Tag: nature

New eyes

Julie Fanselow

Hello, friends. Although I haven’t been writing much, I’ve been living plenty. Today’s post comes to you from a tiny room in a rambling 115-year-old inn on Vashon Island, and I have a feeling I’m going to ramble a bit, too, but that’s OK.

Until Monday, I’d never been to Vashon, even though it is a 20-minute ferry ride from West Seattle, and plenty of people commute from here — remotely or twice a day on the ferry. It remains mostly rural, and it is graced by many parks and laced by miles of trails. I’ve already hiked many of them on this brief visit, about 15 miles over the past two days, mostly through forests but also along the shores of Puget Sound.

My new apartment in Seattle is great. It has the quiet I crave, but it has little natural light and no views at all. So as long as I live there, and I hope it will be a few years, I will have even more incentive than usual to go outside — not that I need much incentive. That’s why, when I saw the forecast for plenty of sun and little rain for a few days early this week, I decided to make a quick trip somewhere I could spend most of the daylight hours outdoors. Vashon has not disappointed me.

How I wound up in the Marjesira Inn is a mystery, but it’s clear I was meant to come here. I went to Airbnb and looked at a little beach shack I rented on the Washington coast last February, but it wasn’t available. I zoomed out, saw a $45 listing, and landed on Vashon Island. Why not? As I said, I’ve never been here. The reviews and the price point made it clear that the Marjesira isn’t for everyone: It’s a funky blend of hostel and rooming house. You’re sharing a kitchen and bathrooms. You hear your neighbors. But it’s a magical spot steeped in history, and I’m sure I’ll be back.

In my last post, I mentioned the Free Will Astrology horoscope I found on my last trip, during my January stay in Astoria, Oregon. “You will receive substantial assistance from life whenever you work on the intention to clarify and define the specific longings that are most essential to you,” Rob Brezsny wrote. A quiet place to live was my most specific longing, and now I have that. But my longest-lived longing is my desire to travel — and I travel frequently because it helps me keep my eyes and perspective fresh. At sunrise this morning, alone in the inn’s front room, I spotted a book, Pronoia is the Antidote to Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings by … Rob Brezsny.

Sharing a bit of conversation with Marjesira’s caretaker this morning as we made our breakfasts, I mentioned how, although I am a dedicated minimalist, I was enjoying the century’s worth of accumulated stuff packed into this old inn. As always, travel was helping me see with new eyes.

As we talked, Jacqui was braiding her hair — something she hadn’t done in a while, she said, but she was on her way to a school visit as a wilderness educator and she wanted to feel like a kid again. She wanted to see the world through their eyes.

The world is in a world of hurt right now, big time, and there’s one man who certainly is not conspiring to shower it with blessings. Travel is a tonic unless it’s a forced march, and my heart is with the refugees streaming out of Ukraine toward an uncertain future. It’s hard for any of us to know what is going to happen next: with this unnecessary war, with the climate, with the pandemic, or with baseball. (Sorry, I know that the breakdown in the sport’s contractual talks are far from a key global concern, but my part-time job at the ballyard is a big part of my income and my social life.)

Yet I do know this, and I mainly know it because I travel: The world is a beautiful place, my stay here is finite, I am here for the adventure, and I am bound by the beauty. This gorgeous song from Jane Siberry pops up in my head every so often when I am feeling especially deep gratitude for the world. Enjoy — and to those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, happy almost-spring.


A few housekeeping notes: Two recent posts have disappeared off the main feed here at Surely Joy. It’s a mystery, but you can find them here, if you missed them:

Presenting my word for 2022

Pandemic postcard #56: Better days

As always, thank you for reading Surely Joy.

Presenting my word for 2022

Julie Fanselow

I was at the Fred Meyer in Warrenton, Oregon, gathering picnic supplies yesterday morning when I realized I’d left my phone at the hostel in Astoria. Did I really want to backtrack to get it? Surely I could live a day without it. But of course, it wasn’t really the phone I wanted. It was the GPS, so I could keep my bearings on an unfamiliar trail I planned to hike. It was the pedometer, so I could record my mileage. It was the camera, so I could capture some images of my day on the coast. It was the music I had downloaded to play on my drive. I went back and got the phone.

For the past several years, in lieu of resolutions and inspired by a practice shared by Tim Atkins, a fellow writer for the Braver/Wiser website, I’ve chosen a word of the year. For 2020, it was learn. In 2021, it was a wonder. This year, I’ve settled on present. As wonder did for me, I hope present will have many lessons I can learn within its myriad meanings as 2022 unfolds.

My main attraction to the word is for its adjective sense, its “be here now” meaning. I want to be present in my life much more than I sometimes seem to be. So even though I went back for my phone, and even though I consulted my trail map and took some pictures en route, I left the gizmo in my pack most of the time because I was on a trail where I really needed and wanted to be present. Mud, roots, and wind made the going tough, but the reward for my focus — a sweeping view at the edge of our continent — was more than worth the effort.

I want to be present for family and friends, to hear and see them and help them feel heard and seen. I want to live and love deeply. I want to continue to prize experiences and people over things.

I want to stay in the present and avoid thinking too much about the past or the future. I want to multitask less — and worry a lot less. I want to be present to the pain that is omnipresent in my neighborhood, my country, and the world without being consumed by it.

And I also want to pay attention to the verb form of present, to tune into opportunities and experiences that present themselves as gifts (or presents, if you like. Isn’t language great?). Of course, some experiences will present themselves as obstacles, unwanted and difficult, but I will learn from them, too.

I would love to know if you have chosen a word for 2022 — what it is and why. Meanwhile, here is a little video from my morning walk today. I’m grateful I was present for this. (I can’t embed it here via my iPad, though I will do so when I get home.) Or to share a Maya Angelou quote a friend reminded me of the other day, “This is a wonderful day. I have never seen this one before.”

Be/wilder

Julie Fanselow

“Which do you think is bigger? Outer space or inner?” — Robbie Byrne to his father, Theo, in Bewilderment

Have you ever finished a book and wanted to immediately read it all again? I’ve just had that experience with Bewilderment, the new novel from Richard Powers. But because I have so many other books waiting, I settled for re-reading its first few pages and its last few pages, savoring those passages for now. I had the same impulse with Powers’ previous book, The Overstory; as soon as I finished it in 2018, I wanted to read it again, preferably over a few days in the woods. But it was a much bigger book that originally took me weeks to read, and it’ll be a while (maybe next summer?) before I get back to it.

Bewilderment is, at its heart, a love story about a father and son and the woman whom they both loved, a woman who loved them both but not quite as much as she loved the world and all the things in it. I read it quickly over a few days mostly spent outdoors, taking in its final 50 pages or so sitting by a lake yesterday afternoon, leaves falling all around me. It was the perfect book to read on the cusp of a summer I was sorry to see come to an end and an autumn that I tentatively welcome, as if I had any choice in the matter.

That’s not to say it is an easy book to digest. Powers finished this book mid-pandemic, shortly before the election last fall. The uncertainty its characters feel is palpable, because it is what we are all living through: environmental devastation, authoritarianism’s creep, and the way our market economy seeks to define and solve every malady with a diagnosis and a pill.

The beauty of Bewilderment is how it resists despair and ameliorates anxiety. It insists that each of us is perfect in our imperfection; that although we can never fully know another person, empathy is possible; that our interior lives are full universes unto themselves; and that a rich inner life can help us survive the pain we’re inflicting on the world. Bewilderment is a book to read in the spirit I think it was written, a mix of hope, resolve, and wild abandon — which seems like a good way to live right now, too.

I finished Bewilderment on the shores of Deep Lake in Nolte State Park, southeast King County, WA.
Bewilderment is a book to read outside, if you can.

Pandemic postcard #40: Quarantine holiday jukebox

Julie Fanselow

The snow started falling in Seattle on Monday evening, just as the shortest day of the year came to an end. I took a little video that wound up having a bit of “Christmas in Jail” in the background (more on this later), but the song in my head at that moment was “I Believe in Father Christmas” by Greg Lake and Peter Sinfield. “They said there’d be snow at Christmas,” Lake sang in the 1970s. But in 2020, the snow fell on the solstice instead, and somehow that seemed more fitting in a year when we’ve learned how closely we are connected, to each other and to the Earth.

I looked to the sky with excited eyes ...

Holiday music is a deeply personal matter. Most of us have seasonal songs we cherish and others we’d be fine with never hearing or singing again, as well as songs that have gained shades of complexity as our lives unfold and our spiritual views evolve. I still enjoy singing Angels We Have Heard on High, Oh Little Town of Bethlehem, and other tunes that evoke happy memories of times spent caroling with my childhood church choir, even as I’ve come to love a wider palette of music that reflects the many ways people celebrate light coming amid the deepest darkness.

In that spirit, the rest of this week’s post is the Surely Joy 2020 holiday jukebox, with a selection of songs that may not immediately come to mind when you consider the sounds of the season. It’s accompanied by a longer playlist on Spotify, including many songs nominated by my friends when I solicited suggestions on Facebook this week. Enjoy and be well, and I’ll see you here next week with some final thoughts on what I’ve learned in 2020.

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