Seasons

Last year I kept notes about the seasons in a way that I’ve never done. I took a break from worrying about writing and editing my book, and I read voraciously, painted almost every day, and wrote essays and poems. I did not share much in this space because posting here involves getting in front of a screen, and that’s how I make a living. During my time off-the-clock, I’ve stepped away from the socials (more so than in previous years) and I’ve written more by hand than I have in decades.

I thought I’d share a few of the results from this not-so-great-sorta-meh-sorta-shitty year of 2022, and whatever else comes to mind. As I do.

Micro-Seasons

I learned about Nijushi-Sekki, a Japanese belief in 72 micro-seasons. I read about this practice of naming small seasons, and I decided to create my own in 2022 using the calendar my bank sends me. When I started, I was slowly unfurling from the deepest depression I have ever experienced, and I was very aware that I was not who I was or who I wanted to be, but I also had to accept that there was very little I could do but live through this. (Thanks for the motto about me and my doll parts, Courtney Love).

I was successful recording my micro-seasons for nine months of the year because I also used that calendar for hiking and biking plans.

My 2022 Nijushi-Sekki:

Season of the wind and rain and long shadows

Season of the blustery wind and fire-colored sunsets

Season of the rainbows and longer light

Season of afternoon shadows after work

Seasons of days and days of fog

Season of sunsets returning

Season of spring buds arriving early 

Seasons of bright, bright sun

Season of my birthday, daffodils, and crocus

Season of the light getting later

Season of menopause research and acceptance and frogs on the interurban trail

Season of spring blooms and buds and grass

Season of not always needing a coat and grassy glorious hills and canyons of Tieton

Season of ferns unfurling

Season of daffodils coming in full bright yellow

Season of magic Skagit tulip glory 

Season of azaleas, greening of trees

Season of Elroy’s birthday and rainy days

Season of mellower days of staring into space 

Season of breast soreness, fatigue, and my 10th boss in 9 years

Season of being really fucking irritated, walking a lot, and buying new blinds

Season of long walks

Season of summer planning wishing staring at maps

Season of backpacking, camping

Season of zero mood swings and not crying

Season of long road rides 

Seasons of the Enchanted Valley and losing count of waterfalls

Season of the North Cascades reading books in the tent while it pours down rain

Season of North Cascades, wifi working in the van, Fragrance Lake sunsets 

Season of North Cascades and finally hiking Thunder Knob

Season of The Floors Fiasco and bald eagles hunting

Season of The North Cascades with proper river shoes, wildflowers

Season of North Cascades, knee injury on C___ Creek.  

And then that’s it.

Nothing after that. I missed the entire fall and the end of the year. Typing this now see I lost the thread of looking outward during a few seasons. We also had a horrific “Fire Season” (as we now say when we spend days inside with some of the worst air quality on the planet). I plan to do this same recording in 2023, and I want to be aware of and pay attention to the changes in nature and recording beauty even when/if things shift for me personally and professionally. This year, I will only record the beautiful things as a gift to my December 2023 self.  

Injury Season: Note to Self
The next time I am injured, I need to be a little more disciplined during the recovery time. I strained a ligament in my knee when a river bank gave out and I caught myself on a root sticking out of the dirt. My arm caught the root, so I didn’t fall into a river, but my leg stayed in place while the rest of my body twisted and my knee made a popping sound. I had a similar experience (same knee) snowboarding 15 years ago, and it healed in a few weeks. This time around it took almost three months. This broke down palace I call my body was my greatest challenge in 2022. I was in great shape heading into the cyclocross racing season (for me), and then my knee decided we were having a different autumn. Fitness is a fickle friend who leaves quickly without a proper plan of return. Part of aging, I am realizing, is that when the threads become frayed, it takes longer to mend back together. Prior to that injury, I had one of the best summers of backpacking that I’ve had in years and I’m going to make it a priority of the summer for as long as I can carry gear into the woods. I am very thankful I didn’t need surgery and/or a helicopter/stretcher ride out of the backcountry.

Quick digression: I get asked a lot if I am going to take up mountain bike packing. I usually take a deep breath and make sure my eyes do not roll, and I simply say, no. The cynical elder in me thinks it’s a marketing fad similar to “gravel racing” that the bike industry spins up just to sell shit. I like the two activities separately, thank you. More power to you if it’s your thing, but I’ll show you a few trails with massive blowdown trees, fast water crossings, and then tell me you want to not only lift your body and your gear into the clear, but also a mountain bike. Maybe you do. Me? No fucking way. It also smacks too much of the ultra-light backpacking ethos that I find annoying. I can see bike touring someday, but I see myself riding in the (distant) slipstream of a bike mechanic (my mister) on our way to a warm bed and a dinner prepared by somebody else at the end of the day. 

attribution

Reading Season

As I write this now, the winter hygge season has settled in, I have plans I’m looking forward to, and I have plenty of projects I’m excited about for this upcoming year. I don’t believe in resolutions, but I do keep a list of things I intend to do, and sometimes, those things get pushed to the next year. And rather than seeing incomplete intentions as a failure, I see it as a gift of hope to my future self.

Let’s pause for a real beauty about the topic of uncertainty, shall we?

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

That distant day is always on its way, right? I find the act of translation deeply fascinating. I read of a Rilke translator who said she wrestled with the word “live” in the quote above because she felt like he had a relationship with the questions he was asking about life and love. That perhaps he meant we should trust the questions as a way of living. That really stuck with me, and I now see this quote a bit differently.

As always, Maria Popova curates the best of everything which I have read and reread and reread since it was first posted in 2012 on this topic. I am very much living into that distant day. That distant season. Thank all the gods for this life. 

I marked the seasons by reading the most books I’ve ever read in a year. I got up early on workdays, read on Friday nights, most of the weekends, and every minute I had a break. In short, I curled up into my shell and embraced my suffering introvert. According to The Good Reads tracking, I read 166 books. Thanks to researching watercolor illustrators and painters and reading poetry, really–shorter books, but still–I made that goal. Thank all the gods for the Bellingham Public Library.

My two absolute favorite writers of the 2022 year? Barry Lopez and Olivia Laing. I’ve hung out with the words of B. Lopez before, but I made a point to read everything by him this past year. 

Favorite quote from Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World:

1] To survive what is headed our way–global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments–and to endure, we will have to stretch our imagination. We will need to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place had melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for boats we forgot to build. 

2] During these days we all resided at the heart of incomprehensible privilege.

Barry. Fucking slayin’ me, man. I still have one book to read before I can properly write Barry a love letter. May he rest in peace.

And speaking of love letters: Olivia Laing just grabbed a hold of me and made me think about artists, my education, and the current disaster-to-disaster moment we’re living in and she saved me this autumn as my knee healed. I have one more book of hers to read. She is now one of my favorite writers, and I copied so many of her sentences in my journal because they are pure music. Genius. Her love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury made me feel like I was reading the words of a friend. Words I wish I had written. Just gorgeous. So smart. Her way of thinking and writing about art is like cool glass of water after dying of thirst in this STEM obsessed zeitgeist.

Fav quote from The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone:

Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

Consequence of Unsettled Chemistry could be my memoir title for 2019-2022 season of peri-menopause and menopause, but that’s a story for another day. For another season. And I’ve lived through it, me and my doll parts. Hope you don’t ache the way I ache. I’m still the girl with the most cake. Okay, sorry if I lost you. Very Gen X digression there. Who knew that fucking Hole lyrics would bring me such solace?

All this thinking about seasons made me remember a few lyrics from a poet we lost too soon as the seasons roll on by. I really see no way to end this as the Wolf Moon sets and clock clicks forward. So here is the my favorite part of the song, Seasons. Poetry, that song.

Sleeping with a full moon blanket

Sand and feathers for my head

Dreams have never been the answer

And dreams have never made my bed

Dreams have never made my bed

And I’m lost, behind

The words I’ll never find

And I’m left behind

As the seasons roll on by

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New Teacher Binder

I promised I would blog my response to a question in a week to share all of the things that I didn’t get to say when I had the privilege of speaking to Todd Conaway’s learning community. First, let me tell you that I am a huge fan of learning communities, and it broke my heart when the 2008 recession forced cuts to this professional development model. It’s one of the best forms of teacher support that is tough to substantiate funding for, but it works. Kudos to that mighty UW-B group for carving out the time to write, talk, listen, and learn together. Endless gratitude for all of the wonderful things you shared about my talk in your blog post.

So why is this post happening three weeks later? Well, life, as they say, comes at you quick. My washing machine broke, my job changed, and the puppy we have been waiting months for came into our lives. And I lost a sweet cousin to suicide. I tell you all of this not to make an excuse, but to share why I needed a bit more time to gather up my thoughts.

A promise is a promise, so let me start by sharing the context to the question I want to follow-up on. 

As part of my rambling-somewhat-coherent story about how writing has helped me as a teacher, I told the story of my first teaching experience where we were given a notebook–an actual three-ring binder–full of assignments and lesson plans. That new teacher binder became the foundation of courses I would teach for over a decade and the basis for my pedagogy as a teacher, administrator, and All The Things I do now. As a graduate student, I was incredibly lucky to have two advisors who mentored a cohort of 20 TAs into their first experience teaching. I was hired as an adjunct twice solely because of the stellar reputation of my program and the many talented people who preceded me in the Washington job market.

I was an “adult-returning student” in this cohort of 20, one of the few who had attended community colleges, and I had a very nontraditional path in higher education by my own choice. I walked into my first classroom as a brand new teacher ten days after 9/11. To say I had little in common with my students was understatement. I felt older than I looked, I was a bit lost in my personal life, so I took the job very seriously, and I felt like I was finally doing what I always dreamed of becoming. I followed everything in that new teacher binder like a script. Like a map to a place I’ve always wanted to go.

Four years later, I was asked by the scheduler of a community college’s English department if I wanted to teach an online section. The woman who had been teaching was taking her family to England for the year, and he said, “I need this class on our schedule. Nobody else wants to do it.” I jumped at a guaranteed contract, and a few days later I got an email inviting me into a  Blackboard course where I had a copy of this woman’s curriculum. Long before I understood forking a course or copying courses in an LMS, I had a new online teacher binder, if you will. Her announcements, her assignments, course outline, gradebook, everything, and then I was advised to put my own handouts in this online course. 

I was certified as an “online teacher” but the course was more about training me to use the functionality of the LMS than it was about pedagogy. The day my students were loaded into my course shell, I entered into a modality I had never imagined when I thought about being a teacher. More importantly, I had never been an online student.

I was probably in fourth grade when I first thought that I wanted to become a teacher, and teaching on the internet would have been in the realm of science fiction. I’ll tell you how old I am without telling you my age. Ready? 

Prior to dreaming about being a teacher, I wanted to be Sheila E. 

Quick digression: In an undergraduate “Women In Literature” course, I was asked to write about my first recognition of a feminist act, and I cited Prince putting the spotlight on Sheila E. in a video for “I Would Die 4 U.”

He could have had any drummer in the world, and he chose a woman. It fucking blew my little girl mind! My teacher wrote three exclamation points in the margins and later shared that I was the only person to cite a musician and a man at that. I remember the class getting very quiet, and I’m sure I started sweating when she read from my essay. She used quotes from my paper as a “teachable moment” to discuss gender and sexuality, and the question of who is a feminist and why. She later shared with me that she saw Prince five times at various clubs in her youth (so bitchin’) and asked if it was okay if she used my essay as an example for future students. The essay was typed on paper (I’m old), so I don’t have a copy of what I wrote, but it planted a seed in me that you could use the work of students to teach other students. I was so elated and proud of myself that a teacher liked my writing. Rest in peace, Prince, and thank you for showing me that chick drummers can, and still do, rock just as hard dudes. 

Okay, where was I? 

Binders full of assignments (not women, ha! Sorry for that Romney joke during my preso, UWB, friends). 

attribution

As a new community college teacher with a binder full of paper handouts and lesson plans, I inherited the same thing as a community college teacher only now it was all digital in an LMS at a time where there were very few examples of what it looked like to teach online (for me). It was also the dial-up era, and courses were designed with folders within folders within folders. A labyrinth lengthy process to do anything, really. Long live the folks who work(ed) in IT and tech support who helped students and teachers make that leap from in-the-classroom teaching and learning to being online. You are the unsung heroes of education.

None of us knew what we were doing, and I’m sure my students, my poor students, suffered as I learned on-the-job. I’ve written about this extensively on this blog as free therapy. Thank you, readers. 

My experience during that era sent me to exhausting levels of empathy, despair, and anxiety during the Covid-pivot-to-online teaching in 2020. I’ll write about that another time, but I had a front row seat to what those teachers and students experienced. At scale, as we say. If somebody were to pay for me to go grad school and I was ten years younger with the drive to be in grad school, I would study what changed pedagogically for teachers who already taught online and those who did not before the pandemic. I’d look at how the zoom-ification of everything in our lives influenced online pedagogies. How that forced experience helped, hindered, or stalled the development of different synchronous and asynchronous modalities that institutions are now offering. 

There’s your research question if you need one. 

Also, while I’m making shit up: If I have one wish for the universe, it’s for a follow-up of all the students featured in Learning Online: The Student Experience by George Veletsianos. In short, I believe people did the best that they could during the pandemic quarantines, but it has shifted the focus on comparing synchronous and asynchronous in ways that worry me.

Veletsianos puts it best: “…comparisons between face-to-face and online course are ultimately unhelpful and that any course is on as good as its design and its ability to meet he need of it students. In other words, ‘which one is better?’ is the wrong question to ask (p.24).

I say all of this to emphasize that there really isn’t a playbook for what we are doing, and there hasn’t been from the start. You can cite all the data you want and all of the studies you can read, but I believe we still do not know what we do not know. I only trust people who are asking more questions than providing answers. 

I do know, however, that what we witness as students with our own teachers is the foundation for what we become as a teacher. What other form of employment provides 16-22 years of observing your future job? Around the time that I realized it was more likely that I could become a teacher than a drummer in a funk band, I started to pay attention to what my teachers did. And I took notes and dreamt of what I would and would not do. 

The great tragedy of the Covid-pivot is that all of the teachers who either resisted or ignored online teaching, got thrown into a modality where they had never been students. 

To put it another way, it’s really difficult to teach in a modality that you have not experienced as a student. It feels like walking in somebody else’s shoes. Dancing to music you do not like. If the new teacher binder was a map for me as a new teacher, then the inherited online class felt like shoes that took a while to break in. I’m torturing a metaphor here, so let me try to explain some more. 

I now work in a setting where there are often several faculty members who set up the 21st century version of “the new teacher binder” by creating a “course shell” or a “master course” or whatever you might call it. For example, I have helped two teachers create a course that is then shared with over 70 adjuncts. If that makes your brain and heart hurt, then hear me out. Those adjuncts are then given the opportunity to change and personalize whatever they want once the main course is copied. And yet most of them do not. They use everything as-is, and the dozen or so I’ve worked with over the years are grateful because they have multiple jobs or full-time jobs in their profession. 

Having this new teacher binder is a welcomed system of support for them. One teacher described that having this course allows her to share more of her experience with her students and focus on them as people. Adjuncts, as many of you know, are not paid for course prep, office hours, or any “clock hours” outside of the class.

So this brings me to the question I came here to answer! What I would say to new teachers who are facing teaching for the first time and they are forced to use a curriculum? What if what you are being to asked to teach feels like walking in somebody else’s shoes? 

Here’s the thing. Here’s what I would say. 

It probably feels wrong because you know you can do something better. Or perhaps it’s going wrong because the curriculum is nothing like what you experienced as a student. Or maybe you just don’t like anything in the new teacher binder.

Know this, new teacher, it’s a good skill to have because someday you might mentor a new colleague or share your work with another new teacher. And this experience, as painful as it might feel, is serving the future you. Every time you have to teach with something from that new teacher binder, take notes of what you would change, what you would do differently, and try to connect with another person who is doing the same thing. Commiserate. Celebrate. And write about it. Always write about it. Even just a few sentences. Keep a paper journal if that helps. Use a note app on your phone. Whatever feels right to you. Know that all of your former selves one day—including who you are right now– will help new teachers, your colleagues, and your future students.  

The notes that I took during my first year of teaching in a classroom and teaching online became the foundation for my teaching philosophy statements, too many presentations to count, and a lot of the material for the work I do now. Eventually, you might be in a position to change the content of a new teacher binder in your future department and you’re going to want a record of why you felt that way and what you want to do differently. 

Also, I would say that you can insert creativity and little bits of yourself in the delivery of that material like my adjunct example above. Sometimes the obsession we have personalizing the content, takes up the valuable time that we could have with human beings. Any teacher using a “master course shell” can still personalize the content in announcements, in the way that they respond to students’ work, and in the examples they use to explain something that students may not grasp from the course content. 

And know this, new teacher, it’s a really hard job, but you will never stop learning. The student in you will never be bored. 

That’s what I would have said had we not run out of time, UW-B learning community, and thank you every so much for your kind reflections. You are a special group, and I am honored you spent some of your precious time with me.

And Todd asked me why it’s important to write about teaching, and I’ve thought about that question a lot. I think it’s important to hear the voices of the people doing the work. The qualitative messiness of teaching is often drowned out by the ease of collecting quantitative data. That’s a story for another day.

I’ll leave you with a quote from an influential writer in my life who always privileges the human beings over the content and/or the tech, a teacher’s teacher, reader’s writer, and a wonderful storyteller Audrey Watters.

She summed it up best in her book Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning why I think it’s important to write as a teacher, why I think it’s important to write: 

“If you were to only read the histories of education and education technology as told by the technologies and technology booster, you’d end up, no doubt, wth a story much the like the one Sal Kahn offers in his video—a story in which there is no mention of racial segregation or desegregation or re-segregation, no mention of protests over wars or civil rights, no mention of legislation or court rulings. The satellite Sputnik is granted more agency in shaping twentieth-century education than students or teachers” (p.17).

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Your Tugboat Captain

A grove of trees has been on my mind as the forests around me burned.

If not for the ocean in the west, wildfires were burning in every direction where I live. This summer, I read about this magical grove of trees and I was surprised to learn they were saved by activists who worked their cilvil disobedience magic in my lifetime. Had the corporations that seek to profit from the endless extraction of resources and man-made manipulations of our forests had won, this grove of trees would have been flooded and killed. Given the amount of tree stumps you can see since droughts have made lake levels drop, I’m sure these trees would have been logged first and sold as timber.

Two of my backpacking trips led me to this magical grove of old growth this summer, and as I stood there alone dwarfed by these trees, I felt thankful for the people who made sure this place was there. That these activists thought of ten year old me and wanted to make sure that when I was middle-aged, they would be there when I needed them.

Lately, however, I have a growing sense of dread we are not being, in the words of Barry Lopez, “good ancestors.”

What I love about the hike to this grove is simple. It is beyond the mileage of most day hikers, and there are miles where the trail meanders along a ridge of tall trees. Below the thick trees and walls of ferns is a faint shimmer of lake water. The trees above block the sun as you walk west at a steady elevation where you can see three bends as you walk deep into the forest.

I’ve read trail reports where people say it’s boring and repetitive, and that beyond the man-made structures in this area, there is really nothing to see. I read these reports gleefully hoping that the people I dislike on the trail will stay home. “Read this!” I want to say to those inconsiderate people who play music and/or talk loudly, people who leave trash, people who are irritated that they cannot access their social media, and please stay the fuck home and go back to whatever it is you did before the pandemic. I realize I was a Jill-Come-Lately to hiking and backpacking at one point, but I have always been respectful of Leave No Trace and I would have never dreamed of behaving like some of the fuckery I have witnessed in the backcountry in the last two years.

Back to my magical grove of old growth trees. 

very large trees with a backpack and hiking poles in the North Cascades
attribution c’est moi, my pack for scale in this magical grove

I have been wondering how those trees have fared. Are they charred? Will they die? What does that forest look like now? Did it all burn? Are those ridge trails now filled with charred black trees? 

Back in July, I noticed two giant trees side-by-side where the trail cuts in between them, and I had this moment of feeling like if there was ever a forest that could have been Tolkien’s Ents, it was here. I almost wanted to ask them if it was okay if I pass through.

To imagine them burning is an unspeakable loss for me. 

This life is unspeakably filled with loss.

A fulfilled life also has unspeakable loss at times. 

Tolkien said it best: What punishments of God are not gifts? 

A question I have loved ever since I read it as an undergraduate studying religious texts. I rediscovered this quote listening to a podcast while painting this week, and I felt the grief myself of the loss of trees where I love to mountain bike and places where I love to hike. 

And the other losses I do not want to write about today.

Yesterday, however, the winds shifted and it rained. 

Fires in the forests, the STEM worshippers will say, are a natural occurrence. Necessary. A gift of regrowth. Sure. Timber, the STEM-for-industry folks will say, are necessary for the economy. Necessary? In 2022? No.

These explanations do not stop me from feeling the loss. It does not stop me from the grieving for a different future than the one we have inherited. As always, it’s the poets, the artists, the writers, and the people who believe we need to preserve forests are the voices I want to hear.

The voices of the descendants of people who saved that forest of Ents for me. For you.

This grove of trees is an album away from my front door without traffic.

A teenage girl lives in me who still thinks of distances in terms of songs and albums and not miles. I once had a friend who described the distance between Atlanta and Athens in Georgia as a “mix-tape away.” We made fun of him for that, but it never really left me. With traffic in 2022, mind you, it’s now like a four mix-tapes distance, but I digress. A distinctly Generation X measurement of time.

Another measurement of distance is an album. To this particular trailhead to the magic grove of trees is Galaxie 500’s Today, and for some reason I listened to this album every time I went out that way this summer. After the fourth trip and listen, I realized I didn’t know what one song really meant even if I could sing all of the words. The poet in me can live with that, and not all things are easily explainable. I found myself standing in this grove of giant trees thinking about the song “Tugboat” and what the everliving fuck it means. Who wanted to be a tugboat captain? And why?

Without access to the internet (may all the gods make it stay that way), I imagined all kinds of silly connections. When I got home, I asked my mister if he knew what the song meant, and he said had no idea. So I looked it up, and found all kinds of shit via SpREDDIT, and I landed on what I think is the most magical answer. The lyrics are rooted in a quote from Sterling Silver. He was asked what he would do after the Velvet Underground split and he apparently said he wanted be a tugboat captain. 

Magic.

I felt immense joy to learn this. I love the Velvet Underground, and my favorite boat to watch in action? Tugboats. How fucking amazing that after being in one of the most influential bands surrounded by all the artsy coolness and your next career goal would be to become a captain of a tugboat. Why not? These tiny little boats have the brute force to guide ships, and thanks to where I live, I see them often. It’s miracle of physics, these tugboats, and I have many (bad) metaphors in my journal about change management (such as we say), teaching and learning, and being a teacher. But I’m not going to write about that today.

Here’s the thing.

I spoke to a lovely group of faculty last week, and I promised to blog some of my responses. In fact, I have a rough draft of things I wanted to say, and then there’s actually the torrent of things that actually came out of my mouth. The draft and what I said are horrifically unalike. I wanted to talk about the forest, so to speak, but I spoke about too many trees. It was wildfire of thoughts that I’m not sure made sense, and I need to type it up to share. It was the highlight of what was otherwise an awful week.

Today I want to mark one month since I’ve been to those burned forests.

One month since I took the time to learn about the origin of some lyrics that I love. And last night as the rain fell hard, steady, and cold in the Pacific Northwest, I thought about how I’d like to be a better ancestor. How these things that seem like punishments may someday be gifts even if I cannot see that now. How the unspeakable losses are something we all share. How I am thankful for the trees.

I opened all of the windows in our little home, wrote these words, and listened to Today while sitting in one place. 

I have no real conclusion because, let me be honest, I’ll just write all day if somebody wasn’t expecting me to be someplace in an hour and I gotta get my shit together (a memoir).

I’ll leave you with more words from Barry Lopez, whom I’ve been reading a lot lately and thinking about boats.

To survive what is headed our way—global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments–and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water.

We are searching for boats we forgot to build.

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Dear Young One

Here is a letter I wrote to my younger self as part of a writing-workshop-group-writing-together, and I saw two folks in the flesh yesterday. Here’s a chapter in my book connecting a previous chapter to one I have not yet posted here. Lost yet? I am taking the advice to share my work as it develops even if I am feeling reluctant to do so. Some things to keep in mind: the details below may or may not be true, this is a work in progress, and my main goal is to teach readers about the Ten Essentials by telling a story.

A Memoir.

Decorative image
a favorite spot in the backcountry
(attribution c’est moi)

Dear Younger Self,

Forgive yourself. 

The second thing, dear Little One. Know this. If I could live our life over again, I would.

There are few things I wish we could do differently. Nothing I would not do again.

Save for one. 

I would floss more. 

Recently I thought of you while I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost, she writes: 

Cut a chrysalis open and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly. A fit emblem of the human soul…

As I write to you, Younger Self, I think of you as this mythical creature. I wish I could say this will be the last time you feel this way. For now, take a deep breath and feel relieved that you did no harm to anyone other than yourself. How to tell you, Dear Young One, in some ways, darker times lurk around every corner. How to tell you things are better beyond your wildest dreams? How to express gratitude for all of the things you are discovering?

Let me start by reminiscing about the first time you sought out adventures in the forest. Good job. You will need these mountains more than ever in the future, so congratulate yourself for figuring out how to save your sanity so early in life. When I think of you and who you are on the cusp of twenty, you are busy meeting the mountains and falling in love with its backcountry.

Breathe deep and enjoy this moment.

Remember the smell of loamy soil. Hold the crisp pine scent of trees in your heart. These trees may be lost one day. Close your eyes and savor the scent of being on the trail. Mountains will become a temple to your middle-aged soul. When you first discover the joys of a trail, it is a complete miracle that nobody will see you as being way out of your league and a danger to your personal safety. Truly! You trick everyone into thinking you knew exactly what you were doing. Nice work, by the way. Turns out this is a life-long skill you will continue to hone well into middle-age.

Talk a good game, sister; it’s soul-craft. 

On your first extended trip, you had a good backpack. Spendy-looking boots you found on sale. A smile that attracted a surfer boy from California who offered to share his tent. A wit that appealed to a granola girl from Vermont who needed a partner-in-crime. You looked the part. Won the role. Joined the cast of delinquents who like a party in the woods. 

What I’m writing to you, Young One, is what I wish I could have told you then. Our life lessons, if you will, recorded here from the perspective of somebody who got to choose her own adventure. This is all the advice from lessons learned from the years we will affectionately come to call our 20s and 30s. Don’t worry, we don’t become a sad woman who pines for the past with regrets. We could have just been, shall I say, a bit more aware.

Relish in the fact that you are the last generation to enjoy unfettered time in the woods. No adult in your life tried to give you any structure when you were a kid playing outside. Your independent stubborn spirit never got in the way of your education. If I could whisper a few things in your ear, other than remembering to floss every day, here’s what I’d say. 

Read up on the Ten Essentials. 

This classic list of materials will help keep you safe in the backcountry instead of relying on extraordinary good luck. Be aware that you’re not exercising good judgment when you make a decision with the phrase:

Fuck those dudes, I’ll show them…

Focus, instead, on learning to dare yourself. 

Public libraries exist, for instance, I dare you to read up on details you need to survive in the mountains. Maybe exercise your library card a bit more instead of doing bong hits in the morning while lusting over maps.

Reading, it turns out, is incredibly helpful and much more productive than daydreaming of new places to go. You will suffer longer than necessary as you become a backpacker. Your fancy-ass expensive degrees will teach you the terminology to describe what you need: motivated self-directed informal education

Spoiler alert! You somehow figure out how to graduate from college. No shit.

It’s also a great idea to remember to turn on some lights while you look at those maps, by the way, you may be ruining your eyesight.

Speaking of maps. 

Always remember to pack the map you purchased. Know where your trip takes you. Yes.

Accept this obsession. Your best dreams swirl with topographic lines. 

Pay attention to where the sun sets in the sky.

Gift yourself at dusk and slow down since you will sleep and miss most sunrises until you are much older. Not knowing how to find the four directions the moment you walk out of your tent is already starting the day off with a struggle. And really, let’s be honest. Not getting stoned first thing in the morning would be really helpful. Wait, I’ve already told you that. See? What they say about damaging your short-term memory may be true, Younger Self.

It may also be menopause.

Here’s what I know: the cliché of being concerned with the journey and not the destination feels like bullshit when it is raining in sheets and you’ve lost the trail. Never doubt that those who wander do indeed get very lost. Your goal is to go there and back again on the trail. Easy. You don’t want to end up on the news.

Pay attention to forks in the trail. Look up. Look around.  

A compass really helps. Invest in a cheap one. Take a minute to learn which way is west on every new trail. Trust me. Follow the advice of “Go West, Young Woman.”

Know when it is time to walk.

And you’ll struggle with this next tip for life, I’m afraid, but try to remember sunglasses and sunscreen, especially livin in the PNW. After The Great Eye Infection of 2005, you must try to always remember sunglasses and eye drops in your first aid kit. The freckles you have are more from getting shit-faced drunk at outdoor concert festivals than hiking anyway. Want to know an easy way to remember which direction is west? Look north, then look down at the freckles on your left shoulder; they are bigger than those on your (stage-right) shoulder. Wait. Who am I kidding? Admit that you like how you look with a tan and sunscreen makes your face breakout.

Start wearing a hat earlier in life. Buy a cute hat. Don’t borrow them from boyfriends, who are weirdly possessive about their hats. And they get super-pissed when you lose said hat. Remember those eye drops. Always. You can use them to hide the fact that you enjoy getting stoned in the morning for a lot longer than you think.

Don’t forget the extra clothing. Spend money on the best sweat-wicking stuff you can afford. The Army/Navy clothes, albeit fashionably edgy in the 1990s, are really fucking heavy. I’m sorry to report those clothes are made for soldiers to suffer. Wool is scratchy. Makes you bitchy. Own up and buy the obnoxious pink colors of wickable fabrics when they are on sale. Claim that you are wearing all the shrinked and pinked gear as style.

Gear, I am pleased to report, both in terms of clothing and equipment, gets significantly better over the years. It will blow your mind how good it gets. How unbelievably expensive it becomes. If you are to forget any item of clothing, do not let it be extra socks. Never hang your bra outside to dry while you’re, um, hanging out with a guy in a tent.

Deer like salt. 

The guy in the tent will not mind that you have fewer clothes, but you will. Hiking with a duct-taped sports bra is a great story that gets you a lot of laughs. It does, however, suck the joy out of many miles of beautiful trails in northwest Montana.

Praise you for being one of the first people among your friends to buy a headlamp!

You turned so many people on to those strappy contraptions, it’s probably a shame you did not have stock in the company. Be sure to always pack that headlamp. You’ll need extra batteries. You like to read late into the night once you get over the newness of that guy sharing your tent. You usually fall asleep with your headlamp on because you’re tired, sunburnt, and stoned. And you hate the dark. Be sure to invest in the best illumination you can afford. Cheap ones do just fine, but they break.

True of most gear, really.

I’m delighted to tell you that you’ll find two headlamps while you’re bike commuting in Portland, Oregon. Enjoy giving headlamps away when you upgrade.

Be sure to sleep under the stars without a tent as long as you love to.

There will come a time when you do not want the dude in your tent. You’ll prefer him waiting for you at home. Like not anywhere close to where you are backpacking. It’s okay to take time to figure that out. Another hard truth is that most dudes in your life won’t be worried about where you are. It’s nothing personal or selfish; they just live their own lives. The magic of middle-age, My Lovely, you accept this about love after you find The Right One. 

You will wear 100 headlamps and still not see The Wrong Ones. It’s your cross to bear.

First-aid supplies. Bring those. Always. 

Don’t ever rely on somebody else. Love many, trust few, and paddle your own fucking canoe. All that.

Aim to bring everything you need to keep your spirits up while being mindful of weight.

Blister first-aid will keep The Bitchy Monster quiet and keep everyone happier around you. Have itch cream to silence bug bites. Ibuprofen for when you get a headache. Duct-tape. Always duct-tape. Burn cream. Floss. Keep that first-aid baggy clean. Make sure you have a Cool Rag which will rescue you for years. Teach others about the importance of The Cool Rag. It’s your freak flag of hygiene and so much more. The Cool Wrag is a bandana that you expressly use for dipping into creeks and streams to keep you cooler on hard climbs or on hot days. You can tie it around your head, your neck, your wrists, or drape it across your shoulders. It’s really helpful to keep the swelling of your hands down which inevitably happens during a long hike until you purchase hiking poles. You somehow hold on to the same Cool Rag for close to 30 years.

Now that we discussed how to stay cool, remember your firestarter. Grab some lint from the dryer before you leave just to be on the safe-side to start a fire. Burn the trash that you can’t recycle. Check!

Always buy cheap lighters. Having a lighter isn’t an issue, stony. You might, however, be with a friend who steals lighters so she has three of them in her pocket and and then somehow loses them all.

Leave no trace.   

Matches. Seems redundant on the list, really. See vague reference above about stoner girlfriends who steal lighters. Let me add another lesson learned here while we’re on the topic of fire and warmth.

Expensive waterproof matches? Worth the investment for emergencies. Weather events. Make sure you bring extra rolling papers. You always run out. One drip drop of rain ruins the glue on an entire pack. Soggy rolling papers dampen spirits on trips. Trust your Future Self here, and pack all important items in extra plastic baggies. Take inventory of your shit before you get stoned. Where was I?

A Knife. Right. 

It will take you years to afford a good one and then you’ll lose it. And that’s okay.

In fact, you will eventually cut back significantly on pot smoking, and you’ll free up some of your budget to afford a pretty okay multi-tool. The guys you share a tent with usually have one. Or you hike with somebody who has a better tool than you.

A cheap Swiss-Army knife will always work. You lose the splinter-tweezers things immediately. They are quite handy to use as a roach clip. Keep that part of the knife with your weed. Don’t try to put it back into the slot. It just becomes this really hard puzzle to solve that makes me embarrassed for you.

Honestly, those guys with the fancy knives? You don’t need them either. 

Hiking with a best girlfriend is way better. She will want to talk about your book and there is no worrying about her intentions in the tent. She only wants to sleep. She will apologize for her body odor instead of thinking it’s her god-given right to stink up the space. Before you both fall asleep she will remind you to bring your bra in the tent.

Everything becomes easier. Getting older is magic.

Extra food. Yes.

Or at least enough food. If you can afford it, this is always your best essential. When The Hunger visits; it makes you miserable. You’re small but you can eat like a large human; you burn a lot of calories hiking. Ration your food before you get stoned. That’s probably the most important lesson. The most important essential, really. Buy extra ramen. You can carry light noodles as emergency food if you run out of fuel for your camp stove. Crunchy dry noodles are better than hiking hungry.

Don’t be afraid to flirt with bearded strangers who have food to share. Make sure he does not expect to end up in your tent. Keep in mind that when you do this, there will be consequences with pissing off the Boyfriend-with-the-Good-Knife who does not score any food from said Sexy Snack Stranger. In fact, the stranger ignores him as he pours homemade jerky into your cupped hands as you scoot close enough to hear him smell you. The benefit of being able to reminisce about the kindness of this stranger, outweighs the cost of the weeklong argument with Backpacking Boyfriend. Totally worth it. Every time you eat spicy homemade jerky, you’ll think of this Sexy Snack Stranger, like Proust’s madeleine. You don’t know what that means yet but you will.

A hot drink at the end of the day is a must. 

Abundant drinking water is key. Moving on.

Hiking in areas where water is scarce is to suffer. Rationing water is simply not fun. You get terrible headaches from dehydration. You suffer in the desert. Stay north.

And there is an eleventh essential: Just for those who menstruate. 

I could not find a single Ten Essential list with a mention of the menses. Seems off. Hiking on a full moon affords you extra light in the evening sky, but it also means you may be taking Aunt Flow into the woods with you. I suppose it could be classified under first aid, but it is an omission in most guide books.

Carry your own supplies for bleeding. You can burn most of them if you run out of fire starter. Menstrual cycle surprises are fodder for your friends to make vicious jokes about your repurposing of the gauze in the first aid supplies, but it is no fun for you.

What you can not burn, you have to hike out. But that may be story for another time.

Some things do, in fact, get better, I promise. Better than you can dream possible.

Keep enjoying this one wild wonderful life,

Middle-aged Me.

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Things We Carry

We are in the process of doing some home improvements that we have put off for five years. When we sat down with our priorities and budgets five years ago, we decided to buy bikes and live with gnarly carpets (you can buy rugs to cover stains), the horrid light yellow paint on the walls (we call it Sun Faded Cat Piss), the uncomfortable futon we’ve had since 2003 (our dog loved it), and the cheap blinds (rental unit level quality). Every time we have had a bit of extra money, we decided to go places rather than invest in home improvements. Then the pandemic hit, and we spent almost a year with those floors, those walls, and the blinds, and whenever I had regrets, I went out to the garage and looked at our bikes to remind myself we’re doing okay in life. 

Before we have folks to do this flooring work, I have decided to see this as an opportunity to cull through my belongings. My husband and I both moved out west (separately) in our twenties with what we could fit in a car, and when we moved in together, we chose the best of anything we had as duplicates. He and I have moved close to a dozen times in the twenty years we’ve been together, so we’ve pared down our belongings. Books and bikes take up the most space, and we’ve always seen it as worthwhile to keep some possessions. If you look at our library and if you know us individually, you can easily tell which books belong to whom. Only he and I know which books we’ve both read (we have different tastes). As we have moved, we have also accepted that there are some things that we will never part with as individuals. One heated exchange is all it took for me to accept moving things of his, and he mine. 

For instance, after our third time moving together, I peeked into a box and found this black leather jacket covered in art that I’ve never seen him wear and I suggested that he part with it.

“I’ve never even seen you wear this, and what’s all of this other crap in this box? It’s gotta go to Goodwill, yo.” I had thought he was the only offender of keeping unnecessary things, but he came back swinging with the snark.

“Oh, you mean like that heavy-ass sewing machine you make me carry. I’ve never seen you fire that thing up.” 

He had a point. I loved that machine. It was from my life before him. It was the only thing left from a certain era, a time that feels like it never happened. Maybe he felt the same way about his jacket. Space in the U-Haul was precious real estate. We parted with a few kitchen gadgets and he kept the relic of his punk rock youth. I blew him a kiss when he carried the machine up three flights of stairs, and he extended his middle-finger with a smile in his eyes. That was the last time we had that discussion. 

Now that we are faced with moving all of our possessions to put in new floors, I am motivated to streamline my things mainly because of a short story by Ann Patchett, whom I love with all my writerly heart. In “How to Practice,” she writes about helping her friend clean out an apartment of her recently deceased father. Both Ann and her friend do not have children like me and my husband.

Here’s the section that gave me pause: 

Over the years, we had borne witness to every phase of his personal style: Kent as sea captain (navy peacoat, beard, pipe), Kent as the lost child of Studio 54 (purple), Kent as Gordon Gekko (Armani suits, cufflinks, tie bar), Kent as Jane Fonda (tracksuits, matching trainers), Kent as urban cowboy (fifteen pairs of boots, custom-made), and finally, his last iteration, which had, in fact, underlain all previous iterations, Kent as cosmic monk (loose cotton shirts, cotton drawstring pants—he’d put on weight).

I love this description for two reasons: We learn so much about this man both by popular references and the way that she uses parentheses. Rather than telling a story within a story, she gives us details about Kent’s life in between those parentheses. I used to teach my students that if you are going to add parenthetical information, you should read it aloud and if it doesn’t make sense like you’re whispering an aside, it doesn’t work (when in doubt, leave it out). 

Explicitly this is a story that teaches readers to think about their things and what might happen when you die, what might happen if you do not have children to clean out your closets. It’s also about what this man brought into his life as he aged and changed through different phases.

Implicitly this story is about so much more, and I thought about how that sewing machine (for me) was the first time I had extra money to buy something I wanted as a working adult. That leather jacket signifies something intangible to my husband, I’m sure. My mind then wondered some more.

When I think about stories of intangible and tangible things, I see the cover of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. If you have not read this book, click away from this bloggy drivel, and treat yourself to an incredible book about the Vietnam War.

Here’s one of my favorite passages: 

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing-these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations…men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to.

We have two copies of this book, by the way, we read it as graduate students and loved it. I know his copy by the handwriting in the margins, it’s a given we’ll keep both copies. The day my book arrived in the mail 22 years ago, I cracked it open and read the whole thing in one sitting. I canceled the plans I had that night, ate cheese and crackers for dinner and read O’Brien’s masterpiece, a banned book. I had heard both of my parents tell stories about the Vietnam era, and I’ve seen all of the movies and documentaries, but that book took me inside the mind of an American soldier, inside the complexities of that war. He taught me the weight of intangible things (like memories) can be heavier than any real thing (like carrying your friend’s dead body). 

Memories are heavy.

When I bought that sewing machine, I justified the purchase because I knew I could always sell it if I really needed the money in the future. I’ve learned from my middle-class friends, they didn’t have to think this way about their possessions. For those of us who survived childhood with parents who lost jobs and the economic destruction that ensues, it is hard to not think this way even if you have moved into a new tax bracket yourself. That sewing machine signifies a sort of success for me (I never got desperate enough to sell it). I’ve never asked my husband what that jacket means to him, but I will carry that box should we move again (some stories are personal, it is also lighter than my sewing machine).

As I started to go through the things I have accumulated since we moved here five years ago, I cut the tape on a box that I have moved but have not opened in probably ten years (if I’m honest, the mister has probably carried this one, it’s really fucking heavy). I have letters from people who are (sadly) no longer in my life, my high school yearbooks, really old family photos, scrapbooks, and my high school diary. I spent some time putting a few photos on the Insta writing captions (Insta is all about self-entertainment). When I cracked open my yearbook and a weaving project from my senior art class fell out. I had forgotten that we done weaving in that class! 

Memories of my art teacher came flooding back as I touched the fibers and marveled at how good it was (humblebrag). I remembered the art teacher telling me my design was ambitious and that I may not be able to make it work, but she told me to experiment and try. Like a good art teacher, she had us sketch and make a plan before we started the actual weaving. I don’t remember my grade nor do I remember what anyone else made, but I remembered loving the feel of the loom, how I obsessed about the colors of the yarn, and that class was one of my favorites because I got to talk with my friends as we made things (a precursor to how my best friendships have matured and endured). 

As I turned the 4×12 inch weave over to see the right-side and the wrong-side, I now see how my plan did not work in reality (some of the rows do not connect, there are holes where there should not be). I am amazed by the teacher’s willingness to let me make those mistakes (she had to have known), and I think I can fix them now.

In this small artifact that has survived 30 years tucked into a yearbook, I see my 18 year old self choosing colors I still love to this day (greens, purples, golds, blues) and a design of a sun and a moon (always a hippy at heart). Until recently, that was my one and only art class. My heart aches for students who do not get to take classes like this or for kids who lose time in art class to do active shooter drills. I know for a fact there are fewer art teachers. 

I also looked at the teacher section of my yearbook, and I was amazed at how many of my teachers had graduate degrees from really good schools. Morehouse, NYU, Spelman, Syracuse, Boston College, and other regional publics from the southeast, I was so very lucky to land in that public school in Atlanta, Georgia though I am not sure I thought that at the time.

I looked at the photo of my history teacher (a Morehouse alum) who played “Fight Power” by Public Enemy during a lecture, and he stopped the cassette tape (I’m old) as Chuck D was mid-stream:

Elvis was a hero to most

But he never meant shit to me you see

Straight up racist that sucker was

Simple and plain

Mother fuck him and John Wayne

He asked us why Flava Flav was so mad at Elvis and John Wayne. I remember the entire class cracking up. We were freaked out that our teacher even knew this music (he was probably 26, ancient to teenagers). In my suburban Atlanta classroom, we loved that music and I remember us laughing at how hip our teacher was (he dug Public Enemy like us!)

I have never forgotten the power of music for what we call teachable moments. I don’t think (and I deeply fear) that a teacher could not do this today, and every time I hear that song, I think of him and what he taught me about poetic explication (though I would not have known to call it that).  

Can you imagine his lesson plan? Today we will discuss American history, cultural appropriation, and race relations as represented in It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Students will discuss key poetic lines from William Jonathan Drayton Jr. and Carlton Douglas Ridenhour. 

Maybe he did not write a lesson plan at all and that’s how it worked (I remember him shutting the door before he pressed play on the boom box). 

So okay, I’m digressing (as usual). 

Here’s the thing.

I want to express gratitude to one of my dearest friends (a textile artist) who bought me Ann Patchett’s new book and had her sign it for me in her bookstore as I housesat. As I fell deeper in love with her home and her pets. As I tried to write this book of mine. As I tried to essay and nothing came. As I tried to remember the hope that you can be an author who owns a bookstore in 2022.

cover page of These Precious Days with a personal message written by Ann Patchett "To Alyson, With love and thanks from Ruby, Ozette, and the chickens. Now get back to writing."
attribution: me & omfg Ann wrote my name

Patchett’s message has helped me through some really dark months, and she has helped me see that I am at my best when I essay (when I attempt, when I try). 

I’ll leave you with her words from (a tear-stained) page 4 and 5: 

…I could watch myself grappling with the same themes in my writing and in my life: what I needed, whom I loved, what I could let go, and how much energy the letting go would take. Again and again I was asking what matters most in this precarious and precious life. 

As for death, I have remained lucky. Its indifference has never waned, though surely it will circle back for me later. Death always thinks us of eventually. The trick is to find joy in the interim, and make good use of days we have.

Amen, Ann. (And fight The Power).

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cour-sera-sera

The French have a saying that I quite love. Plus ça çhange plus c’est la même chose. When I hear a French speaker say these words, I feel like I am witnessing a benediction, a resignation, an acceptance of all the horrors. A full use of the body to emote words.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Sigh. This introduction applies to so many things and thoughts right now, but here goes. A post I’ve been working on for a few months, and I want to post this so I can think about my book this weekend. Bless the heart who told me my bloggy is better when I do not write about educational technology. I have, however, not written here very much, but the following has been on mind as a winter research question.

Last fall, I decided I would carve out some time to learn something new while I had a glorious sabbatical month. Keep in mind I spent most of my time walking in the woods watching the winter duke it out with autumn. Glorious. Just magical that sabbatical of mine.

At the time, I kept seeing the term “upskilling” along with a lot of hand-wringing about the Great Resignation. Professional development while you are working a job in this era? The odds are not in your favor. Nobody cares about your skills until they need them, so if you like to learn for the sake of learning you may have to make that time happen on your own.

Usually professional development, let’s be honest, rewards you with more work. I am a glass-half-full kind of girl, but I also know I don’t own the glass and the water may need filtering.

And The Great Resignation, mind you, is a bit like what Grunge is to music genres. A media concoction to describe a certain time. Meaningless, subjective, and crafted by people who are looking to classify and market things for you to buy. Plus ça çhange plus c’est la même chose.

But I’d like to take a closer look at the upskilling–it sounds like something a mime does with an invisible hula hoop. This improvement of your skills has been around for a long time but you may know it as professional development or professional learning, training, organizational development, and the like. All of these words and phrases summarize learning at work and it costs somebody money or time.

When an offer to take classes for free for a month hit my personal inbox, I decided to give it a shot.

What did I learn from the 2022 mighty MooC that rhymes with the title of this blog? 

Let me start with some questions I had when I signed up.

Could I learn a job skill while not taking a class from a person? I am an okay watercolor painter and fair-to-middling knitter thanks to YouTube, but could I take this focus and use it towards something that justifies a paycheck? Can you really change your career with these courses? These programs? Is this how competency-based education finally finds its way to remediation, developmental level, or pre-college level work?

Could the MOOC course design facilitate students through an upskilling?

I had a few other questions: Why take one of these classes and not one from a university or community college? What is happening with corporations who are paying for their employees to learn from professional development services? What is a MOOC-like learning experience for people who do not remember the first wave of MOOCs? More importantly, are these courses similar to correspondence courses in ye ol’ days o’ distance learning?

If you remove the personal learning network focus of a traditional MOOC (to me), what then is the actual “course?”

What does a badge look like, who hosts it, and who the fuck cares? What happens at the end of this experience? Do people really get jobs? And selfishly, how little time could I devote to this and still pass?

The last question is really the honest truth. Instructional design boiled down.

Let me repeat this: 

How little time could I devote to an upskilling and still learn something meaningful? 

Here’s the thing.

The way that the course is designed, and the care in the tone of the feedback–even within all of automation–I could sense real people behind the design.

There is a story in the course.

Let’s say you’re tasked as an employee with upskilling–this word also reminds me of keeping a balloon in the air as it is floating away.

attribution

With an upskilling, students have a few choices.

1] You can pay for an expensive certification from an organization that has trademarks, certifications, and acronyms galore.

2] You can sign up for a course at your local community college.

3] You can apply to your local university.

or 4] you can sign up for the 2022 mighty MOOC.

You may not really understand what you’re aiming to become because you have no idea what a project manager is, how it differs from a program manager, but you see tons of jobs asking for these skills.

You also have a fifth choice as a student. As a learner. That’s to not to go at all.

And that is deeply troubling to me; people choosing not to pursue an education. People accepting that plus ça çhange plus c’est la même chose.

There is always hope, I want to say. Just like Bansky painted. Look again at the image if you missed it.

When I considered my choices as a student, I chose the shortest path: the 2022 mighty MOOC. They promised I could move as quickly or as slowly as I wanted, and they would charge me a lot less than what I would pay at the university or community college, and much less from the ™ organization.

For the price of 10 fancy coffees, I could earn a certificate or badge to decorate my LinkedIn profile under licenses and certifications.

Here are some other things I learned in the upskilling. Sounds like something in a horror film.

I learned the jargon and vocabulary of another field. I still think that a liberal arts education gives you the knowledge, skills, and abilities to earn a paycheck, friends. And frankly none of us are safe from automation, streamlining, lean leadership, and all of the other undoings of life as we know it. I will die on this hill.

I also loved being in a class and not having to deal with other people. A memoir.

I have a PLN, and for this I am fortunate, so to be able to listen to videos while I sketched and took notes was a real luxury. I did not participate in any of the networking opportunities and I clicked past all of the discussions.

The network is there if student want it, and I loved having the choice to ignore it. To me, this is the key function of all programs that are targeted to adult learners. You have to make it very clear what is optional.

I thought some of the assignments were pretty clever. I like a good story, and they kept a constant narrative about a single company. Clever scaffolding. Kept me interested. I was able to apply what I already know from academic leadership and whatever it is I do now, and I laughed outloud every time they would cite a “business leader’s theory.” Most of the time, it was just Aristotle, Freud, and/or some early capitalist who actually wrote about these concepts first.

I took a few quizzes over again just to see how they reworded questions. And kudos to you, question writers, that shit’s an art that we like to pretend is a science. It is really hard to write a multiple choice question that actually teaches people. All data-driven revisions are a leap of faith that you are improving a course. Or you are quite possibly making the learning experience worse. This I know.

Something else interesting to note is that this is the first time I have taken a class with so many multiple-choice questions. Truly! I have spent plenty of time writing questions for assessments, and I have written them for so many classes I’ve lost count in the last decade, but it was not my first mode of assessment as a teacher.

With this certification sequence, I made a deal with myself that I would not spend more time trying to earn “an A” and I would just roll with my first attempt at any assessed work. A few times, though, I challenged the robot. I was like, “This question sucks, and the distractor is not entirely wrong.” You can loose hours of your life with these thoughts, and I don’t think the majority of students care.

Writing a good wrong answer is so much harder than writing the correct answer. A Memoir.

I really liked assignments where they made me choose the best response in a conversation. As a learner, I hate simulations where people role play in person. Even with skilled actors, it always seems forced. 

Education classes, in particular, utilize simulations, role playing by acting out scenarios, with the hope that it helps in real life. It may for some, but for me as a student, I always felt like it was a shitty theatre class and a day off for the teacher. You never really know what you’ll say until there in the moment.

In the 2022 mighty MOOC, my friends, they had you drag and drop what you would say in a scenario, and they told you if you were right or wrong and why. If only life worked that way!

I often chose the wrong answer just to see why it was wrong. Nerd alert, I know. Those drags and drops were very helpful to learn processes, when to use vocabulary in different scenarios, and what the job might look like should you get hired. Quite helpful, really. Very interesting conversations where the content directly connects to what you might face in the workplace. You never know.

I also half-assed all of the peer response assignments. True confession.

I never read the assignments, I just completed the work based on the rubric.

The teacher in me dies a few deaths with this confession, but holygod did it save me time.

A few times, I got a 100% when I should have failed. The few times I did get dinged for incomplete shitty work, I felt bad for the person who graded it. The last class, the capstone, was a bit of a struggle because they had so many peer response assignments. I was ready for the upskilling to end at that point. Maybe it’s home improvement word, upskilling. We did an upskilling on the kitchen this weekend and it was more than we bargained for time-wise.

Did I leave the six class sequence with a portfolio of work?

No, but you could.

Slight missed opportunity for me, but probably not. I liked the business plan throughout the course, but it was tough to translate the work without your own imaginary business or project.

Did I leave the class understanding the major learning outcomes? Yes, and I have access to templates, vocabulary, and resources that I could use again if I needed to. Mostly it reinforced whatever I already know about this work. Not a total loss.

Would I do it again? Not sure. 

When I concluded the program they offered me a coupon to the fancy ™ program. It was like an upskilling coupon to celebrate my graduation. That could really be appealing to some people, I suppose. If the 2022 mighty MOOC leaves you at the door of a real certification at a discount, chances are you may do better.

Do I understand the “upskill” zeitgeist better now?

Dunno. 

I’m left with more questions than answers, so I’ll close by telling that I read every vocabulary list because I love words. Those were the best part of the six months I came and went with this course.

Here’s the best definition of the word “uncertainty” that I’ve seen in a business course or frankly about life as we know it. (emphasis mine).

Uncertainty: a lack of predictability or high potential for surprise.

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The Place Where You Live

Tried my best to get this down to 200 words and contact my friend for a photo. Neither happened.

Orion magazine has this lovely invitation to write about where you live. If you are a writer, you should do it.

I also learned the word “Zoomtown” today by finishing Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home. It has left me thinking of where I live, how I cannot let go of words without an editor, and if I could write a love letter to capture this moment. I moved to this town from California. I am originally, as we say, from the East Coast. I fulfill all of the categories of the “Zoomtown” expansion, but truth be told, I have been trying to figure out how to retire in Bellingham since I was 27.

Here’s the thing.

Being priced out of this town is not shocking. Witnessing the changes to this tiny cove in the Pacific Northwest is something to see. When I am my most pessimistic, I think of ways to leave. As I have done many times from so many places. I can see leaving.

When I am at my most optimistic, I hope for better restaurants and bike lanes. The public library is superb. There is so much to love, and I feel lucky. I cannot see leaving.

If you can’t make the word count for Orion, by the way, you should write a love letter to where you live. Or where you are from. Write about your home.

I promise I will be a reader.

This is what I wrote.

attribution

City Subdued of Excitement: A Memoir

Below the flight path of migrating snow geese, I live near a repurposed railroad trail. In the skies above the condominium I call home, the Mallard duck, the Great Blue Heron, the Barred owl, and the common gull fly east to Lake Whatcom. Uphill from where the land meets the Salish Sea’s tides. On the ancestral and current lands of the Lummi, Nooksack, Samish, and Semiahmoo people. Within rowing distance of the San Juan Islands. Within walking distance of Whatcom Falls. Within the crawling distance of old growth tree stumps. 

When I walk each day along the trail, I say hello to mosses and ferns as I would a passing stranger. I worry about the waterfront and its tributaries when I read tide tables like lines of poetry with its warnings and watches. In the summer, I plan long sojourns into the forest. Gambling with days off work to not align with the smoke of forest fires. In the summers, I breathe the smokey air from provinces of our Canadian neighbors. I ride my bike close to the border of two countries.

Where a maple leaf of one national flag flies close to stripes and stars my own country’s claim.

All I see is ocean.

Where the summer heat waves now melt our glaciers. Where there are too many shades of green to count. Where we are blessed. Where we are cursed. Where we choose to ignore whether we are blessed or cursed. 

Where a tissue mill that once sent plumes of polluted steam into the air; we now have a temporary park where people ride their bikes in circles. Near where people live in tents, cars, and RVs because they cannot afford homes. 

When it snows, you can see the clear cut acreage on the nearby hills. We use phrases like “tree farm” as a friendly way to describe cutting down trees. To make ourselves feel better, we use phrases like “the mountains are out.”

The most optimistic hopeful phrase of the northwest. The mountains are out.

I like to imagine the mountain peaks choose when to let us see them. It is rare and completely delightful. On days when there is a sea of grey above our heads, you can hear the birds better. If you are still. Quiet.

In the winter, the days are short, dark. If you pay attention to the moment when the sun drops below the clouds, a change of the light turns into a celebration of colors. Brief far away light for minutes. You can miss it. Perhaps the sun is telling the global north a secret we cannot hear.

We live for the the long days of summer to give us back our lost light of winter. Hearts remain open as the in-between seasons pass quickly like windstorms.

Gale-force winds remind us that even the most experienced sailors may need the safety of a harbor. When the seas are too powerful you can find a cove in the City of Subdued Excitement and wait it out.

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To Scribble and Erase and Scribble Again

Watercolor painting is teaching me how to learn when it is time to stop.

Unlike writing, where you can rewrite and revise words for decades, if you rework a shape too much using watercolor, the paper starts to break down. The actual medium starts to deteriorate. If you try to fix a mistake or paint over something, the original mark is still there. The first draft is always final.

This is called “overworking the paper or the paint” as I’ve listened to teachers who share tutorial videos online. Overworking the pigment and water ruins a painting. The worn paper draws your eye to that shape; that’s all you see. Like a coffee stain on a white shirt. A dropped stitch on a knitted blanket.

Your mistake becomes the focal point.

I suppose if I was still writing by hand or with a typewriter, the same would be true. I am old enough to remember how frustrating it was to fix a typo using liquid paper or the backspace deleting of a typewriter. The curse or the blessing of the digital magic machine is that it allows you to keep drafts of drafts of drafts of drafts. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. 

With watercolor, you have to make the call that it’s done. You have to say, this is the best I can do and it’s time to move on. You can either live with the obvious degradation of the materials or you can stop and preserve what you have.

But you have to call it. 

I picked up my first set of paints the same week I learned about the virus that nobody took very seriously in my life. Almost everyone close to me discounted the severity of this virus at first. Discounted it like it would be a snow day. Like a temporary disaster similar to an avalanche sliding across a road. Seeing the doctor who scared us about AIDs and the seriousness of my state’s governor made me pay attention. Made me doubt others who were lighthearted that this was a temporary thing. I kept my opinions to myself and clung to the handful of people who make me a happier person. I started to examine the things I could change and control about my life as chaos swirled.

The pandemic was not the catalyst for my current obsession with pigment, but it definitely gave me the time and focus to learn and practice and think. A deep breath I did not know I needed.

Prior to purchasing my first set of paints, I had overworked the page with a written elegant appeal for why I no longer wanted to travel as part of my jobby job. Why I no longer wanted to be in a position of pretending like I love being an extrovert. Why others are better suited for the work I was doing. Why I wanted to create the materials others can use, but I did not want to spend my life in airports, hotels, strange cities, and that I can live my entire life to the end without ever returning to Texas or the southeastern states. Why I needed an extended break from academic conferences. True confession: I’d go to New York or any state north into Maine, but aside from seeing my family in the southeast, the rest of the country is not that interesting to me anymore. Turns out, all of those arguments were not needed as the virus circled the globe. My pitch was never spoken. That overworked page was never needed.

Life as we know it changed. A deep breath I knew I needed.

Instead, I did what needed to be done and I painted everyday. I had already been working remote for over a decade, so there was nothing to adjust to professionally. I disappeared into books from the library, and I wrote and revised a book. I was strangely content with being hyper-local; I only went south of Highway 20 a handful of times. I drove west because I love the Olympic peninsula. The big mountains that descend into rocky beaches has a pull on me like a magnet. In 2021, I lived within walking, running, snowshoeing, and cycling from my front door. I was treated to a whole month off from work where I painted and wrote while money magically appeared in my bank account. For a month, I got to experience what it must be like to be rich or comfortably upper-middle class. I deleted every app that connected to email, notifications, and focused on being a writer. I felt nothing but gratitude for 31 days.

I was able to take full advantage of the wise words of Mary Oliver from her Blue Pastures:

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart–to pace, to chew pencils, and to scribble and erase and scribble again.

What I love most about this book is her use of the color blue in every chapter. Sometimes it’s sneaky like a reference to the “whole sky” or sometimes it is direct like fishing for bluefin tuna. But it’s there, that color blue. My favorite chapter is “Pen and Paper and Breath of Air” where she explains how she carries a small notebook to lists her thoughts as she walks. Her question below sends me staring into the sky on more days than I like to admit:

Do you think the wren ever dreams of a better house?

In 2020, I painted birds everyday for 100 days with the promise to myself that if I still felt depressed on day 100 as I did on day one, I would seek help. Those paintings got me through to the other side. Since then, I have progressed as a painter. I am still overworking the page as a writer. I am still not sure if the wren dreams of a better house.

Here are some thoughts for today as I head into the weekend with unfettered time and no commitments and no screens and birds in the sky above a trail I will walk. Pure joy.

I have been taking two classes in my free time as an online student. One I am not ready to talk about and the other brings me back to thinking about my early days of being a teacher.

The hardest thing about teaching is remembering what it is like to be a beginner. What it is like to learn something for the very first time. This is sometimes called the “expert’s blindspot” but I am not comfortable with that description. I could never point out where I was an expert and what I could not see. It’s an elitist description that only the worst people in education seem cozy with.

When I tell people who do not know me well about learning to paint, they immediately ask if I am going to sell what I am creating on an online store. Or if I am creating a “side hustle” which I cannot even say without puking in my mouth a little. Don’t get me wrong. Should somebody want to commission me to paint, I would faint, get to work, and happily accept their money. But no, that’s not the goal. I also really hate the phrase “being a Creative” because I believe every person has that potential.

The best questions are from those who are interested in the paint, the paper, and the materials. The tangible. The tools. Shades. Hues. Saturation. The scribble without the erase. The chewing of the pencil or the paint brush. They know the value of working the page. The creative work. And how it saves me. How it saves us to be creative in a time of chaos and uncertainty.

They know the value of thinking about pigment to water ratio. As Mary Oliver jotted down:

The sugar of vanity, the honey of truth.

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Teacher-Leader & Other Words I Make Up

This past year, 2021, was not my best year as a blogger. I somehow wrote thousands of words, however. Just not here. Close to having a draft of a book, this girl. A Memoir.

No, really. It’s a memoir. 

I am the closest I’ve ever been to finishing a book. Let’s hope I live to be 146 so I can finish the other four books I have in my head. Writing that took place during a global pandemic, heat waves that melted glaciers, forest fires, and catastrophic floods in an area that I love. Daily life is filled with chaos and horror where we all just press on with business as usual. Writing, most days, feels like the only thing I can control. La vie continue.

I count myself among the lucky.

What I would like to share here is a follow-up response to a question. I will try to tell you a few stories to help some researchers and I’ll end with a short, short story that I wrote.

First, let me say, thank you, researcher friends, for finding me and letting me chat your ear off for an hour. It was pretty refreshing to share ideas with strangers who had interesting questions. It was lovely to think Big Picture and lift my eyes towards the horizon again.

Apparently I used the phrase “teacher-leader” during our chat. So poetic! In fact, when I read the request to say more about it, I was like, “Wow! I said that?”

I have to admit I have no idea where that phrase–teacher-leader–originates in my brain. Look at me making things up! Allow me to use a phrase and then not have the energy to do a single bit of research.

Call it poetry. Then I’m off the hook to pretend like I care, right? I’ve decided to do research for academic publishing once the federal government stops harassing me about my school loans. In other words, I plan to haunt some future writer from beyond my grave. Ninety years from now after I write my four other books.

This Teacher-Leader phrase, to be honest, has filled my thoughts quite a bit. A few questions come to mind.

What do I mean when I say “teacher-leader”–and most horribly, was I one when I was a teacher? Is it fair of me to look back and judge the teacher I was? I feel very far away from being a teacher.

So far, in fact, when I am asked to talk about my teacherly experience, I feel like I am gossiping about another woman. Somebody who used to dress better than I do now. Somebody who had a hair style. Somebody I used to know. A day in the life. Was another lifetime one of toil and blood. Where I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form. Another day, in other words, when I might have cared if I was plagiarizing song lyrics.

Also, in my short career as an administrator, how did I treat “teacher-leaders?” How have I interacted with them as whatever the fuck I am now?

Three stories come to mind where I’ll change the details slightly, not reference any organization, and hopefully make myself laugh. Everything I write beyond this sentence may or may be not be true.

A Memoir.

Researchers, you can add any of this to our interview. I’m really interested in your project, and I also promised you I would unearth my old thoughts on teacher creativity. Here is a talk that I gave that I really should finish with some research. Here is where I blathered a keynote about change management. And here’s my working hypothesis about adjuncts and their labor conditions, which are also student learning conditions.

Ready? Ok, Magic Machine, let’s see if we remember how the bloggy works.

Let’s start with the question of what a teacher-leader is. 

This is a person who has no ambition to be anything else but a teacher. She might catch the hot potato to be department chair and lead an initiative here and there, but mostly she’s engaged with the business of teaching. She likes students. She cares. She has empathy for the impressionable minds she works with; she likes to collaborate. Most importantly, she’s a life-long learner and her curiosity leads her beyond the scope of her discipline. If you don’t already know, my beat is the community college. I’m somewhat interested in regional publics, very bored by R1s, bewildered by privates. Endlessly fascinated by community colleges, technical schools, and any programs that help students without safety nets get a job and/or to improve their lives. My Commonwealth colleagues have the best title for this beat: The Trades. Give me the open-door policy, scarce budgets, programs connected to blue-collar jobs with more problems than you can solve; and I’d like to think I’m your girl.

I may have been a teacher-leader in a situation that I don’t talk about too much these days. I’ll whisper in your ear a secret: I got into educational technology as an environmentalist. Put simply, I saw an open (hee hee) to reduce handouts and thus lowering the budget for the dean of my division while saving a few trees. A small local tangible goal connected to very interesting technologies. My department had a heavy hand on the college’s print budget so I looked ways to Reduce paper–my R before I knew there were others. I learned about all of the things that currently helps me do a job I now have. Lucky me. All things considered, I’m quite grateful to my former teacher-leader self. At that time, however, I did not see myself as a leader. I was a teacher trying to do some good in the world by saving some trees and money for students. It also gave me a free-ish ride to professional development events we used to call “conferences.”

For me, back then, in The Before Times, being a teacher-leader was pure selfish creativity that helped me get funding to learn. In short, I was curious and easily bored, and I got to travel to different cities, meet like-minded people, and present ideas that other people found interesting. I loved it. Helped me out of the doldrums of teaching the same class over and over. Sustained me until it was a life no longer sustainable. 

Take a look at any long-term change with your campus culture. Chances are it was a teacher-leader who did work outside of her discipline to help things along. For example, my former self connected ways to learn interesting things about open-source projects and small initiatives that brought me to professional development and instructional design. In the Before Times, we had time for circuitous playful self-serving curiosity. Before we were all so fucking exhausted by the pace of change.

Teacher-leaders these days? Probably very exhausted.

My teacher and leader and staff friends, I say this to you, if you need to hear it: do not feel bad for anything you are not doing, love yourself for everything you are doing, and just keep walking forward. Working in education has always been hard; it’s somehow even more difficult than I could have ever imagined. What I write here is a reflection, not advice on what to do next. This I do not know.

This I cannot tell you. Just look down at your boots and keep walking. Or take a nap. 

Here’s the second story that came to mind about the teacher-leader.

What if the teacher-leader is an administrator? (A Memoir). What if winter was always coming with her checking account and that euphemism of “being off contract” started to feel like the tangible unemployment it is? What if “in between contracts” means you will not be paid for three weeks of the month? Let me whisper this in your ear, those administrators are teachers at heart but they most likely made a financial decision to move up the pay scale. They see themselves as caring about the business of teaching and learning, but they have budgets and spreadsheets and meeting agendas centered on the business of the college. Not ideal, but they also have a consistent paycheck and a contract. They lose the “teacher” and just become the “leader,” I suppose. It’s really hard job. If I had to give advice to teacher-leader-administrators right now, I would say to seek out two types of God-tier leaders. One who is interested in the idea of a legacy, and/or one who is really fucking tired and needs a win. They are usually one and the same, so let me parse a slight difference.

The Save My Legacy Administrator probably made a bad call that is now way outside of the zeitgeist. I can’t write about any examples that I can publish without worry, so I’ll write a sentence that I hope helps you see this administrator in a new light. If you can, envision this person with empathy. We’ve all made mistakes. Some more public than others. Some more private than others. Finish this sentence to find the leader on your campus:

Dr. OutsideTheZeitgest does not want to be remembered as the leader who did not support_________.

There is one on every campus.

As for the teacher-leader who became an administrator and needs a win? Ask what they need for their accreditation report or for the next budget planning session. Really fucking boring, but a win. Low hanging fruit maybe. And most importantly, connect a policy or an initiative that actually helps students succeed. There can be creativity with end-of-the-year reports, substantiating budgets, and planning future initiatives. Do I have specific advice for you? No. Take a nap or take a walk. Everyone’s so exhausted. Disappear into a book for a few hours. It helps. I don’t mean to be flippant here. I just have no answers for you. There is no playbook for what we are living through.

The third story that comes to mind is the teacher-leader who likes to collaborate outside of his discipline. There is so much opportunity for cross-discipline collaboration, and I bet there are already initiatives that didn’t work in the past that you can recycle. I used to say it’s 2009 somewhere, and now it’s 2011. Maybe 1991. Depends on your perspective. Maybe you try something cozy and familiar that you tried once. Writing across-the-disciplines. Teachers teaching teachers technology. STEM teachers incorporating co-requisite material into their courses. College success support in every course. Business teachers working with sociology teachers. Marketing teachers working with psychology teachers. Teacher-leaders always already see how their disciplines overlap with others. Giving teachers the space to figure this out together used to happen in the gaps of time between professional development and initiatives.

This time is now scarce, if not gone.

Where this collaboration happens now, I do not know. How it happens now, I do not know. How you pay for it, I have never known. Why it needs to happen, I do know and I can tell you with one word.

Students.

Alas! I need to wrap this up. Getting a little Ranty McRanterson here. I hope this helps, dear researchers. I really look forward to your work, and if I can help, please let me know. I’ve had the honor to get to know a lot of very smart leaders, teachers, teacher-leaders, and leader-teachers. They care about students. They care about the business (literally and figuratively) of teaching and learning.

There are two or three things I know, I suppose. Or I am willing to make up.

I count myself among the lucky.

rocks on a beach
attribution

I will conclude this bloggy with a short, short story I finished at a friend’s house while I hung out with her pets as she travelled. I wrote the first draft of this near her homeland during my magical month of October 2021. I spent some time on The Peninsula writing like I was a writer, and I followed a few writing prompts by Ursula LeGuin. I don’t remember the exact prompt, but I think she asked reader-writers to capture a scene in as few words as possible using action words. From start to finish. Lines like poetry but really a story in form. A narrative arc of two people meeting.

I share this here for you, dear friend, whom I love to walk with on the mainland and in the mountains. And anyone else who has made it this far. A short short story from a rocky stormy beach in the shadow of the Olympic mountains.

Steel Reserve

Wearing several layers of clothing and a hand-knitted hat, I walked along the stormy beach of the Dungeness Spit near Sequim, WA. Not far from where I was staying in a yurt outside of Port Townsend. I walked towards the bluffs, down the primitive trail, then along the rocky spit.

High tide was two hours ago. The walking was hard. Unsteady. From a distance, I could see a person with a metal detector. As I walked closer, I noticed the hip pouch made of canvas cradling a tall beer can of Steel Reserve. 

An older man. His face. He’s lived a harder life than me. Walking my way. Swinging a metal detector machine across the rocks, pebbles, and sand. Eyes looking at me.

I took the low line by the water. 

Right as we were about to pass one another a larger than normal wave hit. Clopped an arc of watery foam spreading in my direction. Fast.

I hopped and skipped up the beach. Got closer to him than I wanted to be, but away from the wave. 

The sun appeared on the horizon in between the massive grey silvering clouds. 

We looked at one another. 

“I can see the sunset in your eyes,” he smiled. 

I laughed with my best Not-Going-to-Happen look. Nodded. Started to walk away. 

He watched me.

“Does that work for you, ya know, quoting Peter Frampton to women?” I wondered aloud walking backwards.

He smiled. Stagger-leaned a bit towards me. 

Raising his eyebrows he pointed his chin in the direction I was walking.

“Last one who got that reference just divorced me.”

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Now Some Thoughts on Writing

Now Some Thoughts on Writing

This past weekend I printed out all of the chapters I think will make up the book that I have been working on in some shape or form for over twenty years. I have not researched old journals to pinpoint the exact date where I started this story. I don’t have the energy to return to the pages written my younger self. Not just yet. I am, however, pretty sure I started crafting sentences with this story arc some time around the moment that I decided I really disliked living in California and that I needed to return to college. Ten lifetimes ago. Since I first started to type up these stories, I have learned a lot about myself and the world–both personally and professionally.

What I have now are nine chapters that might actually become essays with illustrations that I want to paint. Maybe not. Here are the five points I jotted down as the printer worked on recycled blank pages from my last draft. 

  • The main symbol, metaphor, or hub of what makes the story move. (If you’ve ever experienced a bike flat tire where all the rubber explodes, that’s where I’m at with a few chapters. A few feel perfect. A few are lacking tread.)
  • A research question. What am I trying to teach the reader that will help this person in a real life backpacking situation? Where is the separation between wants and needs as a backpacker? (I thought a lot about this question this summer as I hiked solo).
  • Find at least three readings so I can create a selected readings at the end of the book. I love reading books that give me ideas of what to read in the future. (Somebody really wants to write for The New Yorker, but I’m not naming any names.) 
  • Start the editing by hand process. Again. Only this time, type up the edits before moving on to the next chapter. (Gonna try and not let the part I like the least pile up). 
  • Research what is Next. (This is a big fucking question that I’ve chosen to table during The Plague). 

This is what I do. It is progress that does not look like progress.  

This is the closest that I have ever been to actually having a collection of stories/essays/chapters where somebody could actually sit down and read it. As I was backpacking solo this summer in the North Cascades, I thought about how I want to write something that I would like to read. For the first time, I could really see my audience. A person taking a nap in a tent. A person wanting to arm-chair hike. A person who really wants to take a nap in the tent but the story is too entertaining. A tent-bound page turner.

If you normally check in with me this year for back-to-school-type reading, I am giving my brain a break from all that outside the jobby job. I have returned to thinking about some ideas that I started with my first instructional design gig. What I notice is now being called “upskilling.” I see some Big Questions finding their way back into the leadership conversations about labor and education. What happens when sectors of the economy fade and there is not a need for certain types of laborers? What then for those people? What does it look like when an organization provides education for its employees? Does it look like a college program? A certificate? A badge? I’m not really sure, but some days I think it sounds like a word that rhymes with MOOC. 

I am also thinking quite a bit about formal, informal, and nonformal learning. There is learning for The Workplace, then there is something that benefits your social skills or something else not really related to work but it is also not entirely personal either. Then there is the learning that you do all on your own, and that’s a space where learning for craft and art meet. It’s the Third Place outside of capitalistic pursuits. A respite for your brain. Growth for your soul, if you’re comfortable with that word.

If you’re not, allow Emily Dickinson to change your mind:

The Soul selects her own Society —

Then — shuts the Door —

To her divine Majority —

Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —

At her low Gate —

Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling

Upon her Mat —

I’ve known her — from an ample nation —

Choose One —

Then — close the Valves of her attention —

Like Stone —

Now, a few thoughts and ideas to round out the summer.

attribution

Book Summaries or Summer Reading

Most hilarious: I read a historical fiction bodice ripper in the backcountry. I was solo, so I did not get the experience of reading the more saucy parts to my backpacking partners, and let me admit that I had other books to read when the bacchanalia and carnal delights got a bit tiresome. Books like these feel like they are written by historians who have realized that nobody is going to read their academic hot takes so they might as well slut it up with sex to get published. Whatever it takes, man, I’m not judging. I feel for these scholars. Here we are watching the defunding of the humanities and the constant bloat of STEM’s importance, yet nobody trusts science. Here we are with more access to information than ever before, and people trust random shit on a platform that was built to compare the looks of women. But alas, don’t give up hope, fair reader. You can read about history not as a movement about politics and ideas but of hot nookie. I laughed so hard at these turns of historical significance that took place because of one woman’s sex drive–usually brought on by large quantities of alcohol, gifts of jewelry, or dancing. Truth be told, I was ready to put it down when the main character murdered her rapist with a mortar and pestle she had been using earlier to make flour for his daily bread. He thought he was being crafty by backing her onto the kitchen table (he didn’t have the best fitness) and she was slowly guiding him to her weapon of choice (she’s a crafty survivor). That same kitchen maid would use those same skills to become the great queen of one of history’s most brutal kings. Who knew?

Most enjoyable: I reread Viriginia’s Woolf’s The Waves. Ginny is a guilty pleasure of mine, and I can somehow reread her books and experience what the Buddhists remind us about crossing rivers. That we and the river are never the same. Same goes for me and the Woolf. This turn–maybe my third reading–I noticed how she creates the passage of time with the use of the word “Now.” I’m sure the word appears dozens of times throughout the book, but I checked out a library edition that I could not annotate. I’m sure somebody has written a dissertation that nobody will read about this very topic. Now, I’m sure of it, is the main transitional word which brings you to new scenes and perspectives of the different characters. Words of liminal spaces. As in, Now, we’re going to discuss something different. Now the wind blew waves like soldiers rolling onto the beach. Now, the character is actually the sea and not the person thinking. Now, I can’t believe anyone is still reading this blog post. Now allow me to devolve into self-sabotage and despair. I mean, holyhell, Ginny wrote those masterpieces while bombs were blowing up her fucking town and she just went for a walk. What’s my pathetic deal? Surely that era was worse then the Fire-Murder Hornet-Sky-Plague-Earth Burning Late-Capitalism(tm) moment I’m living through. You know, I think about those kinds of things. That’s all. No big. Carry on.

Most useful for writers: Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It has kind of blown my mind, and it has also really slowed me down as a writer. I didn’t really get into the last third of the book where he does a close reading of passages. I’m still paying interest on my last experience with close reading (also known as college), so I’ll return to those activities some other time.

Now a quote that speaks to my soul:

“One of the hardest things about learning to read well

Is learning to believe that every sentence has been consciously, purposefully shaped by the writer.

This is only credible in the presence of writing” (p. 44).

Tell it, Verlyn. He chose this spacing. Not me. Very poetic.

One more: 

“Don’t try to distinguish between thinking and making sentences.

Pretend they are the same thing” (p. 97).

I do. Some days, I’m better than others. 

Most useful theme: Thin Places. I’ve read several books that describe the “thin places” this summer, and it’s made me think about the period of sadness that I went through this past year. Aside from the pandemic (ha!ha!), I lost my dog of fifteen years, most of the mountain where I love to mountain bike, and little bits and pieces of life’s rituals and who I was. What used to be a rich dark loamy dense forest has all been logged. We’ve traded wildness for timber. Tamed the trails that used to be so wonderfully challenging. The new zeitgeist of mountain biking is just disappointing and boring. I don’t want to write too much here about how I really feel; some days it’s too much heartbreak. Some days are better than others.

For about six months, I was not sure who I was. Not really even sure if I’m fully back. Life was just a lot–not the “thin place” at all, but I wasn’t here. Present. The paintings I created during this time helped give structure to my days. Daydreams had dark corners for far too many days. Relentless. I’m not ready to write about it here, but I have hope that things are improving.

Some More Thoughts About Writing

My book? Moving along as I wrote above. 

Now I’m at this painful step in the process where I have stack of papers printed out so I can do conceptual and technical edits. Then maybe I’ll take forever and a day to actually fix the work. I think about this book a lot, and this summer has been pretty good for researching my main topic which is narcissistically me walking on trails. Or becoming the woman I wish I was. Or the woman I had hoped to become. Or just about the importance of wild spaces in a world that I increasingly do not understand.

I do think this book is turning into something I would want to read. If I think about the hiker who is exhausted resting in her sleeping bag, I can better envision the story I want to tell. My audience needs a new sleeping bag or she needs to remember to repair the zipper.

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard captures this present moment of writing with the following: 

“It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work.”

Exactement comme moi maintenant.

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