Documenting a Life
Trying to recapture what I missed
Useless to think you'll park and capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. ~ Seamus Heaney
It’s been about half a year since I removed myself from social media. While I miss seeing what some of my friends and acquaintances are up to, I find it kind of a relief to live my life without considering the share-ability of any given moment. On the other hand, there are times when I get the urge to photograph something inconsequential but aesthetically pleasing, like when the skein of yarn I just wound into a ball perfectly matches the book I’m reading, but I don’t, because really what would be the point of that if I’m not going to post it? As a consequence, I take far fewer pictures, and though I still try (not always successfully) to keep a reasonably tidy house, I’m not curating2 my life in the way I once did when I was active on instagram, let alone when I blogged regularly. And I kind of miss that.
Between this question of what do I do with these moments of life that I want to record and examine and hold onto a bit—without enriching nazis by sharing said moments on social media—along with two massive art collections I’ve viewed recently, one being the hundreds of sketches, watercolors, and cut silhouettes created by my mother-in-law that I, with the help of several wonderful friends, matted for display at her funeral, and the other a retrospective exhibit of the artist Ralph Steadman’s work I viewed at a museum yesterday, I’ve been thinking a lot about documenting. Because I do have a bit of obsession around making records. I keep several journals: a morning pages journal, a 5-year journal, a nature journal, an adventure log, travel journals. I take pictures. I draw. I paint.
INSIDE
At the same time that I’ve been pondering ways of documenting life, I’ve been exploring questions of regret and disappointment, as part of the exercises in The Artist’s Way: What do I feel I missed out on? What did I enjoy doing when I was young? What do I wish I’d done or learned sooner?3
Some of the things I wish I’d done but didn’t do way back in my early 20s:
Attend the Summer in Taos program my first university offered
Study abroad
Spend a semester aboard the Audubon Expedition Institute bus
Do any of a number of travel classes that my second college didn’t offer when I attended there but has since added to their program
Apply for a Watson Fellowship
Attend a graduate school program in environmental science and literature
While there is of course no going back to do things differently, I can look at what appealed (and still appeals) to me about these things and bring those elements into my life now. And what most these experiences have in common is travel and documentation of that travel, either through writing, art, or photography; i.e., travel journaling. I’ve kept a travel journal almost every trip I’ve taken in my adult life, to varying degrees of thoroughness (my book—Uphill Both Ways—was written using notes from my travel journal). Recognizing this unrequited need, I’ve decided to up my travel journal game. To that end, I’ve gone through my travel journals of the last ten or so years and made note of what I like about my process and results:
sketches and paintings (even bad ones!)
ephemera (ticket stubs, boarding passes, food labels, etc.)
rubbings (leaves, money, novelty smashed pennies)
lists (birds, plants, license plates, funny things my kids said)
maps (hand drawn or pasted)
stickers, washi tape
pressed flowers and leaves (and even bits of wool and feathers)
And what I want to improve upon:
draw/paint better
include more images
use neater handwriting
pay attention to layout
incorporate more color
In general, I write a LOT in my journals, and while I don’t want to lose those details, I want the overall balance to be better, and the pages to look cleaner. So, to give myself some ideas of how to do things differently, and with more care for the overall effect, I’ve watched several online travel journal tutorials and bought some new supplies (any excuse to buy art supplies is a good excuse!). C and I are going on a trip later this summer, and I plan to implement this new and improved travel journaling program. I’m thinking I’ll even make a blog post about it when I get back, because sometimes it’s not enough to document, but you’ve also got to share.
OUTSIDE
August is the best month of the year, and I will entertain no arguments otherwise. Not only is it the month during which yours truly entered the scene, it’s also the month when summer is its summeriest. The blackflies and deer flies and mosquitoes have mostly concluded their business for the year. White admiral4 butterflies are on the wing and monarch caterpillars are munching their way through the milkweed patch. The last of black-eyed Susans are sharing the stage with the first of the goldenrods. A second (or is it third?) brood of bluebirds is occupying the nest box at the edge of the field and the young hummingbirds try their luck at stealing a few sips of nectar from the feeder before The King—our resident adult male—swoops in and chases them away.
I’m monitoring a cardinal nest. The structure, made of woven hay and grass, and three brown-speckled eggs appeared, tucked in among the leaves of our small vineyard, around the third week of July, and its presence *almost* made me forgive the likely father of the brood, who likes to belt out his video-game-space-gun song outside our bedroom window at 4 a.m. The first egg hatched on August 1st and the second one on August 2nd, and the third never hatched.
Nearly bald, with only a few oily threads of dark down springing from their transparent skin, enormous skin-covered spheres where their eyes should be, and yellow, waxy lips along the edges of their giant beaks, the babies are hideously adorable. Over the last week they’ve doubled in size, and dark feathers have begun to appear—needle-straight sheaths of primaries and secondaries along their wings, and gray punk-rock spikes along their backbones and on the tops of their heads.
The nest is gratifying in the way all nests full of baby birds are—new life! hope for the future! weird dinosaur babies!—and more so because a much tinier nest of four speckled blue eggs (a chipping sparrow, we surmised) that had had been build in a nearby vine in June was marauded by a predator soon after we discovered it, and a cool, wet June meant we didn’t have the usual cadre of tree swallows nesting in our bird houses. I hold my breath each time I go to—carefully—check on it. So far so good. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll be around to witness two gangly tots emerge from the nest and take flight on the wings they’re growing before my eyes.
WRITING NEWS
My essay “Eight Kinds of Joy on the Colorado Trail” appears in the collection More than Hope: Lessons from the Colorado Trail, edited by Jared Champion.
You can read my article “People Powered Science” about citizen and community science in Maine in this season’s Green & Healthy Maine Summer Guide, available at coffee shops, natural food stores, and other like-minded businesses around Maine.
To see what I’ve been reading, you can check out my June Reads and July Reads posts.
And if you haven’t read it yet, with hiking season in full swing now would be a great time to pick up my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail.
From the poem “Postscript,” which I copied into my Ireland travel journal in 2013.
I used to resist the use of the word “curate” for anything outside of a museum situation, but now that I no longer do it, I’ve warmed to the word’s use in the personal context.
These are not exact questions from the book, but the lines of thinking that a range of questions led me to.
Or “white admirable” if you follow Robert Michael Pyle’s naming preference, which I like!
Beautiful reflections…thank you. ❤️