update in long paragraph, images

Biding one's time in darkening New England

You want these last weeks of the year to be dead, actually. We don’t even count the last few moons of the year here. It’s not time for working or making or doing, but resting; reflection optional. Even traveling has felt like overkill — but exhilarating, since we’re finally getting movement on plans that have been stagnant for months, even years. Everyone has had something they’ve meant to get going since before “the pandy,” as J’s brother calls it. My sister’s partner rolls her eyes when I mention an old classmate whose family bought a medieval chateau and is meticulously documenting its renovation via Instagram reels ([French sigh:] “the number of people who are doing this now is unreal”). For some, it has meant returning to work, but in a more boundaried way that restores some amount of soul back to them (i.e., the WFH trend). For me, it’s meant quitting the wage-slavery at the UC, going blissfully, thrillingly “in absentia,” and watching as the daily crap in my inbox dwindles to almost nothing. The break from writing has opened a trapdoor of escaping energy, guilty nervous energy that serves well for the logistical tasks required in a transcontinental move. It’s harder without an institution to process the paperwork for you; but it feels cleaner, better, easier, more fun when the responsibility of self-management gives way to utter freedom on the other side. With fewer than 14 days before we land in Portugal, it really does feel like freedom: there will be no one to welcome us when we land, no one to arrange visas or accommodations or travel, no desk to check in at and no name tag to receive and pin and leave on. What a relief. RM said he used to love surfing because it seemed physically unreal, impossible, to be standing and maneuvering on churning water, and yet there he’d be experiencing himself doing it: “It felt like getting away with something.” Without jinxing it, planning this move feels like that. I haven’t spontaneously produced, or fed on, optimism like this since I moved to Santa Cruz in late summer 2019—the last time my house was a walk away from an ocean.

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Pleases enjoy this arbitrary selection of images from the end of our time in California and our wintry limbo in New England. Remember: no doing… (is writing doing?)

^See: Lantern Festival in Peterborough feat. rainbow trout; Bread and Puppet posters in Montpellier, Vermont; some (gray) Green Mountains; an Austrian bike custom-made by Billy David in Chicago; end-of-season apples on a bike ride

John H Rooney, Andy Goldsworthy, Maya Lin, Richard Serra.