Memories, Race and Images

Greetings.

I'm not sure why it's been so long. I try to only write when I feel the want and need and lately it hasn't been there. Instead, memory and the speed at which time passes has been a constant theme. It used to be that occasionally words and ideas would need to be written, but recently, it's been memories emerging suddenly.

Words spoken, sights and people seen, and the smallest gestures have been coming back. Sound and smell and taste suddenly bring back so much from the past. It's introduced a reminder of how quickly life changes and how and why we adapt to our surroundings.

It might be the shift of season that's caused me to think, but opportunity and possibility and choice are such strong and positive forces too. The last few months have flown by. I've embarked on changes in location and career and have been happy, realizing too how strong my memories are of this past summer shortly before the changes and of the summers and seasons before this year and what I've gained from each passing season.

Like many others, I've been angered by racial relations in the U.S. that both are finally receiving the media coverage and mass American attention span they deserve, but also are sadly proving the division of race and class existing in the United States. It's made me think back to learning of Civil Rights throughout my public school education. I don't know what's taught today to students, but if the curriculum is anything like the one I absorbed, it makes me wonder why racial relations of the 1960s are taught (despite being extremely important and thought-provoking) when so much of the violence and laws today on race and discrimination mirror those of 50 years ago. Perhaps if we didn't add these events to history class and chose to introduce them to young students 20 years later, more could be positively changed for our world today.

I'm trying to figure out this space of writing too, and thinking more about how we perceive ourselves and others. Much has changed since beginning this blog two and a half years ago and I no longer want to use this space to write about myself but am working on finding a balance and focus elsewhere. We'll see what happens.

(NH) White Mountains and moon.

I attended a conference for work at the Mount Washington Hotel in early November. 

I was originally terrified of the ghost potential, but enjoyed a pleasant ghost-free stay.

Just hanging outside college counseling (at my workplace).

Woodstock, Vermont.

My grandmother's typewriter.

Concord, Mass.

Finance land and 9/11 memorial, New York City.

Holderness, New Hampshire, late December.

Seamus Heaney's Atlanta & Light From Above

I'd never heard of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney until he died in August 2013. I remember his name in the news and then receiving an email from my Irish-American poetry professor a few days into the school year that he had to attend a funeral in Ireland and that class would be cancelled for the week.

We read Heaney's poetry later in the semester and "Mid-Term Break" quickly became my favorite poem exploring sadness and loss, particularly the emergence of life in the process.

I visited Emory University over the weekend and while my host was in a morning class on the morning of Halloween, I found the main library and planned to find a cozy spot and read. Instead, I stumbled upon an enormous Seamus Heaney exhibit. It was overwhelming. And bright. And beautiful. And chock-full of words, music, color and impressive museum-exhibitness. I read. And listened. And walked. And then found some free postcards emblazoned with Heaney's poetry.

I haven't yet read Anthony Doerr's novel "All the Light we Cannot See" but I love the title and trying to understand it, the words seem to hint at a comforting unknown of warmth. I heard an interview the other morning with musician Carlos Santana who repeated "I am a reflection of your light" again and again. 

Just through words, not meaning, both Doerr's book title and Santana's sentence are so beautifully read/spoken with possibility that feels unexplored, as if there is some other way of seeing and thinking and living. 

Whenever flying, I always request a window seat. Images can never quite do justice to the world below, but there's so much beautiful distraction in looking downwards from any great height, observing any chunk of earth from a distance. 

New York City

Atlanta at night (from a building).

Lake Michigan, Chicago

Surroundings

Earlier this week I finished Henry David Thoreau's Walden. I wish I could praise it's magnificence, but it was a bit sleepy. I do love nature writing though, and was attracted to Thoreau's classic in the hope to think deeper about the natural world in relation to writing. The two seem to support one another so well.

Tonight's sky, Plymouth, New Hampshire

I've been thinking recently about our land before European settlers arrived and how Native Americans might have lived, co-existing with the earth in its darkness and light, harvests and droughts. I don't think many of us will ever know the experience of living in a purely natural world. I don't see how we can understand it, even our time spent in the wilderness comes supported by machine-made warmth and the modern conveniences accessible to all. I wouldn't trade any of these comforts but it's challenging and fascinating to imagine that so many lived successfully without them.

Over the weekend, I hiked to an elevated lake in the woods with my Dad. I somehow missed photographing the extraordinary lake, but captured this sweet chimney and hearth about a hundred meters from the lake.

Towards the end of the hike, as we were discussion technology, I looked to the right and saw this owl. He/She was so closely camouflaged to the tree and was an extraordinary sight.  I had never seen an owl in the wild before and both the bird and scene were calm and beautiful. We stared intently for a minute or two until the bird flew away. In the time that followed, the discussion about technology couldn't have felt any more meaningless. 

Our Role as Global Citizens

I’ve heard remarks and questions recently about the negativity of international news, of how our world could have molded so drastically into today’s state. It’s a comprehensive question, one lying in truth, but also overlooked opportunity. The answer may lie in worldview.

Increased media access to place and story could be an explanation, yet a profound information shift has occurred and might better explore the process. The news and media content we receive has split into two distinct powers, one of every person having a voice to project via social networks, and the second being our own media networks controlled by larger corporations and interests than ever before. I think I'll call these separate platforms the media of man and the media of corporation. 

Not only do we have access to increased knowledge of sadness and suffering, but now hold the chance to reach beyond our borders and change what we can, while we can. This model has proven evident as issues of sexism, sexual assault and conscious and unconscious acts of racism are slowly being brought to light and to the table for discussion, both by the media of man and corporation, with an increased call to end.

Our role as global citizens today lies in interacting where we can, with who we can and positively changing as much as we can. Our social divisions today between national border, race, and socioeconomic class still stand strong, but in time, can be broken completely. If trends and movements can spread across the globe, interaction and togetherness can spread as well. The media of man has a positive role to play, one of awareness, and action, in today’s opportunistic, globalized world.

The issues are endless. Income and racial inequality, discrimination, unfair labor conditions, war between cultures and nations and the ticking clock of a rapidly warming planet. In urging our attention beyond our borders, I’m not making a political statement or plea to send finances and resources, my intentions are not to demonstrate that issues within the United States are no longer relevant.

I’m presenting that we turn our attention and compassion, at the very least, paired with understanding and the minutes we have left in our day to educate ourselves about those who live beyond our fence, to those who through our connected world, live closer than they ever have and in which lies the opportunity to end Us versus Them, East versus West. First versus Third.

A Photo Essay: Urban and Rural

Over the weekend, I visited New York City. It's a place that while expensive and crowded, I've grown to love and find an escape in, particularly the amount of culture, modernity, opportunity, diversity and intersection of international influence. 

I've always lived in quiet, friendly, community-minded and naturally beautiful areas. Any setting has pros and cons in lifestyle and opportunity, with the extremes of rural and urban as no exception. 

After work today, (Monday, 10/20) the sunlight was beautiful with a second wave of foliage visible. I walked through Holderness, New Hampshire capturing the surroundings. 

Later, I compared them to scenes of Manhattan from over the weekend, below. 

Literature in Concord, Mass.

In an American literature class a couple of years ago, the required reading included a few poems in a large book with plenty of Concord writers, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne in later pages. I ventured out a bit and tried to read a small ounce of each. Older literature can be challenging, and boring, and I think a bit of an accomplishment once completed. It seems to require so much more focus, understanding and grasp. At the time, I found each writer to be extraordinary in different ways but I didn't develop a love for any of the writers or pieces of writing. Hawthorne was likely the favorite though, as The Scarlet Letter remains memorable today. That summer I read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, another Concord writer. Though similarly challenging, I enjoyed this novel in its own way of showing the domestic side of war.

the Colonial Inn, Concord, Mass. 

I was born in Concord, Massachusetts but until yesterday, held no recollection of the Revolutionary War/Nineteenth-Century-Literary-Destination-town-west-of-Boston. A friend and I attended a literary event in the town and found that through a mixture of morning rain, afternoon sunshine and evening fog, the town appeared so familiar to how it does in literature, with distinctly intact colonial architecture (along with a booming tourism business). I wouldn't have guessed that Concord was quite as old as it is (settled in 1635) as it seems preserved in its two main revolutions, the Concord of the 1770s and the literary one of the mid-1800s. 

The event included a tour of Sleepy Hollow cemetery which appeared to stretch for miles, and in which  Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne and Alcott are buried. Pencils and pens adorned the graves.  

Buried beside siblings with similar single-name headstones, the grave of Henry David Thoreau.

The grave of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Concord, Mass.

Concord, Mass.

with Katie, Lexington, Mass.

Bedford, Mass.

Bedford, Mass.

Bedford, Mass.