Unhinged

Through nobody’s fault but my own, I have lost all documents created between 2015 and the present: letters, poetry, medical reports, notes, texts for blips, all of it. I have lost my Nik software and can no longer access black and white images created with Silver Efex. My computer no longer recognizes SD cards, so in order to use this image, I had to upload the SD card to the iPad and email the image to myself so that I could then move it to Lightroom for cropping. Eventually I will probably acquire new Nik software and get something done to the computer so that it will once again recognize SD cards, however I don’t have time for that right now.

Sue and I leave Wednesday for an adventure we have planned for a long time: a two-night stay in the Virginia Woolf Room at Sylvia Beach Hotel, a book-loving hotel where there is no wifi, no TV, no cell phone signal, no radio, and where guests are strongly exhorted not to bring electronic devices. We will step back into another time and breathe wet sea air (according to the forecast, it will be raining the whole time); we will walk in the rain, in wind-blown sand; we will read and talk and commune as we do; we will write in our journals. We will not blip, check Facebook or email, or communicate with anyone by cell phone till we return to Portland on Friday. We will take our cameras and post after we return.

I am taking with me several books, including Radical Dharma, by a Zen teacher known as Rev. angel Kyodo Williams. She projects a deeply grounded, confident energy (several talks by her are available on Youtube, including a TEDx talk), and she says this, which I’m finding helpful: 

“If you are invested in alleviating suffering, whether as an activist or change-maker or someone who’s committed to life because you hear the cries of the world, it’s important to understand that you can’t even recognize the suffering of others without fully acknowledging the despair of your own suffering. It turns out that far from dragging you down, one of the most liberating things you can do is to come to terms with the fact that some form of your suffering will always be there. To really be present with that unhooks us from the constant anxiety of trying to make it go away.

“Predatory capitalist greed has deeply ingrained a self-worth confusion into our psyche. We associate our value as human beings with our financial worth.” Her solution to this problem is “transformative social change.” Justice. “I don’t want your love,” she says flatly. “I want justice.”


To all those who have taken time to look in on me, I’m very grateful for your patience, your stars and hearts for Bella’s birthday, and mostly for your faith in me, your will for me to return to our online community. I have several hurdles to leap before I can return with any regularity, but I mean to return.