Lessons From A Tourist's Photos: Erosion

image_3, originally uploaded by katherine.kunkel.

I saw the tiny canyon in the sand, carved of a tidal stream and surrounded by miniature cliffs, a perfect scale-model representation of the forces to which we all fall victim in our own time.

We are shaped by waters, blown by winds; leveled and smoothed and carved and designed until we reach our final form; intricate and weathered and true, if only we let those forces move us.

(Zeeland, The Netherlands, Spring 2009)

Lessons from a Tourist's Photos: Just Cross The Flippin' Bridge Already

Every now and again, I feel like I suffer from Late-Onset Adulthood. You know those days when you were learning your lessons and sewing your oats and stuff? I was AWOL then, somehow, locked up in my completely oblivious little mind, and so I never really grew up. Now I'm figuring out the things that the rest of the world learned at fifteen. It's a little bit awkward, although I'm proud to report that I've experienced virtually no acne in this bizarre and belated launch period.

For a very wide variety of reasons, I missed the years when most people are concerned about fashion trends or dating or the antics of the characters in the latest trendy television serial. I was too busy surviving. And then all of a sudden, everything changed. For the first time in my life, I'm beginning to understand what it means to thrive, and it feels amazing.

Except when it doesn't. 

Because sometimes, moving forward feels like a traffic jam. 

For example, four months ago, I quit smoking. Not like I quit smoking last year, or the year before that, or the year before that. This time, I really quit smoking. To prove it, I gained 15 pounds immediately. I'm not as young as I used to be, and the weight is proving to be incredibly hard to take off. I've never been overweight, and truth be told, I'm hardly overweight now. But looking in the mirror is so bloody frustrating that I forget that my new appearance is proof of a healthier me. I curse the hours I now have to spend at the gym, instead of celebrating the newer, healthier lifestyle I'm creating. I forget that just a few short months ago, I was a slave to an addiction that I wasn't sure I'd be strong enough to escape. I beat it, and it was easier than I thought. Victory, right? Except for those pounds. 

And so the cycle continues. I get so caught up in beating myself up about my newest challenge that I forget to look at the challenges as the beautiful, educational, important journeys that they are. I look at the present, and convince myself myself I'm stuck here. I look at the future, and find it a bit frightening.

But I forget to look at the past, and see how far I've progressed. I forget that it doesn't matter how long it took me to get here. The point is, I arrived.

Organization is another weak spot for me, and tonight I found myself once again working much harder to clean my house than I should have had to work. If only I'd emptied the dishwasher when it was finished, I thought, then dirty dishes would never have piled up in the sink and I could have spent that time mopping instead. In a fit of frustration, I finished the dishes and went to bed for some cathartic time spent looking at photos of happy things.

That's when I found the picture of the bridge. This bridge over Germany's Mosul river was so striking to me, in part because it was ominous and cold and threatening against the springtime sky. From down below, it felt like it must be scary to cross it.

And that's the thing about bridges: you just have to cross them, whether they're welcoming and quaint or easy and current or big and cold and frightening. It doesn't matter what the bridge looks like, really. The point is to find out what's on the other side. 

Here's hoping the gym is fun, over there.

Abundance, or The Place Where Nothing is Wasted

Above the alley at the home we share, Waffle Guy and I embarked on a grand experiment: a rooftop patio garden. 

For him, the garden appealed to his practical side. "It'll pay for itself in one basil plant," he mused as I tallied up the cost of the seeds I'd purchased. 

For me, the garden represented catharsis. To keep a plant alive represented proof that the struggles of the last several years of my life had given way to the sort of gentle day-to-day rhythm that allowed a person to remember things like sunshine and water. 

And so one day I tenderly planted seeds in tiny peat pots and waited eagerly for my efforts to bear fruit. 

It took awhile. And I made lots of mistakes along the way. For example, I left my little seedlings out on the porch while I went on vacation, subjecting them to the fierceness of May in Minnesota. Despite a hard frost, nobody died.

I left my extremely promising lettuce sprouts on the lawn in my backyard, where a newly adopted dog was altogether thrilled to poop on them. Grossed out, I returned the lettuces to the earth. It all worked out, though, as my tomato plants took up much more room than I'd alloted them, and the loss of the lettuces allowed four massive tomato varietals to take residence on my patio.

And then there's the Hanging Pepper Planter Saga. Turns out, those thriving plants I planted in it were not, in fact, the peppers I thought I was planting. The good news is that green and yellow beans grow extremely well from hanging planters. Who knew?

I've over-watered. I've under-watered. I've over-fertilized and forgotten plant food entirely. And somehow, my garden decides again and again to forgive me. 

I spend altogether too much time thinking about the fact that my patio is alive, now. When the Deepwater Horizon story broke, my stomach tied itself in knots every time I saw a picture of an oil-covered animal. One day, while sitting near my little urban garden, I realized that growing my own herbs and vegetables means that no one has to truck them to the store for me. It was comforting, somehow, that those plants reduce my use of fossil fuels. Even if the change was a small one, it was real. 

And that's the thing about planting anything, isn't it? You scatter the seeds of all of your new ideas, and somehow, against all odds, some of them grow. And they change things. And they're real. 

Just like that. 

I can't take credit for the metaphor, but I feel like using it puts me in good company. Jesus and Emerson and Thoreau and perhaps thousands of other great minds have noticed how tending a garden reflects tending to our own lives. 

The other day, upon locking ourselves out of the house, the kids and I lounged in the hammock in my little rooftop Eden and snacked on the beans that had grown where we'd expected peppers. I recalled a period of my life when being stuck in such a situation would have been a highly stressful thing. Instead, I was actually having fun. 

Today I picked cilantro, and looked forward to grinding its seeds to make homemade curry powder, and I was overwhelmed at the perfect efficiency of my garden. A few pots, some soil and some seeds have reminded me that I belong here, on this Earth, in this place, and that nothing that's led me here has been wasted. 

On Fires and Forecasts

Sitting by a fire at the cabin on Big Butternut, Waffle Guy fell uncharacteristically silent as he gazed into the flames.

"Where'd you go?" I asked.

"Nowhere," he said. "Just thinking about fire."

"What about it?" I prodded, concerned that he was about to reveal a dormant pyromania within.

"It's fascinating. You can't predict it, really," he said. "I mean, you can predict that if you light something flammable, it will burn. And you can predict how wind direction might affect it. But you can never even begin to imagine what shapes the flames will make while the fire is burning."

He moved a bag of marshmallows to make room for me at his side.

"It's so complicated," he said. "It's like, we can sort of predict the weather. We can predict a storm, and know where it will hit, and we can tell whether it will be hot or cold. But no one can tell you what shapes you'll see in the clouds. Except with a fire, it's right there in that fire pit. It's so small, and it's so complicated."

Evening sun set the scarlet tops of distant cumulus clouds ablaze while sparks popped from burning oak logs, and I knew that we, too, were beautiful and random and complex and unscripted. I thought about predictions: We will never know what shapes we might take, but we know that there will be love.