Where I Went

Map of all the places visited during this project:

I went to a lot more places than I wrote about, that's just the sad thing about writing on schedule, it never happens completely. I find myself living fragments, sometimes forgetting, remembering, or forgetting to remember, the pieces that are never gathered, the pages that are never turned. All the places I go, are real places, but also imaginary, they are places of the heart, places that I carried my heart into, and will be carried away into my heart. It's the statement of a vagabond, one who goes everywhere, but goes nowhere, free-spirited yet always never escaping its own spirit. Everywhere I go, it's the same place.

More than anything, I learned how deeply my heart is connected to the earth, my view of the natural world deeply tied to an ethnic identity, much like the Nazis who believed in the agrarian mystique, the German Blood, German Soil. I, too, cannot sever from the bond of Hakah. I'd like now, I think to read Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem. The years that have been instilled into me, the burden of history I carry. The Famine, the Cultural Revolution, the Capitalistic Experiment, the Tienanmen Massacre. The Homeland That Was Destroyed.

I want to read some Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Ehrlich Gretel, and some more Gary Snyder and Thoreau--what they say about this place we live in. If there is a place for them, there must be a place for me. For a short season, here was my place. The Peace River Watershed, Lake a small part of it, is a very beautiful place. Tropical, seductive, graceful. I'm going to miss it. And there's nothing I could do further about the fact, besides here, this blog, a living memory.

Lake Parker

On the East side of Lake Parker, crossing the monstrous Memorial Boulevard, entangled with telephone poles and lines, and train tracks, It's like Japan. You can see in the distance ahead the even more monstrous tanks of power plants, a pale white rising out of the waves of water combed white and black.

Water + stuff

Water
I used a fairly simple water test kit measuring temperature, pH and turbidity on Lake Bonny just outside of the studio at Mira Lago.

Saddle Creek

Ironically, we each hand-held a copy of Gary Snyder's Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, nothing physically Asian about the guy, nothing "cold mountain" about the sizzling lake shore either.

Circle B

I went canoeing. With some friends on a Sunday morning. Park hours are 5:00AM-8:30PM paralleling the sunlight hours, and my grandparents' hours too in their Hakah home. We got there quite early, to catch the sunrise. There were no sounds on the trail except our footsteps, the boat scrapping the ground slightly, our breathing, birds in the air in the trees, and fish rippling the water for the occasional surface. I suppose what I mean by "no sounds" is ....

Lake Bonny Clean-up

I counted 419 stones on the retaining wall around Lake Bonny and thought I was finally growing to like the place, until they mulched my favorite tree and now it hurts the butt to sit against it.

Mary Oliver: Thirst

loved one

When your life is so intertwined with that of another's, the severing is always so... nonsensical. There are traces of him everywhere: field, cafe, lake, room; and nearly everything reminds of her: sunlight, handkerchief, tea, shampoo. For the poet, the process proves even more painful as the poet's sharpened senses receive the universe naturally, intermingling it with human drama. I would call it psyche-overwhelm. Sensitive souls take everything so seriously.