Category Archives: travel

The fountain is dry, but not I.

bees, bread, my garden, travel, , , , , ,

This morning the fountain-cleaner Bill did his good work scrubbing and flushing out my fountain, and then left it empty and turned off. I am traveling a lot in the next month and don’t want it to become a swamp while I’m gone.

Out my bedroom window.

The garden is looking pretty good right now because it’s entering the flowery time of year, and because I’ve had several days to focus on it, to be out there noticing not just little weeds that are easily pulled out of mulch, but this and that glorious scent and sight.

On my neighborhood walks, too, I’m spying perfection of Japanese maples…

…and at church, just look at the wisteria! I could only fit about half of its span in the frame:

Springtime is downright boggling, to the mind and the heart.

During the few days that were cloudy and gloomy, I washed the dirt from my hands and put them into the sourdough. My recent loaf is very tasty, but it would not rise — well, not much. After several hours I gave up and hoped for oven spring, which did not happen. So I got this stunted result, shown after I had sliced it to store in the freezer, so I can take out one slice (2 1/4 inch tall) at a time.

Soon I was back outside again, planting three butternut squash starts and a Juliet tomato plant in the planter boxes. There is no frost in the forecast, and I will soon be gone to Wisconsin for a while, for the first of the grandchild weddings. My original plan was to just wait until mid-May this year to plant summer vegetables, but it seems worth the risk at this point to get them in sooner.

We Orthodox are entering Holy Week on Sunday. I will be away from my parish for most of it, and through Bright Week, and away from my home and garden, so any real-time reports I might have time for will be field reports, or travelogues. For now, I’m soaking up all the familiar and beloved elements of my world to fortify myself against the asphalt and airports that lie between me and daughter Pearl’s garden. Once I arrive there, I will be well nourished by hugs and kisses from a dozen or more family members, and won’t even think of my lemon tree or coral bells back here.

But not quite yet! When I noticed the bee with its head in the lithodora (picture at top), I was mostly looking at the Blue-eyed Grass nearby. It is so sweet it breaks my heart.

The soft and white sand.

nature, travel, writing, , , , , ,

My church friend Ana and I flew to Florida last week for the Symbolic World Summit in Tarpon Springs, and returned on Sunday. I am still processing all the quite stimulating and encouraging lectures and discussions we heard; Ana and I also enjoyed the extended time together over five days to talk about our loves and lives, including many books and ideas. We attended services at St. Nicholas Greek Cathedral in town after the event.

In the paragraph above I notice that I effortlessly included six noun or adjective conjunctions; does that habit flow from my general tendency to the “Yes, And” point of view, I wonder? I hope you don’t mind, because I’m not in the mood for polishing up my writing skills right now. It could be that the Summit increased my leanings toward expansiveness… but it’s an effort I am always making to keep the conjoined words to only two.

Orthodox Lent is almost here! And there is plenty for me to focus on, of the sort of things that help us on our Journey to Pascha. A few of the speakers at the conference gave us their unique short list of “action points,” for going forward in our personal lives on the theme of the event. That theme was Reclaiming the Cosmic Image, which right there seems a very Lenten goal. Maybe I will share about it in future posts.

For now, I just wanted to document the Florida sands. I had never been in that part of the country before, or anywhere on the Gulf of Mexico. When we first walked from our car to the beach, the bright whiteness struck me first. And then, to walk barefoot on that soft, soft sand, everywhere full of broken pieces of shells, was such a different experience from California’s North Coast, which is my normal experience. We rarely see any but mussel shells on our beaches, but there in Florida intact shells were also in great abundance, and in places laid out in wide swaths. Of course, the air was balmy, but not hot.

Shells not yet made into sand, and therefore not soft.

We visited Sunset Beach on Friday (at sunset), and Honeymoon Island on our way to the airport Sunday. Both outings were fairly brief, because most of our weekend was at the conference venue.

We collected a few shells, and my purse collected a lot of the fine, glittery sand. I even carried a big handful back to the car, where Ana found a ziplock bag for me to put it in. I have been neglecting my sand collection in the last couple of years, but now I will get it going again, and will have added one little bottle of white sand to show that I truly was once upon a time in Florida.

Streams in the Valley of Fire.

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Contrary to my recent posting about the dead feeling of winter, I was for several days experiencing living “streams in the desert” that were, I realize now, an onflowing of Theophany grace. It was rain, rain, rain, and when it fell on a real live desert in southern Nevada, I felt the rivers as symbolic and real, all mixed together.



At the end of last week I flew to visit church friends who not long ago settled in that state, a large homeschooling family whom I’d been longing to see. We had planned that on Monday we’d make an outing to Valley of Fire State Park in the Mojave Desert. It was raining, but in such a dry climate I assumed the precipitation would be light, or fleeting. We all donned our rain gear; I wore a light shell over my sweater, and wished later that I had put on my longer raincoat.

The rainfall was fairly constant, though not ever heavy, and I managed to take plenty of pictures without wrecking my phone. My Newly Nevadan hosts had visited this park many times, but never before when the landscape was wet, with the colors popping out dramatically, highlighting the lines and textures of giant rocks sloping every which way, and towering above us.



Everywhere we looked, there was a new vista of pink and red and purple, and even yellow. This scene got my attention because the grass seemed to be reflecting the yellow stripes behind — and look! blue sky:



A couple of the children scrambled up higher than the adults (like the bighorn sheep that we saw in the scene at the top of this page — but they are probably too distant to notice in the picture.) and the toddler was pleased with the chance to toddle through pink sand and over flat stones on the trail. I was shown the field of marble-like pebbles and heard the theory of how they were formed, from erosion of aggregate rock nearby:


Our company was dripping and soggy by the time we got back in the car after our excursion, but everyone was cheerful. We had breathed gallons of refreshment, and feasted our eyes on the loveliest colors and forms of Creation. Showers of blessing had fallen on us and made us glorious.

Creosote Bush

The journey and the return.

church, family, technology, travel, , , , , , , ,

I breathed a sigh of relief as soon as I arrived at the airport this morning for my flight home. It had been so much work navigating the highways, cities and airport in unfamiliar territory, driving a too-large car decked out with all the beeping and ding-donging technology one could want. The sensors pestered me no end about things creeping up in my blind spot, about my leaving the headlights on, and a couple of times, “Check for passengers in the back seat.” That was my backpack, for heaven’s sake! There was no key to put in the ignition, there was no gear shift lever. And no lock on the gas tank or cap — what?

Lora

The roads of the state of Washington were very gracious, though, and calmed my nerves. Not the roads themselves, but the laws and the drivers. The speed limits are set low, and all the drivers seemed to be okay with that. I never experienced the feeling that everyone around me was hurrying, and wanting me to either speed up or get out of the way, such as I always do in California. I imagined what they were thinking, that made them so courteous: “What’s the rush? We have such beautiful forests to drive through, we might as well enjoy them and take our time.” My sons and I noticed that when the highway speed limit was 50 or 60, many people even drove slower.

As for the stressors, there are also all the QR codes, the “smart lock” codes for lodgings; addresses and texts and apps for everything, all of which one has to store in the phone, and remember to charge it, which one forgets. Normally I take along on my travels a battery pack for the phone to avoid the consequences of having too much stuff like this to keep track of. But I forgot that, too! So the phone nears death and one can’t even take pictures, which had seemed at the outset the only thing truly needful.

My first travel day I was enroute for twelve hours, what with delays everywhere, and those slow highways, but I made it to the venue that evening, where my grandson’s wedding would happen the next day! I was able to visit with some old friends and family and retire to our teeny tiny cabin that night.

We were by a lake in central Washington, and the morning of the wedding some of us went lakeside and a few swam. My great-granddaughter was among us, whom I hadn’t seen in two years, so I was thrilled to spend time with her. Lora is four years old now, busy and happy. The wedding venue was a farm with horses and chickens close at hand; we spent a while admiring the beautiful hens and wondering what they were clucking softly about. Lora thought they sounded sad, but her grandmother Pearl and I told her that it seemed to us like the noises contented chickens make. The day was not too hot, and they had nice shade to hang out in.

Then the marriage ceremony! — we are all pleased to receive our new family member, and so glad that Grandson has found a lovely wife. I took no pictures of the wedding, except for this one as we were headed back downhill from the ceremony, for the reception:

With feasting and visiting and dancing, the evening sped by… and another cabin rest. And then I was on my way fairly early to drive west, back across the state a few hours to visit my old friend May and her husband.

That leg of the journey involved a ferry crossing, in the greater Seattle area. Here is where the GPS technology on my phone was both helpful and crazy-making, as it suggested many times that I ought to change my route to save as little as 1 minute, or as much as an hour and a half! But I stuck to the original route planned, and that long delay didn’t materialize. I suspect it had to do with the phone not knowing what to predict until my vehicle was actually on the ferry. Then the graphic showed my car… swimming.

I had great fun catching up with May and Makarios — they are very dear to me, having been good friends of my late husband as well, and I hadn’t seen them in many years. We took walks and went out to dinner, and took more walks and toured their town.

The most surprising thing happened at the end of my Washington visit. I hadn’t thought that I would be able to attend church at all, but Monday night I found myself at the Church of St. Elizabeth the New Martyr, where Bishop Alexei of Sitka and Alaska was visiting with the icon of Our Lady of Sitka, and relics of St. Herman of Alaska. I met new friends and saw a couple of old ones at that parish, and was able to participate in a most blessed akathist service, in honor of the Theotokos whose icon was gracing us. That was followed by a lecture from the bishop on the history of Orthodoxy in Alaska, and how the Church is faring there currently.

I had never met Bp. Alexei before, but before he was consecrated to the episcopacy he wrote a blog for a while, which was a great help to me after my husband died, because a the time he was writing a series of articles on grief. I was able to thank him in person for the blessing he had been to me.

A wall icon at St. Elizabeth’s.

So, now at the end of the day, and at the end of my post, I have completed my journey, and am at home! I almost found myself typing, “never more to roam,” but that is not likely true. Still, when I drive myself, in the future I would prefer to drive my own dear Subaru Forester. Later this month I hope to be driving it up to the mountains. And even if I have to drive on California freeways to get there, that will be much more comfortable.

In the mountains with sneezeweed.