1,000 Places to See Before I Die

I've been armchair travelling around the world this year, courtesy of my Page-A-Day calendar. I feel blessed to report that I have been to a good third of the locales listed on these pages - Lake Constance and Lake Como, the Bugaboos, Agra, Cape Breton, Milford Sound, Durbar Square in Kathmandu, Fiji, the Grand Palace in Bangkok, etc., etc.  It's really quite affirming to realize that perhaps I have been a place or two on this planet.

Yet, as with knowledge, world travel has a way of hitting you over the head with its sheer enormity.  The more I've travelled, the more I realize how little I've travelled.  I've been to One Tree Hill of U2 fame, but I've never seen the trees of Yellowstone.

Today's calendar image is Halong Bay, Vietnam.  In a word?  Stunning.  I want to go there now.   Have you ever had a visceral reaction to a destination image thereby inspiring you to travel there?  Movies can do that to people but sometimes a simple little calendar image can, too.  I got tired of being awed and amazed by travel brochure images of the Bugaboos, which happened to be in my own backyard.  So I made Holy Hub drive 90 minutes down a dirt road and off the beaten path in order to see these mountain spires in person.  I think it was worth the trip - he still grumbles about the heat, the dust, the detour.

Too many places, not enough time.  But I'm determined to get out there in this world and experience a few of these majestic places for myself.  Sometime, somehow, someway. 

What's on my hit list?  Mostly mountains.  I monumentally love, love, love mountains.  We've seen a range or two or ten in our lifetime - the Rockies, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Karakoram, the Hindu Kush, the Southern Alps of New Zealand - and we now lived flanked by the Olympics to the West and the Cascades to the East.  I'm convinced mountains will factor into the images that flash across my mind in those penultimate moments of life -  Valley of the 10 Peaks, Mt. Rainier, The Matterhorn, Mt. Pilatus, The Three Sisters, Nanga Parbat - all these mountains take up a huge amount of space in my heart.  But there remain, seriously, so many more I must, must see, trek, touch and bow to in reverence in an up close and personal kinda way.   

Patagonia, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, Bhutan, the Drakensberg in South Africa, the Pamirs, the Armenian Highlands (home to Mountain Ararat and Noah's lost Ark), and yes, even a few ranges considerably more local like the Tetons, are all on my must see, do list. 

Which leads me to my next category - National Parks.  I've been enjoying catching bits and pieces of Ken Burns' PBS documentary - "The National Parks: America's Best Idea"  - he's so right, they are.  I was inspired by the adventurous escapades of Edward and Margaret Gehrke, who made it a point in the 20s and 30s to travel to all of America's National Parks.  While I don't feel inspired to see all of the 400 or so parks in the system, I would like to at least see Yosemite, Yellowstone, the main section of the Grand Canyon, and pretty much every single National Park in Utah.

My next category is Islands.  We've vaycayed on more than a dozen gorgeous and memorable islands in the South Pacific, Caribbean Sea and Indian Ocean, but there are some elusive islands I still must paddle to ~ like Easter Island, the Galapagos, the Marquesas in French Polynesia, the Greek Isles, Aruba, Malta, the Andaman Islands, the Queen Charlotte Islands, Tasmania, Madagascar, Iceland and the Hebrides, if only because the latter sounds exotic. Reading books like The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers and a Woman's Search for the Meaning of Wife by Janna Cawrse Esarey struck a wanderlust chord within me to want to set sail for the high and low seas in search of sun, sand and ocean spray.

I haven't even touched on Mystical and Whoo-whoo Places.  We've been to some sacred sites and ancient ruins, but we have yet to see the biggies like Egypt and Stonehenge or the Camino de Santiago or Machu Picchu or even the birthplace of Bono.

There are oodles of other categories that I haven't mentioned - coastlines and scenic road trips and historical cities - but the aforementioned are what really float my travelling boat.

How can you tell the bug has bitten me again?

Testing Testing

If I knew a way to tote my custom domain to Word Press, I'd be so outta here because my Blogger problems have been huge these past few months.

Let's see if this posts, shall we?

Hauntings...

My Blog is haunted. Well actually, I have a different choice word in mind for it but haunted will suffice.

It's been screwing up my settings, not permitting changes (and yes, I clicked "Save Changes"). It's a control and power thing. Technology likes to mess with me like that - seemingly assuming an intellectual superiority.

Anyhoo, our life and times - Blogger-notes version - is that we got Remannied in May on Oahu. I say remannied because that's what our wedding banner said - my husband's name, a popular German one, resembles the first in a two-word Latin descriptor for a particular natural form of birth control - you know the one - initials are CI. In any event, his name is shortened to C--t, which shares phonetic harmony with it's popular German counterpart K--t. Well, for our wedding, his sister, now-estranged - saw fit to fashion lovely car ornaments and head table banners with a stylized font (this was back in they day of dot-matrix printers).

So the R's became N's and our banner read as C-NT & (HOLY) - JUST MANNIED....I'll let you play Vanna. Why didn't we snip the R's? Because to do so would be to mess with the very precarious fabric that fuses the small Schmidt clan as one. Even the pastor was more than a little scandalized that day. And 21 years later, as I made the whirlwind rounds of long-lost but found family this summer, the tale still prevails. "Remember your wedding banner?" titillated family folk would ask, with a giggle and a hand to their pursed lips. (As if we could forget).

But I digress. We were re-mannied once more in early-May. It was a lovely sunset beach affair on the near-deserted Ke Iki Beach, officiated by Rev. Jofrey Rabanal and witnessed by our less than attentive kids, who were just a tad preoccupied with making faces in the video camera and kicking sand at each other than to show any sign of reverence towards the sacrality of the moment. Because let's face it, neither of us were entirely sure we wanted to marry each other again. Kidding aside, we wrote our own vows - this time Mr. Expletive wrote his own and it was stellar - he even promised to obey me this time around (a joking reference to the fact that I argued and lost my war of words with our Lutheran Pastor the first time around concerning having to promise to "obey".

So this ceremony was less the failed performative utterance that the first was (Obey?! - as if!, I mean, Yes, of course I will (not)) and more in keeping with where we were at 21 years ago last August. Our original nuptial vision was to have a small intimate watercraft affair and then escape to a tropical locale for a wondrous honeymoon. So this felt like redemption and might I add, as though I had finally come of age, maritally speaking.

We had a lovely time in Hawaii although unbeknownst to us until the tail end of the trip, tragedy had befallen our family. We learned (by an impersonal e-mail from above-noted estranged sister), that Holy Hub's 17-year old niece (from whom we were also estranged for reasons owing to her still living with her mother) had committed suicide at the hospital.

We performed a bittersweet vigil upon the volcanic rocks of the beach for her on the penultimate eve of our departure under the watchful glow of the most specactular sunset of the week, mere steps from where we enjoyed our vow renewal ceremony days earlier. And then a few days later, we flew back home for the funeral - which was quite possibly the most profane event I have ever attended (toilet humour in a eulogy that is supposed to celebrate the life and brief times of a cooped-up, medicated-from-birth girl is not all that amusing). The only saving moments were the lovely commemorating eulogies of her grandparents, your's truly/Holy Hub, and our brave offspring - who took the time to write and deliver their own heartfelt memories and poems of tribute to their cousin at the podium that day - but those were fleeting and did little to save the day.

We returned this summer to spend time with her grandparents who are still reeling with grief, as well as to visit her gravesite, see the hospital ward she was staying in, and visit with other friends and family.

We, the family, will remain forever haunted by her death. She was only a year away from freedom. She hinted as much on her various blogs, which discovered in hindsight, revealed much about her inner turmoil and unhappiness. We very much looked forward to resuming and beginning anew a relationship with her once she was out of the house. It was not to be.

So there you have it - the fine line between joys and sorrows, regrets and resolve.

I visited with a psychic who does a lot of forensic work, and was able to glean some interesting information about the circumstance(s) of her death. The jury is still out on what all this means or is a foreshadowing for, but in the meantime, the cogs of the wheel in the family, long dormant, have begun to gain momentum again, and that does not bode well.

PS (if you're inclined to leave a comment, do so here - my blog is still haunted.

The Summer Day

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Drowning Fish

Long time no blog.

To be honest, I don't even know where to begin. I feel ranted and raved out and yet, in counterpoint, I also feel like I haven't even scratched the surface of ranting. It just gets bottled and corked and like all good things left to ferment, it turns sour and distasteful.

Do I blog about my disillusionment with the media? No, it's not worth it. I'm being increasingly more selective about the media since the elections and I haven't been inclined to want to plug back in since, mistrustful as I am of the intentions and agendas of most major media outlets. Pick a story and that will be the case. I'm not interested in the prevailing story, angle, slant and skew. I want to hear the untold story and hear from the voices who aren't as loud, popular and boisterous. And I want to hear the real story.

In the spirit of Oriah Mountain Dreamer's The Invitation, I want to know what people ache for, if they dare dream of meeting their heart's longing, or would willing risk looking like a fool for love, for their dream, for the adventure of being alive. And if they have touched the centre of their own sorrow or have been opened by life's betrayal and can sit with pain, their's or mine, and can be with joy, mine and their own, and can dance with wildness and let ecstasy fill them to the tips of their fingers.

Like Oriah, I don't care if the story they tell me is true - I, too, want to know if others can disappoint another to be true to themselves. Rather than being curious about what people do for a living or where they live or how much money they make, I am infinitely more interested in knowing if people can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children. And like Oriah, I want to know what sustains people from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if people can be alone with themselves fand if they truly like the company you they keep in the empty moments.

I don't care if they stand on the side of conservative or liberal, black or white, privileged or oppressed, male or female, single or married, young or old ~ I care only that they dared live and speak their truth such that all those preceding labels become like so much useless armour.

I'm reading Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning right now. It's a clever book. She uses the most omniscient of narrative techniques by positing a dead, quirky narrator, Bibi, as the intrepid guide who takes the reader back in time along the Burmese Trail with an unsuspecting group of journalists, artists and travelers.

She prefaces the book with a delightful quote:

"A pious man explained to his followers: "It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place the fishes on the bank, where they flop and twirl. 'Don't be scared,' I tell those fishes. 'I am saving you from drowning.' Soon enough, the fishes grow calm and lie still. Yet sad to say, I am always too late. The fishes expire. And because it is evil to waste anything, I take those dead fishes to market and I sell them for a good price, With the money I receive, I buy more nets so I can save more fishes."

Anonymous

I like travel tales. All life is a grand fish tale and the steps that define a journey. As such, all life, with its strifes and perils and plights and metaphoric peaks and valleys, can be aptly depicted within such narrative frames.

What does all this babbling have to do with the price of fish in Myanmar? Simply this: I'm hungry for fresh stories and a new mythology and the truth between the fines lines of the lies we tell ourselves in order to play safe and save face.

But above all, I'm especially hungry for a station stop - I've lost sight of where this train is going and as lovely as the landscape remains, I'm getting more than a little bored with the scenery. My own Burmese Trail adventure beckons.

The Late Great Planet Earth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

William Wordsworth (1806)

March Madness

Milestones
This is my 100th blog post. I’ve been thinking it begged a more extravagant form of performative utterance than this casual mention but it doesn’t. Onward, upwards and all that.

The same holds true for my writing or lack thereof. In my attempt to find new footing and get some traction again, I’ve been over-thinking what major thing I should write about. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and so I guess I shall reorient myself from there – that single step.

I get singular steps confused with big steps. They are not at all the same thing. One is measured qualitatively and the other quantifiably. I suppose if I want to justify my lapse of time, I can, indeed, measure numerically the million little things I’ve done of late.

I don’t know that the fruits of my labor (and loins for that matter) add up to anything of substance and tangibility now. All my vested interests feel that way – bound up in uncertain, future dividends. But process is like that – it can’t be measured with any real precision. To quote T.S. Eliot ~ “what we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning.” As winter fades and spring fast approaches, I feel that’s where I’m at; a place of resurrection, rebirth and new beginning.

On that note, I’ve begun the next stage in The Artist’s Way series ~ Walking in This World, wherein Julia Cameron, the author, introduces weekly walks to the “tool box” of spiritual-creative outlets along with morning journaling and a weekly artist date. The first chapter in this new book, no surprise, is about discovering a sense of origin.

Fresh start, clean slate, beginner mind – what a great place from which to embark on a creative and metaphoric spiritual journey.

Mindfulness
In this relative state of minding my own business, I’ve been contemplating the mind. I just read My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor’s account of where her brain was at in the days, weeks, months, years following her stroke. I’m also reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and all this brain food has been giving me fodder for thought on the issue of creativity vis-à-vis right and left brain thinking.

Along with this, I’m learning to see negative spaces. Perhaps I should say re-learning. I suspect I was born with that vision but have since forgotten it. Holy Son has a grey and white screened t-shirt that features a woman’s face on it. I didn’t notice the face for weeks. Now that’s all I see. I hope to keep it that way.

It’s starting to work though. Now that I’m beginning to notice negative space, I see a different view outside my office window – the leaves and trees are arranged in such a way as to create a kind of Greco-Roman statuesque face of Picasso proportions. I need to sketch it before a big windstorm comes up and blows the leaves off my face.

Yes, it’s true. I have Picasso on the brain. I headed up Holy Daughter’s classroom art auction project this winter and this is the final result (the background matte was woven by a creative helpmate - one of the other moms who was also juggling a staggering three other classroom auction projects of her own).

It sold last night at the auction for $1050. Unbelievable. And here I was, hoping it might sell for $75.00. Holy Daughter’s creations are second down from the top left and the center image.

Mypopia
Speaking of vision, distant objects have seemed quite blurry to me lately. It’s been a crazy, busy time of late. We’ve been juggling all the usual suspects of after-school arts and scouting round-around madness with the kids, as well as a host of medical appointments, family visits and attraction tours.

I can’t believe spring is almost here – this has been the winter that just won’t end. When it snowed again this past week for like the millionth time here in the past few months, Holy Daughter noted that it must be Mother Nature trying to get rid Herself of the last bit of cold and flakey stuff to make room for spring. There might be something to that.

All I know is I’m ready for spring. Holy Son is off to Washington, DC for a school trip next weekend. He’s most excited about staying at a Great Wolf Lodge during the trip. Holy Hub is trying to keep a low yet high profile at Boeing – a precarious, betwixt and between place if ever there was one. I’m still encouraged that, amidst all their layoffs, engineering jobs aren’t yet being touched. Fingers crossed. And summer is around the corner, for which I have nothing beyond Holy Son’s scout camp in Oregon etched on the calendar to show for it. Holy Daughter is flirting with going to circus camp this summer and I’m flirting with letting her. There are a couple of options in town – an actual circus arts school, as well as a cirque institute. We’ll see how that goes.

Mourning
Sudden death loomed large on the horizon last week ~ first, with news of Natasha Richardson’s unexpected passing, and next with the shocking news that a friend’s husband had suffered a fatal heart attack on Thursday. He was only 45. She does not stray far from my thoughts from moment to moment.

Musical
The kids finish up this afternoon with their Snow White play, which has been playing at Bellevue Youth Theatre to mostly sold-out crowds. Holy Son had a small singing solo in it – he played the role of The Raven and did a good job of mimicking and a great job with his singing Holy Daughter played the Huntsman’s daughter and also gave stellar performances. I look forward to having our after-school time and dinner hour back to normal again.

And to finding time to write again.