I've been reading.
My spring break resolution is to read, read, read! The books I've chosen have titles like Staying Put, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, and Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. I'm done with the first; I loved it because it affirmed my personal beliefs and I like to be right. Here's an excerpt not necessarily related to that last thought:
Earth is sexy, just as sex is earthy. Each of us is a landscape of plains and peaks, valleys and thickets. I speak in metaphors, as through a garbled phone line, but what I mean is plain and simple: body and land are one flesh. They are made of the same stuff. Their beauty is one beauty, their wounds the same wounds. They call to us in the same perennial voice, crying, Come see, come touch, come listen and smell, and O come taste. We explore them alike, honor or abuse them alike. The health or sickness of one is inseparable from that of the other. There is no division between where we live and what we are (51).
Claims for the virtues of shifting ground are familiar and seductive to Americans, this nation of restless movers. From the beginning, our heroes have been sailors, explorers, cowboys, prospectors, speculators, backwoods ramblers, rainbow-chasers, vagabonds of every stripe. Our Promised Land has always been over the next ridge or at the end of the trail, and never under our feet. One hundred years after the official closing of the frontier, we have still not shaken off the romance of unlimited space. If we fish our a stream or wear out a field, or if the smoke from a neighbor's chimney begins to crowd the sky, why, off we go to a new stream, a fresh field, a clean sky. In our national mythology, the worst fate is to be trapped on a farm, in a village, in the sticks, in some dead-end job or unglamorous marriage or played-out game. Stand still, we are warned, and you die (104-105).
As always, my "field guide to the birds of north america" is my constant companion this week. I miss my home already; I hate that when I return, so much will have changed in such short a time. I haven't much else to mention... just that I STILL HATE New York City.
Earth is sexy, just as sex is earthy. Each of us is a landscape of plains and peaks, valleys and thickets. I speak in metaphors, as through a garbled phone line, but what I mean is plain and simple: body and land are one flesh. They are made of the same stuff. Their beauty is one beauty, their wounds the same wounds. They call to us in the same perennial voice, crying, Come see, come touch, come listen and smell, and O come taste. We explore them alike, honor or abuse them alike. The health or sickness of one is inseparable from that of the other. There is no division between where we live and what we are (51).
Claims for the virtues of shifting ground are familiar and seductive to Americans, this nation of restless movers. From the beginning, our heroes have been sailors, explorers, cowboys, prospectors, speculators, backwoods ramblers, rainbow-chasers, vagabonds of every stripe. Our Promised Land has always been over the next ridge or at the end of the trail, and never under our feet. One hundred years after the official closing of the frontier, we have still not shaken off the romance of unlimited space. If we fish our a stream or wear out a field, or if the smoke from a neighbor's chimney begins to crowd the sky, why, off we go to a new stream, a fresh field, a clean sky. In our national mythology, the worst fate is to be trapped on a farm, in a village, in the sticks, in some dead-end job or unglamorous marriage or played-out game. Stand still, we are warned, and you die (104-105).
As always, my "field guide to the birds of north america" is my constant companion this week. I miss my home already; I hate that when I return, so much will have changed in such short a time. I haven't much else to mention... just that I STILL HATE New York City.