May 30, 2004

• THINGS THAT REFRESH MY SOUL

  Nature

  This is the river that runs through the city where I live now and also ran beside the farm where I grew up from about age five till I left home for college. I’ve lived in big cities a lot in my life – Seattle, Oakland, New York City (where I was born), San Francisco, Moscow (Russia), Paris (France), and of course Portland, Oregon since 1984. And running through it all, like the Willamette River, is that experience of spending hours and days and weeks and months and years with the silence of nature. It was pretty much my only entertainment as an only child of very busy parents who were keeping the farm running. I sat by the water, collected bird nests after watching the eggs hatch and the babies grow and leave, almost got stung by bee swarms, fished for pollywogs in muddy sloughs, fell out of barn lofts, and mainly wandered daily over the 200 acres breathing in the balance and steadiness of it, and the birth, growth, and dying cycles. The river flooded some years, the summers were very hot, we ate fresh vegetables and fruit from our gardens and trees and ate meat from our own cows and pigs and eggs from our chickens. We didn’t even have supermarkets in those days and I have no memories of shopping for food in stores as a child. Today I am trying to turn my tiny city back yard into a place where I can close out the city noises and the sight of neighbors I don’t know and bring it back – it only takes the sound of one bird some days just at dawn.
  Deep Thought: One way I think you can tell if you have a curse on you is if you open a box of toothpicks and they all fly up and stick in your face.
  Today I am grateful for: English Laurel

  • 10:45 am
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