and yes, academic life, even the low academic life has its charms and freedoms. I technically go to work twice a week these days, although the other 5 days its working at home and not in the sense in which non-academics use that phrase as a euphemism for taking a day off. that still gives me a lot of time, to read, to cook (these occasions are getting rarer though simply because of living alone), and to be slow.

and yet I haven't gone for a morning run in about a year now. nor do I get out in the mornings at all, unless my teaching schedule forces me to. I have a feeling this has something to do with the strange constant state of a stuffed and running nose that I have now cos it sort of started when the running stopped or got rarer. anyway, so today after putting to good use some of the extra time gained due to an earlier than usual opening of these eyes calling up my sis and speaking at length with her, I decided to get out, but not to run. and I had good reason, there wasn't anything to eat in my fridge.

it was raining, then drizzling, then gave way; plus spring has settled in. my car got (an otherwise denied) wash and my mind got an overdose of green.
it was beautiful all around, like an exaggeration of the youth of green. there's a very clear difference between the darker green of the mature and tired leaves, and this green, a metaphor of birth, youthfulness, of energy and anticipation.

I ended up driving much farther, to never before roads, through a park bursting with greenery. I saw the duck pond drained of water (probably being cleaned out) and because this was a week-day, there were very few people around. it felt like it all belonged to me. somehow 'green' doesn't say it half as well as 'verde' does, the latter gives the sense of lush-ness that I'm talking about.

my 42

I woke up today, earlier than usual, wondering whether I should jump out of my bed and onto my yoga mat or should I laze around a lil more. I chose the latter and lay there, with the morning fighting through the upturned blinds to reach me, and the sounds of the early-birds dropping off their kids to school across the street from my window.

there were all these thoughts swimming in my mind then. I did not remember what dreams had come, but consciousness came thinking about my plants, and about how two of those pots now contained three different pieces of a mother plant in the department office at school.

my home has evolved somewhat like the earth did, if you subtract me since I am the observer. it started barren, collected some inanimate objects and then some little microbes probably, and slowly one by one - the plants. first came the cactus or the one that needed the littlest care, then the money-plant-look-alikes that just needed water (and have since been replanted in potted earth), and then a succulent and then a flower plant (cyclamen; its having trouble, its yellowing, feeding some parasites at the moment).

there can be no 'soul' to earthly life, no 'god' other than the laws of physics/nature, nothing beyond the vast universe because it ends nowhere.

when I cut a plant and put the cut stem in water, it roots out, for many crotons and money-plant-types. for others, they need soil directly to root out. but many many plants root out from cuttings. do all these cuttings share a 'soul' with the original plant? what is the boundary of one life from another, and what houses the 'soul' then? its not very different if you think of animals and other living things. a female human, when pregnant houses the baby within. are the two the same 'soul' then? or is one within the other, like Russian dolls? the only difference compared with plants is, the 'cutting' happens after the baby has been delivered out, as a separate individual, after having stored enough energy to grow and survive, with its physical boundaries defined away from the mother, only the umbilical cord still connecting, and so it is snapped, free.

the 'soul' and 'god' theory of life refutes logic. but so some would argue, its meant to. because you have to be blinded by belief to believe.

its not like this morning was a sudden epiphany or something. these thoughts have been in my head at least many months now. it all started with that 'energy theory' of life. according to which life is nothing but the evolution of inanimate natural objects in the path of the goal of everything to better capture, store, and use energy. rocks, sand, earth, and water warm up under the sun but cool down in the dark. life preserves the heat better, uses it, to grow and recreate, even exports it by becoming food for other beings higher up and lower down in the energy/food cycle. its pretty amazing.

but think about the flip-side of this argument. if so, what is the big difference between breaking a rock, cutting a tree, killing an insect, killing a pig, and murdering a human? its all killing, starting from the inanimate, going up the evolutionary chain, to the species that has conquered this earth by managing to group together, coordinate, cooperate, communicate, record, and imagine; and of course use hands to use other things, both living and non-living.

why is manslaughter so heinous, compared with every other kind of killing/destruction?

why, of course, because of all those years it took to evolve to reach a human. the highest-up in the chain. to achieve the kind of consciousness that beguiles the human herself to believe in a higher source and a higher purpose of/for her consciousness; to want to give it supernatural status and call it a 'soul', a piece of 'god'. but I am not contradicting. we each are a piece of god because god is nothing but nature.

some days ago I was watching a documentary about Jackson Pollock, after seeing his drawing/paintings in ink and oil and canvas and Japanese paper. apparently another artist once criticized Pollock saying he wouldn't go far because he "drew from his heart, not from nature", and Pollock replied, "I am nature".

strangers

sleeping in a stranger's bed at an airbnb, with torn sheets, and wondering whose hair is on the covers. oh yes, not a pleasant thought; I've usually been fortunate with airbnbs but these last two were uncomfortable in different ways - this one should have at least pretended to be clean, and the one before had a cozy and clean bed and bath but with the strangest empty rest-of-the-house (such that hubby just didn't want to step out of our room and not go straight out the house). two other strangers visiting/living there, and me one morning coming across another stranger in the kitchen gathering food and walking straight out the back door, leaving me wondering if he was a thief (he wasn't).

travelling in some ways means getting out of your personal zone. but its not just travelling, these last two weeks have left me sensing to an elevated extent my contacts with people (and animals) I know I will probably never see again.

from the young girl with blue hair who gave me a haircut before my trip and chatted with me slowly and softly (so unusual compared with the over-enthusiastic and full of compliments hairdressers I often get) about her mom and her own unawareness regarding her mom's schedules and holidays, about her long distance relationship and how people didn't often get why they were so cool, about coloring and bleaching hair, about her stepdad and traveling, about avoiding questions and coming back to them. to the energetic barking dogs who scared away hubby and kept trying to frighten me and getting frightened by me in turns, when I tried to take a random worn path after stopping randomly by the roadside in a small village by the river. to finding myself sitting next to a crying girl at the airport talking into a phone, after realizing (looking up from my tablet book) that she and I had been sitting around in a near-empty airport, obviously both of us spending more time than usual waiting for a plane; having forced to overhear much of her conversation with her mom and some friends narrating her story of cancelled flights and missed opportunity and venting her frustration, between sobs and angry tears. me wondering whether I should offer her some of my Mexican chocolate (that in turn made me wonder about the hands that hand-craft chocolate, esp. when we bought some from a local shop on the highway from the man who claimed to have made them; mashed-in thoughts of the documentary I had recently seen about the fermentation of cacao and the process of chocolate being made; all those hands of strangers touching those beans, making that chocolate that is playing on my tongue, plus these Mexican & New-Mexican ones don't melt so soon - I sort of got back to liking chocolate after many many years - dark, hand-made chocolate) to cheer her up, but only wondering.

to the short one-two line conversations with fellow gawkers at an art exhibition where I would say it was the artist's intent that we talk. "what do you see?" everyone asking each other, me talking to this guy, probably the only other person there, who like me, was scribbling some stuff down, more organized than me - he had a little diary, and he like me, walked back to pieces he had already seen, studying, comparing, trying to fathom something at least of what would have been in the artist's mind. Pollock is not an easy artist to view, and I don't think I enjoyed any solo artist exhibition so much ever. strangers coming together in those halls, scratching their heads to find meaning, in life, in art, in chance meetings. me wondering if any of these past chance encounters could ever become lasting friendships if anyone tried.

watching the crowd returning with me in the evening train, drunk and happy on St. Paddy's day celebrations (I had preferred Pollock) - a couple of separate women puking it all out, a different couple of them (together and sitting next to me in the train) observing aloud how much she had enjoyed watching "all these idiots today".

me watching people, a cat on a leash at a colorful park in golden weather, noticing just one other guy alone like me, munching on my gooey-butter cake wondering again about the hands that made it. thinking back to the forest ranger who gave us his recommendations about hiking trails some days ago around petroglyphs, his smile, his "my favorite is... ", me wondering if I'd want to know him better some day, or if I'd want to be in his place - watching strangers walk in every day every hour asking to buy maps, water, chocolate, hats, and asking which is my favorite trail.

that woman on a trail when we heard those inhuman voices in the distance, shouting out to us, that they were coyotes, probably killed a rabbit, "they have to celebrate". that couple, hiking up abandoning the trail, up up on those black cooled lava rocks, to the top of the table of the black plateau, the guy giving his hand now and then to pull the girl up, me clicking them sitting up there together, kissing, against the blue and black of the sky and land, wondering if I would go up there if I was younger or if hubby was a little more adventurous (most places where I do climb up I see him as a tiny fleck down below) and yet somehow strangely satisfied (satiated) with where we were, walking in the desert, me looking out for those holes in the ground - so many of them - rabbit holes, lizard holes, or maybe rattlesnakes. so comforting that where nature finds rattlesnakes, it also grows antidote herbs that were found and known by americans long before America.

through all this, reading Teju Cole and his meanderings through NYC, mostly alone, bumping into strangers, much like me, thinking, talking, keeping and taking away.