There’s a big college-arts conference in town, and today a group of people gathered here for it are taking a bus tour of public art in L.A. My friend Irina Contreras, a homegrown L.A. artist, is facilitating one of the tour’s stops. She’s asked a dozen-ish people to participate in a public/political performance piece in a community park and garden. I’m supposed to be there mid-afternoon; it’s about three-and-a-half-miles from my place; I think about Sunday bus schedules and how my shoulders hurt a little too much for biking and how I told my partner I wouldn’t need the car we share all day — and also how it is 70-some degrees and the first day of March and gorgeous — and I decide to walk. (Walk with me after the jump.)
(My block, where I’m starting from:
)
Google Maps has told me it will take 1 hour, 11 minutes. I wonder: At whose pace?
This distance I’m about to cover feels minor with any kind of wheels involved (car, bike, bus), like it’s just one neighborhood-ish over, like it’s basically the same part of town I live in. On two feet I remember quickly how sprawling this city is, how neighborhoods that feel like neighbors are not exactly.
Yet: This jasmine. I smell it before I see it. And it smells like three decades’ worth of L.A. springs I’ve lived through, but mostly it smells like adolescence. In high school, there was a ratty couch on my best friend’s porch (one of so many symbols of the class-crossing lives we both lived, where our respective single moms’ hustles or weird relationships – sometimes these were one and the same – jumbled financial precariousness with “good” neighborhoods, in this case a large-but-crumbling house her awful stepfather owned, a ratty couch on a fancy porch).There was jasmine all over that porch, so that all of our adolescent conversations and afternoon porch naps and late-night half-secret cigarettes smelled like this. She and I could never be close now/I miss her.
Walking through the city you are from, there are associations everywhere. Walking anywhere, are there associations everywhere? I want to believe that the homecity version of that is different, particular — that that jasmine wouldn’t do that to someone just passing through.
In my dreams, lately, I keep finding myself living in my grandparents’ last homes. This is not something that would have happened in real life, not in the families I’m from. But, my last two grandparents (one on each side) having died in the last few years, being grandparentless now, I keep finding myself, in dreams, wandering through rooms they lived their last days in, wanting to inhabit them. Last night I was turning on burners on a tiny stove that is not the one my grandmother actually cooked on, but it was covered with her pictures.
Also: As I wind slowly, on foot, through a series of different neighborhoods, I keep crossing under or walking a block alongside this freeway. From a driver’s perspective, all of these neighborhoods are simply off it, undistinguishable, blurred together, just “off the 101.”
Walking on sidewalk – an especially unyielding surface – for more than 10 minutes, my left ankle starts hurting. After 20 minutes the pain crawls up to my knee. Then my left hip, eventually my lower back on that side. By tonight my whole left side will be tight; it’ll remind me of my maternal grandmother in bed a few months before she died, after a surgery, telling me she felt like a frozen chicken they’d pulled from one end to the other. Like they’d just snapped her apart, and now she was thawing, sore all up and down that side. It all starts, for me, from the left ankle. I have “very bad foot mechanics,” doctors and salespeople at running-shoe stores tell me. I wear orthotics and sneakers every day, but still if I walk for more than a few minutes on sidewalk, this hard surface that really is not good for any body (it’s got no give, less even than the asphalt cars move on), my weak left ankle can’t handle the impact, and so I feel the walk all day and into the next, feel the connection so clearly from ankle to knee, knee up thigh to hip, hip to lower back, sometimes even up to my shoulder.
Hardly anyone else is walking these side streets.
Occasionally I pass a woman pushing a stroller, teenagers holding hands. I pass a school that looks like every school I ever went to, LAUSD-issue paint, a certain era’s L.A.-public-school architecture.
Last night in my living room some people were talking about how “THE HUMANITIES ARE DEAD.” I’d had a couple glasses of wine and was trying to imagine this kind of world without humanities. It took me a few minutes to realize they were talking about the humanities within the specific context of the U.S. academic industrial complex, not The World.
At a certain uphill point the sidewalk gives out. There’s nowhere to walk but the middle of the street.
This “humanities are dead” business is reminding me of the too-many conversations I’ve had lately about whether “print is dead.” Someone else always initiates this conversation, wondering, “Isn’t it? Isn’t it?” It happens so often that I’m starting to wonder if what might be dying is failure to imagine beyond large institutional frameworks. That corporate book publishing, which in really recent history has established a book business that is about gigantic advances and megachain bookstores, or a magazine-publishing model that mandates the wasteful and expensive printing of tens of thousands more copies of a title than can actually sell just to secure newsstand placement in one of those megachain stores — that those things are looking, quite clearly, and for very obvious reasons, unsustainable does not look, to me, like the Death of Print. In fact, I find myself saying over and over, I think we might see a lot more exciting small-scale, independent book and magazine publishing in coming years.
And in fact, I say to myself on Sundays like this, several months into a ritual of not turning on my computer this one day of the week, my mind and my heart need print like my body needs to be outside sometimes. I read and I write differently on the computer and off it. Reflection and creativity feel different inside and outside, in print and online. These are not easy opposites, and I’m not trying to set up silly hierarchies among them, but we all need lots of different modes and ways. BFP and I have worried about whether this project is suggesting that getting outside and walking THE necessary, healthy, self-caring thing that everyone *needs* to do in a way that is setting up a new oppressive mandate, like anyone needs another one. And we don’t mean to say that. What I mean to say right here is that I need to read sometimes online and sometimes in print, and that I get different things out of these different formats. And I need to get outside and move. Those are pieces of the balance *I* need. Other people have different needs. A world that is mono-mode, or one-size-fits-all is not, I don’t think, a world of life.
I don’t want to be simplistic or deny the kinds of pain and loss that are/will be real if or as academic humanities dwindle, but I can’t not think there has been a kind of death already if we are talking about that diminishing as the Death of the Humanities, if we are already failing to imagine humanities beyond departments in hulking and in many ways troubling institutions. And then I can’t not think that if and when we remember/imagine beyond them – for some of us in the room last night, myself included, who don’t have graduate degrees or institutional jobs in the humanities, this remembering/imagining is not hard - we know that there is, actually, a lot of life left there. And maybe even the death of institutional modes or models will even be freeing?
(Death as a failure to imagine? Failure to imagine as death?)
I get to the park where Irina’s performance is supposed to start in a half hour. The college-arts-conference tour bus is already parked out front (they’re early?!), and when I walk up into the park, Irina is there giving a talk to a crowd of out-of-towners, talking about the community space they’re sitting in and the South Central Farm , which is a story many of us who live here and care about economic justice and/or community organizing and/or democracy and/or institutional power, etc., keep telling and telling and telling.
I find a spot next to another artist friend and wait. There are colorful paper bullhorns on a table, props for the performance. One at a time, the other performers arrive, in the window of time we’ve agreed on, and come smiling, confused, up the hill. They’re artists, activists, organizers; some of them are friends and some are people I’ve crossed paths with at other community events and some are strangers to me, and there is something gorgeous and charming about each of them ambling up the hill, smiling, looking confused, seemingly on time but the audience arrived early — now what?
Irina finishes what I’m guessing is an impromptu talk created on the spot to fill all this extra time an early audience wants filled, and the audience, these college-arts people (teachers? students? I don’t know), from all different places, today bus-touring L.A., start asking questions about youth and community organizing and coalitions and things. One of them points to the cluster of people I’m sitting with (performers in a performance that seems to no longer be happening), a homecity activist who’s been organizing with youth in L.A. for years, and says this activist/performer’s Boy Scouts shirt reminded her, the traveling college-arts person in the midst of a youth-centered community park in L.A., of how we can do amazing things with kids and arts and stuff within, like, the Boy Scouts. And the activist/performer laughs and says she was meaning to signify something a little different by wearing this Boy Scouts shirt, but anyway, see, the thing is, yeah, it’s true, sometimes it’s cool to kinda intervene on these established institutions and all that, but — do you see where we’re sitting? What if we looked at the indigenous traditions that have been paved over, the communities that have been displaced by the systems and institutions that today predominate, and what if we thought about organizing youth in a way that was rooted in older, other traditions and frameworks. I dunno, she shrugged, performing a kind of performance that wasn’t what we’d planned for but anyway the bus had arrived early and an out-of-town college-arts person had tried to make a point using the shirt on somebody else’s back and so this is the accidental performance by that somebody that was happening — I dunno, she said wearing that Boy Scouts shirt, sometimes you really just kinda have to say Fuck the System and do something else.
For the rest of the posts in this series, click here.
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March 2nd, 2009 at 11:01 am #
Hi Jess,
I woke up this morning, wrote for about 35 minutes. Then fell asleep again. I had series of mad, irrational dreams.
You were there and there was no action, not even words.
Just a passing floating image of you smiling.
Fucking the system and doing something else sounds like two things to me. First it sounds delicious. How we decide to fuck a system and create something new would be an awesome site. Second, it scares me to think about what fucking the system and creating something new would be.
Sometimes I worry too much that we are so influenced by the dynamics of the system that when we try to create something, we’re really just creating a new system, not a new “something else.”
I’m trying to think of this on a daily level. How do I fuck the system and how am I complicit with the system?
I am left with wonderful questions, questions, questions.
How do I fuck the system? What system am I trying to fuck? Do I even know how to fuck? What if I try and I just fuck myself and someone else over in the process?
Thanks for this walk.
March 2nd, 2009 at 11:17 am #
sooooo much in this post!!!!
This “humanities are dead” business is reminding me of the too-many conversations I’ve had lately about whether “print is dead.” Someone else always initiates this conversation, wondering, “Isn’t it? Isn’t it?” It happens so often that I’m starting to wonder if what might be dying is failure to imagine beyond large institutional frameworks. That corporate book publishing, which in really recent history has established a book business that is about gigantic advances and megachain bookstores, or a magazine-publishing model that mandates the wasteful and expensive printing of tens of thousands more copies of a title than can actually sell just to secure newsstand placement in one of those megachain stores — that those things are looking, quite clearly, and for very obvious reasons, unsustainable does not look, to me, like the Death of Print. In fact, I find myself saying over and over, I think we might see a lot more exciting small-scale, independent book and magazine publishing in coming years.
The part especially is SO exciting to me–i’d never really thought of it that way before, and i think you are right. This idea of screaming terror that huge book stores are going out of business–I’ve caught the hysteria–I never really thought that these huge book store chains, just like the auto industry and so many other industries in the u.s.–it’s simply unsustainable. it’s weird how your much more art centered/organizer centered life (there is NOTHING like this within walking distance of *my* house!!!) is still connected to my world through issues of sustainability.
Also–re: fuck the system, do something else–it reminded me SO forcefully of the amazing activists in detroit that are working to turn detroit into a media based economy–on the one hand it’s SO fuckign the system–the big three have dominated this area like you wouldn’t believe–so turning to music and movies???? um…can you say “from left field”????
but on the other hand–people, even michiganders–forget what a musical history detroit has–that detroit was the *hub* of music for so long…that creating a music based economy is really returning to that history we’d forgotten…it’s not such a crazy thought anymore.
March 2nd, 2009 at 11:40 am #
BFP and Lisa,
It’s pretty dreamy to wake up on a Monday morning and write something and have responses from your two reader-heads/hearts so fast!
Lisa — such important questions, and so important not to get all simplistic “fuck the system” … yet there was this kind of funny-beautiful thing happening yesterday afternoon when I’d been dropped back into memories of teenage conversations (which were often very simplistically FTS!!) and then I landed at this event and this rad grown-up who works with kids and is so grounded in communities and histories and getting outside institutional frameworks just kinda shrugged and said, so simply, sometimes we really, really do need to stop trying to reform from the inside out and look at roots and outside/r possibilities. And it sounded especially delicious outside in the park while our plans for the afternoon had been totally uprooted and here we all were, together anyway.
And also how, as in BFP’s comment, getting outside dominant structures isn’t necessarily or always about something “new,” but about revisiting, remembering, reimagining from, often-forgotten histories.
(Also, seriously, not trying to say the falling-apart of big-business publishing and bookselling, or academic humanities, won’t be devastating for a lot of people and projects — the whole publishing world is feeling it, and of course indie bookstores are dying and disappearing too, not just megachain ones — but still I think we need to understand those institutions as specific contexts and constructs, not the whole of media or publishing or art or etc.)
Love to you both,
Jess
March 2nd, 2009 at 1:25 pm #
Thanks for this evocative post, Jess. Totally hit the spot for that part of me we talked about Sat. night, which loves all of you and all the stuff you do, but fell first for your dreamy writing. xo
March 2nd, 2009 at 1:54 pm #
miz joan,
thank you for being an ultimate sweet lady among a slew of awesome sweet ladies i am grateful to be surrounded by right here.
lovely to see you in a group setting this weekend, and we definitely need a one-on-one date soon.
xo
March 2nd, 2009 at 2:20 pm #
This post struck a nerve with me and left me uncomfortable (in a good way! thank you!) because it really hit onto something I’m, I guess conflicted over, or trying to parse for myself where my lines are, which is – on the one hand I don’t really believe that social justice (applied as broadly as it can be applied) is possible without serious structural change. but I also can’t see myself working towards that structural change as the major commitment of my life because… I don’t know. temperamentally I just don’t think I could handle it, you know? which feels like kind of a cop-out to say, oh I’m just not built for activism, but… I’m not. What I’m built for, I think, is more traditional service type work (not to say that it’s more important or anything, just, that’s the way I’m wired, that’s what I can connect to). and I do also think, there are people who need things now who can’t wait for structural change. but it’s hard sometimes to help them without buying at least somewhat into structures I don’t really support. like I think I’d be a really kickass grade-school teacher but how much would I get to exercise my excitement and energy for it if I had to spend an hour a day prepping my kids for standardized tests? or if I were under pressure to turn everything into a competition, which I am so against? or if I were under pressure to react harshly and punitively towards “problem” kids when I think that is so often the exact opposite of what those kids need? so then I think, well I could find work in a really cool charter school and then still be somewhere help is needed most but be able also to help in my own way. but then I think, isn’t it also necessary for the kids who do have to go through all this NCLB bullshit to have someone who maybe can try to make it as painless as possible? to up their chances of getting a teacher who really cares (and a lot of them do, but some of them don’t) since they’re going to have to go through this ANYWAY?
I guess sometimes to me, saying fuck the system seems like abandoning those left struggling inside it, those who maybe it could damage most. but then other times it seems necessary, and working within the system seems like a capitulation. and all the time my desire to work for values I believe in fights for space alongside my desire to leave behind any value except “help more, hurt less, because the people you’re helping don’t care whether you feel like you’re compromising or not.” like if you’re a social worker you’re working within a system that is hugely dysfunctional and from what I hear really just generally awful, but the people you work with just want a home or a job or their GED or their disability payments or rehab or visitation rights with their kids and they know the system’s not going to be overthrown anytime soon, they just want help navigating to get these things that are so important to them.
(and this also ties into my conflicted decision to stay at college even though it makes me miserable half the time and even though the education I’m getting is not the kind of education I think I want most, because these are options I want to be open to me and they are options for which you need a degree)
and I guess it’s hard for me because I read what you say and I’m like, yes totally this is so true and right, but also people need help navigating the system now, and I know it’s just a bandaid on a gunshot wound but the ambulance isn’t coming anytime soon, you know? but I also feel like if everyone thinks that way (i.e. my way) then change will never come. and I don’t really know what to make of this divide or which side I want to come down on.
also: She and I could never be close now/I miss her.
is beautiful. the whole post is beautiful but that really hit me hard.
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:10 pm #
Isabel–I think that your struggle (between staying in the system and working outside of it) is one that never fully goes away. I personally don’t subscribe to separatist feminism even though I support a LOT of their ideas because I think it’s impossible, and often a colonial project, to exist “outside” the structure. Separatism is not an answer in and of itself–to draw on the very old and tired cliche w/audre lord’s masters house–even if you are a slave living out in the slave quarters, you are still sitting on land owned by the master and working for the master–so there’s pretty much no escaping it.
I think the only answer I’ve come up with that is feasible for my own life (others have found other answers) is to admit that I exist within a framework, that there is no escaping that framework, and then work to lay the bricks down to creating a new framework. So, for example, although I am working, getting a pay check, paying rent, buying clothes, etc–I am also doing my own garden and impressing on my kids both the skills of gardening as well as my own reasoning behind the gardening. And like with detroit–it is an auto town, there’s no way to get around that–but it also has the remnants of a really really beautiful musical history, one that can be drawn on to inspire the creation of a totally new economy.
I think it is a false relationship set up with “liberation” that we have been fed for so long–the idea of “overthrow”–which implies that one system is completely destroyed and entirely new one is set up in its place–that doesn’t happen. and what’s more, it usually just sets up continuing or worsing systems of oppression against women, children, disabled, etc. not to mention the fucked up shit that an ‘overthrow’ usually does to those same people (rape, disease, poverty)–so I think that when *I* am thinking about “liberation” I am thinking more about a gradual transition–where people’s needs are replaced with something better, or actually *met*—and that kind of thing takes time. For example, I come from a long line of farmers–but not one person in my immediate family has any damn clue how to farm–it’s a skill that’s been lost. So if some people over throw the government and then tell my family—go, be farmers, your family will prosper!–I wouldn’t have a damn clue what to do and moan a LOT about the good old days of oppression where at least I had a job!
But if I take a class on how to grow my own tomatoes, and then I share that information on this blog, and then ten other people do the same thing–and then in a few years, other people say, I wonder what would happen if we grew beans with the tomatoes–etc etc–eventually, we may all have discovered in a community driven way over the course of a few generations–a whole new sustainable way to grow food–one that meets the needs of families that have to work and don’t have time to grow their own food–as well as families that are too poor to pay for food and families that consist of one person who doesn’t need a whole box of tomatoes–you see what I mean?
I think, I really do, that if we base our actions on what do *I* need, what do *we* need, what does the community around me need–we’ll get a lot more productive action…
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:13 pm #
which is all to say, I just think that if we let the needs of our communities guide us–along with maybe a healthy does of Andrea Smith or paolo freire–we’ll wind up in good places.
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:15 pm #
and just to further clarify–I’m not saying “listen to your communities” in an uncritical way–because of course, our communities are laden with all the same “isms” that overall ‘structures’ are. Knowing who to listen to, who isn’t speaking and why–that sort of thing is SO important and necessary.
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:28 pm #
Isabel,
Thanks so much for your ideas, and your questions. I certainly don’t mean to offer a simplistic “fuck the system” in a way that abandons those inside it, or even in a way that suggests any of us can possibly be wholly outside it, or even in a way that suggests there’s one monolithic “it.” BFP is right on, I think, in talking about how she and I and we and all of us exist within these frameworks, and cannot “escape” them, and I love how she is pointing to concrete and community-centered/-guided ways of creating something different within, around, in relation to that.
Also, I feel like, being an “activist” or challenging “the system” needn’t feel like some singular kind of thing, or some kind of thing that takes up huge amounts of time and energy so that not everyone is cut out for it, or something that’s mutually exclusive with working within the system. Part of what I hope we’re doing here with this project is looking at how activism is lived, embodied, in different individual lives that are working collaboratively with others toward structural change and that are also needing balance, and needing different things from life and action and each other, and full of different inclinations and inspirations and skills and more.
And I guess I feel like there is a lot of play given to working within the system, and not a lot of play given to really imagining, creating, imagining-what-we-might-create, creating-what-we-might-imagine, etc., beyond it, and that’s what I was trying to give some representation to up there. I want to hope that our minds and our bodies and our movements haven’t been so colonized by big-institution thinking that we can hardly imagine or work outside or remember what came before them. No doubt, someone could figure out how to do all kinds of rad arts education/organizing from within the Boy Scouts, and I hope rad folks with different visions and approaches would support her in doing that, but let’s not think that being creative within such institutions is the limit to liberation-oriented work. Let’s imagine that as one piece, and know that some other pieces are, yeah, fuck this whole construct, step outside these institutions in the ways we can or feel inspired to, and create or revisit, try, something else.
Love,
Jess
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:33 pm #
Isabel,
Thanks so much for your ideas, and your questions. I certainly don’t mean to offer a simplistic “fuck the system” in a way that abandons those inside it, or even in a way that suggests any of us can possibly be wholly outside it, or even in a way that suggests there’s one monolithic “it.” BFP is right on, I think, in talking about how she and I and we and all of us exist within these frameworks, and cannot “escape” them, and I love how she is pointing to concrete and community-centered/-guided ways of creating something different within, around, in relation to that.
Also, I feel like, being an “activist” or challenging “the system” needn’t feel like some singular kind of thing, or some kind of thing that takes up huge amounts of time and energy so that not everyone is cut out for it, or something that’s mutually exclusive with working within the system. Part of what I hope we’re doing here with this project is looking at how activism is lived, embodied, in different individual lives that are working collaboratively with others toward structural change and that are also needing balance, and needing different things from life and action and each other, and full of different inclinations and inspirations and skills and more.
And I guess I feel like there is a lot of play given to working within the system, and not a lot of play given to really imagining, creating, imagining-what-we-might-create, creating-what-we-might-imagine, etc., beyond it, and that’s what I was trying to give some representation to up there. I want to hope that our minds and our bodies and our movements haven’t been so colonized by big-institution thinking that we can hardly imagine or work outside or remember what came before them. No doubt, someone could figure out how to do all kinds of rad arts education/organizing from within the Boy Scouts, and I hope rad folks with different visions and approaches would support her in doing that, but let’s not think that being creative within such institutions is the limit to liberation-oriented work. Let’s imagine that as one piece, and know that some other pieces are, yeah, fuck this whole construct, step outside these institutions in the ways we can or feel inspired to, and create or revisit, try, something else.
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:59 pm #
Well, I’m one of those people mourning the Death of the Humanities, so I’ll admit that I’m biased, but here goes…
I obviously can’t speak for my colleagues, but I think that when most academics talk about the humanities dying, we’re aware that we’re using “humanities” as shorthand for “humanities courses in higher education.” Which is probably sloppy, and might just be reinforcing this idea that people don’t talk about literature and philosophy outside of a classroom. But I think (I hope) most of us use it knowing that the humanities are perfectly healthy outside of the classroom.
I guess I feel like it’s a pressing issue because aside from the economic concerns on the teaching end (about 70% of humanities instructors are now contingent, which means we work multiple part-time jobs for low pay with no health care), the people being affected the most by the scaling down of humanities courses are students without class and economic privilege. The humanities are pretty safe at the most expensive schools; at community colleges, however, they’re virtually nonexistent. Almost all you have are composition and grammar courses (which are constantly being canceled or crammed with too many bodies), taught by part-timers who are too frazzled and overloaded to put the necessary time into planning interesting, engaging classes. So if your family can spend $40K a year, you can have these exciting discussions about novels and historical movements and critical theory and anything else in the catalog that turns you on – but if you don’t have the cash, college is just an extension of the same rote exercises you had to do in high school (which was also probably tailored to more privileged people’s perceptions of your class or economic status). And when you consider the wealth of analytical skills and empowerment that comes from engaging critically with texts, we’re essentially helping rich kids become creative thinkers (and rewarding white male academics with full-time jobs teaching interesting classes) and tossing everyone else the crumbs.
And again, I think it’s a folly to believe that people can’t or won’t explore these areas outside of academia – but damn it, as long as we have academia, they should be able to explore it there, too!
But, finally, I do agree that our whole concept of academia and academics needs to be drastically overhauled. It’s terrifying that the academic industrial complex has become so powerful by sacrificing actual education. I think I’ve said this before elsewhere, but it’s mighty interesting that the humanities started “dying” right around the time white men had to allow everyone else to take part in them.
March 2nd, 2009 at 4:23 pm #
Julie,
Thanks for bringing all that info and perspective into the conversation. Being disconnected from academia, that stuff is all pretty much outside my scope of knowledge, so I’m grateful you’ve brought it in for discussing …
I think I had this moment when everyone was talking Saturday night, not being someone who has that conversation among academics in general, where I really didn’t get for a minute that folks were referring to that specific context – which is not to say I presume people aren’t aware that it’s a specific context, but that dropping into the conversation midstream as a non-academic, it was kind of disorienting and took a second for me to realize the context of the comments, which got me thinking …
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:52 pm #
Right, of course. And that’s good for me to know as an academic (or, well, a sort-of academic) – I am painfully aware that we can get pretty insular, especially when we’ve been turning this problem over amongst ourselves for years.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:22 pm #
BFP & Jess – thanks so much for your responses. I’m really brain-tired right now for real-life reasons and I’m sorry I can’t write anything more than that but please know that I really intensely appreciate your words & you have given me much to process & think over & take with me & go back to.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:53 am #
Just wanted to bop in and say how much I love this series and love your work. The juxtaposition of your different walks, at different times, places, from different backgrounds—yet reaching in the same direction is fascinating.
It’s been blowing my mind and yet I haven’t been commenting because I didn’t think I had anything to really add; I’m sitting here thinking “Wow!” What I really like on these walks is the showing of how not only the movement but the place of movement shapes thoughts/feelings/experiences/evocations/memories/daydreams….just thought you should know that you’ve got another fan!
Makes me want to go for a walk, which I haven’t done in a long while because it’s so damn cold and windy here (Illinois—the temp hasn’t been so bad lately, but add 20 mph of wind or so and damn!, nahh, it’s another curl up on the couch day.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:19 am #
Thanks, La Lubu! That is really really wonderful to hear. Truly, thanks thanks thanks for popping in and saying that.