Seattle-Astoria-Portland-Kingsley
Earlier this month my sister Andie and her husband Jason visited the NW again (as they did last year). I spent a day with them in Seattle where Andie had been taking some further education classes for her job and I gave them a ride back to Portland from there. We had thought about doing something crazy like climbing Mount St. Helens but ended up toning it down a bit due to time. We did make it through Astoria on the way south from Seattle and then a camping trip up into the Cascades the next night and a back yard bar-b-que on the last night they were in town.
Me, Underwater
While in Hawaii in April, I of course met up with Blaine and Bethany for a day and that morning we spent with the turtles and fish just off shore near Kona. At that time of day, the turtles weren’t out to swim so we instead had fun taking pictures of each other with Blaine’s super-high-tech camera enclosure. He seriously gets some of those most amazing pictures with it, and here’s a few we shot that morning under water:
This one’s of Blaine:
The Allium
I thought perhaps I should post this since I mentioned it in my previous post.
What happened was that my friends Ryan and Holly and their son Pax had planted a single Allium flower next to the sidewalk at their house and Pax would run out an get excited to see the flower every time they came out the front door. Some time last week, someone cut off the flower and stole it, leaving Holly with the task of explaining to her two year old what happened to the flower – now every time they went outside. Holly left a note describing this, hoping the theif would see the note on their next trip past the house, and at its very least understand the implications of their actions.
So a couple days ago, there appeared another Allium plant, in a pot, on the doorstep. Its impossible to tell whether it was put there by a guilty-feeling thief or an empathetic neighbor, but Pax quickly regained his love and excitement for the flower as they planted it in the yard, replacing the old one. See Holly’s blog about it here. I hope she doesn’t mind me telling the story.
Daniel, who is staying with me for a while in Ryan and Holly’s basement, and I were about as excited and happy to see Pax so happy perhaps as he and his parents were. It was a beautiful day in the Sunnyside neighborhood.
This is Pax hugging his gifted flower:
Come Tortoise, Standing Still
I’ve traveled quite a distance in the past month or two. I have traveled to different parts of the country recently, though these are not the travel I refer to. Really, where I stand now is not so noticeably different from whatever vague moment could be considered a beginning. I only mention this because I’ve been what feels to me like racing through time, thoughts, emotions.Less of a journey through space, however, more of a journey through circumstances, intuitions, and feelings.
Travel of any kind always feels like a video on fast-forward, a feeling only reinforced by the speed with which a setting passes while driving in a car or the speed with which one experience or thought, feeling as though it will carry reverberation with you for a life time, is soon replaced with the next feeling deserving the same consideration as the last. It seems it was the rainy winter of Portland only a few days ago, and somehow all these memories from the past several months were only packed into the passing notions of a spontaneous song, soon to be forgotten as soon as my mind moves on to what’s next. I don’t desire to live life this way, and hopefully steps I take to form a better life for myself and for those around me will do just that. Slowness is my honest desire.
What I’m most troubled by is that I have no idea how this works. I have no idea to achieve that, and as the cliché goes, I’m stumbling blindly. So blind, in fact, I’m not sure whether I’m moving at all or simply standing with a hand reaching out for another’s.
I spent time in Laurelhurst Park this evening near my house, a large park with a duck pond. The ducks and I are commonly acquainted, and they often suggest ideas to me I haven’t yet considered.
It occurred to me while at the park how good people are, particularly in my neighborhood. This is one reason this was on my mind, and here is a picture I took of Pax. This goodness is a goodness I’m not use to. Small town Nebraska, ultra-conservative Colorado Springs, yuppie-ville Hood River. This isn’t a rag on those places, because they are good places too. They may lack this certain kind goodness, but there are things Portland lacks as well, and there’s something about this place that feels like home without my having to coerce my mind into believing so. Its something about my life I likely cannot explain to those other places and may not have understood before I arrived where I now stand.
This goodness I’ve found in places here where I now live is a goodness I would only have speculated about or understood in idealism. Consequently I feel much less than adequate or worthy of living in such a place. That sounds extra cheap, I’m sure. Self-pitiful, whatever. What does one do when they know not how to acclamate old lives with new ones, the new ones they’ve searched for and somehow found? What does one do when they feel the momentum of past expectations and behaviors dragging them beyond what those constructs were suppose to bring them to? or when they cannot turn sharp enough to escape the ruts circling the campfire to get to the campfire itself?
I have no answer for that. I only have friends near and far who’ve heard my joys and sorrows, and the words of those who express what I otherwise cannot.
come tortoise, standing still
go hummingbird, my will
come tortoise, stumbling blind
go hummingbird, my eyes
come tortoise, empty hand
go hummingbird, my plan
come tortoise, undefined
go hummingbird, my mind
come tortoise, letting go
go hummingbird, I know
come tortoise, come and die
go hummingbird, my I
goodbye, I
Love Is Not Really One Of Man’s Powers
Notice this: that love is not really one of man’s powers. Man cannot achieve love, generate love, wield love, as he does his powers of destruction and creation. When I love someone, it is not something that I have achieved, but something that is happening through me, something that is happening to me as well as to him. To use the old soap-opera cliché seriously, it is something bigger than both of us, infinitely bigger, because wherever love enters this world, God enters.
- Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
Spring In Portland
This is only a fragment of the rebirth of Portland in the Spring. It was a marvel to live and witness this small corner of the world and its movement back into the greenness and the beautiful days it offers over the summer months. Spring has come and gone, but that growth and excitement carries enough intertia to bring this world around to attempt it all over again, less than a year from now.
That One Sunset That I Will Not Forget
Blaine and I stood on a cliff overlooking the green sand beach near Southpoint, Hawaii, on the big island. Each of us taking photos of this and that, avoiding the driving wind and the sand it brought to our camera gear. The sun was making its way down the western sky, but it seemed an instant change when the entire valley on both sides of the cliff glowed with the pinks, oranges, and blues of an incredible sunset. Anyone who knows such a moment knows that these photos do it not justice, yet I still post them if for no other reason, to remember.
Mt. Kilhauea
I consider our pitch dark attempts to get lava pictures of Mt. Kilhauea rather pitiful in comparison to Blaine’s photos that he hasn’t even posted yet. Trust me, just wait, they’ll make you wet your pants, and I’ll try and remember to link to his post when he finally does. Here’s one of the few he posted and it doesn’t even compare.
So anyway, a couple days into my Hawaii trip last month when I finally made it over to the big island, the Frangers and I made the most of the single day I was there and stopped by to snap some long exposures in the freezing cold of the mountaintops. (Yes, freezing cold in Hawaii) This shot was about a 30 second exposure, ISO 3200, the best I could do without a remote trigger. Man was it dark outside, but it sure produced an erie glow that we could just see enough of to orient a zoom lens one from about a mile away.
Take Heart, O Bulkington!
Herman Melville begins the unreasonably short chapter 23 of Moby Dick by mentioning Bulkington, a man who had landed just a few months ago from a previous four-year whaling voyage, and was already back at sea with the launching of the current expedition. As though land scorches his feet, Bulkington avoids the safety and comfort of port like the plague.
Melville calls the land pitiful to the seaman. Safety, warmth, supper, “all thats kind to our mortalities,” all that brings a man back to port after such a journey. But he goes on,
In the gale, [land] is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
And he soon continues:
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
The howling, infinite sea is the same fury of truth, the God, all that one cannot comprehend and one of the right mind would avoid. Yet it be not the mind that push one out to sea..
Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing – straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
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