One too many mornings

A big part of me doesn’t believe, still, that “depression” exists.  According to the New Yorker:

There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it…  There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off).

Louis Menand’s article, a review of Gary Greenberg’s book, “Manufacturing Depression,” continues:

Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one. Greenberg is critical of psychopharmacology, but he is even more critical of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., a form of talk therapy that helps patients build coping strategies, and does not rely on medication. He calls C.B.T. “a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment."

In other words, “depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.”

According to Wikipedia:

The term "depression" is used in a number of different ways. It is often used to mean major depressive disorder but may refer to other mood disorders or simply to a low mood…  The diagnosis of major depressive disorder is based on the patient's self-reported experiences, behavior reported by relatives or friends, and a mental status examination. There is no laboratory test for major depression.

Essentially, it doesn’t exist, right?  But then there are days I wake up when I am unable to move.  Not literally, of course—I can roll over in bed, wiggle my fingers—but I don’t.  I lie there and I don’t move.  I think of all of the reasons I should move, or the things I could do that’d make me feel better, but I don’t do them.  I can’t bring myself to.  I rehearse a list of things I know to do, things I know help—heat, light, reading, baking, sitting in the sun, yoga, taking a long hot bath or a shower, going to a cafe or a library—but all of them, even the thought of them, even the first step towards them, feels like dust in my mouth.  I can’t move.  I don’t even pee when I need to pee because it requires too much energy to move to the bathroom.

In an earlier New Yorker article, “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” Andrew Solomon writes about his experience with his depression:  “My vision began to close.  It was like trying to watch TV through terrible static, where you can’t distinguish faces, where nothing has edges.  The air, too, seemed thick and resistant, as though it were full of mushed-up bread.”

I know that feeling.  For me the air feels resistant like mud, or like trying to swim against a current.  Motivation is a central problem.  I can think of a lot of things that make me feel better (writing, sunlight, a walk) but it is impossible to motivate myself to do them.  Or it’s possible but I can never do it.  Or I can do it sometimes, just not when I’m in the darkness.  In the hole, the bottomless pit, that Townes Van Zandt sings about above, so effortlessly.  The old lady catches me.

“Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?” asks the Psalmist.

When I’m in the pit, pulling myself out is like trying to find pull myself from quicksand, use my own body as leverage.  It’s impossible to find any purchase.

Of course I can get out of bed.  It is possible.  It is not impossible.  And yet I don’t.  I lie in bed for hours—literally—not moving, thinking about doing something and not doing it.  Some days I can.  Some days I get up and take arms against the sea of troubles, even when it feels like moving through molasses.  Like swimming while drowning in a sea of mud.  Other days it is impossible.

In the wake of Robin Williams’s death, everyone is talking about depression, but not many people are saying anything useful.  Several times I’ve heard commentators say:  “just so we’re clear, ‘depression’ is a mental illness, not ordinary sadness or ‘feeling blue.’”  And I think:  oh, so what I have is just ordinary sadness.  Even when I’m not feeling sad at all.  Even when I’m feeling nothing inside but darkness, and heat and pain inside my head without actually experiencing heat or pain.

I’m sure Robin Williams and David Foster Wallace and everyone all thought they had ordinary sadness right up till the end.  How can we tell the difference when we’re in the middle of it?

Even Solomon writes, as he recovers, with the help of a vast pharmacopeia:  “I have felt blue sometimes, and on some days I have chosen not to work on this difficult subject…”  But how does he tell the difference?

I find it challenging to talk about, not because I feel guilty or ashamed, but because I don’t believe it exists.  I do feel guilty about my coping mechanisms—computer games and television and food—all things that other people assist me in feeling guilty about.  I feel guilty about my presence on the planet, about myself as a waste of space.  I feel “all the typical symptoms—hatred, anguish, guilt, self-loathing.”  But I don’t feel ashamed of the presence of the miasma itself because I don’t believe in it.

It’s also difficult to talk about because there’s nothing anyone can do to help.  Antidepressants don’t work.  Talking to other people just spreads the disease, if it exists.  Depression is contagious.  Why should I drag anyone down inside the pit with me?  I hate reaching out for help because then I have to admit that the only thing inside is an echo because all that exists in there is a big black hole and I can’t tell anyone without dragging them down too.

I’ve been feeling this way for twenty years, if not longer.  I wept the night before I turned ten because I realized my childhood was over.  Oh, wait—I was just feeling blue, right?  Even as a child, I felt something like nostalgia, a deep eternal grief at the passage of time.  I remember learning the word “melancholy,” and the idea that someone could be a “melancholic.”  I remember thinking, oh, so that’s what I am.  I developed obsessions that I treasured close to my chest, and when I shared them, carefully, and was rejected, I plunged into despair.  I lay in bed crying, before the age of eleven, telling my mother and sister that I had people who loved me, but no one who liked me.  How could they?  I remember listening to Puff the Magic Dragon and weeping:  Jackie Paper came no more!  Therein lay the essence of life’s tragedy!

Some days I wake up okay.  Other days I wake up unable to move.  Everyone blames negative thoughts, as proponents of CBT, and the power of positive thinking, believers in the pieties of American optimism, do:  change your thinking, change your life.

Andrew Solomon writes:

Once upon a time, depression was generally seen as a purely psychological disturbance;  these days, people are likely to think of it as a tidy biological syndrome.  In fact, it’s hard to make sense of the distinction.  Most depressive disorders are now thought to involve a mixture of reactive and internal factors;  depression is seldom a simple genetic disease or a simple response to external troubles.  Resolving the biological and psychological understanding of depression is as difficult as reconciling predestination and free will.  If you remember the beginning of this paragraph well enough to make sense of the end of it, that is a chemical process;  love, faith, and despair all have chemical manifestations, and chemistry can make you feel things.  Treatments have to accommodate this binary structure—the interplay between vulnerability and external events.

Vulnerability need not be genetic.  Ellen Frank says, "Experiences in childhood can scar the brain and leave on vulnerable to depression."  As with asthma, predisposition and environment conspire.  Syndrome and symptom cause each other:  loneliness is depressing, but depression causes loneliness.

For me, negative thinking is merely a symptom.  If I feel like things are hopeless I find a reason for why things are hopeless and I can find plenty.  But the hopeless feeling comes before the negative thoughts.  Sometimes the negative thinking catches me in a cycle and drags me deeper into the hole, but it’s almost worse when I feel nothing but emptiness and just like there’s nothing inside, not even negative thoughts.  And I can’t convince myself to do anything.

Since I was a child I’ve felt like suicide is a brave move, a way of using actual physical weapons against the sea of troubles, as Hamlet is the first to suggest.  “The ultimate hallmark of depression,” an “obsession with suicide.”  I think of those who have—Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, David Foster Wallace, Aaron Swartz, Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf—as secret brothers and sisters.  On bad days I pore over their Wikipedia pages.  Those who had the courage to tell the truth to an empty, hopeless world.

Solomon:

…the particular kind of depression I had undergone has a higher morbidity rate than heart disease or any cancer.  According to a recent study by researchers at Harvard and the World Health Organization, only respiratory infections, diarrhea, and newborn infections cost more years of useful life than major depression.  It is projected that by the year 2020 depression could claim more years than war and AIDS put together.  Ant its incidence is rising fast.  Between six and ten per cent of all Americans now living are battling some form of this illness;  one study indicates that nearly fifty per cent have experienced at least one psychiatric disorder in their lifetime.  Treatments are proliferating, but only twenty-eight per cent of all people who have a major depression seek help from a specialist;  fifteen per cent of hospitalized patients succeed in killing themselves.

Watching Robin Williams movies helps.  It’s odd to me how many of them deal intimately and sensitively with depression and suicide. My favorite movie as a teenager, and maybe still, is "Dead Poets Society," and I was powerfully affected by two of his other movies, not as well known:  "What Dreams May Come" and "World’s Greatest Dad."

In “World’s Greatest Dad” Robin’s character writes a suicide note and then gets to see what happens afterward—in some ways, it’s a suicide’s watching of his own funeral, a fantasy wish fulfillment.  He says, presciently and half-sarcastic:  “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”  But what if the problem’s not so temporary? 

In “What Dreams May Come” we get to see what happens after a suicide, too.  But this time from the other perspective.  From below the ground.

“What Dreams May Come” was horribly reviewed when it came out and still has a 44% rating on Metacritic.  I beg to differ with the reviewers.  Many parts of it terrified and entranced me when I originally saw it—joyful jumps through big messy wet swaths of color in heaven, walking on the disembodied faces of those in purgatory who don’t realize they’re there.  Since Robin’s suicide, I can’t stop thinking about the part when he dives down from heaven into hell, through an increasingly creepy and macabre dreamscape, where finally, at its very bottom, he finds his wife, who committed suicide.  She’s been sent to hell not because of her suicide but because of her own tendency to create “nightmare” worlds, the same tendency that led her to suicide to begin with.  She’s all alone, in darkness, living in a twisted version of their house, visibly tortured by her surroundings.

That part stays with me.  Because it’s what depression is.  When I’m there, I’m all alone, and nothing anyone could say could help or change anything.  Suicide and depression are really the same thing, because depression is already hell.

Jane Kenyon, a depressive and a poet, writes:  “Unholy ghost, you are certain to come again… and turn me into someone who can’t take the trouble to speak;  someone who can’t sleep, or who does nothing but sleep;  can’t read, or call for an appointment for help.  There is nothing I can do against your coming.”

In “Brothers Karamazov” Dostoevsky posits that heaven and hell are now, determined only by our frame of reference.  We are not condemned to hell in some future time;  if we are condemned to hell, we live there now.  The same with heaven.  Christ Jesus said:  “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”  Here, now.

Dostoevsky:

“That life is heaven,” he said to me suddenly, “that I have long been thinking about;” and all at once he added, “I think of nothing else indeed…  Heaven,” he went on, “lies hidden within all of us—here it lies hidden in me now… we are all responsible to all for all, apart from our own sins, you were quite right in thinking that, and it is wonderful how you could comprehend it in all its significance at once. And in very truth, so soon as men understand that, the Kingdom of Heaven will be for them not a dream, but a living reality.”

Spoken by a character who committed murder, a murder he’s been hiding:  “I know it will be heaven for me, heaven, the moment I confess. Fourteen years I've been in hell.”

And here are words spoken by Father Zosima a prophet, a poet, a priest—someone who echoes both Christ and Buddha for me:

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending…  I ponder, “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love...  there are some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God and life.

Those "fearful ones" stay with me. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a Spirit of love, of power, and of a strong mind.”  2 Timothy 1:7

I love that trinity.  Love, power, and a strong mind.  If I can have love and power and a strong mind, then I live already in the kingdom of heaven.  If I fear, then I live in an ever-consuming and voluntary hell.

But I fear so much, all of the time.  As Solomon writes:  "It’s possible to distinguish between anxiety and depression, but according to... a leading expert on anxiety, 'they’re fraternal twins.'"

A quote from Tina Berger:

I often explain it this way. If you go and visit a Western-trained psychologist for seemingly inexplicable anxiety, he or she will most likely ask you about your life and your job and your family of origin. You may receive a diagnosis and plan of treatment. The treatment will likely involve relaxation and stress reduction, perhaps some additional talk therapy to address past emotional wounding, and you may be referred to a psychiatrist for medical treatment with anti-anxiety medication. You may or may not find the source of your anxiety. Whatever the recommended course of treatment, unexplained anxiety is generally seen as a pathology here in the West. If you have anxiety and you can’t source it to an immediate and direct problem in your life, the general assumption is: something is wrong with you.

An ecopsychology-based perspective takes a much bigger picture view of anxiety, considering questions like, “How sane is it, to have no anxiety as such beautiful species of plants and animals disappear from the planet one by one?” “How sane is it to have no anxiety when we know children are dying unnecessarily from starvation in many parts of the world?” “How sane is it that we work such long hours to continue acquiring so many things that we will throw away in less than a year?”

How sane am I?  Not very.

One last Solomon quote:

At a cocktail party in London, I saw an acquaintance and mentioned to her that I was writing this article. 

"I had terrible depression,’ she said. 

I asked her what she had done about it.  

"I didn’t like the idea of medication,’ she said.  "My problem was stress-related.  So I decided to eliminate all the stresses in my life."  She counted off on her fingers.  "I quit my job," she said.  "I broke up with my boyfriend and never really looked for another one.  I gave up my roommate and moved to a smaller place.  I stopped going to parties that run late.  I dropped most of my friends.  I gave up, pretty much, on makeup and clothes."  I was looking at her in bewilderment.  "It may sound bad, but I’m much less afraid than before," she went on, and she looked proud.  "I’m in perfect health, really, and I did it without pills."

Someone who was standing in our group grabbed her by the arm. 

"That’s completely crazy.  That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.  You must be crazy to be doing that to your life," he said. 

Is it crazy to avoid the behaviors that make you crazy?

Jane Kenyon writes, of emerging from a devastating depression:  “With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends…  to my desk, books, and chair.”  She writes, of ordinary contentment:  “What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?  How I love the small, swiftly beating heart of the bird singing in the great maples;  its bright, unequivocal eye.”

So I make plans for a half-suicidal foray across the Atlantic.  Or I make sense of the world through art, as Townes van Zandt, the patron singer of depressives, did.  He also drank himself to death aged 53. Ernest Hemingway, with his shotgun, beat him by nine years.  Robin Williams beat him by ten.

Among the lumberjacks

Waiting for the bus in Bangkok

Still at Bluefin and now alone.  I read “Gentleman in the Parlor,” a book by Somerset Maugham, while journeying through Southeast Asia, saving the introduction by Paul Theroux till the end.  It turns out that while Maugham was jaunting about—almost dying of malaria in a Bangkok hotel, trekking by mule from Burma—he really had his much younger male confidante and lover along with him.  “A drunkard and something of a rogue,” Paul Theroux called Gerald Haxton, Maugham’s companion.

So when Maugham wanted to be left by himself in his hotel room, to be introverted and write, his partner dragged him out to party with locals.  Hence, the book.

And now here I am, for real, no K. to drag me out among locals.  He flew out last week, back to work on the boat, and I insisted on staying.  I wanted to study Thai, or travel by myself—to do something truly adventurous.  Alone.

I am well and truly in the thick of it.  Theroux adds:  “There is no shame in this, though it makes the actual solitary wanderers, such as Doughty on camel back in the Empty Quarter of Arabia Deserta, seem almost heroic.”

I’ve written at times in the past as if I were alone, as Maugham does in his book.  And of course anything that “we” could do “I” could do just as well.  Do we go to the market?  Or do I go to the market?  In Thai it is irrelevant, no pronoun necessary.  Simply “go to market.”  But almost always I am going with someone.  I began hiking the Appalachian Trail without a companion, and traveled from France to Poland.  But those adventures are years behind me.  Even my solo camping trips from Chattanooga days seem far behind.

There’s something about being alone.  About the way it stimulates your creativity, or just gives you an urge to hide away.  The way it changes your interactions with other people.  Opens you up or closes you off.  Gives you the ability to make your own decisions, to make your own failures and successes dependent on yourself alone.  Forbids the blaming of another individual.

People who write about the ability of couples to make it over the long-term stress the advantage of these kinds of separations from one another.  One must always feel the pull of the partner against the other.  It’s not just I-Thou but I-Thou-Them.  We go away from each other so that we can come back together stronger and braver.

As Donne wrote:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
    Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
    Like gold to airy thinness beat.

And still I cherish this time by myself, wrap it around my heart like a blanket, even as already I feel guilt for all the things I’m not doing, all of the things I’d resolved to do.  It turns out that doing this without a six-foot-tall partner holding me by the hand I’m a lot more timid.  I hide out.  I feel like Marilynne Robinson, she who said:

I’m kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone’s hopes, but for me it’s a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence than I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it.

I remember those solitary months in Aroostook where I could dive into myself, into my time at my desk, my time in the woods, not missing the sound of another human being’s voice.  How did I think I could pressure myself out of my cozy-desked room into the roiling mass of Bangkok?  Although when I do, every time is rewarding.  A mini-date with myself or random Thai strangers.  Last night, over sehn yai moo daeng, I met an entire Thai family and conversed with them, practicing my Thai as I’m intended to be doing.

Maybe one day I’ll start visiting all of the museums and temples and famed street stalls I’m supposed to. Maybe I’ll yet screw my courage to the sticking place.  If nothing else, I’m going to need to, because I have to do another visa run.  Soon.  As a solitary wanderer.

Bangkok, Thailand

The Bangkok demonstration site.  Yes, we were told to stay away.  And no, we did not.

19 February – 1 March

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy--being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological.  

--Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

This is exactly how I'm feeling lately. Not that I don't still love the grit and chaos of travel, but more I feel its aimlessness, as if I don't know exactly what direction I'm supposed to be moving. We rested in Bangkok for more than a week because, well, Bangkok feels like home. Especially Siyan, our adopted neighborhood, home of Bluefin Guesthouse—which I'm sure doesn't need any more business, or I don't know if I want it to have any more business because it'll lose that magical quality it still possesses.

Three bowls of beef guaytaeou in Siyan

Siyan is an intersection of two roads, Nakhon Chai Si and Samsen, and the site of a vigorous and thriving day and night market, unpopulated by farangs. (Except for us.) When we arrived in Bangkok the first time, I asked in broken Thai: where's the market? I was expecting something grander, maybe, a tented pavilion with arches. Instead the market's laid out on the street, with almost anything one could want. Plastic utensils, smartphones, Thai flags, clothing, noodles in any incarnation. We spent most of the week hopping from one noodle cart to the next. One that just did beef—thin slices of rare meat just immersed in broth. Another with chicken—floating whole chicken legs and sliced breast.

Thailand is beginning to lose its strangeness. I begin to callous to its beauty, the way I do to a photograph hung on the wall. This afternoon I even went through my photographs of Maine, posted some I'd never bothered to before. It's a place that looks so alien and cold, so unfamiliar now. I'm not as stunned and grateful to be here anymore, and instead I just want to settle in, find a place where I can make friends, talk to the same people every day. Instead we push ourselves forward, out of the nest again, onto the next destination, at least for a little while more.

I loved Bangkok. I hated to leave. It'd take me a full year to eat myself up one side of that street and down the other, and in the meantime I'd get educations in Thai, food writing, cuisine, and how to take market photographs (a skill I have barely begun to attempt). It's terrifying asking people if you can take their picture. More and more I feel like true travel is to move, to stay in one place until I'm no longer a “farang,” just that weird American who lives down the block. But instead we move on.

Come down from this cloud

I went to bed the other night with a slight twinge in my right shoulder blade, a common problem for me. I use it as a barometer, sometimes, of my activity level. If I start feeling pain in my shoulder from my old backpacking injury, it means I'm sitting in front of too many screens. Time to take a walk, time to get moving.

But the next morning I woke up with a jabbing pain behind my right shoulder blade, a constant throb that feels like it connects to both my spine and my neck, looping around my shoulder joint in the meantime. I've always been one of those people who (as much as I try not to) look down on those who let pain stop them. It's one of the reasons yoga has been so helpful to me, but even then, I think: they must not have been listening to their bodies enough. With some Protestant work ethic and some good Calvinist stick-to-it-iveness, they could snap out of it. No complaining. Work through the pain—push harder, soldier on.

Admittedly these are things I did not know I believed until I started experiencing constant stabbing pain for going on five days, pain that makes it impossible to sleep or to sit or to stand still. I'm on my second day of ice, but I worry increasingly that I won't make it to 2014 and Obamacare before I need to see the inside of an MRI machine.

I also begin to search for what I'm doing that is causing God to punish me, as I do whenever I experience suffering, another firmly held belief contradicted by my stated conscious beliefs. For someone who is supposed to believe in ultimate grace, I believe a whole hell of a lot in karma. What unknown sin have I committed? Is it because I have gained weight this year?

Because of course that's immediately where my mind goes, what I blame everything on. If only I was a svelte 00 nothing on my body would hurt. Babies have starved to death while I have padded fat molecules with egg rolls, ranch dressing, ice cream.

Or is it the sin of pride? For having the audacity to teach a new yoga class when I am a year out of practice? For braving the role of teacher when my own practice, thanks to angst and loneliness, has been dying on the vine?

Is it because of yoga itself, because I've deemed it an acceptable choice of exercise, disagreeing thereby with the orthodoxy of the Southern Baptist convention? Because I disagree that yoga is of Hindu descent and thus of the devil? Is it God's way of telling me that yoga is merely Satanism disguising itself as aerobics class?

Once upon a time a 26-year-old girl walked 3000 miles in two years, while carrying all she needed for life on her back. Her walk was a pilgrimage, a rebellion from the broad path, a way for her to discover her inner callings and gifts. She failed to defend herself against injury. She continues to fail to listen to her own body, the gift that yoga gives her that she continues to deny. She injured ligaments, sprained tendons, tore muscle fibers, built scar tissue—in her shoulder lives the memory of that journey.

Can I blame her? Is it punishment? Or is it merely consequence?

I remember the days

Empty beaver pond, dory lawn art, and garden--basil, peas, tomatoes, and turnip barely visible

Missing my grandparents as we head into August. I'm so glad K. had the opportunity to eat dinner at their house in their last year there, to see the breezeway and the garden, to taste my grandmother's food. I know I've written about it before, but August is when it comes back to me—the zucchini bread, the sliced tomatoes, the swiss chard. Especially because I cut my first swiss chard today.

Ridiculous, I know. We could have been eating it a month ago. A friend stopped by this afternoon, a fellow farmer who mainly farms his wood lot, selling what wood he culls in excess of what his family needs, after cutting it himself. Not clear cutting, as the neighbor is doing. I imagine doing the same, trekking out to chainsaw into hunks the trees that have fallen or will soon, dragging out the logs with my team of Belgians. But that'll have to wait until I figure out how to eat the vegetables in my garden.

I mention it, though, because he said what he learned from an old potato farmer: there's no such thing as 100 percent.

Isn't that great? How many times do we hear that on the news—at least I gave it 100 percent. But it's not true. None of us can give that much. None of us have that much to give. We all fail, all the time, we all fall short, we all stumble.

Especially in this business of getting things to grow. The two of us could eat chard every meal, three meals a day, until the frost, and the leaves would just grow back in time for us to make the cycle again. You doubt it, but it's true. Last year we cut them down to their nubbins before the first hard frost to blanch and freeze—frozen chard is a spectacular addition to spaghetti sauce during the winter—and a week later, after it warmed up a bit, the nubs were putting out new tender green leaves. So eating it all is an endless, impossible task.

My grandparents taught me not to waste—not money, not time, not food. But I'm realizing implicit in the enterprise of growing is sacrificing some of the harvest to the whims of fate, whether it's my own laziness or beetles or frost or rot. Moths and rust destroy here. It's a relief, though. When I give up doing justice to the massive quantities of vegetables out in the lawn right now, when I just accept that many of them will be lost, I can enjoy the five leaves of chard I snipped this morning and scrambled into my eggs.

Seven to eight years old

Arugula, beets, lettuce, peapods, and in the back little patches of chard and spinach.  I feel bad posting these photographs because it is clear how bad my weeding and soil enrichment are.  But the lettuce is pretty.

I'm sitting in my office, at my desk, my mind maps to my right and the orange Burton snowboard that is my wall art in front. To my left is K., on the push lawnmower, decorating the grass with patterns of lawn art in the cloverfield. It's been a good day of work, for both of us—me here and he there.

“We're all thieves,” he said today, as we stood out by the garden, talking to our friends, also K., and A. and R. K., the second K.--became a father thirty days ago. A.'s eldest turns two on Thursday. They were talking about the trucks they'd rolled, things they'd stolen in their misspent youth.

“Lift and let lift,” Brian Doyle says. 


[And this link also.]

It made me think about theft, about Bob Dylan, and what it mean to steal things. This is one of these topics that I keep dancing around because I want to talk about it seriously some day, like doctoral thesis seriously. Bob Dylan is our greatest songwriter, and what he did was steal.

My central thesis is that Bob Dylan stole every line of “'Love & Theft.'” Every single line. I understand the impulse. It somehow seems a prod to creativity to turn to another piece of art and feed from it. Allow it to nourish us and respond. But is it exactly fair? I can't decide.

Dylan says: “But to live outside the law you must be honest.”

That could have relevance, perhaps, to us trying to live after the law, after the prophets. Under grace.

Living in the land of Nod

Trusting their fate to the hands of God

They pass by so silently

Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee
        [also Dylan]

So what things have I stolen today?  Food from the ground.  Light from the sun.  Time from my future.

I want to reach out

Today is drear, gray, and overcast, the poplars just beginning to be touched by green along Snow Road. The rain is making the loggers take the day off, which means blessed silence, except for the U2 I blare at my desk. Make hay while the sun shines, they say, another adage that has real meaning now that I live on a farm. I should have planted my beets and broccoli this weekend, when I had sun, even if it was Sunday, my Sabbath.

We have a single lettuce that over-wintered in the cold frame, from which I have already eaten several delicate leaves. It's a lettuce I thought was speckled romaine, last year, but which now looks closer to a spotted trout-back, according to Johnny Seed, and which becomes far too bitter to eat by June. So we did get vegetables in May, despite our spring vacation. It's the time of year when there's too much to do, in every area—dirt to be tilled and enriched and sown, new beds to put in, new crops to try—and I don't always feel like doing any of it.

It's days like this one that I'm happy farming is merely my avocation. I'm trying to be more focused, more driven, even more disciplined, dare I use that loathsome word. I loath that word, but it's one people keep chirping at me, as if it's the solution to life, the universe, and everything. Often I believe that's the opposite of being true, that discipline is dust in the mouth, and the true answer is joy, joy in all things.

Life is a daily practice of mindfulness, of coming to my desk, coming to the blank page, coming to the earth, coming to the mat. I know it, and as Bob Dylan says, still I'm learning it these days. How do I become strong? By a daily delight of being in a single place, of being present in time as time moves forward.

Everything is free

Sunset over potato fields

Another job on my list of ideas from the Bahamas was Emerald Bay, a resort in Exuma. I had several resorts on my job list, mainly in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, places where a bilingual American may have been able to slip her foot in the door. It’s funny to imagine now the alternate life I could be living—as a receptionist at a posh hotel, bumming around with fellow expats at night, rowing home by dinghy to my home in the cluttered harbor. It sounds so sexy, and yet I know I wouldn’t trade the life I have now for that one.

No matter where I am, working for some big corporation, even one in an exotic beachfront locale, makes me miserable. I’ve known that for years, since about when I started working. What makes me happy is living for myself, working for myself, being completely dependent on my own whims and wits and laziness for survival. I sit at a desk most of the day here, in Aroostook County, but it’s my own desk and my own choice.

When I was working in a cubicle, on some days, bad days, I could actually feel each useless second slip by, as if each one tinkled as it passed, dropping into the glass hourglass of my life. I could feel my body spreading wide, dying beneath me. I was getting paid for each of those seconds, a pretty hefty wage at that, when I think about how much I earn now, but it didn’t matter. I was a whore—I was selling each moment of my time, when time is all I have.

So. I could get a big job with a corporation here. Big telemarketing firms have outposts in Maine. There are hunting lodges and convention centers here, the Maine equivalent of resorts, not to mention doctors’ offices and restaurants. Or I could continue to carve out a hardscrabble life for myself on my own—seeing what I can grown and can and preserve, picking up odd jobs here and there—maybe cutting Christmas trees again this year or harvesting potatoes this fall, maybe making wreathes out of northern Maine red crap (my favorite unidentified plant up here), catching an occasional communication consulting job on the internet. Because the less I have, the less I need.

Here’s a song for today, from Gillian Welch:

Everything is free now
That’s what they say
Everything I ever done
Gonna give it away
Someone hit the big score
They figured it out
That we’re gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn’t pay

I can get a tip jar
Gas up the car
Try to make a little change
Down at the bar
I can get a straight job
I done it before
Never mind you’re working hard
It’s who I’m working for

Every day I wake up
Humming a song
But I don’t need to run around
I just stay home
Sing a little love song
My love and myself
If there’s something that you want to hear
You can sing it yourself

Because everything is free now
That’s what I said
No one’s gotta listen to
The words in my head
Someone hit the big score
I figured it out
And we’re gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn’t pay

You’ll never touch these things

Buds in Maine. I can't wait to get back and see if they bloomed!

I’ve written about global warming before, even going so far as to say that it’ll be viewed historically as a conscious choice of the rich white man to make his weather better and himself richer at the expense of the poor multitudes at the lower latitudes. Nonetheless, I feel a thesis coming on, after listening to a piece on NPR today about government subsidies for the oil companies. Part of me wants to quote the thing wholesale, because it was so disgusting. I can’t do it justice. (I found it: listen here at your own peril.)

I’ll try, but I may end up falling into diatribe. You have been duly warned.

Two brave and politically-minded Democrats proposed a bill to eliminate the subsidies that global oil gets from the American government. It’s around $2 billion, so, really, nothing. At least not in comparison to the trillions of dollars our government is trying to cut. Democrats want to pay lip service to the concept of deficit reduction, sure, but I hope that maybe some of them believe that the American taxpayer shouldn’t be adding to the profits of the most profitable companies ever in the history of the universe.

So what do Republicans (and all oil-state Democrats) say? It’ll raise gas prices! It’ll cost American jobs! It'll force America to be more dependent on foreign companies! What’s the real solution? Drill, baby. Drill.

Here’s Mitch McConnell, Senate minority leader:

“By taxing American energy production, they’re also outsourcing American jobs. So let me get this straight--higher gas prices, fewer American jobs, and more dependence on foreign competitors at the expense of American energy? That’s their plan? No thank you.”

I can’t believe that we haven’t accepted yet that fossil fuels are dying. And killing us, both. I flash back 100 years, and wonder—what happened to those forward-minded politicians who proposed ending subsidies for the buggy-whip industry? I’m sure there was public outcry: what about all those poor workers in the buggy-whip factories? What about the American horse? What about carriage drivers?

Even though I’m a devout Scandinavian socialist (most days), I believe whole-heartedly in American entrepreneurship and competition. If fossil fuels were authentically priced, both in true production and environmental costs, then alternative energies would have a real shot. Wind and solar could be competitive. But it’s not until we eliminate the buggy-whip mentality, this foolish prejudice in favor of outdated products, that they’ll be able to compete on a level playing field.

Why don't we build houses with roofs made of solar panels? Why doesn’t every suburban residence have its own windmill? Why have fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles stayed more or less level for the last fifty years? Because of the oil and coal lobbies. Because of corrupt politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, whose campaigns are funded by those industries, and who care more about their reelection than our country’s future.

But mainly because of YOU. Because you (and me) can’t be bothered to pick up a pen and write a letter to our congresspeople. Because we can’t be bothered to reduce our consumption.

What did the piece conclude? The bill is not going to pass. Even 51 unified Democrats in the Senate can’t get the bill past a filibuster. The American people are going to continue to put $2 billion a year in Exxon-Mobil’s pocket. As if we don't pay enough for gas already.

What’s the only thing that’s going to change our future? Our own choices. We have to choose to get involved in political life. We have to make better choices about our carbon consumption.

I have been consciously choosing against high consumption for seven years now, but I'm still getting in a car tomorrow and driving 1000 miles with gas at $4 a gallon. I flew in a plane last month. I don’t have much money, but I still believe should pay more for those things than I do. They should cost more for all of our sakes.

Why did the buggy whip factories shut down? Because we didn’t need them any more. It's not until alternative energy is given a fair chance that we really will stop needing oil.

(On a less political note, how do you like my blog redesign? If you hate it, give constructive criticism in the comments. If you love it, say glowing things! It costs you no fossil fuels. Except for the electricity for your computer. Never mind.)

Blue Mountain Shelter to Cheaha State Park

Another Pinhoti Trail stream

1.9 miles

When I woke up this morning, I thought I may end up here—in yet another motel room. That’s four for a 350-mile trail, and I hope it’s the last. As much as I love the anonymous hotel room, and this one’s especially nice, at a state park with a gorgeous view of Alabama’s highest point and stacked rock everywhere, I feel like I’m splurging a little bit, too much for a short trail. Then again, I always felt that way on the Appalachian Trail, too.

I must admit, too, that a day in a flooded-out tarp does make one want a hot shower, a cheeseburger, and some clean sheets. So we had an easy two-mile hike to the state park, where we got a room.

Pittstown Point, Crooked Island, Bahamas

0 nm

More hard boat work today. I finally did my duty and got the majority of the bottom scrubbed, while Karl finally went up the mast to get the measurements we need for our furler replacement. The miniature crabs had started a colony down there--no wonder we’ve been getting so many of them crawling around our cabin sole. I swear I found pods of eggs. No stings, though--I’ve been exposing the icky growths that had formed on the stainless-steel swim ladder to harsh ultraviolet radiation, so they weren’t down there to attack me. The stuff on the actual bottom was rather benign. Our West Marine bottom paint is holding up fairly well, all things considered, and the current that makes this anchorage so rollly does a good job of preventing the little suckers from holding on tight.

The places where the new bottom paint has chipped off, though, are disastrous. I can’t get the stuff off with a putty knife or a Scotch-brite pad, the two tools in my arsenal. The rest of it came off easily, surrounding me with clouds of green gunk, so much so that I had to back off and let it clear before I could see for another dozen strokes. It made the colony of blue runners under the boat happy, though, giving them a feast. They won’t be so happy when they figure out I’m destroying their meal ticket for the next couple of weeks.

I felt bad depriving the cute little crabs of their home, too. A couple of them seemed like they had invested in real estate. They ran away from my blade, as far up the topsides as they could get. The Thai girl keeps coming out in me when I think about eating them. I’m sure they’re edible, and they’re almost exactly the size of the dried shrimp that Thais use in their pad Thai and som tam. We’ve had a stash on board since we’ve been on the boat, and a handful of those in some fried rice or noodles go a long way towards meeting our protein needs when we’re getting low on provisions. Wouldn’t baby dried crabs be just as good? Like crab veal. So far I haven’t been brave enough, though Karl keeps encouraging me to spice my rice with one of them when we spy one crawling across the floor in the middle of a meal.

Fortunately, the day ended with a far more tasty repast. Frenchie had us over for dinner, yet again, along with Lin and Jim and Dave, the other sand residents at this time of year. He cooked delicious steaks on his new grill, which he welded together himself out of a section of giant stainless-steel pipe. The steaks were delicious, perfectly cooked, as were the accompaniments: chicken gumbo, Cajun red beans and rice, cayenne cornbread made with fresh sweet corn, and salad. If you ever want to get well-fed, make yourself some friends from Louisiana. Those people know how to cook. I don’t know how we always manage to find people who want to feed us, either. Before Nappy left again for Nassau, he was taking us out for dinner three nights a week, and now Frenchie has us over about that often. I like to believe that we are such entertaining dining companions that it’s worth the price of provisions for our hosts, but that may be a little far-fetched. We do try to sing for our supper when we’re not held in the hypnotic gaze of the television.

Today, because Frenchie gave us some notice, I was actually able to contribute dessert to the meal, with a pie of my own creation. I’ve recently discovered a recipe in my Joy of Cooking for a pat-in-the-pan pie crust, solving my perennial dilemma of how to make good pastry without the benefit of refrigeration. Karl wasn’t so impressed with my culinary prowess (his exact words, after the key lime pie of last week, were “it’s like canned pudding on a cracker”), but I flatter myself by believing that any baked goods prepared at sea are impressive in and of themselves. Tonight I brought what was really more of a cherry streusel, since I can’t roll out crust and don’t have a pie pan. I topped it with an almond and oatmeal topping, and everyone, other than Karl was duly impressed. (His exact words tonight were, “it’s like the treat in a TV dinner!” Admittedly, this comment was intended as a kind of compliment.)