Book club book on New River

Sometimes when I am reading three or four books at the same time I realize I just have to chose one and read to the end, finish that story and put that book down. Today I read the last page of Far Appalachia, by Noah Adams.  The reporter from NPR’s All Things Considered took off for a season to travel along the New River from North Carolina to its end in West Virginia in 1994.

 I grew up in NC and lived in West Virginia for six years, crossing the New River Gorge on the New River Bridge quite often.  Driving across that bridge was the highlight of each trip in and out of the state, and many times we would stop at the park to look out over the river before crossing. If we had time we would hike the trail, and eat lunch on the picnic tables.  My deep regret was that I never rafted on the river, and also that I never walked on the bridge during the festival called Bridge Day.

 Once a year one side of the bridge is closed to vehicles, and a festival is set up along the road.  Pedestrians can walk along the bridge, and crazy people can sign up to do the bridge jump, sailing off the bridge with only a parachute to stop them from crashing into the ground or the racing river.  I wanted to go, to watch, but hated the idea of so many people and so I never did get to see that.

 When I was in the 4^th or 5^th grade I wrote a letter to the editor of our local newspaper, begging the world to save the New River.  My Aunt sent the letter in, and it was published, so I view the river as part of me.  I’m not even sure what I was saving from, perhaps another dam for hydroelectric power.

  In this book the author travels along the waterways.  He visits people that live along the river, he paddles in spots with a canoe, a kayak, and of course he goes on all the white water rafting trips.  I deeply enjoyed the book, and I am determined to drive along that bridge again, and hopefully attend Bridge Day very soon.

Walking to think - walking to create

The other evening I was feeling restless, and I decided to take a walk.  Usually I prefer to walk alone, but this time I asked my husband if he wanted to join me.  He turned me down, and I started outside.  Before I was off my porch my daughter had stopped me, asking me to wait.  She ran back inside, put on shoes, and soon we were walking into the night.

We walked along the streets of a nearby neighborhood, listening to the cicadas and the other insects.  Almost right away we noticed lightning bugs flitting about near the ground.  We both reacted with joy and began sharing memories of our childhood thoughts.  Laura told me she had thought lightning bugs were filled with little bits of stars.  Maybe we should call them star flies.  I remembered the first time I caught a firefly, I expected the little body to be warm, like the head of a lit match.  We walked as the sun was setting, the fireflies grew braver and the nearly full moon looked down on us.  Bats zoomed around searching for their dinners, and we hoped out loud that they didn’t eat lightning bugs.  Laura shared with me some ideas she was mulling around in her head.  She is writing a fantasy novel, and was stuck, but with the walk ideas began to flow again.  I shared some thoughts from the reading I was doing on Mindfulness.  With each step I felt my mind settling down into a rhythm.  As I walked, my feet moved, stepped, lifted and stepped once again.  I swung my arms lightly, the legs swished back and forth, and my thoughts felt clear and easy, like a flowing stream. 

Walking outside is a great way to release creative energy.  If I can’t think, can’t solve an idea, or am just in a mental rut, I love to walk.  When I was in college I had to walk from one class to another, from the dorm to the cafeteria and from the library to anyplace I needed to go.  I miss that physical break that fell between each activity, the have to of walking from place to place.  Now I may sit down to write, or read, and not get up until my aching self complains.  My body hurts, my mind stiffens up and I need to move.  I have things I need or want to do, but I take a break, walk around the block and come back invigorated and better able to do the things on my list.  Why do I feel guilty about stopping my work to walk, when the walk always makes the work easier?   

There is something in the steady rhythm of walking that imitates the steady reading of words.  Both fuel the mind, both have a measured beat and both are necessary for physical and mental health.  Is the answer in the measured pace?  Perhaps that is part of the answer.  In reading on mindfulness, I am learning about paying attention to my surroundings and to my own inner self.  Walking can be a type of meditation, a mental release that allows our thoughts to rest and refocus.  Reading has some of the same qualities for me.  The words generate ideas and feelings, and set my mind moving, but at the same time the looking at each word on the page, saying the word in my head and moving on to the next word have the same step by step feeling as walking.  I begin to feel the same way about living.  I am living minute by minute, stepping through life along the pathway.  I participate in this second, and the next second and the next one as well.  On a walk I can’t just skip steps, starting on the beginning of the nature pathway and skipping the muddy section to only cover the dry leafy ground.  Life is like that too, we have to take each step, and splash through the muddy ground, climbing the soaring heights and scramble through the briar covered sections.  Instead of dreading sections of life, I remember to just live, just keep moving and participating, step by step in the life I have been given.

Walking, reading, living, this is my life.  I would not have it any other way.  In the special times that I feel my daily life as a moment by moment meditation I feel like I have been given a special gift, and I don’t want it to end. These moments can happen any time but they don’t last.  I remember years ago, when I found out I was pregnant with my second child.  I was walking up the stairs in our home, I think, to tuck in our first child.  I felt like my life was like walking up the stairs.  As I walked I could see our future stretching up along the stairway, with children, new homes, new friends and all sorts of adventures along the way.  I clearly remember that moment, even if I can’t describe it well.  We now have 3 children, all adults, and we have lived in new homes, made new friends and had many adventures, both good and bad.  I wasn’t seeing the future, but seeing the movement of life.  There have been many times like that stairway moment, with crystal clear feelings that I was a part of something, a river moving forward on this planet, so to speak.   There have been so many more times when I didn’t feel that way, when we were just existing in life.  And, with depression there have been times that the ribbon of existence in front of me was overwhelming, and I wanted to turn away from it.  Walking is a way of quantifying those feelings, physically and mentally.  I can compare life to walking and know that the path is in front of me whether I take it or not.  I can remember many walks when I wanted to stop, either it was too hot or too cold or too steep or whatever, but when I continued despite my feelings, the walk was worthwhile.  I can actually go out and walk, and live the metaphor of life as pathway, and somehow this putting into motion these ideas helps in a way that can’t be explained.

I am so glad my daughter joined me on that walk.  We connected, enjoyed the night sounds, the lightning bugs, and the movements.  We both returned feeling good.  I also learned later that bats rarely eat fireflies.  A recent study found that bats avoid the flashes, and that when they did eat a firefly they coughed and rubbed their snouts as if the food was bad for them.  A study of bat feces showed almost no firefly remains, but instead mostly beetles.  So, happily, we know now that bats do not eat lightning bugs.

Book Club - or where I talk about books that have affected me

Rachel Held Evans was a writer and blogger who recently passed away.  I suppose she was a Christian writer but her thoughts were different than most people who are labeled the same.  I remember the first time I read one of her books.  I was simply meandering through shelves in the Huntsville library. I had climbed the stairs to the non-fiction floor, and started walking around reading titles.  One book title caught my eye, “Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions”.   I picked the book up and read a few pages, and instantly I knew I had to read it.  Rachel had grown up in a very evangelical church, in a family that sounded just like many the families I knew from our home school activities.

I didn’t grow up like her, but in many ways my husband did and we had raised our children in the same way. I found her book at the perfect time in my life, as I was feeling disillusioned with the fundamental faith I had chosen while missing and yearning for the closeness and family aspect of that same faith.  

Rachel writes about her childhood, a happy one in a good faithful family that lived in the same small town where the Scopes Monkey Trial took place.  This was of course the trial of the science teacher that dared to introduce the Theory of Evolution to his high school biology class in the public high school.

When I was in high school I was shocked to find out some of my friends didn’t “believe in evolution.”  I studied biology in college, but I also fell in love with a man who didn’t accept the theory that my entire degree was based on.  I wavered back and forth most of my adult life between Christian apologetics and evolutionary articles.  I taught my children that nature and science reflected the beauty and mind of God and that it was possible to accept both, but deep inside I only hoped it was a truth. 

I taught biology in a private Christian School.  I tried hard to make sure my students knew what evolution really entailed.  I tried to combat statements I would hear from students, such as “Human evolution isn’t real because there are still monkeys around.” At the same time I taught Christian evidences.  I enjoyed showing strengths and weaknesses of different ideas and I never expected my students to accept anything, just to learn and to think.  I am very thankful I didn’t try to push anti evolution on anyone, but at the same time I allowed people to think I didn’t accept the theory. I fear I was straddling a fence I didn’t need to be on.  I remember co-teaching a class on Christian Evidences with another mom in one of our homeschool groups.  I covered science and had fun dissecting pig eyes, and she taught philosophy and morality.  I made sure to teach what Darwin actually wrote and not what people claimed he said. Many Christian Evidence books misrepresent Darwin’s writings.  The other mom bought a copy of “The Origin of the Species.”  She laughed and told me she felt guilty placing it on her bookshelf with her other good books.

Rachel Herd Evans had questions.  Her questions mirrored the ones I had and suppressed, then worried about, suppressed again then finally led to where I am now, wherever that is. It was such a comfort to see her thinking and questioning the same ideas I questioned and had so much trouble with in my faith.  There is no lonelier feeling than when I am sitting in a church building surrounded by my brothers and sisters in faith and yet to feel alone and isolated, to see them rejoicing and singing praises while I sit, sad and empty.  

I struggle with basic Christian ideas, the type of thoughts a person who has put years into her faith should have dealt with by now.  I don’t understand the concept of Hell or even Heaven for that matter.  I can’t understand forcing the multitude of people into small boxes of behaviors and expectations in order to be correct.  To me love, patience and humility are the important values, not what we would call the moral issues.  

Back to Rachel Herd Evens. She was an excellent writer, a deep thinker and an extremely compassionate person, as far as I can tell from her books.  She worried about the same things I worry about.  Unhappy with her faith she still tried to live a Christ like life, and she still took her kids to church.  She had found a way to live with all the conflicts that are threatening to tear me apart.  I wanted to have what she had.  And in reading her thoughts I felt hope that I might come to some understanding, some day. I am sad she won’t be able to finish the journey she started.  I am sad for her family and her children, her many readers, and for me.  I wanted to keep reading as she kept trying to find her way.

The last book of hers I read was titled “Searching for Sunday.”  In this book she wrote, “I have seen the first few ribbons of dawn’s light seep through my bedroom window and there is a dim, hopeful glow kissing the horizon. Even when I don’t believe in church, I believe in resurrection.  I believe in the hope of Sunday Morning.”  She also wrote another thought that felt equally important to me.

“But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith.  You’re on your own for that.”

I am on my own, and yet I am not.  

Space Euphoria

How does one prepare mentally for a space walk, for the disorienting feeling of being out in space 200 or so miles above the earth and orbiting, or falling, 17,500 miles an hour? All astronauts go through hours and hours of training.  They already have a degree in some field such as engineering or physics; some are pilots and have military experience, or even education degrees.  They are trained in physical skills, language skills, experiments and safety.  These men and women are some of the best trained and all around talented people on the planet, and they are hoping to use those skills off of this planet.  To prepare for living in micro gravity they spend hours in a giant pool learning to perform various activities. Those chosen to perform EVA’s, or extra vehicular activities or spacewalks train even longer in the underwater environment.  Simply floating in a pool isn’t exactly the same as the micro gravity experience, but with weights added the astronaut becomes neutrally buoyant.  They neither float up nor down.  In this manner they learn to perform the tasks and they have the opportunity to experience some of the difficulties before being in the exposed and deadly environment of space.

Even with all the training and teaching the very real experience of hanging in space, of seeing our home planet Earth in the sky above while being surrounded by stars and darkness has to be overwhelming.  How can a person mentally prepare for this?  So many astronauts have felt a deep sense of euphoria or joy, and others have struggled with fear and awe.  There have been enough strong feelings and the reactions shown by different people on EVA’s that NASA has come up with a name for the feeling, the Overview Effect.  In a book I recently read, the author wrote that one way to have just a tiny experience of what the feeling might be like is to climb a telephone pole, wearing a safety harness, stand on top of the pole as it wiggles, and then jump off.  The person on top of that pole is secure with the harness and yet feels vulnerable.  Now imagine the same activity but with no ground beneath you, just empty space, and no ground above you, just a round blue planet over your shoulder.

This overview effect is more than just the fear of falling.  I imagine the fear of heights, the fear of having no ground or anything solid to really grab, and the feeling of vulnerability is only one small part of the multitude of emotions that invade the mind.  Just thinking about how large and incomprehensible the size of the Universe is can be unsettling, but imagine thinking about that while hanging outside of your spacecraft home, surrounded by the immensity of space, the deepness of the darkness and the number of stars going on and on.

One astronaut said that standing on the platform of the Canada Arm, stuck out in the empty darkness of space and seeing the earth below him was so overwhelming he had to close his eyes for a moment and calm down.  Another astronaut wrote about struggling to perform some task, then looking away for a moment at the view and almost forgetting what he was supposed to be doing.  It took a strong discipline to get back to work, even knowing his time was limited due to air and other safety issues.  Others have been so taken with the beauty and the wonderful feeling they didn’t want to come back inside.  Almost everyone who has gone out into space or who has had the ability to look out at the earth from space found himself or herself changed by the experience.

The Russian Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov performed the first spacewalk in 1965.  He said, “My feeling was that I was a grain of sand.”  He felt small and insignificant, but others feel larger and part of something huge.

Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14 spoke of a “Profound sense of connectedness, with a feeling of bliss and timelessness.  He spoke about becoming profoundly aware that each and every atom in the Universe was connected in some way and on seeing the Earth from space he had an understanding that all the humans, animals and systems were part of the same thing, a synergistic whole.” He has said that his experience in space changed his life. 

Seeing our small part in such a large vast universe, and seeing the earth from a distance puts all the troubles and angers, the borders and the wars, the petty fights and ideologies into perspective.  Another quote from Mitchell, written after a moonwalk, reflects this.  He said, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.  From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty.  You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you S. O. B.”

Ed White made a space walk during the Apollo program, and mission control had a hard time convincing him to return to the capsule.  He said when he finally returned, “It was the saddest day of my life.”

Gene Cerman, while looking at the earth from space was inspired to look for a deeper meaning.  He wrote, “It was too beautiful to happen by accident…There has to be a creator of the universe who stands above the religions that we ourselves create.”

The best quote is from the first man to walk on the moon.  He had similar sentiments to the first man to perform the space walk.  Neil Armstrong wrote, “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth.  I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the plant Earth.  I didn’t feel like a giant.  I felt very, very small.”

No one can prepare for these feelings and experiences, but we all can learn from them.  From space the Earth has no borders. The Earth is a huge blue marble that holds all we love, all we need and all we must care for within its atmosphere.  Let us protect and love that giant ball while we continue to push our limits and explore farther away from home.  Moving away from Earth helps us to respect it, to hate anything that might try to harm it, and to hopefully grow as a species into the connected beings made of atoms and stardust that work to care for each other and our home as best as we can. 

Joy of Travel .....books

I love books on travel.  I have an adventure through the written word, as I travel through the pages of the book, my eyes hopping from one word to another the way a child hops from rock to rock along a stream.  I travel through the pages of the book as the writer is struggling and fighting through the snowstorm or the heat and humidity.  Books of travel are the best, as I am allowed to tag along with modern day adventurers and explorers from the past.  My eyes and my imagination have hiked the Appalachian Trail many times.  I’ve been along on the Pacific Crest Trail and I’ve sailed around the world a few times.  I’ve crossed the Arctic, kayaked the rivers of Alaska and Canada and I’ve lived in a tent among wolves. Someday I may actually do these things in person.

Most of these books are so much more than just a romp through the woods or across the oceans.  The explorers and adventurers share their fears.  They share the worries, their wishes to escape and the beauty they see on the way.  When I’m hiking I find my mind wandering along it’s own paths, and in my favorite books the writers share these musings.  A good travel book is a window into deep discussions, interesting ideas, various cultures and lifestyles, nature and beauty often not seen by the rest of us, as well as the fears and joys of the travel they are experiencing.

This year I read about a wildlife biologist that grew tired of lab work and endless research and computer models.  She and her husband traveled 4,000 miles from the Pacific rain forest to the Arctic Circle.  They traveled by boat, foot, skis, rafts and canoes.  The writer described the beauty and danger of the trip while also writing about her relationship with her husband and her doubts of career choice in biology.  She has a wonderful way of describing the beauty of nature and she is brutal and realistic about the hardships.  The book is called “The Sun is a Compass; a 4000 mile journey to the Arctic. 

I also read a true account based on heavy research of two women that circled the globe in the late1800’s.  Nelly Bly, a popular journalist, attempted to circle the globe in 80 days while writing about the adventures for her newspaper.  A rival paper found out and decided to send a quickly chosen “woman adventurer” on the same chase but circling the globe in the opposite direction.  As a reader we get to travel in both directions, see the world as it was in this era, and thrill that these two women did not let the expectations of the time slow them down. I loved reading Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World.

Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude follows a woman who travels to various cities alone, and finds exploring alone to be enriching.  I immediately decided to visit museums in my town by myself.  Travels with Epicurus was enlightening, making me smile and learn at the same time.  I read a book called On Trails and learned about so much more than just trails, and in a wandering way, much like I explore and learn.  Now I am on my way to the local library, a wonderful warren of stories, lives lived and places explored.  I never know what I will find there as I meander among the shelves.  Where shall I go next?  Let’s see!

  

Telling time and studying words

Do you know why we say o’clock for the hour when telling time?  Why do we say, “it is 7 o’clock?”  I was asked this in an ESL class and I had no idea.  When I got home I had to look this up, and I learned a few things about time.

At one time people didn’t have clocks.  We told time by sundials or by guessing with shadows.  Some cultures built giant obelisks that worked as community sundials.  Other communities had a Noon Cannon, a cannon that fired every day at noon, allowing all that could hear it to be on the same time, at least for a while.  Churches rang bells telling the hour and the half hour.  I lived near a church that rang the hour and it drove me crazy.  The bells were loud, and rang for each hour.  I especially hated hearing it at 7 or 8 o’clock.  Luckily it stopped before dark and didn’t start until the workday started.  The Latin word for bell is clocca, and this is where the word for the clock came from.  Once clocks were in use, it was a habit to answer the question of what time is it in a way to make it clear the time came from a clock and not a sundial or guess or obelisk.  The answer was to say, “It is 7 of the clock.”  We have of course shortened that to 7 o’clock.

I learned that there were many ingenious ways to tell time before clocks besides the sundials and shadows.  Hour glasses and water clocks helped measure the passing of time, but they were really more like timers than actual clocks.  An incense clock was used with different smells designating the passing of time.

 I wonder what it was like when we didn’t have watches counting down the day.  We couldn’t stare at a watch or clock and see the minutes passing, causing panic and worry that we were not getting enough done. When meetings were arranged people managed to get together but with more patience, as the precise time was unknown.  Perhaps one person pointed to the sky and said, “We will meet tomorrow when the sun is here.”  Both individuals could make the meeting and no one was upset if the first person was later than the other.  It is good to know the time, to carry our watches or smart phones around and to be on time for work and meetings, but I feel like life was easier and passed slower when we were not so consumed with exactness. 

OF course there are times when we need complete exactness in time measurement.  When the United States was first covered with train tracks the railroad companies needed all communities to be together in their times.  Each town and community kept their own time measurement, so while it might be 12 noon in one town it might be 12:05 in the next town over, changing especially as the trains moved east or west.  Many tracks carried trains both ways, and keeping to a schedule would be important.  The USA converted to standard time with our time zones when railroad company presidents gathered to solve this problem.  They developed four standard time zones across the country on a day called the Day of Two Noons on November 18^th 1883. I find this very interesting that our time zones were not created by politicians or our leaders but by the railroad companies.  They were created by the business that needed them to be created, and the entire country began using them.

So, I am enjoying learning the history of time, and I hope this was interesting to you as well.  So many interesting things learned from one simple question. 

Have a great day!

Places to See in Alabama

A tale of two houses

Saturday I drove a little over an hour to visit two towns in Alabama that I had not been to before.  I started in Tuscumbia, the home of Helen Keller.  Tuscumbia is the perfect embodiment of a sleepy southern town, with a quiet downtown and charming old homes and church buildings.  It took a few minutes to find Ivy Greene, the birthplace of Keller.  I parked in front of a small white house. It had been built in 1820, and was 199 years old.  We toured the home with a knowledgeable guide.

 I had both read The Story of my Life and seen the movie The Miracle Worker, so seeing the actual room where the famous “food fight” or Manners lesson took place was interesting.  Helen had been allowed to do whatever she wanted for her entire 7 years of life, so when a teacher was hired to help her she didn’t want instruction.  She locked the teacher in her bedroom and hid the key on the day teacher was unpacking.  The “food fight” came about because Annie Sullivan, the teacher, would not allow Helen to walk around the table eating off of everyone else’s plates.  Annie felt like Helen could learn manners, and Helen did not want this.  Plates were broken, glasses spilled and food tossed all around the room before Helen ate with a fork and folded her napkin. 

Annie knew that it would be almost impossible to teach Helen with the family interfering and trying to help so she and Helen moved out of the main house and into a side cottage they turned into a school room.  From both the books and the movie I always thought the cottage was far from the home, but the two buildings were side by side.  The water pump where Helen first learned that w-a-t-e-r was that cold wet stuff pouring over her hand was right between the cottage and the home.  They were not really isolated at all, just separated.

This picture was taken from the porch of the cottage where Helen and Teacher moved 

I loved the beauty of the homes, and of the gardens and I thought about how Helen never really had the opportunity to see and enjoy what I could see.  But the flowers  were fragrant, and soft to the touch.  It was said that Helen loved a good garden.  She was an excellent and motivated student and she graduated from Radcliff College, traveled as an ambassador for the hearing and seeing impaired and wrote many books. She met every president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon Johnson.  I wonder if she would’ve had the same opportunities if she had not been blind and deaf.  She was highly intelligent but lived in a difficult time for women to achieve as much as she did.  I have always found her life interesting and inspiring.

The water pump where Helen first learned that things have words and that finger spelling was the key to knowing those words.

The next stop was downtown Florence Al.  I found an old but very popular diner for lunch.  I asked the waitress what they were famous for, and ended up with an excellent home made pimiento cheese sandwich.  I ordered a coke and it was served in a chilled glass bottle. 

Next I stopped at the Rosenbaum Home.  When we lived in West Virginia one of my travel regrets was not touring the Frank Lloyd Wright home in Pittsburg, Falling Water.  This is the iconic home built over a waterfall.  It turns out there is one Wright home in Alabama and it is open for tours.  The house is a simple design of his Usonian style.  Our guide explained that Usonian simply meant in the style of the United States of North America.  I had never heard of that before.  We were not allowed to take photos inside the home, and we were part of a very large group that found ourselves crammed into small rooms as we toured.  We entered the home in a dark small hallway, turned a corner and walked into a large living room with floor to ceiling window doors all along the backside of the house.  The view of the large yard and trees made the room feel much larger and airy.  When the home was built 80 years ago the view included the Tennessee River.  Now the trees are too tall.  The room had built in bookshelves that ran the entire length of the room.  The tour was fun and the house was one I would love to live in, but what really interested me was told to us as an after thought at the end of the tour. The Rosenbaums were active in the Civil Right’s movement, and they hosted many of the freedom riders that traveled down to Alabama to register voters.  The house was a safe place for people that were fighting for freedoms and rights for the African Americans in the area.

Click here to learn more about the  Frank Lloyd Wright home in Alabama.

I hope to learn more about the history of Alabama, and to explore more places here.