Writing Archives - Page 2 of 2 -

The arrows that feed us…

Posted on October 21, 2022 by KarenW

Sitting in the Irish dark. Sitting in the Guinness black mouth of morning. Small snippets of sky. Movement of ancient east. Seagulls not yet. To have been there all along. To contain all the supplies you need for life. Dreams or more featured events. Balloons that hurt. Planes that sink. Wimmer wimmer goes the wind, clam shell pock in the mud like foot prints. Waiting, still, in the Irish dark. Rumble of train, tumble of noise. That low anapest of inked in rhythm. Shot through with it, we all are. Best to leave that arrow in. We will grow around it. We always do.

———-

Well that’s my brain dump after I get up. Whatever remnants of dream kicking around thrown out of the slop bucket onto the page… My morning exercise if you will.

I have been waking up in the dawn dark at 5:30 or so and quietly, quietly shuffling my feet along the laminate floors (don’t wake the roommate) to the living room to write. Though it’s not to write, per se, it’s my time to do with what I want. When I was home in America, it was apparent how little time people have for themselves there. Children are the predominant takers of time. Thieves of time, the young ones are. And they are so lucky to have it move slowly in them. My many friends who have kids, I can see through them what I put my parents through. The choices you have to make because you have this love for the humans you’re raising.

Then the other thieves, employment. The career, the almighty American career. Or the job, slaving away at the job and being treated as disposable. Hanging on and giving everything. What else? Oh, I was in San Francisco, so let’s be completely honest…hedonism. The card games with friends, the theater shows, the drag shows, the spectacle of the San Francisco streets, the dinner with friends, the drinks with friends. The music, the endless sublime music played live in a airy stage of eucalyptus and cypress trees all there in Golden Gate Park. The heady intoxication of memory.

But I’m home now. You hear that, America? H O M E….Ireland, is home.

Just off the plane, I go into the little Spar store (think Irish 7-11 for you ‘Mericans) there in the airport and got a bottled water. Waited in line. Took sips from it for I was thirsty. The older Irish woman, the long days of Spar work etched into her face ushered me over.

“We’ll just use the self-checkout, it’ll be quicker,” she intoned not looking convinced. I put the bottle on the side that weighs it after scanning it and the machine complains the product doesn’t match. “Oh shit,” I exclaim, “the weight is off. I drank from it.” She tries entering more buttons. We watch together as the screen flashes more denial, more messages that the product is wrong, we are wrong, nothing can be tallied. “Fuck it,” she said with a laugh, “you’re grand, go on then.” I almost wanted to hug her. We both smiled, made eye contact and started to laugh. Off I went with my free Spar water. Lucky me, lucky charms.

——

I was having a conversation with someone about my time in East St. Louis. When I attended aircraft mechanics school. I was telling her about this guy at the school (it was a sorry little community college plunked down in the industrial landscape of Granite City, Illinois) and how he invited me to his house for beers. He had a large purple Mohawk. He lived there with his mother. Out of the bedroom window, we could see the bar across the street, the 19th Hole.

“My mom used to work the men in that bar right there,” he said as he popped open a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I looked at it in the gray light. Tired neon half illuminated. “Worked?” I asked stupidly. “Yeah, you know…worked,” he said with emphasis. “Oh,” I replied stupidly, “ooohhh, I see.”

I was retelling the story about him. How he hoped to fucking christ becoming an aircraft mechanic would get him out of there forever. That he would never have to come back to Granite City and look out his window to see his mom tottering outside in the dirty snow laughing with the guys who worked in the steel mill down the street.

The steel mill closed when I lived there, thanks to NAFTA. The few months that followed, the sheriff went door to door on my block to all those squat peeling paint homes with an eviction notice in hand. Can’t pay the rent. Time to get out. And watching their lives piling up on the street. Kids, dogs, couches. The middle class gone in an instant. I always wondered what happened to him. I quit that school not long after. Headed to New Mexico. When I fly, I think about all the maintenance logs on the plane. Who is watching over the engines.

These poems were published back in 2005. Reprinted here (on a private blog not geared for any search engine). Hopefully, it’s ok to put these two poems here. (Marin Poetry Center Anthology – Vol 8 2005).

Children of Lir and other such swan songs

Posted on October 19, 2022October 19, 2022 by KarenW

Now that fall is finally here, I mean summer was quite the slog for me (yes, yes…I keep banging on about my sensitivity to heat) and there were definitely great moments and all that, but I’m relieved the seasons have changed. That I get to see seasonal change in Ireland. But let’s be honest, I came for the rain, the dark skies, the stories, the craic, the sense of new place…I came to be closer to Europe (someone told me a few weeks ago, “well Ireland is only sort of in Europe”) and to write.

I fell into a fitful sleep at eleven pm only to wake at five to a drip drip drip. I had left my backdoor open because the night was too warm to sleep in without the cool air. Trains were coming to life but there was also rain. A thrill ran through me. Rain means better writing!

I got up and sauntered into the dark living room, got my Barry’s tea and immediately my mind went to that Gordon Lightfoot song “In The Early Morning Rain”. Sure, why not? So on it went softly on the speaker. Usually it’s jazz or some radio from WFMU or WWOZ, but today we are going soft 70s classics.

The other day I had to go to IKEA to look for cheap shelves that could get my art supplies out of clutter mode. As I walked the labyrinth of the place I marveled how it looked just like every single other IKEA I’ve provisioned myself from (I’ve moved a lot in America). It almost felt like I was back in America except I rode a double decker bus to get there listening to Irish Folk Tales read out loud on my headphones.

There was one that I enjoyed whilst the bus went speeding past the big graveyard and botanical gardens (Glasnevin cemetery is worth an afternoon) and it was a parable on jealousy. And hot days. A mad step wife takes the four children of the king, her husband, swimming on a hot day and turns them into swans for 900 years so she can have the king all to herself. Time goes by, but the swans still had their beautiful children’s singing voices and the sound of them became legend. The spell more or less broke at the end of the 900 years when they heard the bells announcing St. Patrick bringing Christianity to Ireland.

My takeaway from this was beware of hot days on this island. Otherwise, bad things happen. Indeed, a friend of mine (I am making friends here slowly) went back to Inishbofin to do another 2 week writing retreat there (this is where she and I met) only to wake up one morning to find the islanders dropping large bottles of water in front of the cottage doors. Apparently, Inishbofin ran out of water thanks to the lack of rain all summer. The reservoir itself seemed large enough to me, was quite nice to look at, and supplied everyone with captured rain water well enough until the last part of this summer. The same one that saw half of France on fire and the rivers all running dry thereby cancelling Viking River Cruises for posh, rich, white retirees from America.

Inishbofin Resevoir

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Running low on water on the island of Inishbofin in western Ireland…

Anyway, I cruised through IKEA ignoring screaming children and stressed families. Found my shelves which I will likely sand and paint to erase the distasteful IKEA look from them and drop my paints and brushes in there. And my photo mounting kits, for I am decorating the apartment now with the photography I’ve been doing…it’s expensive to have photos mounted, so I’m teaching myself to do not only that, but a bit of mixed media art as well. Keeps the mind sound. And it mixes in with the writing.

Yesterday, my Croatian roommate got up and came into the kitchen, as she does each morning at 7:50am, to look outside at the blue skies. “Oh, grand!” She exclaimed in her thick Croatian accent (when she does this there’s only one way to read her employment of this oft used Irish phrase, grand, as in it’s being used as sarcastic) “It’s going to be a beautiful day. Nice and sunny!” And on this note she left knowing how much I dislike the sun. Ha ha. Two can play at this.

Much to my unbridled joy, I can return the grand observations of the weather back to her in about twenty minutes, “Ah look! Grand! It’ll be raining all day! What weather that is for working and writing and sipping the tea!”

In other news…it looks like Cork is hosting Ireland’s largest jazz festival on the Halloween weekend. I’m kicking myself that I probably won’t be able to afford it, but maybe…if I can find a room for rent. Ah but it’s Cork. Small and probably everything is booked. Might be interesting to see what happens when Samhain (Irish for Halloween and pronounced SOW in) and jazz combine in late fall. If I’d known ahead of time, I would have budgeted.

Regardless, time to go to work. Speaking of…

Island time…extended for another week

Posted on May 6, 2022February 17, 2023 by catstack

I’m here with two other writers and we’ve settled into a good working day schedule. One is leaving tomorrow. I was supposed to leave as well, but was offered a decent opportunity to stay on for not too much extra for another week. I figured why not? We have wifi, I can do my actual job from here and no one at work is asking too much of me right now while a new manager figures out what his job is and how to assign work to me. So now my real job is back to working on finishing the manuscript. The feedback has been solid and detailed and I’m diving in again with a fresh perspective.

The news from America is distressing. Roe v Wade is most likely in a death rattle. I left America for many reasons, one was partly because I couldn’t stomach the political divide any longer. Also, I wanted the experience of living abroad. The Irish are shocked by this news as well, having gone through their own history with pregnant and unwed women being sent off to the Bon Secours Sisters. It didn’t matter HOW they were pregnant (rape, incest, boyfriend, etc). It was deemed morally inferior and so this gave rise to being hidden away, giving birth (also how many died in childbirth?) and then many of the children, known as the Tuam babies, also dying and buried in the backyard.

Which version did that God approve of? Which version of American God do the Supreme Court think they are appeasing? I’ve seen all the relevant memes over the last few days coming out social media feeds. But those supporting this won’t be swayed by memes. Frankly, I honestly feel fundamentalist religion is a form of brain washing. In turn, the fundamentalists believe liberals are brainwashed. And on and on it goes, the washing machine of the American divide.

But the reality is, anyone lacking the money to travel to a state where abortion is not considered murder will help increase the population of children in need. Families in need. Products of rape or incest. Risky pregnancies that kill those involved. The hypocrisy is glaring.

Enough on America for now.

My cottage mates are both Irish, one being a translator as well (speaks and writes Irish fluently) as a poet (with two books out). We are learning about each other and our respective countries. Last night we built a turf fire in the wood stove (I’d always wanted one just to experience the smell and the feeling it would impart). We ordered some turf and briquettes from the one store on Inishbofin and a few hours later, a car pulled up outside the cottage and dropped some off. Well, mostly briquettes. We got the turf from another islander. I know, I know…climate change. But it does get cold here in the evening and man, a turf fire smells divine. Scent of sweet earth with the warmth glowing through the stove windows. Rain blown in from the sea and hitting the window.

There is also a TV here in the cottage so after dinner we put on a documentary on the evacuation of a neighboring island, Inishshark. I’m definitely getting more perspective on the Irish and their history, especially as it relates to traditional island life in the west.

But here on Inishbofin, for now, my time has become simple. Wake up, have tea, chat with the others in the morning. Then write, walk, write, check in with work, finish drafts, then walk to the village 1.5 miles up a lonely and winding road that runs from east to west. Stop in Middlequarter for a drink and a visit with those working the bar. There are tables outside that overlook the sheltered harbor with Cromwell’s Barracks guarding the entrance. Its boat traffic is usually just the ferry returning from Cleggan or a lone man in an old currack rowboat like I saw last night, rowing his way across the calm surface in the coming twilight of evening.

The locals are friendly enough. The accent is thick. The food is fresh and on the weekends, music tunes up in both the pubs (one in the middle and the other on the West end). I thought I might feel too isolated, cut off even, by spending a week here. In the end, I’m looking forward to a week longer.

Tomorrow, I plan on going into Cleggan (then a bus to Clifden) to get some more supplies and possibly on Sunday I might take a boat trip to Inishshark or Inishturk or just around the island. Not sure. So far I’m walking 5 – 7 miles a day while here too. Even at night, navigating the pitch black of the island for a few miles with merely a head torch. No predators here to worry about, man or beast. Just maybe the occasional car.

On a passing and possibly interesting note, the poet Theodore Roethke came to this island for a writing retreat of his own back in the 50s. It did not end well. He started off well enough, circulating between the pubs here, bending everyone’s ears on poetry, railing against Robert Lowell and laying himself down in the middle of the roads of the island to gaze up at the stars. But then the intensity started to creep up a bit. And the mania took over until he was wandering the island with a knife and threatening the locals.

Poets and their writing retreats…what more can be said?

Island of the White Cow

Posted on May 3, 2022May 3, 2022 by catstack

I’ve been in Ireland for just over three months now, having arrived on January 22nd, just a mere eight hours before the next day’s announcement that the Irish had defeated Covid (possibly with one hand tied behind their back and with a solid right hook I like to quip). Masks would no longer be required. Oh! and the pubs could go back to regular last orders at half eleven at night and half one am for the late night bars. So I arrived not just in the midst of a giddy and happy Irish celebration, but also, as I was to understand about a week into it, just in time for everyone to pack up from living with their parents in the countryside and race home to Dublin to begin working again. Which meant, it was an especially bad time to look for a place to rent.

I wanted to update posts here while I was settling in, but at times the thoughts of the blog overwhelmed me, mainly because I was surfing between hotels for almost two of those months. This entailed a constant price comparison online of what the hotel prices were doing three nights at a time and then over and over moving again, complete with two large suitcases and two smaller ones, to chase the best rates via the many places surrounding Parnell Square. Even though I had saved money in anticipation of this transition, it’s still difficult to see one’s money drain off into random hotel stays with the cloud of uncertainty as to where one will live hanging over your head. I also took a solid pay cut to come to Ireland, so I needed to make every euro count.

Eventually, after many viewings of grim lets in decaying buildings (one with a shared toilet jammed in a closet two flights of stairs up), I found a room (and a Croatian roommate) in the East Wall neighborhood of Dublin’s inner city North. And when I moved in, I wasted no time setting it up with a desk, bookshelves and books, and settling in. The balcony has a gritty urban view of the trains sliding in and out of Connolly Station which is a 10 minute walk away. And I can also enjoy the swans being blown about on the Royal Canal. For the Dublin part of this whole journey, this, as the Irish like to say again and again, should be grand. I can settle in here for however many months I need and take the lay of the land, as it were.

However currently, I am not in Dublin but rather I’m on an island off of the west coast of the country. After a three hour train ride west, then a night spent in Galway, then a two hour bus ride to a fishing village called Cleggan, I caught a 40 minute ferry out to an island in the Atlantic called Inishbofin. The Island of The White Cow. I, however, have yet to see any white cows.

There are plenty of sheep wandering around, but that’s anywhere in rural Ireland. As I look outside at the green hills and stone fenced fields, their white shapes dot the entire landscape and as I type, there occasional bleating and distant yakking of the gulls are about the only sounds I hear. Well, that and a mysterious chorus of strangers singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah off in the distance. Their collective voices carrying over a few fields to reach my open window. Once they finished, silence took over again save the occasional song bird. The smell of salt in the air is strong and welcome.

The walk into town is just over one and a half miles. The road is pleasant and there are ruins of a 13th century abby to enjoy (built on top of a 7th century place which was also likely built on top of something from from ancient times). As well as the rare and shy birds nesting in the grasses, the corncrakes. At night, walking home from seeing music, the darkness is filled with their odd calls.

There is a white sand beach nearby (complete with aqua blue waters, of course) and it is a popular spot for Irish Sea Swimming. This is an activity that the Irish seem to love doing and indeed, many of the people I’ve met on the island partake of it every day. Usually in the morning. “Fixes you when hungover!” said one gentleman I chatted with at The Beach Bar, one of the two pubs on the island. He was in his late 50s and halfway into his first Guinness of the night.

Indeed, the other day, the barkeep comes out and says “I’m finally off work!” I joked, “you off to the gym now?” He laughed and said, “No, but I’m about to go and jump right off that pier over there!” and he gestured to where the ferry comes in. “Aye, it’s deep enough though, isn’t it.” And fifteen minutes later, as I sat at my picnic bench outside overlooking the bay, I watched him running down the pier and flying into the air straight into the water. This from the Irish who are always complaining about the overcast skies and how cold it is out.

Inside were two friends here on holiday from Galway, one being an ICU nurse who had gone through the worst of the Covid crisis on the front lines. She also told me she swam every day and it was her foundation for sanity. They ended up being my trad music friends in the end (traditional music is played in the pubs and it’s always best to savor it with others if you can just ’cause, well, you know…the Craic). They were full of dark and irreverent humor and we all shared a deep love of travel.

As to the swimming, I suppose it makes sense. There’s nothing of consequence that will kill you in this ocean. No Great White sharks, no poisonous box jellyfish; only riptides and dangerous surf in some areas. But the East End Beach, where I am staying, is placid and at low tide, riders urge their horses into the ankle deep water to reach a small peninsula with a crumbling ruin of some sort. At high tide, it’s prime swimming time. The waters are fresh, clear, and at a comfortable swimming depth with no riptides.

Anyway, I’m not really here for a sightseeing trip. It’s only part holiday. I’m pretending to my company that I’m even working…which they make it easy enough not to do. I’m here because I joined a writer’s retreat and am sticking to a schedule of four or five hours a day of writing and working on a manuscript (mostly finished) for poetry and on my new gear shift into short stories and fiction.

I suppose this blog will partly serve as my connection to home and to friends, since many of them have jumped away from Facebook. For me, having moved so much over the last 20 years, Facebook was convenient, but friends and family moving away from it is more than understandable. So some of the posts on here will be mundane and boring, kind of like this one. Some might be more of a surreal nature. Some more reflective/poetic. It’s just a means of keeping the lines open to home and to force myself to write often. I’m exploring doing a more literary blog over on SubStack, but am just exploring it right now.

Now it’s back to writing stories, but I’ll leave some pictures scattered in the wake of this post.

Clock ticks and treadmills

Posted on June 16, 2021May 3, 2022 by KarenW

Today I woke up to a message from an HR person in Dublin telling me my offer letter was finally ready. This only took six months, by the way. Six months of pushing it along, negotiating how much I would see my salary reduced by, health care, and then a start date of sorts (end of Sept. presumably). But now it’s here, the offer letter. The terms of employment are full of scary and career ending terms.

“Don’t worry,” she says, “I know the language in the contract is scary. I will walk you through it in three days.” She is on paid time off. And paid time off is a thing. In the last year, at my startup based here in San Francisco I have “unlimited” PTO. But we all know it’s a scam. It’s for those who get pressured not to take time off, instead heroically swinging their hammers on the tracks all year long and saying they have no time for time off. Who takes time off? Lesser people. This is the implication.

Now I will be forced to take 25 days a year plus 9 bank days and I have allotted 5 sick days (negotiable with a doctor’s note). This is more or less where I end up anyway with what I usually game startups with, the initial run at the infrastructure automation to then bank days away for the first year and then take a month a year after that.

But that’s not an approach that fits everyone. Plus, I’m tired. I want to be less intense about my job. This time, I got little resistance when I took my usual routes into this company and things got done sooner. I will feel no fear about taking a month in August.

Now it’s time to prepare. I’ve gone back to the treadmill. Often winded with the effort. It hurts, for this isn’t just a treadmill, but an elliptical and stairclimber. It hurts. And now back to stretching and weights and strength. I will barely be ready by August. I am disgusted with the weight gain from the pandemic. But here, in California, we are done with that nonsense.

Now it’s back to the business of getting ready for Ayereland.

My friend, Jaap, has assisted me in the business of many Messenger calls and letters in preparing for the big leap across the sea to a land of no drought, no fires and equally high rents.

So far we know we will meet in mid August and gleefully take a train to Cork, rent some hotel there. Then we have secured a room in Kinsale, Connemara and even a night in Dublin to kick it all off. I can live anywhere in Ayereland. I am giddy with possibilities. But much to shore up before shoving off.

Perhaps this man can be my guide to finding the new pub to make home base around:

The ambient hum of best intentions

Posted on May 29, 2021May 3, 2022 by KarenW

I imagined, over dinner in a nearby sushi place, making a title that somehow described the sounds the heavy winds make when they tune themselves on the wire fences they installed on the Golden Gate Bridge just before the pandemic.

The sounds that come off that bridge at night! At first you could find poetry in it. Those first few hums and then they grow in height, if that were a way to describe sound. They claw their way ashore and hit the unfortunate residents of the Presidio first. Then the Marina. Then they finally make their way, like wayward dogs, through the windswept tents of the homeless on Market street and into my backyard. When I step outside at night, it’s cold. Always cold. And the wind, relentless. The songs of the bridge, also relentless. They keep talking about taking those fences down. I forget what they were for. Extra guardrails so people wouldn’t hurl themselves off the walkway on either side into the path of trucks and cars? But why when the jump into oblivion is right there?

The journey to Ireland continues its own plodding and aggressive march into my life. I have to make it so in case I am possessed by the Fear and suddenly change my mind. Everything about this is about pushing it so far, I have no opportunity to turn back. It’s occurred to me several times that if I were younger, I would be salivating. Chomping at the bit. Throwing everything in the dumpster and setting it on fire with an over the shoulder throw of a lighter into the pool of gasoline underneath and not looking back as my life burns.

I worry about my possessions some times, even though most advice I’ve received is to NOT worry about things. Yet, I need to make sure my books are safe. I was going through them last night, like children soon to be sent to the orphanage. Thumbing through them, enjoying random passages. I can’t part with them and the seven years they languished in a storage shed in Massachusetts while I paid $75 a month, it now seems worth it. Though I questioned that when I flew back there from SF to fetch them. I flew into Boston, rented a car and drove to the hot, steamy summer outback of Western Massachusetts to find what state they were all in after sitting there for over 7 years. That was exactly 8 years ago, for it was Memorial Day weekend when I flew back there to get my life back and bring it home like the remains of something lost then recovered from a distant land or something.

Those 7 years where I yet again had to reinvent myself, was sick with the Swine Flu, ate Bahn Mi sandwiches from a small Vietnamese deli in White Center because they were a cheap source of food. And looked and looked for work. It was 2009. There was no work.

I moved four times while in Seattle. All the while, the books weighed on me. I could recall the titles. Which ones I had burrowed into for inspiration. Which ones were signed first editions. Which ones had liner notes. Also, my pilot logbooks were in there and they also became vital to recover. All those years working as a pilot, until one day, I cut my losses and walked away. I was 27 or 28 when my last logged flight was with my father on a month long journey to Yellowknife, CA far north in the Northwest Territories. We flew to the Arctic Circle in a pure floats seaplane. It was a trip that at turns was frustrating and terrifying and full of awe. So I had to get those logbooks back.

And when I finally had the many boxes of them delivered to my new San Francisco address, the relief was so tangible. Here I was, after a decade of absolute struggle, here I was home. A close friend had died and made sure I had her beautiful flat and now my books had a place to dwell. I lovingly put them in five ceiling to floor book cases at the foot of my bed. They are the first things I see when I wake up. I’m home, I used to think, and they made it home with me.

But this desire for travel is still a porous dream through which the strange daily mundanities of my own life drain through. S., the Czech lead engineer at work leans into our Zoom call the other day and raises his hand, “Some bee, it stung me when outside” and his hand is swelling and he holds it up to me like Keat’s “This Living Hand”, (see here it is, I hold it towards you) but already my mind is gone to the time when my ex-husband Jiri and I drove to Kutna Hora and we stood on a medieval overlook and the winter sun danced off the 12th century walls and strangely a bee aggressively buzzed us while we squeezed in a few pictures before fleeing to the car.

We stopped at a small village after that and I ordered a “Salad” and what came was a dish of winter pickled vegetables and Jiri laughed at my surprise, my ignorance.

And S. then interrupts this flash memory and says “no one knows when we get the “jab”. Some say Sputnik is bad, tainted.” He shrugs with that same look of disdain all Czechs seem to have and says “I may wait many months more but America is back to being America.”

So part of my carefulness about this next journey is just how keenly aware of time and its fastidiousness I’ve become. I see people whom I only remember as being 32 now turning 60. I see images of my face collapsing in 10 or 15 years and becoming unrecognizable. I wonder to myself if this is a mid-life crisis, but then if that were true, one could argue my entire life was a mid-life crisis.

——

When Djuna Barnes was living in England she wrote, “Everything we can’t bear in the world, someday we find in one person, and love it all at once.” This is how I think of place. Courting a new place. Deeply stalking it and secretly framing it from afar. Like in Lithuania, if we are somewhere where we don’t intuit the speech or language, we must rely on ourselves to intuit it. To imagine ourselves safe or seen or accepted or welcomed. Or, as in the case of the questionable Russians my friend and I encountered late one night in a Vilnius cafe, safe enough to make it out alive through a darkened square with one of them following us and my friend and I stumbling in unfamiliar territory back to our hotel.

The Polish HR woman today said, “You’ve never BEEN to Ireland before? You gonna love it. And when you get here, I buy you Irish Coffee and we will have fun talking about America and the differences here.” I did tell her I had been to Poland once, that it was a dream of mine to always see Poland and then for my 49th birthday, I went one time with my best friend and we rode a train and got off in Poznan and stayed for two nights. “Yes,” she agreed, “Poznan, a truly beautiful place.” Of course, I thought of when I was there and our taxi driver showed us where the Gestapo headquarters used to be. How it was a school now.

All of those travels are woven into me now.

The edges of the unknown are being pried open by the same kind of wind that sings to us every night from the Golden Gate Bridge here in San Francisco. That loud, siren like hum and wail of our own misguided, yet hopeful, engineer. It’s a very human thing to create an accidentally poetic moment that careens out of control. Paradise, may be for me, any place that’s not home. Not settled in convenience. Somewhere I stumble into and find in a half dream of life and growing old and mitigating disappointment, sorrow, loneliness and a modicum of hope.

Djuna Barnes also wrote, “An image is a stop the mind takes between uncertainties.” And I am here in one uncertainty going towards a new image. A new place to dwell. A new spark, so to speak.

The fields are always greener…

Posted on March 15, 2021May 3, 2022 by KarenW

Time is something that we all think about, of course. But I wonder how similar or dissimilar our experiences truly are of time slipping past. For some, it goes very quickly, for others too slowly. Sometimes we are five ages at once and two decades stuffed into a single dream or a memory that triggers unexpected avalanches of wistfulness, deja vu, longing, shame, regret, or disbelief that we are here and no longer there.

For me, traveling stretches this notion even more. The need to experience the newness of a place for the first time. The freshness stays until one day you realize it’s been a year and a half since the first time seeing the Baltic Sea. Or five years since randomly hopping on a train to Poland. Or even six year since riding in a rickshaw in Bangladesh.

The Baltic Sea as seen from the Curonian Spit in Lithuania near the Russian border.

This week, I will hopefully negotiate a new life abroad with my employer who happens to have an office in Dublin. A transfer to Ireland, with the promise of a vastly reduced salary and another life begun in the green fields of a country I’ve never visited before sounds appealing. Especially after being so isolated during the pandemic. One of the things I look forward to, that feeling of motion. So this entails selling everything and settling anew in a city like Dublin or Cork or Galway. Perhaps even somewhere less know than those places even. As there are no real limitations on WHERE I can move to in Ireland, as long as it’s in the Ireland that isn’t part of the Brexit UK.

I’ve been reading a book by Tim Robinson, Listening to The Wind about a cartographer’s experience of Connemara, a National Park outside of Galway. Sadly, I find out after a quick Google search that Robinson passed away in April of 2020 from Covid-19. He was 85.

In the beginning of the book he writes:

“A writing may aspire to be rich enough in reverberatory internal connections to house the sound of the past as well as echoes of immediate experience, but it is also intensely interested in its own structure, which it must preserve from the overwhelming multiplicity of reality.”

And

“I concentrate on just three factors whose influences permeate the structures of everyday life here: the sound of the past, the language we breathe, and our frontage onto the natural world.“

This time around, this won’t be an amusing vacation. Or a trip for work, like when I went to Bangladesh and was stored at a sad motel in the diplomatic district where I ate a thin gruel each day for breakfast and was not allowed anywhere outside except for the roof. Yes, I will be doing work there, but this is entirely my choice and at my own request to go there. This is a move that is meant to be something to give me more perspective on my own writing, to respark my enthusiasm for remaining hungry for the world, and to keep engaging with that part of me that believes I’m not really growing older. Surely, this is not a mid-life crisis because if it were, then I’ve had about fifteen others as well. Well, granted I didn’t move to another continent…

Though I’ve been to England and Scotland, Ireland is still a bit of a mystery to me. Practical questions present themselves: taxes, new salary, the cost of living in Dublin or even Cork. The loneliness and sense of culture shock that will surely manifest within the few months after my arrival. Most of my friends are settled. Have families, spouses, homes, children, even grandchildren now. And I’m about to do the opposite. Sell the accumulations of a life at the tail end of a pandemic to fly over six thousand miles away and begin again.

Thought I would start a blog again to keep some sort of record. My last blog died an untimely death after keeping it for fourteen years when I lost my credit card while traveling in Thailand. Ironically, it was most likely lost at an Irish bar on Patong Beach where I was distracted by the unsettling event of watching four Russians unfairly gang up to beat a Thai tuk tuk driver half to death over a fare dispute. They were drunk and this would not be the last unsettling encounter with Russians on the trip. But in my haste to leave the bar and get distance from the incident, I left my card behind. And a month later, after I had switched to a new card, the blog had been summarily canceled and deleted by the hosting company with no way to recover the many years of writing I had put into it.

So six years later, I’m trying again. Also, keeping my photos here while adding others might help give me a new sense of continuity. Though while I was on that journey in SE Asia, I did keep a small (and separate) travel blog, which can be found here. Onward, as they say.