Winter Sounds Like This

Image by Bob.Fornal via Flickr

The radiator hissing

The whirring hum of the floor heater

Howling wind

Bare branches clacking like some spooky typist

Groaning, cracking sheet ice on the river

The crackling, popping and hissing of a fire

Coffee gurgling in the pot

Clink of a teaspoon against bone china

Scraping of skates against fresh ice

Skis swishing through snow

Frozen feet stamping

The muffled thump of mittened hands slapping one another for warmth

The ker-thump! of a snowball hitting its target

The slhllllllump! of a wet pile of snow slithering off a roof

Crunch of feet across salt/gravel

I know that some of you — lucky things! — live in warm places, or places where our North American winter is your summer

What does winter sound like where you live?

Four Epiphanies

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It’s been quite the year. Here are my four (major) epiphanies for 2011, three pleasant, one not so much…

Why I work

Earlier this year, I took a fascinating test offered to me gratis by James Sale, a British businessman who found me on LinkedIn. His company, Motivational Maps, helps companies and workers find the best possible fit between their deepest personal values and their job. After taking this quick but incisive test, you’ll learn whether you most want to be a Builder, Friend, Star, Director or other role.

I emerged as a Creator and Seeker, which surprised me, but explained a lot. It clarified a wearying battle between my desire for a higher income and my joy in doing good work that satisfies me.

I’ve been duped for decades

The details are too grim and convoluted to share here, but I learned this year that my mother has been lying to me for a long time, relying on my ignorant goodwill. Words fail me on this one.

I’m spiritually hungry

I did an eight-day silent retreat this summer with Jose. I dreaded it, but learned a lot and came away moved and inspired: by the Buddhist teachings, the spirit of community, the wisdom and humor of our teachers and some new, helpful ways of thinking and behaving. (Visit my website if you’d like to read my piece about it from November’s Marie-Claire.)

Spending time in natural surroundings nurtures me deeply

For a New York Times story, I spent eight hours in a Central Park thicket studying wilderness survival techniques, which reminded me how much I love being outdoors, in nature, far away from machines and noise and screens and things that blink and beep. If 2012 allows, maybe it’s the year I finally buy a canoe, small sailboat or kayak so I can get out on the Hudson River and really enjoy it!

Have you had any epiphanies this year?

Aaaaah! Seven Soothing Things

Lake Ontario...Image via Wikipedia

Half an hour before I walked down the aisle to re-marry, after 19 years as a divorcee, I was sitting in a church pew, barefoot, my legs stretched out before me, savoring the moment.

“You’re calm, cool and collected,” the minister, said, surprised. No hyper-ventilating, no last-minute panic, no wardrobe malfunction. A bride just…happy and calm.

I realized that day why I was so calm, because I had included, without consciously thinking about them all, seven things that always soothe my soul. Enjoyed in combination, bliss!

Nature

I’m always happiest when I can easily escape into nature, and the church we chose for our wedding is set in a public park on an island. The little white building, from 1888, stands beneath ancient weeping willows, shaded by maples and oaks, a carpet of green grass all around. Ten minutes before the ceremony, the minister walked outside and began gathering huge armfuls of goldenrod, which he put into two tall metal buckets at the church door. I loved his spontaneity and this powerful reminder we were as much as part of that world as that of the church itself.

To get from the vestry to the church door, I walked, barefoot, through the grass, before slipping into my Manolos, connecting me to the earth.

During the silent moments of the service — which we deliberately built in — we could hear one sound from outside. Crickets.

Water

I’ve been a water-baby forever: sailing, water-skiing, swimming, canoeing, kayaking. I grew up in Toronto, on Lake Ontario, attended summer camp ages 8-17, always on the water, often living in a cabin where the lapping of waves on the shore was the lullaby soothing me to sleep each night. I now live with a clear, year-round view of the Hudson river and take a commuter train into Manhattan along tracks that hug its shoreline. I love being near water.

Animals

The photos of my father and I, standing outside the church awaiting the music of my processional, show us laughing so hard we could barely stand up…because the sound we were hearing was that of cows mooing from a nearby field. I’d forgotten that Centre Island also has a petting zoo with cows, sheep and other animals.

I’m much happier and calmer I become when I’m around dogs and horses, especially. (Cats, not so much.) One of my happiest moments anywhere ever was riding on an elephant’s neck (!) in Thailand.

Beauty

I thrive on physical beauty — in nature, design, color, architecture — and feel its absence keenly. I flee surroundings that are ugly, thoughtless, dirty or poorly maintained. I seek beauty everywhere I go, and am grateful and delighted every time I find it. Our church that day was spectacularly lovely, its stained glass windows glowing with late afternoon sunlight like jewels.

Intimacy

I don’t have many acquaintances and make little time for people unless they become, and want to be part of, my inner circle. Emotional intimacy matters deeply to me, and when I find it, I try to nurture it as the treasure it is. We had only 24 guests at our wedding, every one of them carefully chosen as the dearly beloved to us that they are.

History

Old places, buildings and landscapes with a long, deep, rich past, move me most deeply: the Grand Canyon, the Arctiche rough, wild,  landscape of Corsica. Shiny, new, sleek modern spaces leave me cold. I want the patina of others’ hands and lives, to know I, too, am a part of their tapestry, a continuum reaching back centuries, even millennia. Our church that day had the smell of sun-heated wood, a scent which shot me back to my 12-year-old self in the hall where we rehearsed our musicals at camp. Heaven!

Music

My wedding processional was, a capella, the lovely round Dona Nobis Pacem (Give Us Peace) and our processional the joyous and playful “You Are The Sunshine of My Life” by Stevie Wonder. Music is a daily pleasure, whether jazz, rock, classical, or big band.

What are some of the things that soothe, calm and satisfy your soul?

Just Another Species

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It’s too easy to think we’re it, we homo sapiens. The wise, rational ones.

Which is why I hunger to be in nature as often as possible. Only out there, walking, canoeing, kayaking, riding, on my bike, do I quickly and indelibly remember we’re just one of millions of species inhabiting our shared blue ball of Earth.

I was lucky enough, in my late 20s, to take two safaris in East Africa, one in Tanzania and one in Kenya. I had never before fully understood how poorly equipped the human body is for some habitats — without the necessary protection of camouflaging colors or fur or  feathers, scales, thorns or poisoned stingers.

The Equatorial sun was brilliant and harsh; I once lay directly beneath a large fallen tree trunk, desperate for the tiniest sliver of shade. Insects whirred and bit. The water was filled with all sorts of dangerous things that could burrow into our flesh or bloodstream.

The landscape was full of large, silent stalkers — how would we ever hear the lion before he arrived at our tent door? In the mornings, we opened it to discover a pile of elephant dung the size of an 18-wheeler tire. Right beside our tent.

It was a life-changing experience to be reminded how fragile and vulnerable we really are. That we are but one piece of a large ecosystem, and often its most disrespectful and destructive.

From an interesting and smart essay in today’s New York Times:

So, the conundrum: More than ever, an urban nation plagued by obesity, sloth and a surfeit of digital entertainment should encourage people to experience the wild — but does that mean nature has to be tame and lawyer-vetted?

My experience, purely anecdotal, is that the more rangers try to bring the nanny state to public lands, the more careless, and dependent, people become. There will always be steep cliffs, deep water, and ornery and unpredictable animals in that messy part of the national habitat not crossed by climate-controlled malls and processed-food emporiums. If people expect a grizzly bear to be benign, or think a glacier is just another variant of a theme park slide, it’s not the fault of the government when something goes fatally wrong.

This year, Yosemite is experiencing a surge of visitors — 730,000 in July, a record for a single month, they say…

“Many of these people aren’t used to nature,” said Kari Cobb, a Yosemite park ranger. “They don’t fully understand it. We’ve got more than 800 trails and 3,000-foot cliffs in this park. You can’t put guardrails around the whole thing.”

On this week’s bike ride, a cardinal flashed before my eyes. A deer and her fawn ambled across the trail in front of me. Hawks and eagles soared overhead.

As I walked the bike up a hill, I saw a skeleton flattened in the wet grass. A deer.

Our suburban town, from which I can see the glittering towers of Manhattan 25 miles south like Oz, is filled with wildlife: raccoons, deer, crows, wild turkeys, groundhogs, skunks, rabbits.

I love hanging out in their neighborhood, whizzing through their world.

I wonder what they think of us.

When and where do you most enjoy being outdoors?

Moved By Mountains

Mt. Rundle, one of my new favorite places in the world! Banff, Alberta. It's 330 million years old...Image by s.yume via Flickr

I’ve always thought of myself as a city girl. I love to dress up, eat out, look at art, attend theater.

But having just spent a week in the Rocky Mountains I came away so bereft at the thought of leaving them behind it was hard not to weep today when the Air Canada 767 finally took off from Calgary, taking me back to Vancouver for another week.

How can mountains, ones I didn’t even ski on or climb but merely admired from a distance, so move me?

Every morning, I opened my hotel room’s pale yellow striped curtains and stared straight up a steep, wooded mountain. If I peered off to the right, far in the distance, snow-covered peaks glowed rose in the dawn, disappeared into wreaths of snow or cloud, gleamed blue at dusk.

Having never lived near mountains, I had no idea how they change with every cloud and shaft of light, shifting shape and character hourly. Like an ever-changing baby’s face, I could watch them, mesmerized, for hours.

I had never felt such an intimacy with a landscape, enveloped by the crags surrounding me. I was up this morning at 6:30 to catch my bus, and ran about — my nostrils freezing shut, eyes weeping with cold, bare hands cramping, snatching earrings out of my pierced ears (they conduct cold!)  — snapping last-minute photos. As the bus raced east, I shifted from one side to the other taking more images through its windows, oblivious to what a gawping tourist I was being.

Mt. Rundle, one of the peaks I stared at every day in awe, is 330 million years old.

As we entered the endless suburban tracts outside Calgary, a local woman — heading off for a week’s warmth in Mexico — pointed out a “sundog” — a huge rainbow encircling the sun, thanks to light refracted through ice crystals in the air.

It sounds odd to say I’ll desperately miss a pile ‘o rocks, but I will.

What landscape has so touched you?

Something Different: Three Of My Fall Photos

I began my career as a photographer, and have sold my images to Time, The New York Times, and Washington Post. I shot these last weekend at the Rockefeller Preserve, a 750-acre park donated to the state of New York by the Rockefellers, who live nearby. I took these with the Canon G7 digital camera.

I hope you enjoy them — a break from all those words!

Does Nature Still Matter?

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How many trees can you recognize? Birds? On any given day, if you’re lucky enough to live near a forest or any large piece of land not covered with concrete and glass, and made the time to be there for a while, how many wild animals did you see, hear and know?

Does it matter if that number is zero?

New York Times writer Nick Kristof wrote recently about hiking with his 11-year-old daughter on the Pacific Crest Trail, complete with aching feet, mosquito bitten, soaked at 4:00 a.m. after failing to put up a tarp. It was in some measure an elegy for a generation of kids addicted to DVDs and video games, tethered by parental fear and loss of green space to a world where nature’s becoming one more app. As “the environment” heats up as an  issue, nature seem to get lost in the dust.

If, to many of us,  the natural world has become just one more amusing image on a screen we can flick on and off at will, nature is screwed. Really. We fight hard to protect, selfishly, what we know and love, what we believe to be of value, to us, our families, our friends and neighbors. Why protect — through arguing for smart legislation, attending town meetings, writing a check to an environmental organization — land to which you feel no profound connection? Abstractions, as any NGO fundraiser can wearily attest, aren’t compelling.

I live close enough to New York City that, glittering in the distance like Oz, I can see its towers from my street. Yet my winding residential road also has herds of deer and flocks of geese. Red-tailed hawks circle overhead daily, chased by crows — one hawk even landed on my balcony and stared into my eyes for a few long minutes; I felt like, and potentially was, prey. Several nearby streets are lined with raspberry bushes and I’ve seen rabbits, coyote, raccoons and turkey vultures, all within a mile of my home. In spring, traffic jams occur as the geese guide their goslings across the road.

I walk several times a week beside a reservoir and, over the years, have gotten to know and love this mile-long stretch, shaded about 90 percent of the way by tall trees that create a cool, welcoming cathedral on the hottest and most humid days. I’ve skated on the water’s frozen surface in winter and, most of the year, I look forward to seeing its turtles, swans and ducks. I dream, one day, of spotting the otters my neighbors have seen there.