Monday Morning Beach Report

Sometimes turning around and looking back is just as beautiful as facing forward.

And remember to look up.

Saturday Beach Report and Big News!

It's hard to say which was more beautiful today--morning or evening.

As for me, I'm now a certified Channel Islands National Park/Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary volunteer naturalist. I've loved this place since the minute I moved here six years ago, and now I get to talk about it on whale watch cruises and at community events. Eventually, I hope to get certified to lead hikes on the islands. And I hope that the islands will find their way into my writing.

Yes. This is a post about divorce.

Leaving is often a melancholy business. Ten years ago I left the Vermont Studio Center for the first time, and tomorrow I leave it after my second residency here. When I left a decade ago, I was newly divorced and happy to have cut myself off from the life I’d been living. I hadn’t yet established my new life, and I was free but also in a sort of free fall. I spent all of February here that year, and it snowed like it might never stop. I felt buffered by the whiteness as if I was in the blanched room of an asylum, taking some cure meant to heal me. The cold held itself against me, and I held it back, hoping for numbness.

I forgot all this until I arrived back here four weeks ago. And then during this very snowy March I felt these things come back into my body. Remembrances of this sort can serve as a gauge, and it was fulfilling to sense the needle tipping toward full this residency. I’m all right now. More than all right. But I wasn’t then.

Oddly, the Someone reached out to me while I was here---on a perfunctory matter of post-divorce business. That was a gauge too. Winter’s power over us can be absolute during a snowfall that shuts everything down. An adversary’s power can feel absolute too. 

Rally in Montpellier, VT

Thanks to another Vermont Studio Center resident, I made it to the March for Our Lives today in Vermont's capitol city, Montpellier. The population is under 8,000. (No, I didn't forget a zero.) There was a big turnout.

The take away of the day for me was when a little boy pointed at the sign my friend was carrying. It depicted an assault rife in the typical red circle with a slash through it. "See that gun?" the dad said. "That's not a hunting rifle. That's a gun for bad guys." This is an important distinction here in Vermont.

Yesterday a different outing took us by a general store in a little village out in the countryside. The kind of place where you can get gas, your end of work week 12-pack, a bottle of maple apple cider, some maple kettle corn, homemade sausage, and pretty much anything else your household might be in need of. I think the owner must be a taxidermist on the side--because the walls and ceiling of the store were a menagerie of the hunted. When the family with the little boy walked by us a second time today, the father made the distinction about guns for the boy again.

God bless the moose, god bless the hunter, god bless the guy who makes the sausage, the people who tap the trees, and god bless all the fathers and mothers and children who were at the rally today.

We must stop stop stop stop.....

the suffering.

This image just above and those below are of immense puppets housed at the Bread and Puppet Museum which we visited yesterday.

I found the wildlife displayed there more enjoyable.