22. What to say

I know I started doing this daily (well, that was a pipe dream!) blogging thing so I'd stay engaged, keep looking around, paying attention, and find something, anything, to say something wise about each day. But I'm finding I don't have much energy for that. Today, for example, I could post some photos I took and tell about an excursion a few of us made this morning to Santa Cruz to do a "puzzle adventure"—which ended up a bust because the server wouldn't/couldn't connect. So we ended up taking a walk down to the end of the pier, and checked out the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary visitor center—and it was nice to sort of be tourists in our own backyard, just wandering around, following our inclinations. We ended up with sandwiches in the downtown area, outside in the sunshine. So pleasant! Okay, here's a photo—a plastic wolf eel in a plastic kelp forest, from said visitor center:

I took a bunch of photos of letters while we were walking around—

—which I may one day cobble into an alphabet collage, as I do; though I was with people, so I wasn't fastidious about hunting down every single letter, and may have to pick up the last few separately. But then, it occurs to me that I have a Costa Rican alphabet and a Copenhagen alphabet, still unassembled. I've gotten too lazy—or something (I'm not really lazy)—to do the last step. 

Back home come afternoon, David and I took the dog for a walk, and I shot this picture, of cactus blooms (a favorite subject: this particular cactus has gotten enormous, and it makes the most beautiful flowers): 

We saw a turkey on a roof, squawking, looking for its pals (no photo), and a chestnut-brown squirrel bounding across the dogless dog park, tail in the air (no photo, but it would have made an amusing video).

I've been considering devoting a post to the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado (he died Friday at age 81), whose work I've long loved, but I keep seeing other testimonials to him online and I figure, why bother? It's all already out there. 

You might call it depression. Certainly, overwhelm. 

Everything, lately, feels like too much: too much bad news, too much chaos, too much uncertainty, too many people, too many opinions, too much anonymity, too many cars (too many fast cars running red lights; or, too many cars slowing Highway 1 down to a 20 mph crawl), too high of prices, too much me-me-me, too much name-calling, too much are-we-great-yet (or rather, from my perspective, are-we-totally-screwed-yet)? 

And then the Howlers meet up to discuss a poem ("we have questions!"), and Sherilyn mentions a short piece on CBS News Sunday Morning about a forgotten cartoonist, and things fall into place again. What matters. 

Sebastião Salgado definitely matters (seeing his work a couple of years ago was so moving), but I will wait a bit until all the other posts have faded away, so I can make my own reckoning of him. 

Here's the video about the cartoonist, Barbara Shermund (and a NYT piece about her as well, from the Overlooked series of obituaries that I wrote about a while back):

And here's the poem we Howlers read today. Once again, talking about it helped, though it still feels rather elusive; very personal.

We Love in the Only Ways We Can

by Carl Phillips

What's the point, now,
of crying, when you've cried
already, he said, as if he'd 
never thought, or been told—
and perhaps he hadn't—
Write down something
that doesn't have to matter,
that still matters,
to you. Though I didn't
know it then, those indeed
were the days. Random
corners, around one of which
on that particular day,
a colony of bees, bound
by instinct, swarmed low
to the ground, so as 
not to abandon the wounded 
queen, trying to rise,
not rising, from the strip of
dirt where nothing had
ever thrived, really, except
in clumps the grass here
and there that we used to call
cowboy grass, I guess for its
toughness: stubborn,
almost, steadfast, though that's
a word I learned early, each 
time the hard way, not to use
too easily.

Right now, David is cooking Swiss chard to accompany chicken sausages (spicy mango with jalapeño and artichoke & garlic), the little white kitty is sound asleep on the back of the couch (there's a music festival on at the fairgrounds—loud—and we think she's exhausted by it: she doesn't like loud anything...), and the girls nextdoor, Bella and Daniela, are raising a happy ruckus. It's the little things that matter. 

I also know I don't "need" to write tomes on this blog. (I don't "need" to write anything.) And lately, I'm finding that it's the small moments that are satisfying—to me. Whether they are something other people care about, I don't know. But I guess I hope that finding those moments and pausing to savor them will be something that anyone actually reading this far does also care about.