Sunday, March 09, 2008

the slow and difficult trick of living

i'm awake, and it's been a long week, or month, or six i suppose. the last thirty hours i've had a little time to relax. up until that, i had gone two weeks without much of one. you would think that someone who is used to teaching would feel a little less busy without teaching this semester. yes, i have two students working on independent projects, recommendation letters to write, and other activities to attend to. but mostly my time has spent on a fellowship application (writing research and personal statements) and my prospectus (the last official step in the phd process before defending my dissertation). i'm meeting with my committee this coming wednesday. beyond that, i'm giving a biology seminar on campus on monday (gave one of these talks up at umn a week ago, and maybe another this tuesday also), possibly filling in as a guest instructor in environmental ethics on monday, that sort of thing. and making more graphics. i do that a lot lately.

trying to get all of these things figured out and done has taken a lot of time lately, and i just don't know how i would have done them had i been teaching. i'm pretty sure i wouldn't have gotten them done. that seems unfortunate for all the many people who aren't as luckily unemployed (at least less employed) as i am. i'm still getting paid for the work i did last semester and during january term.

the strange dreams continue as they always do. most notably, i had a new variation on my most often recurring dream a couple nights ago. this time i was riding in a truck with a guy from my hometown, someone with whom i graduated, but haven't talked to since middle school really. and for a while, it was making a lot of sense that we'd be talking about other people from our grade, as though we were at a class reunion. but driving along in his truck, we soon had to be avoiding the people who were chasing us. and just like normal, this meant driving along a ridgeline with a crazy drop-off and unexpected places in the ridge road that you might not see when going at higher speeds where the road just wasn't there, with the accompanying drop-offs again. i know a place like this very well, but much less extreme, which is what makes the dream the most confusing. and i know this dreamed landscape about as well as one can know such a thing, especially with the minor variations.

it's not the only dream i have that's like this, some recurring more often or varying to greater degree. others involve running and hiding in a hillside forest from an undesirable bunch of militant-types, showing my family around behind-the-scenes of a large research facility, or boating in a flooded forest.

it makes me wonder how dreams can influence how someone plans for the future, life choices, that sort of thing. i hardly ever dream of being a middle-aged professor, and it is somewhat disturbing that this hardly comes up in the futures of my dreams. most of the time, things are pretty tense or disturbing.

on the other hand, my best thinking happens when i'm sleeping. if i can't figure out what or how i'm going to say something in a paper or project i'm working on, most often i solve it and figure it out while sleeping. some people say that they think the best in the morning or afternoon. for me, it's when i'm sleeping at night.

if i were to include a song's lyrics here today, it would probably be all my little words by magnetic fields (because of the writing i've been doing among other reasons), but i referenced that song in september 2005 so i'll skip it this time. i suppose if you haven't already listened to it, you should. but a conversation with my brother this last week sent me back to the poem below, which i liked when i read, but had forgotten. i don't think i'll forget it again.

going to walden by mary oliver

it isn't very far as highways lie.
i might be back by nightfall, having seen
the rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
friends argue that i might be wiser for it.
they do not hear that far-off yankee whisper:
how dull we grow from hurrying here and there.

many have gone and think me half a fool
to miss a day away in the cool country.
maybe. but in a book i read and cherish,
going to walden is not so easy a thing
as a green visit. it is the slow and difficult
trick of living, and finding it where you are.

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