The Action Potential

I just saw this article in the Times – another neighborhood where I stayed is being destroyed. I’ll admit that I particularly like the line “it’s no fun wearing five layers from October to April”…make that ten layers from September to May and you’re getting closer to describing how cold and damp that street was. Which is not to say it should go. It just has lots – and lots – of character.

Anyhow, that made me decide to do a run-down on the latest news from places that I’m attached to.

News from Warren Wilson is pretty tame. The stately white oak on Cowpie Cafe’s lawn is being removed. If that doesn’t sound like news, it’s only because you’ve never seen that tree. It is a truly fabulous specimen. Magnificent, even.

Unfortunately, Kashmiri politics are just as I remember them, which is to say divided and the water wars are only getting worse. (I lived right on the Indus’ banks and if you walked up any of the surrounding mountains you could see that every speck of life in the valley was nestled up against it. A meandering band of trees, fields, and settlement within a vast expanse of beige desert.) And the culture, again true to my memories, is changing rapidly. (I knew some polyandrous families when I stayed there, but few and far between.)

South Africa? World Cup, of course. Painful to see Zuma strutting around, fun to see the country happy – totally wish I could have been there.

With regards to Panama, an absolutely wonderful nurse I met there – Becky Cridford – is trying for a position at a children’s hospital in Sierra Leone and could use your vote to get funding in a competition sponsored by vodafone! Becky was a volunteer at the organization (CREA) that I worked with in Panama. She pretty much single-handedly brought the first ever health clinic to a nearby village and is an altogether a wonderful candidate for the position and genuinely lovely human being. You can vote for her here starting tomorrow-ish: http://www.facebook.com/worldofdifference?ref=ts

Finally, Iran. No, I’ve never been there, but I still follow it rabidly. We’re only a week and a half away from the one year anniversary of my friend Josh Fattal’s illegal, inhumane, unjust, and entirely unnecessary detention there. The politicization of “prisoner swaps” in recent weeks has left a bitter taste in my mouth. Not only are we evidently bad at math, but to allow political machinations to take the place of a) trials, b) common sense, or even c) humanitarian concerns and civility in no way serves our interest. Just let them come home. You could look at their website, here, or just read this and wallow in insensate fury.

On a lighter note, East Lake is doing well according to the two metrics I’m using right now. 1) My favorite neighbor-child there, an engaging little ginger who was a toddler when we met and is now more like a miniature adult remembered my name! I was picking up my veggies at the farm today and she pointed to me and said “Nora!” then pointed to my dog and said “Nora Puppy.” She is pretty much a child prodigy. 2) The veggies were good…though I’m open to suggestions on what to do with a pound of something called “cinna-basil.”

With love,
N

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=10696524

I just had a great weekend playing with my Dad in Atlanta! How fun to get to spend spring with him. Spring was, in fact, so explosively fast that we really spent the entire season together. The Palisades, Arabia Mountain, Fernbank, time in Gaia Gardens, and evenings on the back porch – it was lovely in all ways. A few weekends before that, I had a great visit from four of my friends from college, too. So a glut of good company, and now a glut of essays. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about:

Morning Reports

During that grey and groggy haze of the morning rush hour, people have only the patience to listen to the news that is most relevant to their lives. It is a time kept holy by the force of our own irritability, coddled by our serial sleeplessness.

Before moving to Atlanta, I had no idea the variety of new that different people considered worthy of their 7 am time. In my childhood there was a strictly enforced silence while my mother committed to memory the depths of snow accumulations in every corner of Vermont, the time the ice would hit, the velocity of winds that might make the snow drift. My father, too, was held in rapt attention by the weather forecast; heavy ice or high winds meant he’d be working late to restore electricity in the hardest-hit regions.

It’s always sweemed natural to me that such news should hold our bleary, belligerent focus at the start of the day. Naively, I’d assumed that weather mattered this much to everyone – that what people bet on in March was the timing of the last frost.

So it came as quite a shock to me that the weather is displaced in our regional cosmology by…traffic.

It makes sense, really. In a series of 70 degree April days, one really ceases to care whether the day is described as sunny, really sunny, warm, or really warm. The traffic, though, is a force to be reckoned with. An accident on Briarcliff, injuries at the downtown connector. Each morning is attended by a far different calculus than the one familiar to my youth. Leave early, take a shortcut, hope there’s something interesting on the radio. A life so disconnected from weather and so dependent on traffic is surprising at first and tragic after a while. Does the grace of spring rain wait at the intersection of Buford and Clairmont? Are you going to plant your garden based on the rumblings of traffic on 285?

Vision

There was an article – years ago – about an Amazonian tribe who left the inner reaches of the rain forest for the first time. Having never seen so great a distance before, they had no sense of depth perception. Their eyes and minds were completed unadjusted to the plains.

Well, sometimes I forget to put on my glasses before I leave my cubicle. Stumbling out into the labyrinth of hallways and the vast canyons between buildings, I like to pretend that I am one of those tribesmen.

Merrain

When my friend returned from 3 weeks at sea aboard a wooden sailboat, she struggled to describe what she had seen. Landscape? Terrain? Not quite, but the shape of the sea – sometimes a solid wall of 13′ swells, sometimes a veil without substance – lacks the (at least in our culture) the lexicon it deserves. The summer I spent working on the beaches of Long Island, the lived geography of the ocean confounded me. Most of the time it was drab, repulsive even. Then, without warning, it could adopt the bearing of majesty.

Its form alone was not what intrigued me, but also its deceptive sense of history. I’d just come back in from a day of planting grape vines when my friend called to say she’d arrived safely in port. Before her call, I’d been marveling at the grapes’ view of time. I’ll bbe 26 the first season they produce and they’ll outlive me by decades. Withered, dried branches bursting with succulent fruit; it must be that paradox that earned the poets’ admiration. The sea, though, lives its own paradox of time. We were born out of its briny embrace thousands of years ago, but at its seam in the middle of the Atlantic it is still creating newness. Its branches more withered, its fruit more succulent than anything on land – a thousandfold the terroir of a vineyard, but a thousandth of the connoisseurs who know it well enough to marvel.

Justice and Safety

There’s an awkward admission I need to own up to: I live in a gated community. Eugh. Yep – after a lifetime spent scorning the Stepford set, I actually do. In its defense, East Lake Commons is a vibrant community of ecological stewardship, a bold experiment in a living resistance. But it has a gate.

From the start, its been the thing about my neighborhood that has gotten under my skin. When we fenced off plover nests to protect them from marauding cats, a strange transformation took place. Passersby mistook the meaning of our fences and gathered to watch the birds; once fenced, the nests went from nature to zoo. They were a spectacle, something the beachgoers couldn’t participate in and something they no longer belonged to. I’m certain that we saved a lot of nestlings from death, but what did we take in the process?

Yesterday evening I was walking back from the farm when I ran into four young men who’d come onto our side of the gate. Suddenly the question of the gate became far less abstract. They say good fences make good neighbors. Do evil fences make evil neighbors? Or do evil neighbors make fences? I spent a great deal of last night rethinking the gate, though, and all I came to conclude was that especially in light of feeling threatened the gate is part of the problem, not the solution.