A short tableau of summers past.

The smell of sunscreen mixed with citronella: perpetual summer. Sitting on the guard stand, the idyllic teenage summer job - get a tan and get paid! Friends and annoying little kids abound, whistles and straw hats, and if you forget your water bottle I'll hand you a red plastic cup with a healthy dose of shame. Snarf lunch on a twenty-minute break, or if you're lucky an off-duty guard will run to Safeway for sandwiches or sushi.

So much encapsulated above the blue chlorine water and below the blue hot sky.

Pulling tarps as the sun rises, quiet in the early morning. Old ladies wait to do an exercise routine recorded over a tape of Kenny Rogers songs. Trees and birds watch the cycle of the day go by as parkas are peeled off, the old ladies leave, and chipmunk chatterers of children arrive to jump or be dragged into the pool for a half hour of heaven or hell.

Pulling tarps as the sun sets, tired sunned-out skin, lithe happy bodies, high school idealistic chatter: "What's everyone doing tonight?" The never-ending search for thrills on vacation in a small hometown.

The Holdfast

I live in a home in the redwoods.

Mushrooms blossom after each rain.

But today is not a mushroom day.

The ocean is calling, its salty fog whispers twining around my wrists, my ankle, my mind.

Ahh. Heartbeat of my soul, the breathing of waves in and out.

Sometimes things die.

Sometimes we help them die.

We think it’s just a straw.

If a million of us think that, a million straws settle in the belly of the ocean.

One day, we might be thirsty

and find nothing to suck up our straws.

The part of kelp that anchors it to the ocean floor is called a holdfast.

Let us hold fast to the earth. If we forget our holdfasts,

we might drift in an ocean of straws

forever.

The ocean makes me feel expansive, infinite, philosophical.

Stinging nettle patches, up the road from the ocean, make me feel hungry!

Stinging nettle is one of the most nutritious plants native to North America.

Full of minerals and vitamins, its stinging barbs release

neurotoxins that act like

Icy-Hot

on stiff muscles and arthritic joints.

It’s also very tasty!

(Like spinach on steroids.)

Blanch, boil, or dry the leaves.

Make nettle tea, which can also be used as a conditioning hair rinse.

Blanched leaves blended with

olive oil

pine nuts

garlic

and parmesan

make an incredible, wild-harvested pesto!

“Hope means to keep on living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness.”

- Henri M. Nouwen

Keep humming, keep harvesting, keep running to hug the ocean.

Her arms are open. The redwoods keep breathing.

The earth waits to embrace you.

The smiles linger in my mind, the sweetness lingers on my tongue.

I balanced on the chipping white paint metal of the volunteer house's back porch. Gnawing. Twisting. Jawing on a stick of sugarcane Betty had given me. If everyone had to work this hard to get sweetness in their mouths, obesity would be a flying-pig, laughable myth. Finally I worked a section away from the center, my teeth prying the treasure open and chomping down to release the juice. Mmm. I wouldn't say heaven, but it was close. Watery enough to be refreshing; sweet enough to be, well, sweet. Candy water, just shy of syrup on the tongue.


No wonder all those brown teeth gleam dully out of all those mouths, the school children waving "Hello, mzungu!" as I the white person ride my privilege on the back of a motorcycle taxi. If sugarcane were my after-school snack, cheap as it is, I would set to work chewing it open too. Their bodies stay fit - not enough calories to weigh them down - but their teeth fade from white to yellow ivory before resigning into splotches of rich brown and tan. Even toddlers, even Kymbi who has a leg up on life in Uganda because Betty works for a couple of mzungus, even he is blooming tiny brown blossoms on his two-year-old teeth.


I see these smiles and ache. We high-falutin' Westerners have the audacity to imagine we can "help" these people, by bringing them railroads and English and Jesus and chemicals. We can't even bring them toothbrushes. Or maybe they don't care, and that's my Western fallacy, imposing my paradigm of "teeth-need-to-be-clean-and-people-should-live-to-be-100" on another culture.


The bulk aisle. I stare at the five different brands of packaged raw cane sugar, not to mention all of the other kinds of cane sugar. All those brown tooth smiles, those small hands grasping chunks of sweetness. All these privileged or not-so-privileged, grasping at chunks of sweetness in canes, Cokes, petit fours, you  name it. Is sugar the Pandora's box of our bodies? We know not what we wish for. Our ancestors celebrated bitter as embodying life-giving nutrients. But we lean in, sugar bedazzled, and lift the lid.

Wise words echo from Tamarack Lake at sunrise.

"Above all, stay grounded. Remember that there is earth for your roots and sun for your leaves. All you have to do is reach down, stretch up, and breathe deeply."

The middle of the wilderness is such a simple place from which to feel certain. The struggle, I find, is to bring the certainty of those wild places into my tick-tock clock-based paycheck routine. To reach up out of everydayness into the visions of something more.

Reach down, into where you come from. Stretch up, to where you know you can be. And breathe deeply, knowing that to breathe is enough.

Taking my own wisdom to heart as I inch towards the river of writing that I long to jump in. Applications to science writing programs in the midst of work is a little like someone asking you, "What is the meaning of your life?" every ten minutes. A practice in groundedness, to be sure.

Having a heart, no matter where you are, at once takes courage and no effort at all.

"Ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, the path is of no use." ~ Carlos Castaneda

My path has a heart, even if it doesn't have a clear destination at this point in time. I find myself devouring stories of pursuing one's passions despite everything, and clinging to the words of the wise in the hope that they might apply to me.

"To find our calling is to find the intersection between our own deep gladness and the world's deep hunger."

~ Frederick Buechner

I find deep gladness in words, but could writing really be what the world hungers for? I run back and forth along the trajectory of a writer, searching for that place where it meets the world's deep hunger, poverty, despair, injustice.

"Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you avert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you."

~ Annie Dillard

Perhaps I am searching in vain for that place where writing mingles with social and environmental justice, personal and environmental wellbeing, to the extent that I want it to. Because it is up to me. I can read nature philosophy and sustainable op-eds all my life long and admire how they manage to blend science and literature. Or I can bravely step out into the stream myself; take a deep breath, and share my story.

My thesis is finished, but Suubi will always be in my life, if only in my heart.

Here is the link to the culmination of my time in Uganda and three months spent thinking, researching, and writing back in California. By no means is it perfect or all-encompassing, but I gave it my all.

My senior thesis in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

I've got the fire back in my belly; only now, it burns on charcoal from Uganda.

It has been exactly one month and three days since I left Uganda. That was the first time I can remember not being excited to get on an airplane; in fact, I was downright jealous of the fresh crowd of people who arrived at the airport just as I was about to leave. And though my take-off went smoothly, in many ways I feel like I crash-landed back into my homeland. I am just now beginning to feel like the discombobulation that possessed my life since I came back is gone. Here is a conversation my friend Jocelyn - who is studying abroad in Senegal right now - and I had that helps to illustrate what this transition has been like. She sent me a message on Facebook in response to my last post:

Heather, this is an absolutely beautiful that strikes a chord in me on so many levels. I hope you don't mind if I ask everybody reading my blog to please come and see this entry; it speaks volumes to what I hope to communicate little by little through my own entries.

How are you coming along in your project of learning to love America in all its imperfectness? What you say about breaking illusions as being the real process of learning is absolutely true.

Isn't it wonderful to know that we are all just like anybody else? And yet, so unique individually and culturally? The layers of difference and commonality are endless, enmeshed, and ever-shifting. Beauty incarnate.

Love,
Jocelyn

thank you so much for letting me know what you think, jocelyn! you are welcome to share this post with anyone...a huge part of why i write is to help communicate what i learn about the world to people who maybe haven't had the chance to learn the same thing. i'm glad you like it. :)

i have had a really tough time learning to be back here and love america. it's been a little over a month, and i'm just now feeling like i'm on my feet again. (it didn't help that i only gave myself a week before school started.) i think that being out of this culture and country for three months has made it nearly impossible to ignore all of the things i didn't like about america in the first place. where before, i could put up with aspects of this culture that annoyed me, now i feel like they are glaring and unavoidable. things that i thought used to satisfy me don't anymore.

although that all sounds super doom-and-gloom, it's like a painful but good pruning. from this i'm learning what can truly satisfy me and make my life as fulfilling as it was this summer. i can have a fulfilling life here; it just means seeking out truly edifying habits and places, rather than numbing out on what my culture tells me is fun.

yes, one of the most humbling lessons and joyful truths is how absolutely human everyone is. it shatters any ideas that superiority or greater wisdom lies in one culture or another. when i find myself wanting to look down my nose at people who seem to be absorbed in materialism, i remember that many ugandans are just as proud and anxious to have and acquire possessions. once my lens of judgment has cracked and fallen away, i can truly appreciate the individual and simultaneously universal beauty in each person i meet, and it humbles me.