Alexandersmap

    Month: April 2020

    • The Sound of Familiar

      “I hope you’re haunted by the music of my soul
      When I’m gone”
      – Greg Allman, My Only True Friend

      There is what feels like a thousand Black-capped Chickadees living in the holly bush next to my deck. They’re the state bird of both neighboring Massachusetts and Maine. New Hampshire, sitting between these two states, opted for the Purple Finch. Don’t tell that to this cast of characters – they don’t much care for state borders and such human concerns. The party never stops in that holly bush. But now and then a solo singer will fly up on a branch somewhere and sing that familiar “fee-bee” song and it transports me back to earlier days. That song’s been playing my entire life.

      One of the first things I notice when traveling is the ambiance is different. That’s obvious to everyone when you’re seeing the Eiffel Tower or the Grand Canyon, but close your eyes and listen past the sounds of humanity.. There’s a vibration to any place, a soundtrack playing in the background. Wind, water and trees offer their voice, and of course the local bird population sings their own greatest hits like a house band in a local pub. I’m a bit of a migratory bird myself, stuck in a cage at the moment. But I’ve learned to listen in new places and long for the exhilaration of immersion in faraway places.

      With fewer long drives I’m listening to fewer podcasts. I’m reading more, and I’ve grown tired of most of the interviewers I regularly listen to. Instead I favor silence more, or listen to WMVY streaming from Martha’s Vineyard. We all have our greatest hits playing on repeat, but I’ve always sought out new music. WMVY offers music you don’t hear on some corporate iHeart radio station. Respectfully, I prefer to find my own soundtrack. Someday, maybe, I’ll get back to that island. In the meantime I listen to the familiar voices and think about the ferry ride to Vineyard Haven and fried fish and beer at The Newes From America. Island sounds are different from mainland sounds, but for the life of me I’ve lost the sounds beyond the bustle of crowds and the crash of waves. I do need to get re-acquainted, picking up just where we left off like old friends seem to do years between seeing each other.

      The music of a place goes beyond the songs played on the local radio station or in the local pub, it includes the buzz of outboard engines or lawn mowers or street sweepers or chain saws off in the distance, of laughter and chatter coming out of open windows, and the birds occupying the local shrubs catching up on local gossip. The place doesn’t hope you’ll remember it, it just keeps on going as it always has, so long as humanity doesn’t bulldoze it all away anyway. I suppose Greg Allman was thinking about his legacy in the lyrics of this song. We all hope we’ll be remembered in our own way. I write and let it all fall out the way it may. Mostly it’s a familiar record I might return to someday. Like fond memories, revisited.

      I believe I’ve held onto this post long enough. I think it’s time to release this bird from its cage.

    • London Eye

      I’m reflecting on the places I’ve been to instead of the ones I can’t get to at the moment. One place that every tourist seems to go to is the London Eye. And so too I made my way into one of the pods last November for my own check on the tourist checklist. Opened to the public in 2000 to coincide with the new millennium, it also goes by the name Millennium Eye. According to Wikipedia, it’s “the most popular paid tourist attraction in the United Kingdom with over 3.75 million visitors annually”. It was once the tallest Ferris Wheel in the world but has fallen to fourth place on the list. That might be true, but I don’t have a burning desire to go on the other three ahead of it. The London Eye has a certain charm the others haven’t earned. Location helps, of course, but there’s also a level of cultural history the London Eye has spun through that makes it feel more timeless than its twenty years.

      It takes 30 minutes to make the trip around, and that feels about right to me. It’s slow enough that you can take your time getting a picture but fast enough that you aren’t getting restless. I took the ride with some random strangers and some close family. It’s interesting to experience the trip through other’s eyes, one very uncomfortable with heights who chose to stay right on the bench in the middle, the rest of us walking about to the edges of the glass pod looking around at seemingly all of London. Circling slowly to the highest point, you’re struck by the magnificence of the city around you, and the beauty of the Thames River as it flows below. It’s worth the money to experience this, and I’m grateful that I went.

      March was the 20th birthday for the London Eye. It sits empty for the first time since it opened. Tough way to celebrate your birthday, I’d say. By my math, there have been roughly 75 million passengers in that time. That’s a lot of souls spinning around in that bit of sky. Mine amongst them. It’s a staggering statistic, and one the architects and engineers who built this magnificent machine can point to with pride. The experience was just as amazing for me in year 19 1/2 as it was for the first passengers in 2000. A chance to fly above the city, marveling at it all. But I took some of that time in our glass pod in the sky to examine this extraordinary structure supporting us on our slow turn. This amazing time machine of glass and steel and wondering, wandering souls collectively awestruck for two decades and counting. Surely a generous share of awe must be given to the London Eye?

    • Pay Your Dues

      “You have to assemble your life yourself – action by action.  And be satisfied if each one achieves it’s goal, as far as it can.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      I wrote an entire blog post alternating between English and French to practice my French.  But I relied heavily on Google Translate to accomplish the task, and frankly it felt too much like cheating to me to publish it.  I’ll attempt it again another time, but with me slogging through it, not by typing an entire sentence and having it translated for me.  Handy tool when you really need it, but there’s no soul in that.  And no satisfaction when it’s done.

      There’s value in the work.  Learning by pushing through the challenges.  Becoming better over time.  I learned that rowing in college.  Bloody knuckles from getting pinched on the gunwales when the boat suddenly tilted to port (likely my fault for lunging too far out).  Bruised back from catching an oar handle of the starboard rower behind me (from bad timing on one or both of our parts).  Blisters upon blisters on the hands (a necessary evil, for as you harden your resolve through thousands of strokes your soft skin must adapt too).  All of it is paying your dues in blood and sweat and time.  Maybe a tear or two on those especially cruel rows when coach would have us turn around and do it again.  But the work payed dividends, and changed me in the process.

      And so it is with other work we must do.  Lingering projects that won’t finish themselves.  The blessedly passé commute to work.  You know sometimes it will suck, but get on with it already.  Working when you don’t feel like it.  Cleaning up the dirty dishes and cleaning the bathroom and washing the clothes and weeding the garden and picking up the branches after a windy night on the edge of the forest.  And it turns out the mind stops protesting and you get into the routine and you see the finish line and push on through until you’re finally, blessedly, done.  Until tomorrow.

      And that’s life, one task at a time, repeated.  Sure, a little rest and relaxation is nice too, but the mind and body weren’t built for sloth.  We all need to get on with the work at hand.  And so I try to move, try to keep up with things, try to make the most of the time at hand, and save the little life hacks like using Google Translate for when I really need it.  There’s value in the work, and we know it instinctively.

      We all know people who skate through life, not doing much, talking a good game, telling the world how much they’re doing and how important their contribution is….  but in your gut you know they’re full of it.  Really, you don’t have to look too far for a great example of that.  But that’s not us.  We pay our dues.  Look at the pictures of nurses with scars on their face and the backs of their ears from wearing a mask all day, every day.  Who are we to complain when the world is full of people paying a tougher toll than us?  Do the work.  Pay your dues.  Even when you feel you’ve earned the right to relax a bit, pay your dues anyway.  We’ll all be better for having endured.

    • For My Next Trip Around The Sun

      For my next trip around the sun, if I may be so presumptuous, I’ll try harder to meet the Aurora Borealis on its terms. Maybe finally catch those evasive Northern Lights, I really do need to meet up with them this time around.  I’ll travel again to faraway places.  Places previously unknown to me that caught my imagination in a travel article or a book.  Places that Google street view hasn’t posted online.  I know these places are out there, I’ve tried in vain to reach them with a mouse before.

      For my next trip around the sun, if good fortune should shine upon me, I’ll rest a hand on the trunk of a Sequoioideae, but first I’ll learn how to spell it without copy and paste.  I once spent a week within an hour’s drive of Redwood National Forest and never bothered to go visit.  Some excuse about work, I suppose.  I don’t recall that mattering in the end anyway.  Touching a redwood tree and looking up to the sky would have mattered far more.

      For my next trip around the sun, if the stars align and I make the full trip, I’m going to celebrate the graduation of my first born and prepare for the graduation of my second born.  The world has changed in ways that seemed fictional not too long ago, and presents challenges that you and your generation will rise up to meet.  I hope my generation and my parents generation does the same and you have something to build on.  The world isn’t fair, we all know that, but a few generations collaborating on solutions to the world’s problems seems a logical next step.  The world is ready for non-violent transformation.  Will it begin with now?

      For my next trip around the sun, should I be so bold, I’ll strive more.  Strive for more meaningful contributions, strive for more engagement in conversation, strive to be more disciplined in the food and drink I take in, strive to be more consistent with the daily habits that make a difference today and for however many trips around the sun you have left.  We all know what we should do, how many do it?  I strive to do it this time around the sun.   You know I’ll write about it, so feel free to poke and prod me should I fall behind.

      For my next trip around the sun, if it should come to pass, I’ll savor more.  Savor the sounds and sights and smells that make up the moments of the day.  Sip a little slower, chew a little more, slow down just enough, look up from the phone and see what’s happening around you.  Savor the time passing by instead of grabbing it tighter and watching it escape anyway, like beach sand in a tight fist.  Savor the long walks and the long talks and the short moments that catch your breath.

      For my next trip around the sun, should the gods look down upon my favorably, I’ll look up more.  Look up at the sky to track our progress over the next year.  Look up old friends you don’t talk to nearly enough.  Look up at the stars and learn to identify them by the way they align with other stars from our unique perspective in the universe.  Look  out, up and out again as the sun rises, warms the skin and the earth around you and drops down again below the horizon, as we all must do eventually.  And so you begin another trip around the sun.  Where will it take you?

    • Something Ethereal

      When this is all over with I’m going to a favorite breakfast place and settle into a deep conversation with my table mates, offering artful-disguised-as-clumsy banter to the waitress who’s heard it all before but plays along anyway, and savor eggs cooked by an unseen savior who hides just on the other side of a small window. When this is over that’s what I’ll do.

      Last night we watched the crescent moon reluctantly drop down in the western sky, coaxed along in a slow dance of wonder by the stunning beauty of Venus. I burned an entire wheelbarrow of split wood in a pagan tribute to the dancers, sending sparkling tributes upwards to the heavens. My breathing raspy from the wood smoke and my mind calculating the cure for one too many gin and tonics before I turned in for the night. The pandemic hasn’t robbed us of this ritual just yet. May these nights last forever (maybe with less gin – sneaky spirit that it is).

      The morning after such celebrations is a great time to go out for breakfast and make new memories over super-heated coffee. Perhaps that’s why I miss it so right now, or maybe I’m just ready for close banter with the outer circle again. We make our splash in this world and our ripples ring outward, intersecting with other rings from other splashes and others still, all bouncing off one another in a continuous dance across the surface of our lives. Social isolation removes the bounces, and we just ring across the surface touching nothing. Offering deeper moments with our immediate circle to be sure, but we need the interaction with others to influence our concentric circles. There’s only so much introspection you can tolerate without testing out ideas on the rest of the world.

      On their own the crescent moon and brilliant Venus are striking, but when they dance together it becomes something breathtaking, something… ethereal. So too we might offer our own mark on the world as individuals, but need others around us to truly illuminate our place in the universe. So there you are; two analogies in one blog post, blended together and served piping hot, like that coffee would be. Cue the waitress rolling her eyes.

    • Spring Chorus At The Edge

      It began with a White-Throated Sparrow, with its extraordinary high-pitched song. It likely wasn’t the first singer of the morning, but it was the first to draw my attention. Soon I was sitting outside in the cold, dim light, sipping coffee and wondering at the divisi chorus rising with the lux level. I’m no expert on the songs of the forest, and cheat with an app to help me pick out unfamiliar singers. I mourn lost opportunities to learn such things as I grew up, but I push that aside and double down on learning now. Instead of mastering the songs of forest birds growing up I mastered the catalog of music spanning the 50’s to the 90’s. It’s a trade-off I can live with.

      But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn now. An active, engaged mind is the best student. And I’m quickly noting the various singers amongst me as I slowly walk around the edge of the woods: Robin, Carolina Wren, White-Breasted Nuthatch, Mourning Dove, Purple Finch, Black-Capped Chickadee, Cardinal, Northern Flicker, Crow, House Wren, Blue Jay, Eastern Towhee, Bluebird, Wild Turkey, Red-Bellied Woodpecker… I hear or see each of them in the span of an hour. There are others I don’t recognize and the app fails to decipher them amongst the dominant voices of the Nuthatch, Cardinal and the White-Throated Sparrow who started it all today. So it goes. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I’m happy to add another couple of singers to my catalog of favorites.

      The morning progresses and the hum of leaf blowers and lawn mowers and some form of pumping truck create their own chorus. The sounds of suburbia. I live on the edge of the woods, but the other edge is getting on with their weekend chores. All good things must come to an end I suppose. Until tomorrow, woodland chorus. Save me a seat up front, won’t you?

    • A Rainy Day Soundtrack in Five Jackson Browne Songs

      It’s raining today.  It’s April in New England and such things are to be expected.  I set my alarm every night for 6:30 AM, and I’m usually up well before it ever goes off.  This morning I was finishing a dream I don’t recall except that someone was about to speak and as they opened their mouth the alarm went off and it all went away.  Feel free to analyze that if you wish, I’m moving on to other things.  6:30 is sleeping in for me, and I found myself behind the eight ball on my morning routine.

      But back to that rain.  It reminded me of this collection of Jackson Browne songs I’ve been collecting in my drafts waiting patiently to fly.  So why not now?  It’s not easy to create a list of only five songs from a writer as prolific as Jackson Browne, I mean, I played the Running on Empty album on repeat for months when I was 17 or so.  That one would be a favorite album, but only one of the songs on it made it onto this list.  I think the rain also impacted my choice of songs, all of which are introspective, forgoing classic hits like Running On Empty, Doctor My Eyes and Somebody’s Baby in favor of deeper water.  Anyway, here are five Jackson Browne songs that are particularly meaningful for me:

      You Love The Thunder
      “When you look over your shoulder
      And you see the life that you’ve left behind
      When you think it over, do you ever wonder?
      What it is that holds your life so close to mine”
      This song, along with The Road and The Load-Out, was a highlight and the one I play frequently from this album.

      For A Dancer
      “Into a dancer you have grown
      From a seed somebody else has thrown
      Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
      And somewhere between the time you arrive
      And the time you go
      May lie a reason you were alive
      That you’ll never know”
      Jackson wrote this for a friend who died in a fire, and it’s one of those songs I return to when I think about people full of life taken too soon from this world.

      The Pretender
      “I want to know what became of the changes
      We waited for love to bring
      Were they only the fitful dreams
      Of some greater awakening?
      I’ve been aware of the time going by
      They say in the end it’s the wink of an eye
      When the morning light comes streaming in
      You’ll get up and do it again
      Amen.”
      If the pandemic is doing anything, it’s pushing people to question the endless cycle of mindless work they do.  If you don’t love your life, change it.  This song is the great reminder of the unfulfilled potential in all of us bursting to get out, if you’ll just stop doing what you think you have to do.

      Your Bright Baby Blues
      “Baby if you can hear me
      Turn down your radio
      There’s just one thing
      I want you to know
      When you’ve been near me
      I’ve felt the love
      Stirring in my soul”
      The link above is a Don Kirchner performance in 1976 where Jackson’s backing band was The Eagles.  I’m old enough to remember a lot about the 70’s, but young enough to have missed most of the craziness happening at the time.  I imagine there was a hell of a party after these guys played this song.

      These Days
      “These days I’ll sit on corner stones
      And count the time in quarter tones to ten, my friend
      Don’t confront me with my failures
      I had not forgotten them”
      I understand that Jackson wrote this when he was 16.  Talk about being an old soul at a young age.  I’m a long way from what the lyrics express at the moment, but haven’t we all been here?

       

    • In Spite of It All

      “Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement. The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay.” – Robert Greene, Mastery

      Change is constant, and so must we be constantly embracing change. I’m grateful for the places I’ve been, for the things I’ve done, because if I hadn’t done them I might never have gotten to them. The pandemic has highlighted this for many people, I suppose. The world has changed massively in a short amount of time. Can we ever go back to what we were before? God, I hope not. So many sleepwalking through life, so much apathy. We have to live with urgency before we run out of our aliveness.

      I have friends currently anchored off a small island in Puerto Rico weighing their next move. They would tell you everything they initially planned has been upended by circumstances. They started later than they wanted because some critical work on their boat took longer than anticipated. They spent unexpected time in Bermuda because of weather. And now a combination of timing a weather window and global reaction to a pandemic has them waiting to finally weigh anchor and move again. But despite the strange twists of fate, to have begun when they did meant everything. Had they waited just one more year they might never have started. Might never have seen all they’ve seen. Learned all that they’ve learned about themselves and the world. To have started made all the difference.

      There are days when the writing is a struggle, when I want to just take one day off, but I write anyway and get something out of it. It’s hard to write about travel and my experiences in the world when I’m not traveling and experiencing the world. But you know that too. We all do now. These are my own plans upended by circumstances, and I’ve embraced the changes and learned more about myself along the way. I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be at this point in my writing, but I’m much farther along than I might have been had I not started, and had I not kept going despite it all.

      This pandemic will end at some point. We’ll all be transformed by it. But it will end and the world will shift into some state of new normal. That will be our own weather window to weigh anchor and get on with the business of living. Will we sail for new harbors, embracing the changes in our lives, or will we cling to the safe and familiar? There’s only one path to growth, to being alive, and our weather window is all too brief. Clearly we must weigh anchor, in spite of it all.

    • A Bit of Thoreau and Sagan on Earth Day

      I toyed with the idea of a long blog post about Earth Day. Instead I’ll drop these two quotes. I think Thoreau and Sagan would have gotten along quite well. I’d hardly keep pace, but would love to sit in on that conversation:

      “This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” – Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

    • Stay Up Late

      I stayed up so late last night that it was almost today. Apparently people still do this. Personally, I’ve grown too fond of early mornings over the years to spend much time up past 10 PM or so. We all choose the toll we want to pay of missing out. We can pick only one: late night fun, early morning productivity or sleep deprivation. Life is full of sacrifices.

      This is serious business of course. Marriages end on smaller things than sleep cycles. Like “why did you put the dishes away in that cabinet?” or “I was cleaning out the attic and threw away that box full of old stuff”, or something like that. Sleep cycles, and lack of sleep, amplify small annoyances into bigger things than they should be. When you’re socially isolating together for an extended time it’s best to minimize such sources of contention all around. We’ve learned long ago to give each other space. Hers is running and late nights. Mine is gardening and early mornings. We make it work.

      I’m not sure the standup comedian we watched on television was worth the hour of sleep I sacrificed, but the toll was paid, the coffee is hot, all will be forgiven. Just don’t do it every night. A life together is made up of these little special moments, repeated, with a soundtrack of The Association’s soothing greatest hits playing softly in the background. “Say, why did you put this dish in this cabinet? You know it’s always gone over here, right? I’m sorry? … okay, I think I’ll have another coffee. Would you like one too?”

      I think tonight I’ll get to bed at a decent hour…