I’m feeling much better today than I was this time last week. Thank you for your concern! I’m still feeling a bit torn between competing priorities and not entirely productive, but am feeling much less morose. I slept well this past week and exercised, which helped a lot. Kira has no school today, so I’ll try to keep this short so we can get outside for a walk together. It is getting up to 60 degrees today. The snow is melting fast.

First, some progress. I went ahead and booked lodging and a shuttle for the Presidential Traverse in August. So now it’s official. Dorian, the girls and I will be doing it over four days, from north to south, and summiting maybe ten mountains including Mt Washington (if everything goes according to plan!). I know some folks do all twenty-some miles in a single day, but this will be challenge aplenty for us and good motivation for me to keep up the strength and cardio training. The family is a little daunted but excited. We’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed for good weather and good health and the wonders of naproxen. We’ll also spend a few days relaxing at our favorite “Awesome Maine Cabin”, the AMC Gorman Chairback lodge on a beautiful lake with lots of nature and scrumptious food.

I’m also planning a mother-daughter canoe trip with Elanor in July. I think we’ll try the Moose River Bow Trip, up in northern Maine (likely opting for a shuttle to skip a 1.25 mile portage). We both long for quiet wilderness time, and I am excited that she is still excited to spend time with her mom :-). We have heard great things about that trip, and I think it is the right stretch for us. It’s about three days, with a few modest portages (and the big one) and a mixture of moose filled rivers and loon filled lakes. It is wild and remote but also popular enough that we should be able to get help from other humans if we run into serious trouble. It will be good for me to lead a canoe camping trip (instead of always relying on others), and is also good incentive to keep building up my strength and endurance. Elanor is strong and steady and was terrific on our guided Allagash river canoe trip a couple of years ago. I think she is totally ready for an unguided trip. I’ll have to figure out how to make it up to Kira.

No progress on the music front this week. I spent my time vacation planning instead. Nor do I have a poem in mind to share with you, or a beautiful photo from my week. My canoe planning did just remind me how much I like Sigurd Olson, though. He’s kind of like the Minnesotan Thoreau, and was the best thing about my high school biology class (sorry, dissected fetal pigs). How can you not love a man who wrote a book “The Singing Wilderness” or “Listening Point”? I just googled quotes from him, and will give you this one:

There is magic in the feel of a paddle and the movement of a canoe, a magic compounded of distance, adventure, solitude, and peace. The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten. It is an antidote to insecurity, the open door to waterways of ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfactions. When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes have ever known.

Sigurd F. Olson

Ooh, and here is another one:

I named this place Listening Point because only when one comes to listen, only when one is aware and still, can things be seen and heard. Everyone has a listening point somewhere. It does not have to be in the north or close to the wilderness, but someplace of quiet where the universe can be contemplated with awe.

Sigurd F. Olson, “Listening Point”

I was going to write more about other things I have been thinking about, such as how my perfectionism and fear of displeasing people creates way too much internal drama and stress (e.g. contributing to my lack of sleep last week over something that really wasn’t worth it). I’ve been reading the founder of Girls Who Code’s book “Brave Not Perfect” and a lot of what she says hits home. I have also been thinking more about Eckhart Tolle and presence/awareness as an antidote to the churning thinking brain. But rather than writing a perfect blog post that delves deep into these matters, I am going to sign off now and go for a walk splashing in snow-melt puddles with Kira and perhaps getting a treat at Cafe Nero. Until next week!

Ok, I couldn’t resist. Here is a photo from my walk around our neighborhood with Kira. Puddles galore, and great company.

This week I am a far cry from gushing about ski adventures and quoting happy daffodil poems. The sun is in fact shining, and birds are singing, and outside is bright with snow. But I am feeling sluggish and full of sloth (why did those two slow animals get singled out?) and just want to curl up inside my turtle shell, preferably with a book and a cup of tea, while the kids are off at their various weekend activities. Nothing has really changed in the outside world, but I am wallowing (what a wonderful word!) in something Eeyore-like. Actually, I just now looked up the word “wallow” and was surprised to see it is much more pleasurable than morose – more like luxuriating and basking. So maybe I should find something better to wallow in than self-pity – like the pleasure of getting to write a blog post!

There are some things I am proud of this week. Kira and I enjoyed a lovely walk in the town forest last weekend, and I enjoyed walking from the train station to the office Monday morning after our big snowstorm the previous night.

I wrangled my “Mary’s Song” score into shape, so that it is much nicer to look at and all the voice parts are sorted out. I was really happy with it last weekend, but now am all negative again. I also found a really high quality online recording of last spring’s performance of my “Peace and Love” song by the Reading Community Singers (the recording made by RCTV – our local cable station). I added the link to the “music” tab of my blog. The recording covers the whole concert, and also includes lots of great close-ups of my daughter Kira singing “Love Changes Everything” later in the concert! I love watching the recording, and seeing members of the chorus enjoying singing my song (and seeing Kira enjoying singing the other song). I take the fact that it doesn’t make me cringe in my current mood to be a good sign!

I fell short on the other things I told you I’d do. I still haven’t done anything about scheduling summer plans, and I only exercised once. I also got stressed out at work and had trouble sleeping this week, which probably goes a long way towards explaining my current state. It has been a recurring problem for me, and my stretch of good sleep since January was the exception rather than the rule. The problem is that one bad night leaves me exhausted the next day, which leaves me more stressed (and disinclined to exercise or otherwise get things done), and more likely to sleep poorly the next night. I need to find a way to become more resilient and less hard on myself. And to keep exercising.

I also missed writing my blog post on Friday. That was because I had work I really needed to do Friday morning (because sleepy me had forgotten something due Thursday), and a work event I had agreed participate in Friday afternoon (ironically as a panelist on better work-life balance for International Women’s Day!). The panel was actually really fun, and a good stretch for an introvert like me.

One thing I have enjoyed this week is listening to Oprah “Super Soul” podcasts during my commute. (Hey, I said I’d be brave and show myself here in this blog!) I love her, and I love her even more after listening to her interview Beto O’Rourke and Bradley Cooper. But what jumps out to me especially now is her first session of “A New Earth” with Eckhart Tolle. I love how she frames things, and especially her affinity for oak trees, and her take on many paths to God.

The main theme of that podcast was how we have two consciousnesses inside us – the “voice in our head” constantly providing commentary and wanting to label and classify things, and the something else that is awake and experiences the world directly, without the filter of preconceptions. And how stillness with nature is the easiest path to that other state, such as by beholding a flower (or an oak tree) with an open and quiet mind.

I think perhaps that is why I tend to like essays by poets, or at least by observant nature-loving poets. They value that other state, and find gateways to it everywhere. I bought “The Book of Delights” by poet Ross Gay on a whim last weekend (after a lovely dinner with a friend of mine – see! why do I mope? Also, Wellesley books is terrific). It is a collection of short essays based on his practice of writing every day about something that brings him delight, and is full of gems.

All of this writing has left me inclined to poke my head out of my shell, and get outside skiing in the company of trees while the sun is shining and the snow has not yet melted. I’ll leave you with another poem I found in “The Poetry Pharmacy”, which speaks to me today.

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and the children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry

Epilogue: I did indeed go cross country skiing this afternoon. I went to the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary in Topsfield, and it was just what I needed. Lots of peace of wild things (mostly black capped chickadees hoping for treats) and still water, and the feel of spring. It is also maple sugaring season!

This was a glorious, lopsided week.  I wrote no music, went to no cardio exercise classes, and spent almost no time reflecting on the deeper meanings of life. Instead, I spend the last weekend of school vacation week cross country skiing in the New Hampshire mountains with my family, in (mostly) dazzling sunshine, perfect temperatures and great snow.

That means that I don’t have a deep pool of ponderings to draw upon for this blog post.  When I think back on the week, I mostly see images of snow and sun and family, and feel an upwelling of joy. Lots of goodness to draw upon for when I get worn down in future. I tend to spend a lot of time in my head, thinking about experiences more than actually experiencing them, which can be very interesting (to me!) but perhaps also a tad tiresome. This weekend’s feast was too big to have digested already. Perhaps I am like Wordsworth and have just experienced the daffodils, but have not yet lain upon my couch in pensive mood in order to write eloquently about them. Oh, look! I’m starting to be tiresome.

Some neat things about our trip:

The white ridge of mountains in the photo above is the path of the Presidential Traverse, including Mt Washington. It makes me aspire even more to hiking it one day. Everyone else in the family is game, too, if a bit daunted. I’ll have to see if I can make it happen. That means I should get off my butt and start going to cardio classes again, lingering cough or no.

“The Wave” trail in Jackson, NH, was every bit as wonderful as we remembered it from last year. It is an intermediate trail with just the right amount of excitement for us on the collection of downhills. The trail to get there from the ski center was unexpectedly challenging and a bit out of our league, but by the end of it Kira had figured out how to climb steep hills without falling over or sliding backwards and we were all very proud of ourselves!

The Eagle Mountain House in Jackson has delicious dinners that are pretty reasonably priced for the quality of food.  Afternoon tea at the Mt Washington hotel is sublime (but pricey). Doing jigsaw puzzles as a family in the evening is surprisingly satisfying. Chocolate is a great motivator for skiing on a wet slushy day (or any day, for that matter).

We skied the town trails in Jackson on Friday. We went to the Bretton Woods Nordic center (at the Mt Washington hotel) on Saturday. Both of those days were gloriously sunny. We did the Mt Washington Valley Chocolate Festival on Sunday, a snowy day so warm that the snow became indistinguishable from rain, but with lots of stops at different inns for chocolaty treats along the ski trail. The drive home was a bit treacherous.

Everyone in the family loved the trip and wants to do it again next year (though perhaps with a later start Friday morning or a stop at Polly’s Pancake Parlor). Success! We ran into an older woman I know from the Reading Community Singers on the trails (as well as other retirees), which leaves me hopeful that we’ll be able to enjoy this for many years to come.

Although the season is premature, I’ll leave you with Wordsworth’s poem since it largely captures how I’m feeling. Between now and next Friday, I’ll try to get back to exercising and work on summer plans, and try to figure out how to make the formatting of my song less kludgy.

I wander’d lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretch’d in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: –
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth, “Daffodils”

Until next week!

I often spend quite a while lingering over my blog posts, but will try not to this week. It is school vacation week and I won’t be able to write tomorrow, so I am trying to squeeze this post in on Thursday night before bed. This week has mainly been spent with family and obsessing over my new composition, and trying not to do too much of both at the same time. The rest of my family likes to sleep late these days, so it has actually worked out pretty well. Exercise has been mostly a dud, since a chest cold has been sapping my energy, but I did make it to Pilates. I worked some, too.

Our family also managed to spend a decent amount of time with friends this week, mooching off of their superior initiative and hospitality. I do keep intending to do more to knit our end of the social fabric, but meanwhile am very grateful when people still invite us to spend time with them anyway!

Now, about my song. My diligent (obsessive?) angel-wrestling has resulted in an initial draft that I’m pretty happy with. At least I have the notes and the words mostly where I want them (except I’m still not quite satisfied with the last few measures). I solved my tenor problem from last week by transposing the entire piece up from C minor to F minor. There is still a lot to do regarding dynamics, tempo, notation, sharing notes between the voice parts, etc. And I haven’t even begun to think about the accompaniment (a thing I seem to keep avoiding with all of my songs!). But I think the shape of it is now pretty clearly visible, and pretty close to what has been filling my mind during walks in the woods. And I’m more confident that I’d love to hear the Reading Community Singers sing it (if we have a soprano who can hit a high B flat, and at least a couple of basses who can hit a low F). Now I just have to try to convince them, and to actually finish it. In case you’re interested (and even if you aren’t), here it is! I’ll also add it to my blog’s music tab as “Mary’s Song”.

A friend of mine recently shared an article about the benefits of walking in nature. It talks about how nature hikes boost feelings of calm and contentment and boost creative problem solving, among other things. I have already noticed that myself, but it is nice when science agrees with me!

Unsurprisingly, time in the woods with the kids has been a highlight of school vacation time from my perspective (though binge-watching “Victoria” with them also has its charms!). Kira and I went for a walk in the town forest on a particularly icy day, and she managed to turn awful walking conditions into an exciting adventure by leaping over ice patches, finding thin crackly ice, finding good sliding ice, and finding weight-supporting swamp ice. And our search for a relatively ice-free trail resulted in the discovery of a beautiful ridge trail we had previously overlooked.

Elanor and I went cross country skiing in Mattera woods after we got a few inches of snow the next day. The bumpy ice under the fairly thin layer of snow was pretty terrible for being able to turn or stop, but the woods were gorgeous. It was still snowing slightly and the world was monochrome but rich in detail, like an Ansel Adams photograph. Elanor was like a shadow, silently gliding on ahead engrossed in her surroundings. We listened to birds. I love that my kids love this.

So much for not lingering over my blog post! I have spent much longer than intended again, and I should sign off now. Thanks for checking in. More next week.

I’m sitting down to write again, a bit later than I had intended, but here nonetheless. I had this idea that I’d write some intelligent and thoughtful post about Michelle Obama and Mary Oliver that also tied in singing in the town forest, building a better tomorrow, and the state of my hall closet, but I’m not so sure I’ll get there. I’m feeling pretty tired.

I have still been exercising and still haven’t hurt my back yet. I scaled back my ambition a bit this week so I could make up for my missed Pilates class (due to Kira’s field trip last Friday). Weekly Pilates has helped my back enormously, and is what makes everything else even thinkable. So I missed the spin class but did do a treadmill and strength one in which I managed to get up to the low end of the range of what qualifies as jog and run speeds, which is an improvement over last time! And I did my goofy Bollywood dancercise video. So maybe I’m not pushing against the bounds of what I can do as hard as I might, but it is still progress, and I plan to stick with it. My muscles are screaming at me less this week, which is nice.

More satisfying to me was my walk in the town forest last Sunday. The kids were occupied with friends and Grandma, so I took advantage of the sun and lack of wind to go for a long walk and mull over my next song. It was a beautiful day near freezing, and I mostly ambled about, soaking it all in and sometimes pausing to be sniffed by friendly dogs (including a happy young Bernese Mountain dog – I do love them!). I had been working on the song lyrics before heading out but had gotten stuck. I immediately relaxed when out in the woods, and felt more myself than I had at my laptop.

In her essay “Of Power and Time”, Mary Oliver talks about having three selves inside her – her childhood self, her smiler/doorkeeper social self (who makes and keeps appointments and buys the mustard), and her tyrant creative self who is out of love with time and the ordinary and hungers for eternity. Inspiration for that third self tends to come out-of-doors, in solitude, and in concentration. I see her point. At least, after spending time walking and listening and NOT wrestling with my song, and then singing some of my favorite “I’m happy to be outside amidst sky and trees” songs (once I got off the beaten track a bit, and feeling a bit like Winnie-the-Pooh walking and humming), and only then coming back to the song I had been working on, everything came more naturally. My box checking, task-oriented self doesn’t create songs. They bubble up from someplace else entirely. My other selves just have to not get in the way.

It reminds me of a Rumi poem that I like (that I found in “The Poetry Pharmacy”), that is really about divine love but could just as well be about songs: 

Your task is not to seek for love,

but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself

that you have built against it.

“Your Task” attributed to Rumi

Anyway, I spent a lovely hour or so walking and singing and gazing at red pine trees, and now I think I have all the lyrics for my song. It is a Christmas song, about Mary pondering the words of the shepherds and wise men. It is really a song about mama love, about our overwhelming desire to keep our children safe and secure when inevitably we must let go if they are to become who they are meant to be. It is song about trusting them and their path even if the path is uncertain and we are afraid. I think it could be really powerful if I manage to do it justice.

Alas, I discovered that one drawback of composing songs by walking around the woods singing is that all of the parts are in the alto vocal range. I just tried putting it into my music composition software and discovered that my shepherd tenors cannot actually sing the notes I have for them, and if they go down an octave they’ll sound too similar to my bass three wise men. Ah well. I’ll need to go for another walk with my newfound knowledge, or spend more time at the piano. Maybe I should make Dorian walk and sing with me!

Now on to Michelle Obama. I just finished the audiobook (narrated by her!) of her memoir “Becoming”, which I loved and which gave me lots of food for thought. Learning about her childhood and community on the South Side of Chicago was fascinating, as well as her experiences in the White House.

In many ways she is the complete opposite of Mary Oliver. She is a self-described achievement oriented box checker, who likes to define and accomplish tasks and get gold stars from her teachers. Mary Oliver used to skip class to flee to the woods and read Walt Whitman. For years Michelle has maintained an insanely busy schedule, balancing commitments to her family, her work, and being the wife of a politician. Mary sheds the mantle of obligations to go lie in the grass and observe grasshoppers. Michelle loves meeting with people and has been rarely alone for years. Mary loves solitude. Michelle couldn’t even open the windows in the White House due to security concerns, or go outside without the Secret Service having to shut down streets. Mary (and I!) would shrivel into husks of ourselves in those circumstances.

But I admire both women immensely, and they share some important things in common. They both rejected the path that others expected of them in order to pursue meaningful work that suited them. They both were willing to forgo financial security and the esteem of others, and to work incredibly hard to move the world forwards at least a bit. Both have enriched lives by sharing their vision with others, albeit in very different ways.

In Michelle’s case, she left a lucrative career she hated in corporate law in order to work at City Hall and then helping disadvantaged kids first through a non-profit and then the University of Chicago. It was a tough decision to make after growing up poor, in a family that made great sacrifices so that she could get ahead. She then became first lady and threw herself into all kinds of initiatives to help kids aim high and to see what is possible in life.

In Mary’s case, she worked tirelessly at making a life for herself as a poet, and shared her vision of the sanctity of the natural world and our connection to it through per poetry. I know this is cheesy, but it reminds me of Xena Warrior Princess season 4, in which Xena and Gabriel find they have different paths to enlightenment – one the Way of the Warrior and the other the Way of the Healer. Both paths are equally worthy. Each person has a path that is right for them. (See, my time watching Xena with Kira is both bonding and educational!). I’m not sure where my path is. I’m somewhere in between.

So what does any of this have to do with the state of my hall closet?

There is a downside to all this wandering around in the woods with songs. I could have spent that time checking all manner of productive things off of my todo list. I doubt Michelle Obama’s hall closet has ever looked like this, although I expect Mary Oliver’s did. I take solace in the words from the last paragraphs of Mary Oliver’s essay:

“It is 6 a.m., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. …  There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Mary Oliver, “Of Power and Time”

Yes, my closet is a mess. But I am wrestling with an angel and am stained with light. Now, about that tenor line…

Until next week!

One day late, but I’m back. I chaperoned Kira’s school field trip to Salem yesterday, which was great, but meant I lost my Friday writing time. It has been an odd week here, with temperatures yo-yoing between “definitely winter” and “definitely spring”, sometimes in the course of a single day. Sadly, our outdoor walking tour of Salem was during the “winter, of the grey rainy Boston variety” half of yesterday, but the kids still asked lots of great questions and we grownups fortified ourselves with coffee.

I didn’t get out for any long nature-y walks last weekend, but I did get out for a short one in my neighborhood last Sunday, during our first glimmer of a thaw after the preceding week’s polar-vortex-related deep freeze.  It was windless, overcast, almost above freezing, and the birds were going nuts. They were all out, chirping loudly, flitting between the (overgrown, invasive bittersweet) bushes – sparrows, cardinals, blue jays – all overjoyed to be able to move again with the balmy weather.  There had been such silence during the cold. It felt warm to me, too, like a promise of spring.

On Wednesday, the temperature surged to 60 degrees, and I took advantage of a cancelled work meeting to walk to the Charles River. I saw a man sailing a boat in the narrow stretch of unfrozen water near the shore, tracking the edge of the ice as closely as he could.

It was a stupendously gorgeous day, and the man was clearly loving being on the water even with his roaming range so restricted. I watched him for as long as I could before heading back to the office for my next meeting. He made me so happy, and I felt the image symbolized something. It was a specific feeling that felt like it should have some name, perhaps in German made of many small words put together. Something about relishing what you can do within the constraints of what is possible today, while also pushing back against those boundaries and looking towards an even better tomorrow.

I have been feeling that way with my new exercise efforts. My spin classes have started to yield results that may seem pitiful from one perspective (“that boat has almost no room to maneuver!”) but to me is an expanding patch of open water.  When I walk up the five flights of stairs to my work space, I am still short of breath by the end but my legs aren’t burning. Last Saturday I felt a decidedly uncharacteristic urge for heart-pumping, sweat-inducing exercise. I did an exercise video because I wanted the exercise, not because I knew it was good for me. What a concept!

On Wednesday morning I went to an “On the Mill” exercise class which alternates treadmill intervals with strength training and is NOT advertised as “all ages and abilities”. I didn’t die or hurt my back. My “sprint” speed is what the instructor recommended for “jog”, and I can’t do real push-ups or burpies, and I have been hobbling around for the past few days with stiff muscles (doing stretches when I can). But for today-me, it counts as success.

I can see a viable and even enjoyable path forward – with my increasingly appealing loud exuberant spin class on Monday nights, a Wednesday morning class which will kick my butt for the rest of the week but also let me measure incremental progress (“maybe next time I’ll sprint at a ‘fast jog’ pace at least once!”), and a goofy smile-inducing I’m-glad-nobody-can-see-me-doing-this BollyX Bollywood style exercise/dance video while the kids are at Saturday morning activities and my husband Dorian is asleep.  And that still leaves open the possibility of weekend nature walks or hikes with my family.

I know the river is likely to freeze over again a few times before spring well and truly arrives. I know I am likely to have setbacks, just like I have every other time I have tried to establish a routine of doing something good for my body. But I shall endeavor to maintain a steadfast hope that over time, with diligent effort and the scaffolding of my commitments (including my accountability to all of you!), I shall one day be sailing free over the vast expanse of blue water. Or traipsing over mountaintops, as the case may be. Or at least that my patch of open water will become a bit bigger than it is today, and stay that way long enough for future-me to enjoy it with her family for a good long time.

Music-wise, I have been struggling with the piano accompaniment for my Saint Francis song and becoming increasingly preoccupied with a different big choral “maybe the Reading Community Singers could sing this one day” song that is taking on a clearer shape in my mind. Part of me wants to finish one thing before starting something else. Another wants to follow inspiration wherever and whenever it leads. Will likely do a bit of both and work in parallel. I did at least put in the lyrics for Saint Francis and added a page to my blog for recordings and sheet music. You can see it there. I think writing piano parts is another little patch of water that I need to diligently expand. Melodies are much easier for me.

More next week!

Hello again.  I’m not sure how long I’ll have to write since my daughter Kira has no school today, but we’ll see how it goes.  It isn’t due to the deep freeze impacting most of the Midwest and us only a little bit – it’s a balmy 13 degrees Fahrenheit here!  I must say that all of the news coverage about the coldest temperatures in a generation has me feeling old.  I remember -20 degree days with -50 degree wind chills in Minnesota back in the 1980s when I was the age my kids are now (and school NOT getting cancelled!).  But yeah, I guess that is a generation ago.  Sigh.

It has been a decent week for me goal-wise. I failed to do the work talk prep I had been feeling guilty about last Friday, but crammed on Monday morning and was fine (which shows I was right to work on my blog post instead!).

I also failed to avoid time black holes.  It wasn’t fantasy real estate or news so much last weekend, but I spent an inordinate amount of time investigating opportunities for applying computing/math/data-crunching to ecology. The idea being that when future me is spending her days going for long hikes in the mountains and composing music and hosting friends and family, she could also spend some time here and there doing data-related projects that help ecologists with their work.  There are all sorts of online courses in “Geographic Information Systems” and data science that seem intriguing.  I told myself I’ll try not to get sucked in for now, and continue to use the limited free time I have to focus on writing and music.  But it took myself a while to obey.

I went to my crazy “light” spin class on Monday and was feeling much stronger after my previous weekend of skiing with Rebecca. I could pretty much keep up with everything, though there is some move they do which looks like doing push-ups while pedaling full tilt that baffles me. It appears to require way too much coordination. The ear plugs are great except that I often can’t make out what the instructor is saying and so just guess. I felt really energized the next day and my back was fine. I’d like to find a second class I can take but am dithering about getting up extra early vs getting home late.  We’ll see. 

Kira and I went for a walk at Halibut Point on Sunday.  It was a glorious sunny day above freezing, and it is one of our favorite places to go.  Kira scrambled on the rocks and we reveled in the sound and smell of the ocean, and the views, and patterns of the wind and waves across the vast expanse of blue water.  We then headed to Rockport, where Kira enjoyed a lobster and Shirley Temple at Roy Moore’s Fish Shack restaurant (after walking out to the breakwater and verifying along the way that every single ice cream place on Bearskin neck was indeed shut for the winter, as was Helmut’s Strudel).

I did work on my St Francis song, and am sharing it here as promised.  I finally got the different voice parts and underlying chords worked out mostly to my satisfaction.  I’m dithering a bit about whether the altos should help out the men in some places, but figure that once I add lyrics it will be at a point where I can ask for feedback from folks who know way more about music than I do! Next I need to put in lyrics, dynamics, and figure out the piano accompaniment. It will take me a while, but I’ll try to at least get the accompaniment for the first section of the song done this week.

I’ve also had “The Sound of Music” and Mary Oliver on my mind this week.  I finally introduced Kira and my husband Dorian to “The Sound of Music” movie on Saturday night, and I think it was the first time I had seen it in over thirty years. I had forgotten how amazingly good it is (and how much I love Julie Andrews). Kira and I have been singing songs from it ever since, including on our drive to and from Rockport! It resonates so much with me and with things I have been thinking about.

In her talk about being an introvert in an extrovert’s world, Susan Cain talks about the importance of finding the right lighting.  Some of us suit the lights of a Broadway stage.  Others a desk lamp in a library.  The Sound of Music’s Maria was a terrible nun, but the innate parts of her that made her so ill suited to cloistered life were the very things that enabled her to bring joy, love, hills and music into the lives of a family that desperately needed all of those things. I like the idea of searching tirelessly to discover the dream (and lighting) that is yours and that said dream ought to require great love. That said, I don’t think we really only have one dream, we have a series of them which we uncover along the way and which speak to different parts of us at different times.

The movie shows the power of music and nature to connect people to who they truly are and to each other. The gorgeous scenery doesn’t hurt!  Those are themes that speak to me. I love this line from “The Hills are Alive”:

I go the hills, when my heart is lonely 
I know I will hear what I’ve heard before  
My heart will be blessed with the sound of music
And I’ll sing once more

I have been thinking of Mary Oliver because she is my favorite modern poet (along with Maya Angelou) and she died on January 17^th. She also writes about the wonder and healing of the natural world. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite poems of hers, “Wild Geese”.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

More next week!

It is Friday again, and here I am sitting down to write another blog post, after only a minor diversion down the online news black hole. Thank you for sticking with me. Today is challenging because I do have a work presentation to put together by Monday, so I’m feeling guilty about not working right now, but it is my day off and it can wait a few hours.

I did spend some time this week working on the underlying chords and the different voice parts for my St Francis song.  As expected, I find it slow going and somewhat trial and error.   I wish I actually knew what I was doing!  But I am seeing glimmers of where I want to get to, and it is a lot less ambitious than my “Peace and Love” song that the Reading Community Singers sang, so I’ll remain hopeful and keep plugging away.   I’ll commit to sharing it next Friday, whatever state it is in, as an incentive to keep going.

My big thing this week was my Martin-Luther-King-weekend  back-country skiing trip with my friend Rebecca.   This picture sums it up pretty well. 

It turned out to be a snowy and windy weekend, and I learned or relearned a few things.  One is that I generate an enormous amount of body heat when skiing (the one advantage of being well-insulated and out of shape!) so that skiing in 0 degree Fahrenheight weather with a  -19 degree wind chill is still warm and toasty and not as daunting as it seems (as long as I keep moving). My water bottle gets frozen shut when it is that cold, even while there is still mostly unfrozen water inside it. A deep hood with furry trim is very effective at keeping the snow out of my eyes, except when going downhill. Forests are very good at providing shelter from the wind if you avoid roads. Rebecca gets impressive icicles on her eyelashes.

Skiing during 16 inches of fresh snowfall in the bitter cold is tiring but magical. The snow is so light and powdery and it squeaks and groans and transforms all of the laden trees, especially the fir trees. The only sound when you stop is the sound of your breath and the falling snow (until the wind picks up). It felt like the whole world was me, Rebecca, the vast silent forest, and the snow.  The world felt much smaller and much larger at the same time. And much simpler. I ended my days sore and tired but gratified, and very grateful for a sauna, hot meal and cozy cabin.

I think only certain people enjoy an experience like this, and it turns out I like those people very much. We met some wonderful folks over dinner, including some from the Nature Conservancy who work at restoring rivers and protecting forests for wildlife and for carbon sequestration. And some “kids” in their twenties just starting out in wildlife management and science writing. I met a woman not much older than me who says she gets grumpy if she doesn’t get out in nature every week (I can relate!) and who does the 22 mile Presidential Traverse in the White Mountains as a day hike every year, including all the summits (starting at 4:30am). I had been feeling daunted about trying to attempt it over three days, and now want to try it next summer. More incentive to keep doing the spin class to get in better shape cardio-wise! She doesn’t go to the gym but goes for a hike in the mountains every week (which sounds like heaven to me). She said she does it a lot more now her kids are grown.

I didn’t come back feeling as refreshed and restored as I had expected. Some of that might have been because of my cold.  I took a sick day on Wednesday and slept all morning and then felt more human.  Also, as nice as the snowfall was, I did miss the brilliant sunshine we often have.  But I think also some of it was that in meeting all these different people with interesting lives so different from my own, it got me questioning life choices I made years ago and pondering the paths not taken.  I read somewhere that millennials are particularly prone to burnout because of their “relentless self-optimization” (particularly perfectionists who are hard on themselves).  I’m not a millennial, but I think I am prone to that.  I do love my life and am very grateful for my blessings.  If I had studied ecology I wouldn’t have Dorian and the girls and my wonderful friends in Boston.  But the woods and the wild do tug at me, and I would love to help save them.

On a less introspective note, here are some quick comments on the Appalachian Mountain Club lodges we stayed at, in case you are thinking of checking them out.

Medawisla.   We stayed here Friday night.  Unlike the other lodges, you can drive all the way here in the winter instead of needing to ski in.  And everything is new, which means well insulated cabins with high efficiency wood stoves, which means staying comfy all night without having to get up to feed the fire.  The cabins were really nice, with two bedrooms with comfy beds and a main room with a futon, sleeping up to six people.  We stayed at lakeside cabin #5 which was lovely and close to the bathroom.  If coming in the winter with kids, I’d choose to stay here.  The staff and food was great.   From the right places you can see Mt Katahdin.

Gorman Chairback.  This is my favorite, and where we come as a family in the summer.   That said, its beautiful views across the lake weren’t visible with the snow, the food was not as good as usual, it was a long trek from lakeside cabin #5 to the bathroom in the main lodge, and we had to keep feeding our not-so-high-efficiency wood stove every couple of hours in the night.  Also, the high ceiling in cabin #5 is nice in the summer, not so much when trying to warm up the cabin in the winter. Am still very, very fond of it.

Little Lyford.  Is smaller and more intimate than the other two places.  Apparently gets lots of flies in the summer, but not (usually!) an issue in the winter (except when Elanor and I stayed there last winter and there was an unexpected thaw that woke up the dormant flies).  Unlike the other lodges, you need to bring your own towel and sleeping bag.   We stayed in “mountain top” cabin which was charming and had a decent wood stove, but  Rebecca’s dust allergies kicked in big time.  Also a long trek to the bathroom and lodge (though probably felt even longer due to the deep snow).  Still really nice.     

More next week!

Time for my third blog post.  I find I really look forward to writing these, even though I’m not sure what I’m going to say.  Thank you for reading them!  I have also continued to find that I am in a better mood since I’ve started this experiment.  Maybe some if it is due to getting exercise, but I think perhaps more if it is due to no longer being resentful that I never find time to devote to my own personal interests. We’ll see how long it lasts.  Or maybe it’s because I’m heading off to the Maine woods with my friend Rebecca tomorrow!

I went to the crazy loud spin class again on Monday, and it was better in all regards.  The earplugs helped, the volume was lower anyway, I was a bit closer to being able to keep up with the class, and my butt was a lot less sore afterwards.  And my back was still fine.  I had been nervous because I tried going for a couch-to-5k walk/jog in the town forest on frigid Saturday (after having bemoaned the fact that the spin class was the opposite of that), but some combination of the hard frozen ground and the extra few pounds I put on over the holidays meant that my back hurt the next day.  So I’ll limit myself to walks for the time being town-forest-wise.

My half-hearted effort to avoid getting sucked into time wasting “black holes” this week totally flopped.  I spent way too much time looking at completely impractical fantasy future properties online.  I did find some beauties, though.  One can dream. These are my favorites:

A 150 acre Arts and Crafts estate near Sugar Hill called “Hidden Pastures”

50 acres of fields and views in Hanover, NH, near Dartmouth

I still managed to keep my head above water work-wise, and to spend some quality time watching Xena Warrior Princess episodes with Kira!

In this post, I was going to quote something I had read online about setting SMART goals, but this week I am totally eschewing all of my newfound accountable-goal-setting in order to escape to Maine with my friend Rebecca for a weekend of cross country skiing in the 100 Mile Wilderness.

It is in keeping with my Nature Hermit goal, though, and I’ll be getting lots of exercise!  We have done this a few times now and I love it beyond words.  We’ll be staying at warm cozy Appalachian Mountain Club lodges with wood stoves and great food (and a sauna!) by night and skiing on groomed trails from lodge to lodge by day with just the woods and snow and mountains and sky and each other for company. It fills me up with nature-y bliss.  And is great bonding time with Rebecca who I am happy to have inside my hermit bubble.  The high will be 3 degrees Fahrenheit and low -4.   Good thing we both grew up in Minnesota.  I’ll bring long underwear and a balaclava.   Dorian will be just as happy to be warm and inside back at home!

I did work on my Prayer of St Francis piece as promised. I got the melody in, and now have to do the hard slow part (for me) of figuring out the underlying chords and working out the different voice parts and piano accompaniment.  It will be a fairly simple arrangement suitable for a small church choir.  It’s in an awkward phase now of not sounding as it sounds in my head (since only one part and no accompaniment).  I’m always extra shy about sharing “churchy” songs, but in the spirit of becoming brave, I’ll share it here anyway.  I do think the message is especially important now in our shouting, hating, despairing world.

Here are the lyrics:

Lord, let me be an instrument of thy peace
Where there is hatred, let me sow love 
Where there is injury, pardon 
Where there is doubt, faith 
Where there is despair, hope 
Where there is darkness, light 
Where there is sadness, joy 

Let me seek not so much 
To be consoled as to console, 
To be understood as to understand, 
To be loved as to love [to love, to love] 

For it is by giving we receive 
And it is by pardoning we are pardoned 
And it is by dying [to self] that we are born 
Into life eternal [life eternal] 

Happy Martin Luther King weekend!  I’ll sign of with a quote from Dr King in honor of the occasion and in the spirit of St Francis.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Dr Martin Luther King

Let us all shine a little more light and love this week.  Look for my next post next Friday, maybe with photos!

Look! It’s Friday and I’m writing again! So far so good.

Thank you so much to those of you who read my post and gave me feedback. (And to Auntie Pauline for being my staunch champion!). I think that so far this external accountability thing is working. I feel very motivated to write today even though I have tons of important kid and work things vying for my time and attention. And I feel motivated to keep exercising since I told you I would (and because I want future me to be able to bound up peaks in the White Mountains after her breakfasts at Polly’s Pancake Parlor). I am also feeling less mutinous towards my other commitments now I have managed to devote some time to my own.

After some wrangling, I did indeed install the Notion 6 software on my PC, laptop and iPhone and get it play sounds. And during my commuter rail commute one morning, I managed to put in the melody from a Butterfly song I made up for the kids when they were young.

Oh the wind is blowing and flowers growing, I long to be a butterfly
Oh the wind is blowing and flowers growing, I long to be a butterfly
I'd float on the breeze, the sun would warm my wings
I'd sip from the flowers all day
Oh the wind is blowing and flowers growing, I long to be a butterfly.
I long to be a butterfly

I think the iPhone app works well for writing down a melody I already have figured out (other than deleting notes being very cumbersome). For working out harmonies for accompaniments, I need a real keyboard. Luckily, the keyboard seems to work easily with my laptop. Next, I plan to work on a “heavier” piece I have had percolating inside me for some time – a three part choral arrangement of the prayer of St Francis (which strangely I first learned about via John Boehner). And to come up with a flute accompaniment for the butterfly song.

I did also attend the spin class I said I would on Monday. Holy moly. With the loud pounding music and colored lights it was the complete opposite of going for a peaceful couch-to-5k walk/jog in the town forest. But the people were very nice, the timing was good, I got a good workout, I survived without injuring myself, and I think that if I go prepared with ear plugs, water, and less clothing, it will be better. I’ll go again on Monday. I walked from the train station to work along the Charles River twice this week, which was lovely.

I came across a quote from E.B. White (on Gretchen Rubin’s blog) that I really like. I think it captures much of the impetus for my music:

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”

— E. B. White

One thing I struggled with this week is that devoting time to my blog and my music did make me behind on other things I really need to do. Once I get into something, I’m very bad at stopping what I’m doing to work on something else. For this to be sustainable, I have to get better about moving on after a certain time. I don’t think it was just writing the blog or installing the music software that was so bad. I also spent way too much time looking at land and properties for sale in Sugar Hill New Hampshire, for future me to have her cozy wild refuge with future Dorian. So I will endeavor to finish by blog posts by noon on Fridays (starting on Friday mornings) and then move on. There was an idea somewhere on Linda King’s “Joy of Getting Things Done” blog that I should set a timer when about to start something that I know could suck me in for a long time but want to time bound (like browsing the internet). I think that could help me a lot if I stuck to it.

In the interest of time-bounding things, I’m signing off! Look at me letting go of perfectionism :-).