information about how we process the world around us. there is a lot of wisdom in nature, waiting there for us to just open our eyes and receive it. traditionally, a lot of literature on spirit helpers (also known as totem animals) focus mainly on vertebrates (birds, mammals, perhaps a reptile or two, occasionally a fish) and rarely you can even read about spirit guidance from the plant people, and even more rarely, from invertebrate animals, such as spiders or dragonflies, for instance. as we all know, however, most of nature is not made up of vertebrates, so i believe it is important to look far beyond the charismatic megafauna for the truths nature holds for us. i will be the first to admit that i go for the charismatic megafauna types, don’t get me wrong: dolphins are my numero uno totem, but i like to look to the sea urchins and the kelp for their wisdom too. the bioluminescent beings seem to have their own special brand of wisdom to gift us with. small though they might be, they are responsible for most of the light produced in the majority of the ocean’s volume! i am only going to go into detail on a small handful of light producing critters and their medicine, just to give you an idea of some of the endless possible ways you can use the spiritual truths found in nature to enhance your own spiritual walk.

dinoflagellates

these are single celled marine algae that make up a huge part of the base of the food web in the ocean. some are photosynthetic (over half), some heterotrophic (that means they engulf/eat other organisms), some are endosymbiotic zooxanthellae (meaning they live inside other creatures, for example corals, in a symbiotic mutualistic relationship) and still others parasitic. shall we say, they’re adaptable? always a nice trait to embody. so wait a minute, are they plants or are they….? yep, as heterotrophic photosynthetizers, dinoflagellates blur the lines between plant and animal, which makes me love them all the more. i think it’s important to realize that classification (taxonomy) is always a best guess/approximation and that nothing is ever truly black and white. i love organisms that defy our dualistic paradigms.

pyrocystis fusiformis dinoflagellate (~1mm)

dinoflagellates bioluminesce only upon disturbance. now there’s a spiritual tool for you- to learn how to glow your brightest when life sends you disturbances. they are responsible in large part for the glowing bow wakes, dolphin trails, and sparkling beach sand: if you drive your boat into them, they glow. again, we do not know exactly why they glow, but some speculate that they glow when a predator arrives to munch them, perhaps as a distraction; others think they do it to attract yet larger predators to the scene to take care of their predators. all i know is there is a lot to be learned from these 1-mm small beings. small is mighty! indeed, dinoflagellates are the organisms responsible for harmful algal blooms known as red tides- they are powerful indeed and not to be trifled with!

ctenophores:

off the top of my head, some of the attributes of comb jellies or ctenophores, who belong to their very own phylum (ctenophora) are: symmetry, simplicity, efficiency, flow, buoyancy, transparency… yet for all their grace and slow, quiet, twinkliness, they are voracious carnivores, again capable of achieving devastating results when too many of them bloom in one place. they waste no energy, producing nothing but light (no heat) from their glow, which in the case of ctenophores is again, maybe a defensive response, kind of a fake-out smoke-screen strategy.

they’ve got rhythm- their cilia (the “combs” of comb jellies) beat in a coordinated, sequential way- think of doing “the wave” at a baseball stadium. something else they can do is incorporate the stinging nematocysts of the prey they consume into their own tentacles- another one of those handy skills to be packing.

fireflies:

fireflies are a type of beetle (not flies, after all) making up the family lampyridae. all the eggs and larvae, and many of the adults of the various firefly species can luminesce. the larvae (who eat slugs- now there’s a trait i like in a totem animal, preying upon my gardening nemesis!) are presumed to be broadcasting that “we don’t taste good” through their use of bioluminescence, while the adults (who light up their abdomens in flash dialogues) are thought to primarily use light in mate attraction. they are tricky, though, and in some cases fireflies have been observed to lure in members of other firefly species by mimicking that species’ flash type, then gobbling them up when they unsuspectingly land hoping to mate. fireflies may also use light as a defensive mechanism- making light is useful, and not at all reserved for just one strategy.

again, the reaction going on in fireflies to create the light gives off almost no heat; compare this nearly 100% efficiency to that of an electric light bulb, which loses 90% to heat and turns only 10% of the energy into light. how do they turn their love light on (and off?) well, the “exact mechanism has yet to be worked out.” translation: “we dunno.” (sounding familiar?)

the author begs your forgiveness for the scientific inaccuracy of these quick sketches- not intended for any kind of official use, just eye candy for my post!

dragonfish

i could not leave out dragonfish; though i did very little reading on them, other than in quinn’s copy of one nighttime sea, i couldn’t help but see the parallel between these dragons of the sea, and my dragons of the air, about which i posted a similar science-geek-spirit-helper-fest a few months back. these crazy deep-sea fish can produce light in both the blue-green portion of the spectrum, and the red. this red light is especially unique in the deep ocean, where it cannot be seen without special tricky adaptations, and points to a truth about light and vision- that not only does the organism have to have the equipment to produce the light, it also must be able to see it. in the deep sea, almost nobody retains the ability to see red, but these dragonfish are true visionaries, and they can use this special red light to all kinds of advantage in the darkest of dark environments. more little dragons doing awesome things.

choose your own glowing totem

many, many other species display bioluminescence- this is only a very tiny sampling. in fact, according to the review i quoted above, it is estimated that bioluminescence evolved over 40 times, independently, just in the marine environment. but if it’s so darn useful, why doesn’t every marine (or freshwater, or terrestrial) organism produce visible light? you guessed it- we dunno. there are hardly any cases of bioluminescence observed in freshwater- such a striking contrast with the glowing ocean. i highly recommend reading up on more of these fascinating organisms, and incorporating them as your very own glowy spirit helpers.

light up your life

“we rode back to the ship on a carpet of stars and comets and streaks of lightning- some of the most amazing bioluminescence i’ve ever seen. i leaned over the rail of the boat, watching the moon and the glowing feeding frenzy alternately” ~me, 3-17-01, mexico

want to go dancing on the stars, and swimming in sparkly water? it’s something i plan my vacation time around, and you can, too. a little internet searching can let you know what your best bet is for landing in a field of fireflies, or showing up on a beach at the most auspicious time for sparkling sand encounters. here on the oregon coast, i haven’t had any opportunities (yet!) to encounter bioluminescence, but now that quinn is a bit older, i plan to make it a priority for this summer to go walk on the beach under new moon darkness. summer is when nutrients and sunlight are more readily available to nourish plankton and also when we will be least likely to freeze our heinies off on the beach at night! happy coincidence. we hope to make an east coast pilgrimage in the warmer months, for a firefly encounter (oh yeah and to see family- just kidding, family is actually the priority but the fireflies will be a bonus!) i am also slated to be on a research cruise at the end of june, and am hopeful to see some bioluminescence while i’m out to sea.

here are some resources, if you want to do more reading:

the bioluminescence web page (full of illuminating info! including ways you can grow bioluminescent plankton at home– care to light up your homeschooling/unschooling science scene anyone?)

got older kids who want to see the (glowing) world? semesters at sea for high school and college students

here’s where i got some of my firefly info.

while you’re learning about bioluminescence, another aspect that is great to cover is conservation. like any other insect, fireflies are sensitive to the pesticides used so heavily in our current agricultural scheme. ocean health and plankton health are certainly sensitive to many anthropogenic disturbances as well. there are many rabbit holes to go down on this topic, but i’m refraining from mentioning too many depressing ones in this post- this one, i just wanted to let shine. 😉

unschooling, schooner style

Posted on October 15, 2010 by marybethrew

one of my first tastes of unschooling might have been when i spent my first 9 weeks aboard the schooner Harvey Gamage. i just dug out my journal from SEAmester, and the entry from our first day of sailing (3-3-98) included this:

“earlier today we ate breakfast, swabbed the decks, and then the crew let us figure out how to raise the sails. we broke Harvey on the raising of the mainsail, but then our group did a good job on the foresail. i helped with all the sails, and then with coiling the loose lines. ”

having been a crew member on 2 later SEAmesters, i know this “unschoonering” is not the usual protocol. usually there are implicit instructions relayed from the top of the hierarchy on down, and lots of hovering by mates and deckhands, while students learn the lines and maneuvers. there are fewer broken blocks when done that way, it’s true, but i know that students who learn from the top down gain competence far less quickly, and almost never get a handle on the big picture, though they may become adept at isolated tasks. i find it interesting that the first time i really was “allowed” to just discover something on my own, was really the first time i found myself truly in love and so naturally competent and in tune with something (sailing). i had many passions and hobbies before then, but this made my heart sing like nothing ever had before.

funny thing: i have also been reflecting recently that i do not really feel that pull to be out traversing the high seas like i once did. (i’m not saying i never will!!! just reporting my current status which may have a lot to do with having a 3 year old and feeling content ashore… i will withhold speculation on how things may change once my lad is, say, 7-9-11 years old!) but i now feel the way i felt about sailing back in 1998 about many more things in my life in 2010- the amazing magic and empowerment of being able to unlock any door i want, the realization that i can really do anything, has spilled over into every aspect of life (i guess that’s why they call it whole life unschooling…) i also know that the experience i had on that ship was crucial for me, i’ve felt that way ever since in fact, but i had never put my finger on what exactly was unlocked for me, right there on day one of sailing. i spent the rest of the trip unlocking all sorts of other doors within me, and all those open doors have led me so many wonderful places, but mostly they have led me to myself. i finally figured out that i was someone. and that i got to decide who that someone was, what she believed, and who she would become. and that she had a voice, one that mattered.

{image “the mighty storm” borrowed with permission from michael mcdevitt. here is where you can like his art on facebook}

mb

magic & bioluminescence

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