Author: admin

Day 8: Glaciers

(photo source: NASA public domain, via wikipedia.org)

I was six when our family moved north to a suburb of Detroit. My parents and grandparents were all from the area and they wanted us to be raised there, closer to extended family. In Michigan, we’d be grounded in a solid midwestern and very Presbyterian way of life. One of the first things our father did after we arrived there was to drive along the road adjacent to Lake St. Clair. St. Clair is a part of the Great Lakes story that takes place between Lake Huron and the Huron River to the north and the Detroit River which flows towards Lake Erie to the southeast. It’s the one place in Michigan where you are slightly north and west of Canada. By Michigan standards, St. Clair is literally a little fish in a big sea, but in reality, at the widest part of the lake you cannot see across. Lake St. Clair can be deceiving – changing from calm and tranquil one day to a boiling foam whipped up by the wind the next. On this particular day, Dad encouraged us to “look across the lake and you might see Canada”. I gazed out the car window, where I could just barely make out a row of greenery across the lake. The edge was dark and it looked fuzzy against the horizon. “Who is over on that side looking back at us?”, Dad asked us excitedly.

The history of the Great Lakes is fascinating. Some think the first settlers were the French explorers, trappers and missionaries who named Detroit and Grosse Pointe, and streets like Gratiot and Cadieux. There are rivers with French names like Au Sable and Pere Marquette. However before the French arrived, there were the Iroquois, Chippewa, Algonquin, Ottawa, and Shawnee Indians, led by the great chiefs, Techumseh and Pontiac. And before the Indians, we were told, were the great glaciers that created the Great Lakes.

Now most school kids in Michigan get back at least to the Indians and some as far back as the glaciers when they learn about the state. But few go all the way back to when the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was a rift of black trap rock coming up through the primordial ooze resulting in semiprecious gemstones and world renowned iron ore deposits. The most beautiful rock formation in the world, in my humble opinion, is the one named BIF, for the Banded Iron Formation, found in the upper peninsula. All of this was eons before the glaciers, and long before our little nuclear family moved back to Michigan.

A book called “Paddle to the Sea”, written and illustrated by Holling Clancy Holling was required reading in grade school. It was and still is, one of my favorite books. The story is about a young Indian boy who carves a wooden canoe with a small version of himself in it and sends it off for an adventure exploring all five Great Lakes. The little wooden boat ends up making it to the St. Lawrence seaway and beyond to the ocean. It was easy to embrace this story because we would paddle in the rivers and could see the freighters making their way across Lake St. Clair. We could hear their somber fog horns at night as we drifted off to sleep. We knew the boats were on the same course as the canoe in the story. From the lumber and iron ore lake freighters, long and skinny in the middle, to the ocean freighters which were shorter and thicker around the middle, we watched the flags and smokestacks pass by on long and slow summer days, and saw the ice-cutters in the winter, churning up a path towards the river.

In school they would show us movies with nerdy-looking stereotypical scientists wearing white coats, bow-ties, and glasses. The science movies were my favorite, especially the one where they implored us to “Imagine, if you will, a world without water!” The best movie of all was the one called “The Rise and the Fall of the Great Lakes.” In this movie, another person in a canoe goes up and down with the lake levels through time, as the glaciers advance and recede across the Great Lakes. It’s a quirky Canadian film, full of visuals showing the impact of man on nature and vice versa. Coincidentally, or maybe not, the teachers thought this movie an appropriate lead-in to studying the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Having at least dunked under or dipped my toes in all five of the great lakes, I can say that my favorite by far is Superior. I am in awe of this lake. Gitchigummi is the stuff of legendary poems. It is an ocean sized lake with ocean scale swells and water so cold your brain freezes swimming in mid-July. The rocks along Superior’s shores and the perfectly preserved shipwrecks also confirm that this is no ordinary lake. The glaciers melted over a deeply faulted synclinal chasm, creating a marvelous body of water like no other in the world. In high school, we backpacked along the Pictured Rocks National shoreline where you can see the change in lake levels sculpted into the cliffs. I spent one summer at Isle Royale National Park. The island is the upside block of that faulted and then tilted, syncline. Differential erosion made beautiful long finger lakes with ridges where the moose like to roam and feast on blueberries along the tops and thimbleberries near the lowland bogs. The island has many interesting features, including one infamous smaller island that is in a lake, on an island, in a lake. Exposed at the Rock Harbor end of the island is the precambrian basaltic trap rock, containing small amygdolites, voids filled with semiprecious gems more commonly known as greenstones. People who arrive at the island by boat usually look greener than the tiny greenstones with sea sickness from the lake swells. People who arrive by float plane just look relieved.

In 1975 I was walking home from high school in blustery November weather. When I arrived home, my mother was watching the news reports from Lake Superior, where twenty-nine imperiled men had lost their lives on the Edmund Fitzgerald. I still remember what those gale force winds did to my face walking home, and how the white caps roared across little old Lake St. Clair. I could not imagine what Superior must have looked like. My friends’ father was the minister at the Mariner’s church in Detroit where as the song accurately portrayed, “the church bell chimed 29 times”. Everyone in Michigan felt the loss, in the wind and in the ice-sharp slivers of gray etched across the sky. The morose and chilling sounds of the Gordon Lightfoot song capture the climate we all felt perfectly.

I went on to study a little about glaciers in college and to marvel at their amazing footprint across the midwest. Rolling hills, beautiful river terraces, dunes, eskers, kames, and drumlins and the irrepressible beauty of the greatest lakes in the world all tell the glacier story better than any book or movie ever could. Empires rise and fall, Indians, trappers, missionaries, settlers, and nuclear familes all come and go. The lakes were there before we arrived and will be there long after we are gone. Immortalized in poems, songs, and childhood memories, their legend lives on.

(lwr Oct 8, 2017)

Day 7: The creek behind our house

It was 1963. Our house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains had a creek behind it. One of my earliest memories is that creek. I was three going on four and these seem to be my very first memories. Of course, a carousel slide show could jog me all the way back to age 2 and memories of crawling around under trendy and sleek 1960’s furniture. Listening to Percy Faith and Petula Clark could take me back even further. My three year old memories include scenes of my mother packing us a picnic lunch and sending us off to the woods and creek to explore. And there are scenes in my early memories of being in the back of a car, no seat belt, joyously bouncing in the air as the car went over a hill on the way to the Piggly Wiggly supermarket.

This was the early 1960’s and mothers were accustomed to kids flying around in the car when they went over hills. And sending three year olds off for a day of fun and frolic outside with only their older siblings to watch them was the norm. Mothers were probably close by but we never noticed. My original heroes were the older siblings who seemed to be authorities on everything from snapping turtles to gravity and swingset dynamics: “don’t swing too high!”; to health and welfare: “don’t eat the sand in the sandbox!”; to hydrodynamics: “don’t go to the place where the creek connects to the James River!”. The James River represented everything unknown and dangerous in our little world. It was the same river that made the rust in the bathtub, the same river that stole our little creek and sent it to the ocean.

When we weren’t playing in the creek we would go on family vacations to the ocean and dig, dig, dig, until we reached more water! Then we’d lie down in the surf and clean all the sand off and head back to digging again. You shouldn’t eat the sand at the beach either, but we probably did. And we stopped being curious about the James River and rust in the bathtub because the ocean bathtub was huge, with waves, and sand dollars, and shells, and crabs and snails.

Flash forward to 1980 and I’m in college on a field trip at the Cannon River in Minnesota. We are throwing sticks in the river from a bridge and an unlucky classmate is standing in the river with a current meter and another with a stop watch. Does the stick method give us an accurate reading? I could stay out here all day, measuring and watching this river. I think, it’s like being three again. We meticulously take notes, and gather sediment samples for drying and sieving. When we get back to the lab we will make cross sections and river profiles, and compute sediment load, sorting, and other parameters.

I am carried back again to my early memories when we went to the creek and found a good rock to sit on for lunch and built dams and bridges, and sent leaves and sticks downstream to a fateful journey towards the mighty and scary James River. The voices of my classmates fade and I am transported back, my siblings shouting up and down the creek as we find rocks, and sticks, and bugs and treasures. In my memory, the creek dances with us and shimmers, and acts like a mirror, glowing on our faces. I can imagine us watching our little creek as it carries green leaves, then red, orange, yellow, and brown, all off to embellish the picture we have colored in our minds of James River water.

The leaves fell and 1963 was just about over we when wandered into the living room one day to find our German babysitter who we loved more than the creek, crying, the tears streaming down her cheeks. I sort of remember touching her face and tracing the route the tears made. She gathered us in her arms and told us a great man had died. The little creek ran all the way down her face, presumably on its way to the mean and mighty James River. We watched silently. My siblings remember the event better than I do, but what made the biggest impression on me as a three year old who was almost four, was the little three year old boy on the TV staring back at me, saluting bravely. I don’t recall what my parents said, I just remember that was a time when even our trendy and sleek living room was swallowed up by the outside world, and our faces glowed from the TV . The following years we would go back to the creek, to the ocean, and beyond. And every year the picture of the brave boy would get clearer for me. In the same way I learned to appreciate the complexity of rivers and hydrodynamics, I appreciate now the journey our little creek represented, as it gathered up its nerve and tumbled over the rocks carrying sticks and leaves, and a generation of kids like us.

(lwr Oct 7, 2017)

Day 6: Guy clout

My story begins the day I was born, or maybe well before that.  I have no Y chromosone.  Neither did my mother. Neither do any of my female friends, my daughter, or my sister.  We’re all X’s.  Now I know that nature is more complex than this, but for the most part, humans  either have two X’s and are female or an X and a Y and are male.  This is who I am, female, with X’s.   Do not misunderstand.  I like who I am, I like being female, I like that I can cry at movies, and give birth, and drink wine with my friends,  go shopping without apologizing, and that I was never required to do the same amount of push ups as guys during the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge.  I am happy with my lot in life and the fact that I have no Y has not limited my freedom as it does for many other women in the world.  That said, every now and then, I am bluntly reminded that not having a Y means I have less importance or at the very least, less clout.

At work there was an astute colleague who once said, what we need is “borrowed clout”.  At work, men and women were generally equal as long as they got the job done, and as long as they had “clout”, could get others to do things too.  Clout can come from hard work, from talent, from having a good reputation, from a good track-record, from reciprocity, from position, from luck, and unfortunately, in some cases, from having the right chromosomes.  I worked in a male-dominated industry and some of this comes with the territory. Some men and women have quiet clout.  Both men and women can lose their clout because their mouths get them into trouble.  There is no gender requirement for clout, until there is.

Yesterday on the news I watched a sports figure apologizing profusely for suggesting a women sportscaster lacked knowledge in her field.  I saw the offense right away.  I also saw the age-old criticism of “she’s too sensitive” and the observation coming from all corners, that some of this comes with the territory of being an X-X among X-Y’s. I personally thought the apology was good and sincere and that the incident was small but very representative of life in the X-Y realm. The man also realized that as a father with daughters, he needed to change, to allow them to be all they can be without risk of bias.

There were many times in my career when I was asked to get coffee or asked to order more paper for the copier, which were not my job.  I would be asked where the boss was, even when I was the boss. While these were for the most part, honest mistakes, they were biases based on assumptions about women’s roles and capabilities. Women and men are different.  Men are (in general) physically stronger.  I cannot carry a couch up a flight of stairs, and I am okay with that.  But I can hike up a mountain and program a computer.  At one point, I was proficient in  four programming languages.  There are people who assume I cannot turn on a computer because of my gender. Some of them think that older women should  not climb a mountain, they should be knitting doilies. I am pretty good at that too. Most of this is not intended to insult, its just that they have not met someone like me before. We all have biases, some of them grounded in truth, and some grounded in ignorance.

When I encounter these limitations – people who won’t answer my email until I add a professional title, people who won’t give me a good appointment time, but will give my husband one because “he works”, it’s irritating and frustrating, but when it happens I know it’s a bias. In these times, I “borrow clout”.  I either make my name sound generic and androgynous, or I add my husband’s name to the appointment request.  When I was young and single and needed my car fixed at the shop, I invented a fake boyfriend who was good with cars. When I did this, I not only had better service, but got a better price. I’m a terrible liar, so maybe the shop just took pity on me.   Its annoying but a fact of life that the world does not treat people equally.  We all need to “borrow clout”  at times to get attention.  When traveling for work I have had business men cut right in front of me in line, only to find me sitting next to them in the elite section of the plane.  Sometimes clout can feel like sweet justice.  Now that I have retired I have no more clout with the airlines.  The only thing worse than having  no clout, is having it, getting used to it, then losing it!

So all of this is to say that although I know men and women are different and are called to have different roles in life, there are many women who are good at “men’s work” and vice versa. The males in my household are better cooks than I am.  I am better at cleaning and organizing. When my son is home he mows the lawn.  When my husband is traveling I mow the lawn. In our house, there is no “men’s work or women’s work”, there is “just work”. My husband is better at handling spiders and mice, and better at installing dishwashers than I am. I take care of ants and weeds.  In fact, I cannot do many of the chores my husband is proficient at. It might mean he is more skilled than I am, but it does not mean he is more important.  That’s where bias comes in.  If you need to “borrow clout”  to be important as a human being, something is wrong with the universe. Yet we see it all the time.

Jesus had a very impactful life. But he started with no clout in a world that was likely biased against his mother and his father. In Jesus’s world there was a serious bias against first born sons. Jesus didn’t need clout because he trusted God in all things. People were so threatened by his brand of humble power they crucified him. And still, centuries later, he has more “clout”, more impact, than the average world leader or pop icon. Jesus didn’t have to lie or boast or add names to his request to get things done – his directions and his influence came from the Almighty. In God’s world there is no need for us to distinguish ourselves based on accomplishment or traditional roles. We are important to God because we “are”. While this gives me peace, it also makes me realize that losing clout (or no longer needing it) challenges the way I think about the world. For starters, I should no longer look for bias. Rather, I should train myself to look past it. I should not borrow “clout”, but following the example of Jesus, I should strive to personify it, to deserve it. Jesus earned a clout that comes from being a decent and extraordinary human being, through faith in God. Here was someone with no clout who eliminated bias and made more difference than anyone with it. The lesson he taught was also sweet justice: watch who you cut in line in front of, they may wind up sitting next to you. In God’s world, there is no bias, no need for clout, no need to jump the queue. We all have the opportunity to stand in Group 1. Every time I board a plane, I think of the parable of the workers in the vineyard: “So the last will be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16, ESV). There are many interpretations of this parable, but to me it means that clout might work differently in Heaven than it does here on earth.
(lwr Oct 6, 2017)

Day 5:  Crock pots and hummingbird feeders

Today I was wandering the house in search of  inspiration when I decided to write about the first two things that caught my eye.  One was a dirty crock pot.  Kicking myself, I realized it held yesterday’s dinner that I had left to cool off before refrigerating and then promptly fell asleep, leaving the contents to spoil.  The other was the bright red hummingbird feeder dangling from a hook outside the back kitchen window.  Both items, unrelated, except by proximity.  And now that they have my attention, both represent the fact that there is a nudge of guilt and condemnation associated with each vessel.  I think to myself, hmm … these would normally be bringing me joy.

First the crock pot.  A marvelous invention for working Moms and because stay at home Moms are also working their tails off,  I include in my definition of working Moms, all Moms.  We all work hard and crock pots are an emblem of multi-tasking on steroids if there ever was one.  The ability to say “I’m washing my hair AND also cooking a healthy and inexpensive dinner for my wonderful family” is like no other.  The fact that we’re probably washing the dog, the floor, the car mats, and yesterday’s baked on crock pot container notwithstanding, crock pot cooking makes one feel good in a way clean hair alone never could.  And an added bonus is that no matter the quality of food going into a crock pot, it’s usually going to make your house smell candle-scented, pot-roast fresh, unless of course, you fall asleep and forget to remove the contents until the next morning.  Even as I write this, I’m thinking of my next crock pot, “fill the house with great smells”, chicken dinner. 

Great.  so on to the hummingbirds.  No, I have not discovered a way to mix hummingbird food from natural ingredients and let them simmer to perfection in my crock pot.  But I am pretty sure someone, somewhere out there, has done just that, and they probably have a Pinterest page devoted to it.  Well the first thing I’ve learned is that my pretty red hummingbird food is probably KILLING the hummingbirds or at the very least subjecting them to red dye # (fill in the number) poisoning.  I can already see John Travolta starring as the dynamic and passionate lawyer defending the birds:  ” … and when did you first learn about red dye”, and “where did you purchase said dye”, ” please remember you took an oath!” ,  “..  did it ever occur to you that you were harming the birds?”, and me replying, humbly, with my most effusive tactics: “sir, it’s not that I don’t disagree with you, but I really thought that the red dye of my youth was a problem they solved back in 1984,  uh, June, to be exact. I seem to recall reading about it in the uh,  Post, yeah, the Post …” . This ought to send every paralegal in my imaginary, made-for-TV movie scrambling, I think, smiling.

Crock pots and hummingbird feeder guilty verdicts aside, I normally find an abnormal amount of joy in both vessels.  Crock Pot dinners usually do turn out great and make the house smell good, and have plenty of  hearty leftovers for freezing.  Hummingbird feeders are a delightful addition to the back yard and when I follow the directions and correct timing, I can see the great migration as the birds travel to past my house along the Mexico to Canada highway. Its marvelous to me that hummingbirds and butterflies seem to have discovered the best way across north America long before the rest of us did.

So  I see the connection both stationary items have to inner joy.  With little prep time, and good timing, both the crock pot and the feeder, bless their little non-existent stationary-object hearts, make the world a better place, make MY world a better place. They are two minor, unrelated, well, maybe a little related, items that make our house feel like a home.  They are vessels representing the good things in life,  especially in the joy you get as a result of filling them with the best ingredients. I laugh to myself, thinking how unrelated these two items  are and yet how much alike in the role they have in my home. I don’t have a clue how hummingbirds find the feeders or how the food particles combine when simmered to make things more flavorful.  I don’t have a clue about Heaven either. But I secretly hope should I be blessed to arrive there one day, that there will be at least one simmering crock pot and plenty of hummingbird feeders.  I imagine the hummingbirds have already discovered the best way there.

(lwr Oct 5, 2017)

Day 4:  A day late 

My wise mother used to have some very wonderful one-liner sayings that seemed to make things better no matter the situation. Once when I was playing along in Jeopardy,  I surprised myself by acing the Proverbial Sayings category because her expressions were so ingrained in my mind.  Too bad I never had the guts to try out for the show.  I realized that my mother’s sayings were mostly from Proverbs, or at the very least were historical idioms that had stood the test of time. She always said she was quoting her own mother who at one point, down the generational line, had a proverbial Irish grandmother. 

One of my mother’s sayings was “a day late and a dollar short”.   In her world, you never wanted to be either of these things. I am still trying to find out who first coined this clever expression but the practical application is “you are late”  and “you are providing information that is late and less than helpful”.  Today’s expression might be “arm chair (or Monday morning)  quarterbacking”.  Providing someone practical advice a day late no matter how sage or well-intended, rarely makes them feel good.   From this oft-expressed maternal wisdom I learned to be on time and under budget, a quality which helped my work life when I was asked to manage projects and keep them within 10% margin.  A micro-manager was born!

Enter the 31 day writing challenge and already I’m two days behind (more than 10%) and probably overspent to get the blog up and running.   So this pressure should bring out the best in me – nothing like some pressure and a deadline, public embarrassment, loss of credibility, etc, to get the creative juices flowing.  And what do I come up with?  “You are a day late and a dollar short”  says my mother’s voice in my head.   

So what do we do when a project is a day late?  Reprimand the person in charge,  light a fire under the workers,  ask why?  In my experience, asking why is the fastest and most reliable path to resolution.  There is usually a logical and important reason for being late.  The “dog ate my homework” excuses aside,  life sometimes takes us down different paths and we encounter obstacles we were not expecting, before being late.  Shortly after 9/11,  NPR interviewed people who were running late that day.  The premise was survivor’s guilt, but the end result was how grateful they were to have missed the train, stopped at their kid’s school for the birthday party, or paused their schedule because the dog barfed just as they were leaving the house.  This show made a lasting impression on me.  How many times did I stress out about being late for something?  I had good habits, but was far from perfection in showing up on time.  Of course we all have that friend who is “notoriously late”  and we usually learn to stop waiting on them.  But do we stop to ask why?

So the next time I felt like I was a “day late and a dollar short”  was during the recent hurricane cleanup efforts in our neighborhood.  I would head out enthusiastically with donations in the trunk and fresh arms and legs all ready to help, only to discover they needed a bigger shovel, a  bigger person, a bigger heart, or a bigger bank account.  Once I figured this out, I was able to help in a more scaled back, timely, and reasonable fashion.  In other words,  “a day late and a dollar short” didn’t mean I was letting God, or people, or myself down,  it meant my project plan needed tweaking.  There was an obstacle I was not considering, I needed to open my eyes to understand what type of help was needed, when.  If I didn’t have the skills or desire, I would let the A team run things.  If I couldn’t help but knew who could, then I would get that person connected to help.  I also stopped apologizing to myself, to God, and to others for not being heroic enough, or strong enough, or just plain enough “enough”.  If I was tired, I would go back to my non-flooded house,  say a prayer of thanks, shower, and rest.  After all, I reasoned, I am not helping out of guilt, I am helping because its hard to watch people going through something difficult and not help. Others have helped me,  therefore I should help others, was my driving mantra.  

Somewhere in there I let  go of  being “a day late and a dollar short” as a character flaw.   I needed to look at it more as a fact of life.  I needed to turn the adage into an “ask why”  moment, an opportunity to change course, downshift, tweak, resolve to find a better way.  I needed to realize that sometimes being the right person , or the wrong person with the right skills, or any of those fateful combinations are not something I can contol.  Just as a traffic jam makes you late even when you left early, sometimes being a “day late and a dollar short” is a sign to change focus, to look up and ask God, why?   Sometimes it makes all the difference.

(lwr Oct 4, 2017,  but it’s really Oct 6)

Day 3: What we all have in common

During my youth I was fortunate to be able to attend summer camp at a beautiful lake up north. I attended this camp for many years as a camper, a counselor, a prep-cook, a dish washer, and swim instructor.  The experience of this special place runs deep in my veins. To this day the things I learned at camp influence my day to day decisions and general approach to life.  

First of all, camp instilled in me a deep love for the outdoors and an even deeper appreciation for the fact that nature had patterns and forces which must come from something bigger than humans. Camp solidified my belief in God.

So yes, this was a ‘”church” camp but not an “over the top religious” camp. We were working on belief from the inside out.  Introspection mixed with fun and duty filled the day. We were given a schedule which instilled in us that we are here to learn about this beautiful world God created. We learned that we are here to try new things and  always strive to become better as human beings. We learned to seek God’s truth, understanding, and enlightenment.  

We worked together doing kapers (chores) and learned that it feels good to do your part and feels rotten when you let someone down or have someone letting down the team. 

We learned to swim in very cold water.  We would tread for 45 minutes and be so uncomfortable.  Camp pushed us beyond our limits and helped give us a barometer for life.  Often I find myself thinking: “What I’m going through may be painful. But I’ve been through worse, like treading in cold water at camp”. While many people have been through more daunting challenges, this experience somehow developed tenacity in me. 

We learned at camp to watch the moon shimmering across the lake.  We would trek through the woods with only the moon lighting our way. We learned to tell a homesick kid that their parents were looking at the same moon and missing them too.  We learned to be kind and empathetic.

We learned to walk softly and listen to the wind in the trees and the stories the birds were telling us.  The trees were our guideposts and we learned more from their silence than we did when the wind broke their bows.  We learned to appreciate the dancing branches on the roofs of our tents, for they too told a story.  When the aspens quaked, the leaves would flip and turn white, portending storms.  We counted the time between the lightening  and the thunder as we drifted to sleep during evening storms.

We learned to make campfires and to watch the point where the fire sparks rise up to meet the sky.  The sky was beautiful at night, colorful  in the morning, teasing us with rain in the afternoon, and cooling us with light breezes in the evening.

A bell told us when to work and when to play, when to eat and when to lie down and listen to evening vespers.  Vespers helped us all sleep well, knowing that God had watched over our day and would be there during the night.  It gave us peace.

At camp we all learned to trust the earth and moon and sky and water that God had provided us that day.  These are timeless gifts, they work no matter where you are in the world, and no matter who you are.  They give all humans a common interest -one moon, one earth, we all share them, sometimes not equally, but we all appreciate the bird,  the tree, the wind, and the hope each new day brings.  The bell rings and its time for vespers.  Homesick people can look up at the sky and know their loved ones are watching too.

(lwr Oct 3, 2017)
 

Day 2: Mapping the world

I have always had the desire to see the world.  This started as a young child when I would listen to my grandmother’s stories of her travels.  My grandmother was a traveler and artist and progressive for her time.  She visited the seven wonders of the world.  I remember her telling me about a hotel that was an actual tree house where she stayed in Africa,  and about her visit to the Taj Mahal in India.  She traveled every year to Arizona and when she returned would tell me about the beautiful rocks and colors in the landscapes there.  Outside, a cold and dreary Michigan winter day would be gray with flecks of blue and brown.  My grandmother would tell tales of  places where the sun was shining and hot in the winter.  I admired her ability to compartmentalize and relay these tales over Sunday dinner while snow fell outside the window.  I caught the travel bug while dining surreptitiously on pot roast with carrots and potatoes on these wintry Sundays after church, before I was told to go upstairs to study. 

My parents also fueled the interest in the world outside our windows. My mother was a teacher and every road trip was a teachable moment and an opportunity to learn about new places.  My father was a physicist and encouraged us to have boundless curiousity about all matters of matter, so to speak. He also insisted that we end every debate with a trip to the study to consult the Encyclopedia. How marvelous it is to have Wikipedia, the fount of all knowledge (albeit  occasional misinformation) at our disposal today.  

After college, I had a couple of jobs which fueled the wanderlust even more.  One was a job in western Colorado which involved pinpointing water sources using USGS quadrangle maps and satellite images to locate springs and intermittent streams.  My job was to field check the locations and if I encountered real water, to test it for nitrates and sulfates, and also measure the pH.  It was a fun job, taking me to places like the Black Canyon of the Gunnison where I would eat lunch and bask in the glory of the scenery. Following that summer of bopping around Colorado, I worked as a cartographer for a small mapping company in Minneapolis.  It was a far cry from field work in the mountains, but I learned to hand-scribe contour maps and within a year we were converting those same photo-rendered maps to digital elevation models, using early scanning technologies.  I loved the maps, especially the ones from different places in the world.  

Studying geology and mapping afforded me the opportunity to see some interesting parts of the country and world.  I have hiked in most of the mountain ranges in the US, set foot on seven continents, and visited forty-nine of the nifty-fifty United States, (with apologies to Delaware). I have also seen obscure places such as an elaborate Grotto in western Iowa, the Corn Palace in South Dakota, and Prairie Dog town in Lubbock, Texas. While making maps in Texas, I found out there is a city named Ding Dong, in of all places, Bell County.   There is a tiny little town named Unadilla in Michigan and a place called Pike’s Peak in Iowa, the original Pike’s Peak, discovered presumably, by John Muir, on his way to the real one in Colorado.  There is a road in Houston, a notorious speed trap, perhaps the only road in the city where people obey the speed limit, named Buffalo Speedway.  Thinking about all of these fun and interesting places makes me thankful to the person who thought of the clever names and who also worked meticulously to put them on the map.

Not everywhere is picturesque or delightful to visit but the maps are always beautiful pictures of possibility.  Even in the most desolate or destitute places I have found something  to appreciate, whether it is a planned or unplanned stop. My grandmother used to tell me “the world is your oyster”. Well I am happy to report that indeed it is. I am very grateful to have seen much of it, am thankful to God for the beauty of the world around me, and glad I have had a chance to be guided by many maps and fellow mapmakers along the way.

(lwr Oct 2, 2017)

Day 1: To see the world

Day One of the thirty-one day writing challenge. Challenge is an apt description. The first thing I realized I needed was a blog. Deciding on a name for the blog was the first challenge. The blog name I wanted to use was taken. So that sent me into an hour long quest for a “new and just as clever name”. The new name I arrived at, “Mind Grains” is a suitable replacement. What I want to pursue with this blog are small grains: nuggets of observation that come from my mind or which come to mind in eventful or mundane life situations.

A favorite poem inspired me:

“To see the world in a grain of sand and
heaven in a wildflower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour” – William Blake

I discovered Blake in High School. He caused me endless days of wondering and wandering, riding my bike to the lake near our house and long hours searching for truths in waves lapping against the shore, in pondering the wonder of it all, and deep down inside, grappling with insecurities brought on by not being quite normal or popular enough. I was no ordinary teenager, but then again, I don’t imagine anyone thinks they are or were.

In college I was reminded of the quote as I studied geology, where one truly does “see the world in a grain of sand”, and time takes on new dimensions which are humbling and give one pause. “You mean to tell me that 500,000 years of time is missing between this rock unit and the next one? And it’s all encapsulated in that little crooked line?” and the wondering and wandering would begin again.

Years later when I became a mother I realized the wisdom of the “infinity in the palm of your hand”, the first grasp that little one makes on your hand is timeless and real, and feels like electricity – small life flowing from their hand to yours and back again.

When my parents grew old and passed on I became acutely aware of time, of “eternity in an hour”, the passage of time being out of ones’ control, and sickness being out of my control, just one more hour, I would pray, just one more day.

And now as I sit back with time to reflect, wander, and wonder again, I can see “heaven in a wildflower” as I sit and write, I imagine what the view will be next spring, expecting that flowers will once again bloom in a absent-minded, showy, and yet subtle fashion outside the window. Blake’s words inspire again.

Last week I was on a retreat. We were mostly beginning artists learning plein-air painting and it felt natural for me as an earth scientist to be outside documenting colors and textures in an orderly fashion again. But this trek was supposed to be spiritual. Like geology, we needed to glean facts and truths from what was right in front of us and also from what was not there. Lights and darks defined the rock units and cloud formations. The trees looked green one minute and yellow the next. Browns turned into reds and the sun mocked my attempts to capture what appeared to be a scene of natural perfection until I painted it.

Our leader read aloud Psalm 139:

17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!
18 If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake, and I am still with you. (ESV version)

So I pray that this blog will capture my awareness of the physical world, the ties to the spiritual world, and ultimately, inspire myself and others to see God’s creation at the macro scale: at the beach, in a mountain, in the clouds, and simultaneously at the micro scale – in a grain of sand, a tiny hand, or an absent-minded wildflower.

(lwr Oct 1, 2017)