labyrinths & lupines & thanks

This morning, with sun and nothing pressing to do, I looked up information on creating labyrinths. While tracing or planting our own labyrinth is not the most practical of things for us to do, especially outdoors and in this pretty bad and typically cold weather, it is something I want to create one day.

Lately I’ve been reading, hearing, overhearing or witnessing people tell one another: That is so you! Sometimes this is addressed to me, other times it’s something general and in the air… I’ve been wondering what this means with more intensity recently, because I haven’t really been feeling like myself. I wonder what that even means? Who am I, really? And who are you? And are we really different?

Instead of identifying, and thus strongly attaching, ourselves to certain ephemera: interests, likes, personality traits, states of being, etc., aren’t we supposed to be trying to transcend all this stuff? I imagine a lot of people may disagree with such a view and decide it kind of airy. But what I mean is, the more names, designations and identity traits we tape to ourselves, the more bound we are to things that don’t really matter… not in the end. (Here I imagine someone completely wrapped up in duct tape of varying colors and snug beneath pieces of paper with lots of nouns and adjectives—no verbs, unable to move.)

The more we try to differentiate ourselves from and disown each other, the further we get from the truth. Which lies, I believe, somewhere more in the realm of union. We like bad news and gory details, mostly because we are capable of such things. We like to complain or talk smack, because we prefer to distance ourselves from certain people, behaviors and ways of living. But all that really does is sow negativity seeds into our hearts. The seeds, of course, work as magnets, so we end up attracting exactly what we claim to abhor (or at least dislike).

How we label ourselves happens consciously and subconsciously, and we tend to make the labels negative or positive, instead of accepting ourselves and the things around us as they are. In this way, even the “positive” carries an implied “negative” charge with it.

So what does this have to do with me not feeling myself. There’s something bluer these days and so much more earthbound. I’ve been feeling frustrated lately, and fighting against this frustration instead of… well, embracing it as the fleeting thing that it is. Everyone feels sad or far away or discombobulated or aggravated sometimes. But fighting with our emotions usually has the effect of honing them, knife-sharp. And since it’s hard not to succumb to knives, we spiral further into this place and begin to identify with our emotions, and so they grow.

Lucky for me, Serkan stays patient and is more of a problem-solver than a problem-maker. He tells me exactly what I would say to me if I could at said moment. And since I say similar things to other people , I am able to listen to him. He talks to the part of me that knows I’m being a fool, not to the part that is in the middle of being dramatically foolish.

This morning I was looking for labyrinths, some activity on a path inward and back out again. Breathing. Full of breath and thanks. Since the sun was shining, Serkan and I went for a bike ride on the muddy dirt roads. We visited our land and planted lupines in a line along one side of the property. Two chubby, super cute, but overwhelmingly urine-scented, puppies accompanied us. In a year or so, the lupines will start flowering and seeding, whether we’re here to see them or not.

interviews, fishing & life.

So, here we are. The first sun of the day finally shines into our living room. This morning, cold and rain battered the streets. Serkan and I were out in it, sipping coffee from his travel mug in the colectivo on the way to the center.

Today I had a job interview, no biggie. Except that I totally didn’t know that I was walking into an interview. Ha! I’m not actually looking for a job, you see. They kind drop into my view as baited hooks. I’ve been slow to bite. Why? Well, mostly because we are supposed to be moving to the States at some point in the (hopefully) new future. But if we can make that future more secure by staying here a little longer and helping to set ourselves up for later, then this also seems like a wise option. I wasn’t ready to take hold the bait, hook, line and sinker yet, but I did want to see what it tastes like. See if I could stomach it. This is when I unwittingly walked into an interview.

But being interviewed shouldn’t be surprising. We are all, essentially, interviewing one another throughout our lives. Dating is a type of interview for instance. We size each other up constantly. We meet a new face, are maybe drawn to such and such a person for some reason we can’t pinpoint. We ask further questions to see if we are compatible, in work, friendships, life, love. So, it’s not that strange to walk into a place and find yourself in an interview unbeknownst to you. The only difference is the person across from you is taking notes.

On Seymour...

So, back to Salinger. I’ve only ever read The Catcher in the Rye, famously formerly banned high school required reading. But it’s been ages, and I can’t say I ever revisited Catcher. In fact, even though I got good grades, loved to be around books, had an inclination toward English classes, edited the HS literary magazine, ended up an English Major in college and edited the university lit mag, I truly only remember reading maybe three books throughout all four years of high school.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean I didn’t read the books. I also don’t readily remember character names or story endings for books I may have read last year, but I remember reading them. The tactile experience: place, smells, weather, excitement, sadness, sudden lit light bulbs and so forth. If I flip through the pages, the memories rush back.

But for so many HS books, I can’t even remember picking them up. Call it PTSD or what you will; my memory of that era is shot full of holes. I do know for a fact that I never finished Huck Finn, though I always did want to go back to it, in theory. Other novels—such as Beloved, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine—I can probably thank these books for my (poor) choice of university study.

So, how did this get to be about high school reading anyway? I wanted to say what I loved about Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.
While Seymour did start to get a little old with the narrator, Buddy’s, description of his older suicided brother, Seymour, I love the tone, the voice, the undercurrent throughout. And what Salinger was trying to do: keep Buddy’s older role model brother young alive and still a model, someone who Buddy can continue learning from. In that way Buddy is able to deal (or not deal) with his grief. Or more accurately, he starts to reminisce and to grieve. We bear witness to this as writing about Seymour’s eyes and nose becomes excruciating reason for naps.

While the entire novella reads self-consciously as a writer writing a book, the “transcription” of Seymour’s letter to Buddy after Seymour stayed up all night reading one of Buddy’s short stories (in the story) is a beautiful collection of tips for writers. “Don’t make me proud of you,” Seymour writes. “If only you’d never keep me up again out of pride. Give me a story that makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up again till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.”

Seymour isn’t not praising the Buddy’s story. It kept him up till 5 a.m., but he’s warning him against perfection. As “trite” as it sounds, Seymour mainly wants to tell Buddy: “Please follow your heart, win or lose.” Don’t get carried away by what others want or by what you think others want. (Oh, this is so often when we miss the shot.) Essentially Seymour advises Buddy: don’t aim. Let accident happen.

This ties in with Buddy feeling it necessary to drop poetry entirely if one is to settle and stop seeking… well, perfection. I puzzled over this passage for some time. If one is able to loosen up, as it were, and accept things as they are, why is that a call to “drop poetry altogether?” I reread this passage several times, thinking what does it mean… exactly? At the end of the novella, Seymour re-utters his no-aim refrain, suggesting that Buddy stop trying so hard while playing marbles. Sure, Buddy always hits the target, but there’s no fun in it, no adventure. No serendipity. Nothing learned.

Which brings me back to what does it mean exactly…

As I write this I realize that as a reader, too, I’m shouldering my perfectionist tendencies. Part of me, what I will call my intuitive and more intelligent side, wants to accept this line of thought as somehow profound; it’s certainly interesting. Another (rational, bogarting analytical) part is saying, what the heck do you mean by that? I want an answer. I want my target to be hit. But the fact that such a passage stops me in my tracks means my target was bullseyed. Go figure. I didn’t even know I had a target. So, perfectionism aside, my target, which might not have even existed before someone struck it, was indeed struck by accident, without aiming. Aiming for what? Exactly…

It’s funny that I’ve written all about Seymour, when during the read it was Raise High that I enjoyed most. But it seems I’ve run out of time. I’m hungry, and it’s time for breakfast, coffee and phone calls.

Appropriately, today’s Dictionary.com word of the day is jnana

This morning like every morning, our noisy kitty whined me awake, predawn. But instead of going back to sleep, I was awake enough to want to read some news. Why I would choose news over J.D. Salinger is beyond me. I just started reading Raise High the Roof Beam & Seymour: an Introduction. This book makes me happy, but I will return to that later, because right now I am thinking about being disconnected.

Disconnection comes so easy down here. And in a way, it’s therapeutic. The realities are different. Before it was simple: I, like most people around me, was “educated” and comfortable, I read the news and would feel emotional, even inflamed by it. Lament at what’s happening all over the world (and at "home": tea parties, oil spills, birtherism, nativism; really? are you kidding me? isn't the USA founded by immigrants?). So it so happens that sometimes we read the news, stress out, lose sleep, proclaim ourselves political and down antidepressants or blood pressure meds. We vote, maybe we donate. We grow alarmed, we grow frenzied. And this agitation pools into a greater collective human energy--maybe, I venture to say, even creating more bad news. Increasing the volume, as it were, on our own aggravated state. Thus creating more of a frenzy whose crescendo grows louder and louder and steadily more insane, because the crescendo never ends.

What am I trying to say? I see myself attempting to explain my own current disconnection to myself. Formerly I might wallow a little in guilt to be as desenchufado (unplugged) as I am these days. But let’s face it, I (have tended to) cling to guilt like a threadbare baby blanket. But that’s another story and another bad habit. Here, though, we are far, far end-of-the-earth far away from... well, everything. Isolated in every way. While such passions for news might warm me up, I guess I have little use for them here.

It’s often such a lonely place. A friend of mine, also from the states described living here as being like a family, because you know so many people. Or--she immediately revised herself--because there are so few people not to know. My experience has been rather more lonesome. But I guess my (other) tendency toward lonesomeness hasn't changed with place or time. It’s been cathartic, though, taking the proverbial step back. What I can say is, without wading through the tedium of over-explaining myself (or explaining myself sufficiently) is that I have less baggage and more presence.

I watch our 8 a.m. sunrise. Heavy violet-deep purple clouds, bright salmon linings. Wind whacks at the house and the rustic gate, clinging to the fence by the last nail of its last hinge, creaks. In bed, I can see my breath. I turn off the lamp.

pictures of our lives at breakfast.

We’ve been eating breakfast for hours. It’s our first day back to Natales with the ability to sleep in instead of run around collecting stamps of denial all over Santiago. Now that we’re sure we’ll be here through the winter and then some, we’re settling in. And what better way to feel at home than to purchase… small household appliances? Yay! We are now the proud owners of a quick-boil electric kettle, a hand-held electric beater (making batter for anything will be so much easier!) and a toast/waffle iron with three different hotplates. The waffle hotplate is my personal favorite. And toast (tost), a simple panini sandwich, is really common in Turkey, for breakfast or for a quick ‘snack’ whenever.

This morning, and afternoon as you can see from the time, we used all three of these handy devices :)


Spiced Italian espresso started this morning’s breakfast madness. I make it sound fancier than it really is, because we drink that every morning. Ingredients and digressions: 1.) Coffee (which horrifyingly contains sugar! It’s difficult and expensive to find real sugar-free coffee grounds here.) 2.) Two whole cardamom seeds (a gift from one of Serkan’s Turkish friends living in Vienna, where we stayed for a few nights. We could hardly communicate, but I was really excited about the cardamom, so she sweetly sent us off with a couple of bags when we left.) 3.) Cinnamon stick shavings and/or 1-2 clove spikes (called clavo del olor, which can translate directly to ‘scented nails.’). We usually drink this espresso concoction more like a coffee, with added water, heated milk and a small dollop of honey. On morning that I breakfast alone, this is my breakfast.

A small bowl of cereal and fruit accompanied our coffees, and then I got to work on the waffle batter, from scratch of course, because Aunt Jemima (ick!) and Krusteaz (yum!) don’t live here. While the waffles cooked, we brewed some yummy small leaf tea, which Serkan was able to find in Punta Arenas. I sauteed some peaches and bananas with some honey to top the waffles. The rest of the waffles, we slathered with my cousin Kevin’s famous apple butter, almond butter from Trader Joe’s (both of which my aunt sent down with Tim when he came to visit; thanks guys!!!), currant-strawberry jam (handmade by me, my first attempt at such a thing), and spiced peach jam (handmade by Serkan). Even though we were way finished eating and drinking, I thought we should take some pictures of all this goodness, so I made us some Turkish coffees, threw the last of the batter into the iron and we had a little photo shoot.

Our Magellanic stove that soots up and heats the house. Turkish style double kettle for tea and coffee pot (cezve).


Kevin's apple butter & almond butter, thanks to my dear family and Tim, who brought it down here!


The super cute Turkish coffee cups we bought in Samsun, Turkey. A man and a woman sitting on big hearts blowing little heart bubbles to each other.