Best line read today.

"She despised Langlois for the sweat that pasted his trousers to his buttocks when he stood up and for the panic which seized him in the presence of the head of the firm and occasionally on the phone when he heard the name of some lawyer or even of some idiot with a de in front of his name."

"Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things."

Last night was the first really heavy snowfall of winter (sadly not the first snowfall, which came early in October). As happens when you live in a neighborhood with many old trees, branches came down everywhere and inevitably some power lines did too. Cut off from the electronic world, I decided to head out to the natural one. I bundled up in my big gray hoodie and set off for a walk through Memory Grove.

Earlier this summer, while camping at the Swell, I was on a walk with M and B when I remarked that camping and hiking and just general trekking always brings to my mind The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. It is not that I am expecting dragons, orcs, or elves around the next tree...it is not the pure fantasy elements of Tolkein that appeal to me, but that sense of the elemental journey that he captures, where it is just you and a simple pack--and if you are lucky, some faithful companions and a bit or two of magic--against the forces of nature and of humankind. The finding and losing and possibly finding again of the road, and how it goes ever on and on; the convergence of small individual lives with the larger flow of history; the pleasures of home and of not-home.

And on snowy days like today I always think of the Robert Frost poem Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening. A meditation on death it may be (and really, so is The Lord of the Rings trilogy), but I like to think of it as a meditation on the differences between work and purpose; the allure of losing the road, and how the woods go ever on and on (lovely, dark and deep); the trampling of small individual lives under the larger flow of history; the pleasures of the journey and the not-journey.

Home again and in a hot bath with sea salts from New Mexico (by way of Japan, I suppose) called to mind yet another novel that has stuck with me, and one that I always think of when traveling through desert landscapes--Death Comes for the Archbishop. I read this novel long, long ago and have to confess that I don't remember the plot at all, except that part of it (a long part, in my mind) involved a journey by donkey through the New Mexico landscape. This book sticks with me not in words and plot but in images and, well, that feeling you get only in the desert. The meditation it evokes doesn't come in words, it comes only with the real desert air on your skin.

Last night we skyped with J and S and T and the BB. Snow and darkness here, sun and palm trees there. That instant video across the miles still freaks me out a bit (in a good way), but I'm thankful for the technology that allows those who are so far away to seem a little bit closer.

I'm glad I took a walk outdoors today. I'm glad I can walk, can move in any way at all. I know so many who have lost that ability, or who never had it, or who have it only with great difficulty and pain. This week of Thanksgiving I am thankful for the ability to move in this world, and for journeys great and small.

time to start again

Perhaps someday I will start blogging regularly. Perhaps not.