What's Next?

“To affect the quality of the day is the highest of the arts.”

-- Henry David Thoreau

How many of us are really living the life we dreamed when we were six years old, or even twelve, maybe twenty-one?

Aren’t we running too fast, over-scheduling ourselves, feeling that we have no time?

What’s next?

Nothing in society teaches us to live in the now—everything is “What’s next?”

When we enter grade school, we feel the pressure to do well so we can get into college. When we get to college we are asked, “What’s next? What is our major? What job will we have?

We look for the ideal mate to make our lives fulfilled and joyful. We wait for children. We wait for them to sleep through the night. We have an eye on their education, their college.

Remember when you were a kid and you laid on the grass and felt the cool dampness of it?

You were lying on a living pallet, and as you lie there with the sunshine a blanket of warm on your skin, you looked into the sky and watched a whiff of white gas gather itself into a cloud.

Can’t you smell the grass, feel the sun?

Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

 Recently I reread a book I had read about 20 years ago and loved the author all over again. It was Dorothy Gilman, and her book was A New Kind of Country.

She was a lady alone, her boys were in college, and for $10,500 she bought a house and ten acres in Nova Scotia. She went there to find a new kind of country, one in which she could “Front only the essentials.”

During a Christmas visit back to New York, at a dinner party, the host turns to her and says, “It’s high time you told us about your move to Nova Scotia. Which I certainly envy you doing.”

“Yes,” his wife says, “I’m so curious. Tell us, for instance, what you do every day.”

Dorothy was about t reply when the friend who accompanied her to the party, said, “Oh, I can tell you that. She gets up at dawn, chops wood, milks the cows, builds fires, does a little writing, eats fish, and goes to bed at sunset. Now tell me, she continues. “what you’ve heard about the Johnsons’ divorce.”

 

 

I, too, feel I must be working all day, to read a book during the day is somehow frivolous, so I squeeze in a little reading before I fall asleep at night.  I’m caught up with the need to be doing “important” stuff,  too.

 

In his book, Medicine Power, Brad Steiger quotes a one-hundred-year-old medicine man named Thomas Largewhiskers. “I don’t know what you learned from books, but the most important thing I learned from my grandfathers was that there is a part of the mind that we don’t really know about and it is that part that is most important in whether we become sick or remain well.”

 

Oh, It’s Halloween—go scare yourself silly.

 

Comment:

So true! I remember well the oak tree up the 'D' hill by Grandma Willett's , climbing the hill, lying in the weeds to look up at the clouds to see what the might be......and look out over the area below extending to the river. There was a retired horse in that pasture named, Captain, whom I had asked the owner if I could climb on/sit and pretend as well as stand on while he grazed. Almost the same mentality as drinking out of a hose, 'eating' the mud pies, riding in the back of a pickup.......M.

Traveling With Joyce

To the grocery store on a rainy day. 

I looked up at chattering overhead...

Daughter, grandson, and I drove to Albany, their first visit, my second. We wanted to see the carving in the basement. And there was the senior carver, Larry, telling us about carousels, and that this one has been carved in the old tradition, by hand, even with the carving tools being sharpened with a leather strap.

And he told us that many people work on each animal--this is on purpose to keep one person from claiming possession. Within the hollow belly of an animal is a time capsule of all the people who worked on it.

Do you know the difference between a Carousel and a Merry-go-round?


A carousel is fixed, usually in a building or a Pavilion. a merry-go-round is movable, such as those in traveling amusement parks.

And then driving home down I-5

Monday came and with it a celebration of the leaves. A footbridge leads from the parking lot on one side of the Willamette River to a park on the other side. Many people come and go across the bridge walking or with bikes, and some leading dogs. Sweetpea proudly pranced across it as though she was a charger.

A walk through the Park.

Back on our home street, I hear this from the tree, "Hey man, I was sleeping, you know, when suddenly something cold hit me, and I woke up with one limb red as a lobster."

A block from our house I sit under a spreading walnut tree,

Home, I am met by our Magnolia tree, and I think,  Hum, all these Magnolia leaves will soon be on the ground, our ground... 

But, come spring

our Pegasus Magnolia tree will awaken with buds in her hair.

Our Purpose

For the past 29 days I have been doing a self-imposed process. I’ve been taking and posting a photograph a day.

If someone had asked me what I did during the past month, I would hem and haw, either not wanting to explain, not remembering, or making small my experience. Sometimes it does appear we do not accomplish much, we go through our daily process and nightly sleep, only to get up and do it all over again.

Taking those pictures made me notice what was around me and to find something noteworthy in it.  It made me keep my word. It was a journal in pictures.

There is nothing terribly fancy in my pictures. It is life as I see it, beautiful flowers wet with rain, a tiny frog, baby chicks, carousals. Go for a walk and what do you find? A horse coming to the fence to greet you, a tree turning color behind your house*, mushrooms in the yard.

Me and my phone walking  around.  One more photo to go.

 All are posted on www.travelwithjoyce.com

And now about our purpose:

Ever since I heard the writer/ researcher Michael Tellinger say, “Our purpose is to raise the consciousness of the people,” I said, “Yes. That’s it.”

This is the top purpose, you might have sub-purposes, like pursuing your dream of becoming an artist, or building a hospital in Africa, but first and foremost, we ought to uplift the consciousness of the people that populate this planet.

We do not need to fix people; we need to assist them in fixing themselves. One by one if people popped out of their limitations, the world would be transformed without our lifting a finger. And we could say that rarely do we find a broken person, only people in want of something.

Evidence of my claim is that hordes of people are seeking out healing experiences, joining consciousness-raising groups, and studying Quantum physics to understand where they fit into the cosmos. People throng to Tony Robbins events with the belief that their lives will improve because of it. Millions follow the TED talks with presenters encouraging us to live our dream, follow our bliss, and live the life for which we were born.

All this tells me people are hungry to know and to understand where they fit into the cosmos. People throng together to bring fresh water to Africa, to begin a peace movement, to stand up for green movements, promote solar energy, animal rights, clean ocean, and healthy forests.

See, people do care.

The negative side is upping the ante as well. Perhaps we have negativity running scared. Movies feature violence unprecedented, with writers coming up with atrocities that rival the inquisition. Television, once fun, and a cultural unifier, has become to use Seth Godin’s phrase “An instrument of dissatisfaction.” Either it presents something we can’t obtain, or it tells us that something is the matter with us for which a product can fix.

Don’t listen. Don’t watch.

We have become polarized over politics to the extent that we can hardly have a civil conversation. The Democrats think the Republicans are stupid. The Republicans think the Democrats are losers. You can shake your head and say, that’s about right, yet, remember the neighbor who took you to the hospital when your little boy broke his arm? She was of the opposite party from you, yet, she was your friend. It is hard to hate someone close up.

“Dehumanizing,” according to sociologist Brene’ Brown , “always starts with language, often followed by images.” We call people aliens, cockroaches, or savages, to justify exterminating them, ostracizing them, delegating them to subhuman status, or just plain not liking them. When I was a teenager I read that in 20 years it would be as abhorrent to us to kill a person as it was then to eat one.  Whew, I thought, however, I must wait a while longer.

We have been enslaved for millennia, and largely still are. That’s where we need to assert our independence. And people are—when employment became ridiculous to obtain even with advanced degrees, people turned to entrepreneurship. 

We are a creative bunch.

The best account I have read of unleashing your creative self, came from #Don Hahn, the producer of The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast (animated version). He was the son of a pastor, and his Sunday morning memories were of the fragrance of coffee and doughnuts wafting up from the basement. One morning his teacher read a Bible verse that changed his life. She read that God created humans in his own image. Wow, thought Hahn, I am related to God.  A creative relationship, like the potter to his clay, the painter to his canvas, the baker to his bread. And, God is crazy about creativity—oh he must have had a few false starts, like dinosaurs, and giants, but look at his successes.  Then, thought the young Hahn, if I am related to God, I must be creative too. (Hahn was an animator for Disney.)

“Rather than searching for life’s meaning, know that you have the power to create it.” –#Marie Forleo

Multnomah Falls Still Roar

Monday Sept 25, 2017

I must write this while it is raw.

When I read that the firefighters where striving to save the bridge over Oregon’s Multnomah Falls my heart ached. The bridge! A fire decimating the forest around Multnoma Falls? It can’t be.

When I was eight years old I saw the falls for the first time, and our love affair was instant. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. And over the years we often hiked to the bridge and looked over its cement railing to the tumultuous water spurting out beneath us. When I was a kid we drove up the Columbia River Gorge, past the falls, to Portland. Now we live on the west side of the gorge and last Sunday my husband and I drove down the always exquisite gorge to our little home town of The Dalles.  

Mulnomah Lodge, a stone structure with a cedar roof, sits at the base of the falls.

When flames ripped across the ridge at the top of the falls, they swept down the hillside, and raced toward the Lodge and all those cedar shakes.

The firefighters had their marching orders: “Protect the lodge.”

It was an exhausting overnight firefight. They brought in sprinkling trucks and drew water from the creek. The one that made the falls, and flows steadily toward the Columbia? 

See the falls was instrumental in saving its Lodge.

“Multnomah Lodge is the icon of Oregon,” said Lance Lighty, a Eugene-Springfield Fire battalion chief called in to help manage the blaze. “We didn’t want Oregon to lose that. And we weren’t going to let the fire win on this one.”

I couldn’t believe it when I heard that the Gorge was on fire.

Yesterday when husband dear and I drove to The Dalles, and passed Multnomah Falls we could see that the bridge and the lodge was still there. And looking to the bluffs we could see that the burn had been chased by the wind into a serpentine pattern.

Strange, seeing the scars that were once green trees, and seeing that portions burned, yet next to it giant green Douglas fir trees stood healthy.

I heard that the fire jumped the Columbia River—a mile wide strip of water one would think would be the best fire berm in the world, but winds being what they are, and cinders floating on currents, a spark can travel a long way. Thus an area on the Washington side of the river burned as well.

I was happy to see that the area around the gorge still had green trees and was still gorgeous, but the fire is still burning, out of sight of the highway, and about 50% contained. Sunday, however, the air was clear.

Looking on the bright side, perhaps this fire will rejuvenate the forest, fertilize the soil, clear the underbrush, and open some pine cones that only reproduce when fire has melted the wax that binds them shut.

We must drive by in a year or so to see the recovery.  Some trees will survive. Some will be gone. Some will grow up from the roots. We’ll see.

My mother and I moved to Oregon when I was seven years old. We moved from the flatlands of Illinois to mountainous Oregon-- eye-candy to a flatlander.

The soldier-boy my mother married had enticed her with images of his home town of The Dalles. It is nestled beside the Columbia River east of the Cascade Mountain range with its resultant rain shadow. This leaves The Dalles’ topography close to a barren prairie. In spring, though, the hills emerge triumphant. The area is known for its fruit, and in the spring the enormous orchards burst into color, and little wildflowers sprang up and spring shoots transform the area. The rest of the year, set me up with eyes that love green.

And as they say, you can’t go home again. You can, but it hurts.

What was once home isn’t home anymore, guess that’s the reason they say you can’t go home again. The Dalles feels worn compared to its life when I was a child, relishing horseback rides, camping trips, and excursions to the creek to fish.

The Dalles Dam desimated Celilo Falls that narrow strip of river that was a Native American fishing ground. (A treaty said the Native Americans could fish there forever.)  Once, so it has been said, salmon were so thick you could walk across the river on their backs.

We have a lot to apologize for.

My husband’s brother said that they used sonar to determine if the rugged basalt flow that made Celilo Falls still existed under the lake behind the dam. Some proposed that the rock formation, now buried under so many tons of water, had been blasted away removing any possibility of future litigation, for it is a sore point with many people. But the rocks are still there, neither are they silted in as some had surmised. Future generations may have them back. Someday we will probably have no use for dams. But we will always have use for a river.

Imagine this: You know how prospectors pan for gold in creeks? Perhaps those rocks have collected gold dust over the years, the rushing water upstream washing it down to the now buried Celilo Falls.

Does it then belong to the Native Americans?

Ha!

I’m dreaming.

While in The Dalles, we drove past my parents old property on Cherry Heights, and I didn’t even recognize the spot. It was as though straw covered.

The house—gone. The terraced lawn my mother kept so beautiful—gone. The crabapple tree that blossomed, a bouquet in the front yard, pink flowers along with green leaves that was so gorgeous drivers stopped to take pictures of it—gone. The cherry orchard, peach orchard, and apricot orchard—all gone, as were the apple trees that grew abundantly around the house. And that peach tree in the front yard with its peaches so juicy you could hardly eat one without choking? Gone.

Don’t go home again. It isn’t there.

The museum where my brother-in-law and wife volunteer, rather bothered me, not because it wasn’t an excellent museum, and I do believe in preserving history, but except for the nostalgia I just talked about regarding my childhood home, and the memory of good times, it is best to look ahead.

Looking back works if we learn from it, but it does not provide uplifting thoughts.  

I believe in a better world, a forward thinking world, not holding onto the old ways. But remember how resourceful those people were, the ingenuity of the men with their farm equipment, the arrowheads of the Native Americans, the creativity of the women, beading, quilts, some artwork made from their own hair. These people used whatever resources they had on hand.

And regarding the falls--
jim Ryan

Writer for The Oregonian, said:

 “Gone are the swarms of snapshot-seeking tourists at the foot of Multnomah Falls. The hordes of hikers are nowhere to be seen. There are no diners in the lodge. No fight for parking.

“But the falls don’t need an audience. They continue to roar.”