Sunday, May 28, 2017

Iceland Report

I got to the airport and found I did not have my wallet. Brief panic. Did have my passport, so I guess I'm OK until I need to rent a car in a month.
Flight was OK. Little sleep, but no sciatica, no back pain. Yay!
Got the bus to Reykjavik, two o'clock there, five AM for me. Got a bowl of soup at the bus station and amazingly it was good. Encouraging. Found our lodgings. Listed as nonsmoking, but stinks of old tobacco smoke. I'll live, too tired to regroup. We are fifty yards from a greenspace along the water.
Iceland smells like alders, though I have only seen birches, which are halfway into leaf. I guess they must smell similar, they are related. The birches are lovely, with a coppery bark that has a ringed effect from how it peels.
Took a bus downtown looking for dinner and a SIM card for Nels's phone. Excellent dinner, nice walk around town, Great walk home with lots of water birds at the pond. The terns, mostly arctic terns but some others also, are spectacular to watch.
Knee is holding up great so far. Slept adequately too, despite time change. It gets dark about 11 pm, and light again around 4.
SIM card didn't work. Can't plug anything in (did we lend you our converter?). Went looking for a converter, and started getting a little more familiar with the bus system and the layout of downtown. 
Went to a sculpture museum, not great but a fabulous building, domed and white with many windows and extraordinary light. Walked to botanic garden, which was wonderful. Beds of volcanic stones with alpine plants from around the world, some blooming, many I had never seen before. Many species of woodland flowers and perennials that I was familiar with but had no idea there were so many species. A few old friends: dicentra formosa, labeled as to place "Kalifornia", trillium chloropetalum and ovatum bloomng now, in bloom at home two months ago. Unbelievable numbers of pulsatilla and anemone species in bloom, and I want to come back for the peonies.
Another good dinner, and a walk on the beach coming home. Growing among the grass, where you might find fennel at home, is angelica! 
Though it looks like open water here, between Reykjavik being very protected in almost every direction along a west-facing bay and the wind being out of the east, the water of the Atlantic here is amazingly flat. I can't think of open water on the Pacific I have seen it so still.
Having you to write to helps me appreciate my visit here.Second day in Iceland took a ferry to the island of Videy. No cars, thirty species of nesting birds, the industrial bustle of Rejkyavik visible and audible just across the water, but totally idyllic. I'm still trying to figure out what bird it was that darts about beating its wings rapidly and then swoops saying Hootle hootle hootle.
The eiders are gorgeous and make kind of a single hoot that is amazing to hear in chorus.
I keep being told, it's the journey, not the destination. But that was definitely a worthwhile destination, with a rather ugly journey. I'm not fond of Rejkyavik, which feels kind of like Eureka with more industry - everything is being torn up - and more restaurants, and fewer Victorian houses.
Last morning there, went to the swimming pool, just to live like the locals. Dissapointed that the water did not smell of sulphur as the shower at our lodging does. Did find the alders I was smelling, though.
Now it's our second morning in Paris. It's pretty hot, and the neighborhood is noisy, so I've been going to sleep late and waking late. Last night there were people outside the window stealing bicycles.from the rental-bike stand at the corner very loudly with lots of banging.
Got home from dinner at midnight anyway. Restaurant David Toutain, fabulous one-star, six courses, but really at least two dozen plates, all very imaginative and incredibly tasty. Ate from eight to eleven, then a walk home. Realizing how much I am enjoying walking in the evening, either by twilight or soft streetlights. I experience the bright LEDs of Berkeley as an assault and have started staying indoors at night. So good to feel free to wander about.
Too many museums! Too many restaurants! Too much to describe or photograph! Making myself lame, taking it easier today. Saw a wonderful show of Camille Pisarro's work from the 1880's in Eragny, he was such a master of light! Then had to also go to the Orsay, which I think was still a railway station when I was last here, with lots of everything, including Van Gogh's amazing Church at Auvers which stopped us in our tracks as we entered the room, and several of his wonderful portraits. Was also floored by Nature Unveiling herself to Science and works too diverse to mention.
It may be time to leave the apartment in search of lunch.

Thursday, May 4, 2017

Envisioning a Future

The lights went on for me while I was reading a book review that described its main character as unable to envision a future. Envision a future! Is that what people do?

 I have barely been able to envision a present, to figure out what I want to do now, and act on it. That's what I've been working on. Now, almost finished with my seventh decade, I feel ready to envision a future, but I don't feel capable of creating one.

It's true I have done a little visioning. Over the years I have become more capable of making plans and following them through. I suppose that's what has led to me finally being ready to envision a future. I think it started when I was a young mother. First I realized that the notion that we, the nuclear generation, despite the popular notion, were actually living past age thirty. I began to get inklings there would be life after laundry, and I tried to plan for it. I wanted to learn to work, make a paycheck, even have a career.

Previously all my inquiries into what I could be doing had been met with answers that indicated they were preparation for something else: high school for college, college for grad school, but the bridge to a life was never visible. I knew very few professionals. They were men. What they did was invisible. The fact that everything in the human world was created intentionally by humans was not clear to me.

So, the professions I knew of from direct contact were limited: pediatricians, psychiatrists, nurses, schoolteachers. Lawyers and architects were abstractions. I didn't know there was such a thing as business. Of course beggarman, thief, Indian chief as well as receptionist, secretary, bus driver, airline stewardess were off limits. Don't learn to type; you will end up a secretary. No, you don't want to be a nurse, you want to be a doctor.

How could I know whether I wanted to be a doctor? Having been told so, how was I to evaluate for myself? I had no experience of a contrasting possibility.

Being a housewife and mother was the state that being a doctor was in contrast to. Yet, realistically, whatever else I might strive for or achieve I would still be keeping house. And I never doubted that I would have children. Even though other roles were presented as alternatives, they were really only alternative in status. I would have a profession and be a real person, not an "only". No alternative ways of accomplishing that necessary work were conceivable. The knowledge that I would be doing it was deeply rooted.

But since being a mother is not a profession, and was not to be thought about as an adult role, I could not plan for it. It was something to be taken on after the plans had been implemented, the establishment of a profession accomplished.

And when I got older and began seeing a larger world, there still was no bridge to a future. Any envisioning of a future I have done has been as a flailing version of get me out of here! It is a panicked state with great need for immediate action and no breadth of vision, and no follow through.

The first step was acknowledging myself as an adult, ceasing to see adult humans as a separate species.