Stormy Lake Adventure

I have an urgent need to tell you my Fourth of July weekend outdoor experience, my small-scale "hero story." Now this episode was not bold, instead mildly stupidly reckless, and yet a fine little adventure with some lasting satisfaction.

Sunday afternoon I felt a strong pull to take my little inflatable Sea Eagle kayak out for a paddle on nearby Jordan Lake. It had been too long, and the sun was shining. Never mind that thunderstorms were predicted.

Once out on the lake, I could see that there was a dark smudge along the treeline on the horizon, but it was only about a foot wide. Intellectually I know that things get larger as they get closer, but I was still sure that with my lightning paddling speed, I'd be able to dodge it. The lake is huge and many-armed; I'd just avoid the weather, if it even traveled in my direction.

I had a particular and exciting goal in mind, finding the mouth of a creek that I regularly drive across a few miles away on my way to work and back. I had a pretty good idea where it would enter the lake.

Well, I'd paddled hard for over an hour, found a beautiful little cove I'd never seen, scared seven great blue herons out of the trees there, cruised along at the edge of a tall thicket of water grass, and still not found the creek mouth, when the rain began to fall. And, in instant, the thunder and lightning were cracking overhead.

I wasn't going to dodge the weather after all, and I was a very long way from anything but heavily forested shore with bits of exposed sand at the edge here and there. Plus, I was using a metal paddle, in the state with the highest number of lightning deaths per year (or so I'm told.)

So I took the paddle apart and used only the plastic blades, one in each hand, and slowly scoop-scooped my way to one of those little strips of sand, just in time. Five seconds after I pulled up onto this sliver of beach, huge wind whipped up and flipped the boat over as a big pelting rain started, and suddenly the lake was all grey surf. The waves were big enough to break and roll, to force water several feet up the strand and under my feet where quickly I'd positioned myself, lying beneath my overturned my boat, holding it down against the force of the wind.

Within moments, I felt cozy under there, a little warmish cave, with hard rain beating down on airfilled compartments overhead and on the sand on either side of me. The sound was like that of a tin roof in a storm, but all within a foot of my face. I could see out from under the edge of the boat and watch the long waves break into white against dark sky.

I'm accustomed to water. I grew up at the beach, living in Wilmington and spending much of my time at Wrightsville, and I continued going along on some surf fishing and deep sea expeditions in my early twenties. And my eldest nephew tried to teach me to surf fairly recently. But it had been thirty years at least since I was so surrounded by the raw edge of the elements. And this time alone, and definitely not in a charter boat.

As soon as I got under the shelter of my dear little boat I found I was immediately deep in trance. I was comfortable in spite of being drenched, and lying half across a broken branch and having one shoulder hanging out in the rain and dealing with some aggressive ants. For most of the hour and a quarter I was under there, I had little sense of the passage of time. I had a feeling of gratitude, for both the shelter and the nature drama, that was almost tangible, like a shawl of warmer air.

I wasn't really worried. The worst likely to happen was that the storm wouldn't let up until late night, and a small embarrassing search for me would begin. Husband Bob wasn't likely to be worried prematurely though; he's not a worrier and has also decided I'm invincible. I hope never to dissuade him.

I didn't want to be rescued, but I did wonder briefly where the bullhorns were. Once, out on this same lake on a sunny afternoon, I was floating in what was essentially a toy boat, an $11 blow-up vessel with plastic paddles that I got at Best Buy. I probably looked pretty ridiculous because the paddles were tiny and the boat not much bigger than an innertube; my legs were stuck up in the air. A huge cruiser chugged up close by, with enough waves to swamp me. From up on the bridge of the boat, a man in some kind of government park service uniform called: "Ma'am, are you all right?" I was just fine. It was a gorgeous day. There was no threat in sight. But on the day when a storm hits and lifts my 30 pound kayak into the air, I saw no crisply nautically uniformed man cruising up alongside. No doubt, he has the sense to stay in on such afternoons.

The rain quit once for about five minutes, then started again, quiet and steady. The thunder gradually became a little more distant. The surf died down. I crept out. I regathered my metal belongings from where I'd tossed them: glasses, earrings, the pole of the double paddle.

I set out on the water again, again using only the blades, one in each hand, one on either side of the boat, to paddle. There was still too much thunder and lightning nearby for me to want to be flashing a metal rod over my head. I don't know that any of my safeguards actually make any difference--I'm going to learn about that before my next storm chase--but I was doing what I could.

It was one damn long dog-paddle before I could even see the paved ramp where I'd left my car. And by the time I got there it was too dark wearing my prescription sunglasses to see anything at all. But the water was deliciously warm, and I found myself talking to it, every few times I dug a blade in, almost as if it were a pet: "nice warm water, such nice water." It felt as delicious as the shawl of air. Good thing: because if I paused in my paddling for a second, I slid backwards fast. The wind was not going my way.

By the time I made it back to the put-in ramp and was onshore deflating The Boat, packing it in the trunk of my car, I was shivering all over, ready for towels and a hot shower and more towels. And I was enjoying a strong sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, in spite of the basic dumbness of the escapade.

This morning, the day after my adventure, I drove across one of the lake bridges coming into town and thought: "My lake." I felt as if we'd spent a night together, this body of water and I. And we very nearly did.

I'd spent afternoons on or beside this lake before, but never so memorably, or to such effect. This trip melted me into the place, and brought back another location where I'd been so connected before.

When I was a kid, I had this kind of lying-in-the-wet-dirt intimacy with my whole neighborhood on Mimosa Place, knew how the grass grew under the drip line of the Lynch's roof, and could draw precise maps of the major branches of a lot of the trees. It's been a long time since I've had that cell-to-cell connection, even though I'm a gardener and love the plot I raggedly cultivate.

I'm glad to rediscover that deep earth-to-human infrastructure, to remember it exists. When it's active it feels like a combo of raw storm energy and puppy affection, born of nothing but intense prolonged close-up attention to the place and dependence on knowing those details. I didn't know I'd missed that feeling. A funny thing to rediscover on an Independence Day weekend.

What I did know, while I was out there, was that I was going to relish telling this story.



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Happy Boldness Day

For people of the USA, there's never a better day than the 4th of July to make a significant and positive bold move. If you do make one, be sure to report it here. It will inspire all.


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Two Free Tickets to a Bold Performance

To the first person to comment here who can plan to attend, I'm giving two tickets to this Saturday's Raleigh performance by the Brussels Chamber Orchestra.

It's the American premier of this group and they are hot; their second American performance, to be held in the Hamptons next week, just got a nice calendar notice in The New Yorker.

Setting up the Raleigh appearance is the very bold project of my office partner Carrie Knowles, whose 26 year-old son Neil Leiter plays with the group. She single-handedly turned the news that the group was coming to New York into the creation of an annual international classical music festival for Raleigh. A successful visual artist, gallery owner, and author, she says its the largest project she has undertaken, and that is saying a lot.

If you want to buy tickets ($15), call 919 757-9279. The performance is Saturday, July 5, at Raleigh's AJ Fletcher Auditorium. The musicians, eleven young talents from six countries, will come out front and meet the audience at the close of the program.




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The Fear of Separation

I recently finished watching the full six years of The Sopranos TV series a couple of weeks ago, in sequence in my living room on Netflix DVDs. Through the last weeks with the famous "Mafia" family, I had come to dread the inevitable end of the disks, so great was my attachment to these people.

I even did that dumb thing that people do--that I thought I'd never do--when someone close is dying. I started to withdraw in advance, in order to ward off the full impact of the blow.

I was surprised at myself. If there ever an example of "cowards die a thousand times before their deaths, the brave but once" or whatever that quote is*, this was it. And provoked by nothing more serious than the loss of fictional characters I can always rent again.

Ideally, one stays involved full-tilt to the end, even with fictional people. At least that's what I think. That strikes me as the boldest and most satisfying approach. No numbing out, no missing of the final intensity. That's what I mean to do should I ever face another such loss.

But I can't even imagine it. I agree with New Yorker editor David Remnick: The Sopranos were the best thing that ever hit TV. I also think the show was the best characterization I've ever seen on film. I'm pleased that this particular piece of art unfurled in my lifeime.

Surely that deserves full engagement.

I'm doing one thing right in this process though. I thought about immediately starting to rent The Wire or My So-Called Life or some other series. But I'm not yet ready for another relationship. First I need time.



*
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar




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My Beaded Fish: A Writer's Cross-Training

Last week, during my stay-home-and-clean-up-the-house vacation, I finished this little craft project that I'd let sit for about two years.

Because of popular demand (one request, thank you, Mamie) I'm displaying it here. I mean for it to go outdoors, hanging from a tree near our little "farm" pond. But I hung it up overnight in front of the curtains in the den, and decided for the moment that I like it there.

She's a quarter of an inch shy of three feet long. This kind of goofy free-hand playful handiwork does a lot for loosening up my creative juices for writing. It's very helpful to me to switch gears so radically: to place little physical widgens of color rather than words.

And to not have to meet any standards of quality or of market limitations. Very freeing. It's also nice to literally tie up some loose threads.







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Day Five: Clean and Organize

Many emotional stages to this process: last night I felt my efforts at helping Bob clean out his junk room weren't being properly appreciated. I had a talk with Gandhi who reminded me that we need to refrain from focusing on the fruits of our labors; "do the work and then step back."

Also had a talk with Bob; there were points on both sides. Today I'm feeling much more appreciated.

I feel I know Bob a bit better, from seeing the things he has saved for twenty, forty, sixty years. It's rather moving to me.

And then I come back to earlier bits of my life in the process too. Had to pause for a while over a 1969 Yackety Yack (UNC yearbook, for the non-North Carolinian.) Even though I'm a Dukie, that was pretty stirring.


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Day Four: Clean and Organize

Hoo boy. We have taken on something large here. Yesterday morning Bob and I started on his "junk room," which is also the kennel location of his 125 pound serious-shedder of a dog. This morning Bob likened the process to remodeling; it tears up everything and leaves it a mess for a long time.

It's satisfying though. We're making progress.

And I'm also doing smaller projects that are actually finishable: the bathroom drawer, the upstairs chatchke bowl, and a more inventive little undertaking: sewing corner extenders onto the sheets so that they don't come untucked.

I started that last one because I have a larger sewing project in mind that I don't want to do by hand as I usually do these things. So Sunday I bought one of those little $15 hand-held battery sewing machines at Target and I'm trying to learn how to use it. Haven't quite got the hang of it yet. It feels like a cross between a stapler and a hamster.

This is all so grounding, this real-world nonverbal stuff. I say that somewhat ironically, but it's true.



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Day One: Clean and Reorganize

Since I last blogged, I finished beading a two-foot image of a fish and did all of the pile of mending for Bob and me (3 prs. pants, 2 shirts, a scarf, a vest, and a gardening glove). The pile was mainly winter clothes. Oh well; they're ready for next year.

Cleaning and reorganizing mean different things to different people, obviously. I'm very happy with this progress.

Tomorrow I will hang the beaded fish art from a tree near our pond. This particular project has been lying around my house unfinished for about two years. What a relief and delight to get it out of the house and up a tree!! It had become one of those things that coaches and feng shui people refer to as an "energy drain." (See Cheryl Richardson's Take Time for Your Life.) Getting rid of those is a major point of this cleaning week for me.



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A House Cleaning Vacation Plan

This coming week, my husband Bob and I are staying home to clean up. We had this "vacation" planned before I stayed home last week being sick, but I've rallied in time to pitch in; though I may forget what my office looks like in the meantime.

The work-at-the-house week doesn't officially start until Monday when we'd normally go to offices. But I thought I might get a running start this weekend.

Well, not yet, as it turns out. It's 4:08 pm. Saturday and I've not yet done a dab of the planned neatening.

But I'm excited about this. My plan is not to create some ideal of order (fat chance) but to make the kind of changes that actually make life better. If I discovered that this worked, there could be a revolution.

Anyway, this effort is for me pretty damn bold.

I'll keep you up on progress.


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Clay Collins: Creative Freedom

I just stumbled across a blog on a kindred subject: The Growing Life, about the blogger's creation of a life and career outside of corporate institutions.

"One of the great tragedies of human existence is that so many of us toil for another person, who is in turn toiling for someone else, who is working for someone else’s interest. And on and on. There are entire corporate chains of command comprised of people working for someone else’s interest rather than their own. In far too many cases, there is no there, there."

I feel much the same way about large organizations, and not only from the point of view of what it's like to work there. My objection is: it's too hard to locate the conscience in an organization where the final deciders are the amorphous stockholders, presumed to be interested in profit by any means.

So there's much I agree with this blogger Clay Collins, who describes himself as "a trafficker of ideas, an outdoorsman, a proponent of human rights, a creative visualizer, and a believer in a better world."

There's one idea, though, which crops up here and there in the posts and comments on this highly popular blog, that drives me crazy. Irritates me enormously. And that is: a trace of feeling superior to those who work day jobs for salaries, etc. Examples:

*"At a very young age, I somehow knew that the schooling process was bullshit."

*"It's the dilettantes that really get to grow."

*"The paradox of intelligence (POI) says that in general, the more intelligent you are, the less brainpower you’re likely to keep for yourself."

*"Who’s winning the battle for your mind?"

My stance is that I do my thing and people who are doing something else no doubt have their reasons. No doubt I'm inclined toward righteousness or I wouldn't be so easily irked by it.

Anyway, I very much like, on the whole, the way this guy thinks. I save my wee smackdowns for the people who are almost meeting my impossible standards. (I often niggle about how Bill Moyers presents something; never give a thought to Rush Limbaugh.)

So do go visit this site. Because there's a lot of damn-right good stuff: "Once external factors no longer tie us down, it becomes easy to become our own tyrant bosses... We make what seem to be incredible sacrifices to remove ourselves from restrictive conventional situations, and damn it, after all that sacrifice, it better result in something breathtakingly amazing. So we start setting unrealistic and ego-driven goals (as opposed to the unreasonable authentic goals that bring us alive and cause us to wreak havoc on the world in beautiful ways)."

Now I'm off to wreak some havoc.




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The Five Things We Cannot Change...

I just started reading a book from my stack(s) that my hand felt magnetically drawn to. The title: The Five Things We Cannot Change...and the Happiness We Find By Embracing Them. The author: David Richo.

I hadn't even reached the discussion of the First Thing before the book had reminded me very memorably that: the difficulties we each encounter are our chances to learn, expand, and shine.

I've always had a feeling that any problem I encountered was likely caused by my own bad planning. No matter how improbable it might seem, somehow it was a bad decision I made that caused trouble.

I don't know how exactly this book dissuaded me of that. But for the moment at least it has.

If you're burdened with hyperresponsibility, you might find it worth having a look at.

Personal health update: still recovering, sleeping about 12 or so hours a day, and feeling amazingly serene.



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Eleanor Roosevelt

Rarely has anyone so bold emerged from such a timid beginning.

Last night a 2.5 hour documentary on Eleanor Roosevelt aired on my local PBS station. I hadn't planned on watching, though I knew it was scheduled. I told myself I already knew that story.

I happened onto it by accident, though, turning on the TV just as the program was starting. I was fascinated through the very end. And not so much by any new facts I learned, instead by watching this woman transform.

She moved from dreadful shyness to become the most powerful woman in the world. And it didn't happen in a smooth easy sweep. Nor did she transform herself into a different sort of person. Instead, she took herself, as she was, out into the world and kept doing the best she could: for human rights and equality and the easing of poverty. The effects of her work continue. So does her example, made more powerful by the fact that it was never easy.




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Healing Quotes

Advice from our wise commenters on healing boldly:

From Mojo:
"Take your time..."

From Billie:
"...When we get sick like this it's a direct message to take time for our 'selves'; and slow down our pace."

Debra W:
"Part of living boldly is knowing when to just say no to everything else, so that we can give ourselves the time that we need in order to heal. It is very important to learn when that time comes. We must become bold enough to become our own advocates."

Thanks to all.







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Pneumonia Lungs

The bug I was thinking of as sniffles turned out to be pneumonia. As the germ turns!! It was certainly a surprise to me. I tend to downplay any health problem, because I've never had one to amount to anything.

But other people kept telling me that this situation was not looking good and I finally went to a doc. One person had actually refused to do business with me, said we'll talk another day.

I'm a great believer in optimism. But there's also some value in not jauntily walking off a cliff I'd refused to recognize.

So, with a few days of sleep behind me, now I start creeping back, a little at the time. Then picking up speed, if history is any indicator.

More later on combining sickness and boldness in a useful and nondestructive way.


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Expecting to Recover Soon

Got a bug. Can't talk now. Back soon.



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The Last Lecture

If you haven't seen this already, go to Youtube and listen to Professor Randy Pausch's last lecture--on how to live--which he gives knowing he has pancreatic cancer and has been given a life expectancy of two to four months.

I had a sore throat the day I saw it, and was moving kinda slowly. The video of this gutsy, charmingly immodest, athletic, gorgeous, smart, and nice 47 year-old facing death didn't take away the slight under-the-weather feeling I had.

But it did remind me that, with the right spirit, it's possible to face anything with courage, joy, boldness, generosity, gratitude, and style.

One delightful piece of news: he has already outlived by months the prognosis. At least as inspiring as the video is his online update of his progress.





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Another Technology Success

Yesterday I carried on here about my bold move in managing to send a photo from my camera to my blog.

Riding the swell of confidence and accomplishment from that, I took on a biggie: I learned to make my own letterhead envelopes on my own printer. Not without difficulty, as you can see from this off-the-mark attempt at a return address. (By the time I'd gotten to this point, I was almost home free.)

But having persisted and struggled and whined, I now have some very artful and personal envelopes. And the immense satisfaction of having again ventured successfully into the storm-tossed surf of electronics. Little victories do add gas to one's tank.

Do remember to give yourself credit, even if it feels a little silly.




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Daily Courage

This strange structure--a water tower, I think--is about 12 stories high. And there's someone walking around on its sloping upper surface, adjusting those wires that hang down.

That guy has a job that takes daily courage. Maybe he's used to it. But I can't believe he doesn't get a stomach wobble now and then.

I pulled my car in beneath this tower yesterday, while in the process of correcting a wrong turn I'd made on the way to a printer's. My own small act of courage was to to, for the first time, shoot and send by phone a picture to my computer for this blog. There are people who are used to phoning in photos too, millions of them. But new tech tasks still give me a stomach wobble in the form of dread and irritation.

The daily courage requirement is different for each of us. An undertaking that feels like nothing for one person takes guts and boldness for another.

It's important to give ourselves credit for our own bold moves, and not compare them to walking on water towers.





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Orchestrating a Major Bold Move

My friend and office partner Carrie Knowles decided recently to create in her spare time an annual international music festival in the Raleigh area. Not that she was lacking for things to do: she's a writer and visual artist and mother of teenager.

It began thusly: Her oldest son Neil Leiter, 26, plays viola in the Brussels Chamber Orchestra which was already scheduled to come to the U.S. and play in the Bard Music Festival of the Hamptons. Since they were going to be only 500 or so miles away, it seemed a no-brainer to arrange a few concerts in North Carolina and turn it into an annual event.

Whoo-boy!

Well, a few weeks into the project it looks large and it's definitely happening.

There's plenty still to arrange, but the orchestra from Belgium will play two concerts in the Raleigh area and the Star-Spangled Banner at a Durham Bulls baseball game.

I'm wowed. And here's my point that we can all keep in mind: set the wheels of something big in motion and it's highly likely that it's going to happen. Because once you've got hosts for the musicians, restaurant meals set up, a new nonprofit in the works, a couple of concert venues and a fundraising art auction scheduled, then there's no turning back. Even if the details start to seem overwhelming.

Ten years from now Raleigh will probably be a major international classical music venue. And it will be because one woman had the idea and then got busy on the phone.

NC concerts are July 5 in Raleigh, July 6 in Cary, and July 2 for the national anthem at the Durham Athletic Park. For more info about the North Carolina appearances, contact Carrie Knowles at cjknowles@earthlink.net.

(Neil is the tall blonde guy in the back.)




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Garden Wisdom

My eccentric garden benefits from some of my husband's bold and imaginative ideas. This owl and another totem pole he used for years as posts for a badminton court. When joint troubles ended badminton, he got them moved into the plot that I devotedly cultivate. They're ever a mysterious surprise when I notice them again . I'm glad I didn't marry the kind of guy who would use a couple of aluminum poles to hold up a badminton net.


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