New Year's Calculations

I resolved this year to walk every day, which really means to go on a walk every day. So far, so good. I added a new ap to my phone to help me keep track of my progress. It's called walkmeter. According to the ap, I walked 12.33 miles at an average pace of 17:57 minute miles. Somehow in my flat neighborhood I managed during the week to ascend 53 feet, yet descend 54, so by the end of the year I will be 52 feet below where I started. . .

I also went to an athletic shoe store and had some analysis done on my feet, stance, and gait. Lots of graphs and colors. I joined their club, bought some shoes, a bell was rung. It felt like smoke and mirrors, but my feet are happy with my new shoes, insoles, and fancy socks. I am willing to go along with some degree of hoodwinkery, if in the end I have happy feet.

After one week of walking (on average 1.54 miles per day), I can tell already that I will need to concoct some extra complication to keep me interested. Some experiments or assignments. I heard on the radio (NPR Costas Karageorghis, a sports psychologist at Brunel University in London) that listening to music while you exercise can enhance your performance. Might try that for a week. Question: will I walk better or will I get mugged or hit by a car while wearing earbuds?

Maybe one week, I will go on protest marches every day, carry hand-made signs declaring my unhappiness with some thing or another. Or go on walk-athons. Pull out my old Save-the-Whales pendant. Wear tube socks.

For this first week the goal was not to fail in the first week. Not sure what I'll do next week. Maybe walk with my son's dog who has spent every day since Christmas stealing our holiday treats off the counter. So far she has consumed an entire bag of reindeer kibble, a handful of Peppermint Patties, a batch of cookies, and one of those chocolate oranges (dog owners, worry not, she does not get sick when she eats chocolate).

I welcome other suggestions.

Bed Ridden

I just bought a rolling bag and put inline skate wheels on it so I can walk to work in quiet, just the softened thrump, thrump, thrump as the bag glides over the sidewalk joints. Every time I walk to work, it's like rushing to catch a plane.Makes me walk with purpose. Yesterday I took 10,013 steps and was feeling grand.

Today I can barely move, old horse injury that flares up every time I push at life too hard. Twenty five years ago I got on a horse, a young stallion who had spent all winter out of the saddle. None of these details mattered to me, because the sun was shining, the California air smelled sweet like velvet and hay, and the next day I would be turning twenty five. A quarter century and still alive, why shouldn't I mount a stallion?

For one, I usually ride nearly crippled nags. And when I say usually, what I mean is almost never. And, as it turns out, winter-wild horses can be frisky and a little sneaky. The one I rode took a big belly of air while we saddled him up, a horse trick for keeping the gear loose and comfy. That's the sneaky part. A smart horse person knows to ride a short while and then get off to tighten the straps, so the saddle doesn't slip to one side or the other.

After walking the horses for a bit, the young man I was riding with suggested we gallop across an open field. Here comes the frisky part. Just one tiny heel tickle from me and this horse took off. He ran past the young man who I think was galloping his horse, but I just saw a blur. Speed is not my thing, even back then. I don't tilt my head back and laugh at the world in times like this. I become consumed with terror.

Maybe it was my roller skating instincts that saved me. When I needed to stop while skating, I'd turn rather than brake, dissipating the energy going forward by converting it to angular momentum. That's my C-in-physics explanation. I yanked the reins right and back and eventually the horse pulled up into a turn and stopped.

This is my plea for following your gut.

My gut said get the hell off that beast right this instant. It is way more horse than you can handle. But the sun was shining, blah, blah, blah. And my smiling young friend promised not to gallop any more. So we wandered the horses toward the shade of the oak woodland that draped a hill. With my stallion's nostrils flaring and his muscles twitching with the memory of his great dash across the open field, I entered the quiet shade of the trees. Maybe a twig cracked under his hoof. Maybe he was just young and full of adrenaline, but the horse took off at a gallop. By now the saddle had loosened and began slipping to the left, taking me with it. We were headed for a tree on the horse's left. He intended to scrap me off on the tree trunk. I had just enough time to guard my head with my arms before colliding against the tree.

I fell to the ground and lay on my back, unable to move. I could see the lovely blue sky through the oak canopy and hear the stomping and snorting of the horse trying to fight out of the saddle. I thought he was coming back to finish me off, but I couldn't seem to look around to find him. So I just lay breathless and still whispering "help."

I snapped three transverse processes (the little wings off the vertebrae in my lower back) and cracked a rib, and needed a few stitches over my eye, but was otherwise fine. Spent the night in the hospital having morphine-induced hallucinations that my mother was calling me to say happy birthday.

Ever since then, if I begin to think I can mount life like a wild stallion, my back reminds me that speed just isn't my thing.

P.S. I did get back in the saddle ten years later
on a horse named Lips whose lust for fresh lupines
kept him at a constant strolling pace. 

Passing Along a Little Walking Research

I heard this on NPR and am spreading the word on yet another good reason to walk. Check out this story
Yeah walking!

Walking Women Writers

I'm reading two books right now, both on walking, one by Rebecca Solnit, whom I have for the past decade referred to as my Doppleganger, a term that I just learned from Wikipedia is taken from the German (Doppel (double) and Gänger (walker)). Solnit lives in San Francisco and publishes books I always think I should have written, an opinion based on their titles, because I haven't, up until last week, been able to bring myself to read her work. Why? Because she writes the books I think I should have written and, if that weren't enough, we share the same first name. But that isn't it entirely. No. She has beautiful hair. Long wavy blond hair that spills around her face like a waterfall in a sunlit spring.  How is that fair? If she gets the published books, she ought to have to take my mousy straight thin locks.

So after ten years, I made myself download her book Wanderlust: The History of Walking, onto my Kindle. Seemed like less of a book that way. And now I'm 15% into it (that's how Kindles count progress, not by pages but by percents) and am so relieved to find out that while she is very smart, we couldn't be more different in how we see the world, how we write, or even how we walk. I still envy the hair, but she makes some excellent observations about walking. 

After reading one too many sentences like this: "Feminism and postmodernism both emphasize that the specifics of one's bodily experience and location shape one's intellectual perspective," (location 605-10, 8%) I took a break and picked up a used hardbound copy of Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking at my favorite local bookstore. Infinitely more entertaining and humble. I like to laugh while I read and he writes with wit. But, he just went through a litany of writers who walk and, with the exception of Wordworth's tag-along sister, Dorothy, who wrote in her journal while her brother traipsed around with her in the Lake's District waxing poetic about daffodils (see poem below), nobody on his list was a woman.

Why?

Where are the walking women writers? Other than Solnit herself, the walkers in her book (so far) also are mainly  of the penile (the adjective for penis, a word derived from the Latin term for tail) persuasion.

If anyone has references for walking women writers, please let me know.


Daffodils by William Wordsworth

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils. 

Changing Water

This little canal where I walk seems to suffer
from bi-polar disorder.
One day the water surges down the channel
all full of slosh and vigor. And then. . .
empty--it's debris and thick mud, full of sticky smells
exposed and raw.

This week my mood reflects
these watery fluctuations--
A happy life gushing forward
full of promise and reward
followed by the same life seeming stuck
snagged on junk around the house--
dirty dishes, recyclables, laundry.

How is it that the same circumstances
can appear so
inconstant?

Lessons from the Wise and Furry

I'm still walking on the canal and to temper my habit of taking the fun out of walking by turning it into a workout, I invited my two gurus of fun.

This is their grammar lesson about the important distinction between on and in.

Today, I am Grasshopper. Thank you Masters.

And now a word from Master Khan:
"See the way of life as a stream. A man floats, and his way is smooth. The same man turning upstream exhausts himself. To be one with the universe, each must find his true path and follow it."  Kung Fu, season one episode 9: "Chains"

What a Difference 185 Days Make

Sometimes when I walk, I get thoughts I think are worth remembering, so I type them into my notes app on my phone. This way I can e-mail them to myself for use later, if I still think they are worth remembering. For example on July 3, 2010, while walking on the canal, I wrote this:

"Late afternoon winds pickkingg up like a river rushing through the tall trees efood along the canal citrus fig pomegrAnit fish canal muddy with new flow watering time summer dove coos walking into the sun glare hand up to psee edibles mesquite beNs it's raining pine needles in the strong desert wind the canal is cat jumpable a long hair turtle coated cat jumped in front of me dates too I solve prnlems while walking like how aunt and uncle can get neighbor not to look in back yard take up nude gardening"

Then on Jan 4 2011, strolling down the same canal:

"185 days later winter I can see more through the naked trees
Cold air no wind to stir up dust"

So, observations: I like trees and nakedness, regardless of the season. And wind, but not dust. I write more with warm fingers, but still can't type well on a phone.

I also caught this shot as a train passed by on my way back home. I like the idea of a graffiti poet.

Walking by a March

I grew up in Berkeley in the late sixties, not so young that I can say I learned to march before I learned to walk, but pretty darn close, so I'm familiar with the concept of marching. As Americans, we have a constitutional right to freedom of speech and to peaceable assembly. And as coordinated creatures, we can exercise both of these rights and walk at the same time. There is something profoundly moving about marching with a bunch of people who, at least on one point, agree with how you feel. Whenever I have marched for a cause, I have felt empowered and connected to something larger and more important than myself. It's uplifting.

I've marched for lots of reasons. When I was young, I marched because my dad was marching and I, like an imprinted duckling, followed. I marched in protest of a war I didn't fully understand, but felt out of principle war was a bad idea. I marched to Save the Whales and that helped for a while. It's probably time to march again for that. I marched against military invasion of Granada. In college by then, so I had a little more political savvy than I had had the first time I protested war when I was still young enough to ride a banana seat stingray. But, in truth, I still don't understand the nuances of war. I see them as an action of absolute last resort. If I believe a war is treated as any way otherwise, I'm against it.

A few days ago while walking around Washington D.C., I came across a march of Tea Party constituents. I have to say, it was a strange experience. On the one hand, I recognized the slow gait of the marchers--the sign-holding, chanting, and crowd makes marching a low cardio form of exercise. I felt that familiar twinge of excitement in seeing a big group of citizens taking to the streets to get their voices heard. I love it when people exercise their constitutional rights in ways that don't cause physical harm to others. Regardless of whether or not I agree with whatever it is they are saying, I think it one of the coolest things Americans do.

Yet, while standing by a lightpole, watching the marchers march by wearing bright yellow tee shirts and chanting "Who are we?. . .Americans!",  I also worried about media and business propaganda and the manipulation of citizens with fear-mongering and its affect on our exercising of these rights. The cynic in me wonders who is financing the Tea Party movement. Is it really a grass roots movement or does it have corporate sponsorship? Why is everyone Caucasian? And generally old? Why was one guy carrying a sign in support of Sheriff Joe Arpaio? What is this all about? I didn't ask these kinds of questions when I tagged along behind my father. I took it on faith that his views were right. Or right, by being left. Why am a patriotic cynic now?

My faith in the American structure of society took a huge hit when the Supreme Court weighed in on the disputed election results in Florida during the Gore v. Bush presidential race. In my mind, if the Supreme Court was going to enter into politics, then nothing was sacred. Everything, including the Constitution was fair game for political manipulation. I used to really admire the Supreme Court, but I didn't even bother to stand on the famous front steps of the courthouse on this recent visit to Washington. Some of the justices who made the decision to render a decision on the election were already retired or deceased, but I'm still disillusioned. Had I just been illusioned for most of my life? Is truth really fiction? Are our rights inalienable or are they manipulable? Is Right all that's left? Is Right right? Has Left left? Politics hurts both hemispheres of my brain.

When I came home, every morning this week I was roused awake by my radio alarm to a story on the tea-party movement,  parts of a week-long series on NPR. Here's what I learned in between snoozes:

• Tea Partyers are, according to Jonathan Rauch, contributing editor at the National Journal and guest scholar at the Brookings Institution: "White, Bright, and Right," meaning they are in fact mostly Caucasian, and are also educated and right-wing conservatives.
• Tea Party backed candidates are also funded by the medical community and oil industry. Not sure why.
• Tea Party constituents don't agree on everything, just like most any big groups of people

Personally, I'm a coffee drinker, but marching for a cause is still a really cool inalienable right.

We Do Too Have Seasons

The grass along the canal has turned golden, so to all naysayers that claim the Southwest has no seasons. . .I say Ha! We may not get drowned in Autumn leaf drop, but there are signs of change. Soon I will need my slippers which I keep at the ready under my writing desk (see below).

Walking to the Polls

Yesterday evening I tucked my sample ballot into my bag and marched off to vote. The air blustered and slapped big rain drops onto the dry ground, creating that dusty smell of a brewing storm. I looked up at the sky and saw a double rainbow emerging from billowed clouds. A good sign. Maybe my vote will help change my state's politics, maybe schools will get proper funding, maybe people won't lose their homes, maybe emigrants won't be run off like mongrel dogs. Get to work rainbow, time's a wasting. But storms blow across the desert landscape so quickly and today blue sky has pushed the clouds to the horizon and I still live in a red state.

Yesterday I did what I do every election, completed the arrows on my ballot, selecting candidates, with a black marker while standing in a booth scantily draped for privacy in a church community hall, exercising one of my fundamental rights as an American citizen, me and an estimated 25% of registered voters in the state. My husband votes by mail-in ballot, but I hang on to the ritual of walking to the polls, being greeted at the door by a volunteer, showing my picture I.D. to another volunteer, signing in, being handed my ballot from yet another volunteer, marking my ballot, and feeding it into the ballot-counting machine while the last volunteer hands me a "I voted today" sticker and asks me to have a nice day. Voting by mail seems a lonely practice by comparison. Though it is less convenient, I make myself walk to the polls to vote, because my whole body gets to be reminded that voting matters, it is an active and vital part of living in a democratic society. I think of my great grandmother who was born long before women's suffrage and how she drove rural women to the polls in Santa Barbara so they could vote for the first time. I try not to think of hanging chads in Florida.

Postcard from Greece aka my face when I found out Reagan had won

I have only missed one election since turning 18, the year I made my first trek to Europe, at 19. Yes, I was in Athens when Ronald Reagan became the President of the United States. My old governor became the oldest American president while I was buying postcards in the Plaka. Too excited about the three months I was going to spend touring the Old Country with my best friend from high school/current college roomie, I never thought about absentee ballots. I didn't vote, so I had to spend the next four years not complaining about Reagan, his trickle-down economics plan, cuts to welfare, education, and the EPA, or any other policy and practice he established.

Never again. I always vote, but secretly feel guilty that I will probably never volunteer to hand voters a sticker and tell them to have a nice day.

Three Laps Around the Garden

I hear what I need to hear when I need to hear it, if I am listening. Last night I walked in the botanical gardens, during the flashlight tours, so the path was lined with docents showing families snakes, lizards and night owls. I had just participated in a one-day writing workshop with Laraine Herring and she made us breath before writing (she let us breath during writing too). Whenever I focus on breathing I realize I'm a shallow breather, so I wanted to practice deep breathing. As I walked in the garden I tried to be a deep breather, which was pleasant since the air was fragrant with creosote. Walking seems to make me listen better, and so, apparently does breathing, or at least breathing attentively, because while I'm walking and breathing I hear a docent say "Anything with an exoskeleton has to shed it if it wants to grow." She's talking about me, I thought to myself.

The docent thought she was talking about a scorpion, but the statement holds for any hard-shelled creatures, like me or my hermit crab.

When my daughter was in kindergarten she came home from a play date with a hermit crab. We went through a few small crabs with brightly painted shells before we learned enough about hermit crab natural history to keep one alive. Turns out hermit crabs breathe with gills that need moisture to function. In a desert climate they need a daily misting or they suffocate. They also need a range of shells to accommodate their eventual growth. The lone surviving crab is Crabicus and he/she (it's hard to determine gender) is at least eight years old. Crabicus sheds his (I think of him as a boy, not sure why, maybe because he's shy and pinches me) exoskeleton a few times each year. He finds a quiet corner of his crabitat and throws off all his armor, exposing the tender soft new shell. There he'll sit while his new shell hardens.

Here's the crazy part. He eats his shed skeleton. He eats it! From an ecological/sustainable point of view, this isn't so crazy, since the discarded shell is a good source of calcium. And there it is right next to him. He's too vulnerable to crawl around to the food bowl, so Crabicus eats his old self in order to make his new self stronger. There's a metaphor for personal growth there.

For the Love of Sauntering

It seems that every effort, every action, must always present an opportunity to examine personal flaws. The flip side of flaw exposure. . .growth.

I have abandoned my pedometer ap, because it made me walk wrong. My doctor said "get more exercise" to lower my LDL cholesterol. A measurable act for a measurable problem. But, as I figured out by my reaction to walking with a pedometor ap, the one that daily declared me overweight based on my BMI, that shifts my focus away from being present on the walk to trying to up my step count, my pace, my calories burned, and on and on.

Numbers are abstract external measures, and though I love numbers, math, rational thinking. . . healing the body needs to extend beyond the measurable, the quantifiable. On my walk yesterday, I just walked and took pictures. I'm trying a new camera ap and so the pictures came out crappy for the most part (note: CameraOne ap not worth 99 cents). Walking with a camera makes me look more closely. It's an instrument that brings my focus to the present moment, no numbers, just a fresh perspective that there is beauty in my neighborhood. Here are some that came out okay. My neighborhood lacks iconic beauty. I don't live in a quaint hamlet in New England or Old England for that matter. My neighborhood is part of a huge sprawling 20th-century metropolis, laying on the desert like a big-footed teenaged boy plops himself on a couch. But what we have here that gets lost in trees and green hills of more compact romantic landscapes is sky. The sky is my surrogate Pacific Ocean, a vast blue that can stretch to the far horizon. When I'm feeling sorry for myself because I don't live at Baggins End in a hobbit hole, I pay attention to the sky.

Yesterday the canal water was running high and the park had been flooded for irrigation, so I could see the reflected sky. Like a Claude Glass, the reflection softens the view and allowed me to crop out alley trash and other scrappy bits of my neighborhood.

A Breezy Ramble

When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park, they created a section called the Ramble, a hilly woodland with meandering footpaths meant to allow park visitors to escape the hustle and bustle of city life and let their feet and minds wander. Olmsted believed in the restorative powers of nature and the importance of mental escape. In contrast to the Promenade, the  razor straight road in the park designed for social intercourse that was chock-a-block with benches and given ample width for carriages, the Ramble paths were designed to wander through a thicket of trees that masked views to the city. The Ramble was designed for walking. Walking in a particular way, a way Henry David Thoreau, who said "It is a great art to saunter." would have endorsed. Or Jules Renard, the French writer who noted that in walking "the body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird."

Rambling has purpose.

I want to yell this at the editor for whom I was, until last night, revising a piece of writing. If I were reading the emergency instructions for what to do if my child accidentally wrote on his eyeball with a Sharpie, I would want it written like the Promenade, straight and to the point. (FYI, a long saline rinse and time seems to do the trick). But if I wanted to escape from the toils of my days, be transported away from my own world, I may take a ramble. I delight in following the mental paths of other writers, through the wooded thickets of their own design, seeing how they sculpt the views, revealing glimpses of the world I may not have noticed otherwise.

He said I should remove my "too-breezy" voice and  the "ramble through [my] own stories, places of youthful discovery," and replace it with more clear and backed up historical reference. More mile markers, less unmarked forks in the path. He wants a promenade. I gave him a ramble. The choice: stay on the meandering path I created or blaze a straight line through, so the journey from point A to point B is clear. Hmm, I wonder where this foot was going? I don't care, I just want to follow it.

 

The Name of the Lizard

I love knowing the name of things. Plants, animals, towns, rivers, continents, gardens, mathematical theorems, stellar constellations, old dead philosophers. . .With the name, I can begin to trace its origins, its story. Despite Shakespeare's famous quote: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." So says Juliet from her balcony whilst (Shakespearean for while) the love-struck Romeo looks on (Romeo and Juliet II, II, 45-46).

True, names start wars, names do hurt, sometimes more than sticks and stones, but I still love the naming of things. Today I found the name of the lizard that I saw fighting in the botanical garden: Desert Spiny Lizard (Sceloporus magister) and now I can learn more about this native species, its penchant for eating ants, and sometimes small lizards. Though I haven't found references to the habit of biting the sides of other Desert Spiny Lizards.

Walk In and Drive Out of Bliss

One reason taking pictures of plants is so satisfying is they don't have legs. They stay put, allowing me time to take the lens cap off, focus, set my aperture (if I'm using the DSLR), and frame the shot. Plants are patient subjects. No so with critters, which is why I usually get blurry snaps of their rear ends.

I just got home from a walk in the botanical garden, just around sunset, and these are some of critters who were kind enough to sit still while I fumbled with my point and shoot. I was thrilled, especially when that bad ass looking lizard had a fight with another lizard of his species. I missed photographing the brawl that went on for many seconds right at my feet on the trail. I don't usually like fighting, never watch boxing, but I've never seen a lizard fight.  It was one of those moments when the whole world shrinks down to one point of focus. Nothing existed but those two bad boys biting one another's sides while they swirled around in a circle and me watching.

Then I saw the bunny. :-)

As I drove out of the parking lot, I felt completely relaxed.

Then I got flashed by a photocop while I was driving home, writing in my head, a habit that distracts me from things like speed traps.

Then I got stuck behind a bus, my zen spilling away. Once it's flowing away, it's hard to get back, except by writing and looking at pictures of bunnies, and reliving lizard fights. Ah, bliss.

Virginia Woolf and Walking

A year or so ago, feeling that I should improve my knowledge of the classics, I decided to read Virginia Woolf, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Bible. Actually Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was on the list too, but I couldn't finish it, despite the images of my father's face in rapture when discussing it with me. Maybe I'm too much of a feminist to read Canterbury Tales. The depiction of women was so distracting I couldn't get carried away in the language like my dad seemed to have been. Discussing literature with my dad is always bittersweet, because he has a magnificent memory and in every conversation he will at some point tilt his head up, as though he were browsing a high shelf in the library, take a breath, and quote from whomever we are talking about with beautiful inflection. No matter that he read the words as a freshman in college (about 50 years ago) and hadn't seen them since. It is an awesome thing to witness, though it makes me wonder why I can't do it. Did growing up in the sixties give me brain damage? Or was I just not passed on the gene of awesome literary recall. Or do I just not practice enough? To my dad's credit, he used to keep himself entertained while driving a tractor by memorizing all the lines of Hamlet. Yes, all of them. And I am one of the billions on earth who can't get past "To be or not to be." Okay, I can remember to "outrageous fortune," but that's it.

Anyhow, I couldn't undo the sixties brain damage, nor recode my genes, so I thought maybe I could improve my brain with classic literature. Here's a quick review:

The Bible: really long, took me two years to read, and in truth, SPOILER ALERT I was appalled at how many people die in it. I had no idea. There's the hopeful beginning, but after that it's centuries of death, mostly fighting over the number of gods there are, one or many, and whether or not gods should be worshiped on high, no if one, yes if many. Thank God for the new testament or the whole thing would be a downer, like a really long version of The Road (SPOILER ALERT, no happy ending there). Actually, the Song of Songs is beautiful. The happy abridged version could be Genesis, up to but not including the expulsion, the Song of Songs, a few Psalms, and the New Testament up through the resurrection. True confession: I still haven't read Revelation. I've seen too many horror film villains borrow lines from it and that creeps me out.

The Odyssey: great romp. Loved it.

Beowulf: kind of a thin tale, though the original text sounds awesome read outloud. Big brave guy kills a monster. Odysseus rocks over Beowulf.

Which leaves Virginia. I read Mrs Dalloway, because I felt I should,  and A Writer's Diary, because I love reading other people's diaries. I have two older sisters and, growing up, reading their diaries was one of my only forms of revenge for whatever mean thing they had done to me. My oldest sister had a very active and creative mind, so she was the interesting diarist.

Now I'm reading Moments of Being, Woolf's memoir writing. She reminds me a little of my dad, in that she is obviously really smart and has a way of making me feel a little dumb by comparison, but in such a lovely way that I don't feel resentment. Here's something I recognize in myself and in both Woolf and my dad: personal drive. When she takes on a project, she doesn't tootle around with it. She digs deep and hard, driven by a desire, it seems, for perfection and by an intense habit of self-criticism. My dad doesn't talk much. Neither do I. I imagine that Virginia Woolf didn't either. Sometimes this quiet is perceived as snobbery, but I think it is because we all have (or had) intense internal dialogue going on and can't (or couldn't) get a word out edgewise. My internal dialogue is almost completely self-critical, or impulsed by my intense trepidation about speaking. I plan my comments three moves ahead, like playing chess. And then replay the conversation and critique my performance. It's very time-consuming and can leave a person looking distracted and preoccupied (which looks a lot like snobbishly bored)

Now to the point: Perfection and self-criticism have this to do with walking. I have tried to resist my impulse to become obsessed with my new activity. When my dad took up running, he was soon running marathons and eventually ran from Kansas City to Boston. So I've been walking for about three weeks, trying to take it slow and make it fun. Yesterday, I went to REI and bought $90 walking sandles, a new BPA-free water bottle, and a book of all the hiking trails in town. Then I down-loaded a pedometer app for my phone. I can now be reminded everyday that my BMI (body mass index) is 26.4 so right above the little body graphic (a well-built male figure) in my app is the word "overweight." I paid $1.99  for that information. And when I walk, my phone counts my steps, calories burned, distance traveled, and progress towards my goal. Occasionally it beeps at me. But my goal was to enjoy walking. My phone can't measure that. I wanted to be more like John Muir ("I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown; for going out, I found, was really going in.") and a little less like the hyper-critical side of Virginia Woolf ("Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?") and get my LDL count lower in the process. Should be as easy as a walk in the park.

Dog Heaven

Our golden puppy has learned to walk on a leash, no longer laying down and refusing to move when she feels like it. We've been walking along the irrigation canal, which was running high yesterday evening. The park was getting its share of irrigation flooding and looked like a calm lake. The puppy loved it after our hot walking. The sky reflected in the water all around her.

Walking North

Looking forward to walking in cooler weather. It's hot, hot, hot and walking in Birkenstocks because shoes are too hot gives me blisters. Yesterday I walked for forty minutes and saw almost nobody at all. Of the handful of people outside during the day, I was the only one walking. I could have been the unsuspecting stranger in  one of those eerily-deserted-town films who stops for gas (though I should have been carrying a gas can to make this image work) only to find that the entire town has been infected by a terrible virus and everyone has become flesh-eating zombies. Needless to say, I never walk at night. But it's not a zombie virus, just a case of too much sun and not enough water. So I'm walking north, but I'll be back before the antidote to desert conditions has been found and get back to wandering alone through the neighborhood.

Here's one way to respond to too much sun and not enough water: be a cactus, all plump and fleshy on the inside, extra scary and prickly on the outside, and then, just when your type of pollinator buzzes by, pop out an outrageously gorgeous and seductive blossom.

Pomegranates

 Along the small canal near my house, a canal I know is cat-jumpable since watching a long-haired turtle-coated cat bound across it, the pomegranates are swelling.  The pomegranate is the original apple, the fruit that some think the serpent used to lure Eve to the dark side in the Garden of Eden. Let's examine this possibility. Eating a pomegranate takes patience. The leathery skin offers little entrance beyond ripping at the fringe where the ruddy orange flower had earlier in the season shriveled away. Once penetrated (always a sexy word), the innards reveal a matrix of interlaced bitter white membranes that shroud the shiny red fruitlets that are packed together with the tight efficiency that makes the pomegranate one of nature's finest examples of  mathematical beauty. It also makes the fruitlets hard to separate. Each tear-shaped bead of fruit latches to the white membrane, which must be the fruit's version of mammalian placenta (yummy).

So Eve, seeing that the fruit is way too much trouble to get into, hands the pomegranate to Adam. He works it over for an hour or so, finally holds a tiny bead of fruit pinched between his fingertips and hands it  to Eve, as proudly as if it were a whole gazelle. She pops it in her mouth and for one glorious moment, like when storm clouds open for a split second and cast a sliver of warm sunshine onto a weather-beaten cheek, she tastes the sweet juice. She smiles and is about to lean towards Adam and tell him it was all worth it, when her teeth break open the inner seed, releasing a bitter tang.

Lesson: sin takes effort to get into,tastes sweet for a split second, and leaves a bitter aftertaste in your mouth. Yeah, it was the pomegranate that taught  that lesson. Any type of regular apple is just too easy and rewarding. Imagine trying to kiss up to a teacher by setting a pomegranate on their desk.

Walking Take Two

After committing to walking daily, and then committing to writing about daily walking, I immediately thought "what a stupid and boring idea!"

Who wants to hear about the blister I got on the ball of my left foot? No one. (Fear not, there will be no macro shots of it either.)

I am still walking, but I can't tap notes into my phone as I walk. It's too distracting. As I walk around the neighborhood, I like to carry on conversations in my head, and I can't do that and write at the same time. Multi-tasking, I am happy to say, is currently being scientifically debunked (note to self: Google a reference for this later). Turns out Gerald Ford was not such a dork for being a crappy multitasker. Walking and chewing gum at the same time is in fact, according to science, hard to do.

Okay, it's World Cup soccer time, and my husband is a soccer fan, so the T.V. is blaring the vuvuzelas like a swarm of killer bees. I think a goal must be eminent. The swarm is mounting. Time to go for a walk.