The Archies: 60 Peaks in 2011

One of my professors encouraged her blog readers to participate in the Archies, which looks at tangible matter from the past year before you delve into the next one. (This is my second year to celebrate Archies, but you can check out last year’s list by clicking here.) The presences on the list are not categorized as good or bad, but they were of import. In a way, they are they are the most visible ridges in the year’s vista. The Archies exclude constant presences such as the loved faces of family, friends, and Wayne Robin.

2011- a year thick with many things. It was my first year to cross the pond to visit England, Scottland, and Ireland. With graduation approaching, I am having to make decisions about life after the Honors College. Environmental threats, political unrest, and especially climate change call for attention.

1. 350
2. David Abrams
3. Leon the Cat (saved as a kitten by Wayne from the jaws of Stella)
4. Hiking in Eden Falls Cave with my family
5. Women Farmers, Women working in Agriculture
6. Building Big Wayne’s Greenhouse
7. UCA Environmental Alliance
8. Ballot initiative: The Natural Gas Severance Tax Act of 2012
9. My brother Josh protested that fixxing the cat was unethical. He said, “Isn’t that like abortion?”
10. The Jerwood Centre, Dove Cottage
11. Striding Edge of Helvellyn
12. The Globe Theater
13. The Red River Gorge
14. Vegan
15. Persimmons
16. Waterboxxes
17. Fairytale Eggplant from the Farmers Market
18. Antiquarian bookstores
19. The Lake District
20. Vandana Shiva
21. Shittake Logs
22. Coffee Mornings with Patrick
23. Stop Arkansas Fracking
24. Movie: Jean de Florette
25. Class Action Settlement for Arkansas Rice Farmers, whose fields were contaminated by genetically modified rice from Bayer
26. Madame Bovary
27. Herman Daly
28. Compost
29. Deep Economy, Eaarth (Bill McKibben)
30. Dad’s Extended Garden
31. Abbotsford
32. Carpools with Raleigh
33. Movie: Forks Over Knives
34. Movie: Hotel Rwanda
35. John Ruskin
36. Coxcomb Celosia
37. Ponca Lost Valley Canoe (#1 returning Archie- good people, great conversation, and Simba the Cat)
38. Bodum Thermal Stainless Steel French Press
39. The National Trust
40. Chickens in our family gardens
41. Wendell Berry
42. Huffington Post
43. Beef Beef’s Blog
44. The Unicorn Tapestries at Stirling Castle
45. UBINIG
46. Wayne at 24HHH
47. “Block by Block, Occupy Little Rock!” (the Police assisiting protestors at the Occupy March in November)
48. The Weekend Theater
49. Keneth Branagh Shakespeare Adaptations
50. The Spirit Cathches You and You Fall Down
51. Little Rock Climbing Center
52. CAAH
53. Two Moms in the Raw - Blueberry Granola bars
54. Cold Frame (made with Dad)- all winter salads
55. Martha Graham Dance Company
56. Sunsets from the Rest Stop at Highway Seven
57. Ozark Highlands Trail
58. Wordsworth's Indian Rock Houses
59. The Natural State of America
60. Allegro Queen Bee Tea

Travels With Amber Haydar

The thesis is a long journey that each scholar takes through pages of research and mazes of thought. The process of creation is a dappled experience where far flung thoughts and emotions tumble to conclusions on the page. At times, you could combust the thesis with your eyes, but at others are warm with awe of new insight or synthesis. Of course, coffee is needed to chug a’ lug through to the finish...to the moment when you look out at the responsive gaze of people in your karass, and you begin to teach. Hours of work are now gifted to the current of ideas. Today I got to see two amazing people, whom I care for and admire deeply, give there thesis presentations for Honors. Amber Haydar and Patrick Russell were my teachers today. In this post, I am going to highlight Amber’s presentation and her startling ability to spark enthusiasm in others about the good things in life- friends, food, travel, and books. I promised Patrick that I would read his thesis over Christmas break, and I will pass that rich plate of knowledge to you soon. (Heidegger, Hogs, and Earth’s Community!)

Amber Haydar: Where Am I? Being an Account of One Student’s Experience in Culture Shock, Journeying Across the Pond to Visit Four Countries in Two Summers

Amber wrote a travel memoir of her two study abroad trips, one being to Paris and the other to the British aisles. She divided her thesis into seven sections. Six of them focused on different aspects of the trip including food, books, theater, cuisine, signs, and transportation. She followed a traditional model in which she started with snippet into her own life, often a personal anecdote, and then delved into a comparison of her two trips, concluding with how this journey had expanded, brought fresh life to her experience. Amber then read a portion of her experience with books. She informs her audience that she learned how to read when she was three, and it has been her passion ever since. When she was in Paris she learned the joy of a historical book store when she visited Shakespeare and Company. Throughout many visits she bought several books- and when she read in the beautiful city, she found a heightened sense of the “people and animals” in this place. In England, she discovered the wonder of antiquarian book stores and collections, and Amber channeled excitement (I was on this trip with her, and was happy to share it) -Ah the smell of books! When she found a first edition of Oliver Twist (over 11,000 pounds) her hands shook for fear of dropping the book. These experiences added to her dream of library, a room that is essential for her nesting and settling into a home, where a book (never a kindle!) is always on hand for a new experience.

In the last segment of her thesis, she reveals the kairotic moment from her visit to the Lake Isle of Innisfree, the location of one of her favorite poems by William Butler Yeats. Here, as Clint read the poem and she looked over the lake to the small isle, so much meaning collided in her life. The experience gave impetus for to her decisions about the meaningful work she will find as a scholar and teacher, but most importantly as a lover of literature. Amber began tearing up as she explained why she needed to share traveling, literature, and her sense of wonder as a professor. Amber will be going to graduate school to train for next fall and plans to become a scholar of 19th Century Literature. I look forward to both visiting her library and having her books in my own. In honor of Amber, here is The Lake Isle of Innisfree by Yeats:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

No Eye at All

BINSLEY POPLARS - Gerard Manley Hopkins
felled 1879

MY aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew --
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc únselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

I was first introduced to Gerard Manley Hopkins in my Victorian class this semester. Hopkins is an interesting poet who finds that poetry is like the music of speaking and thinking; his unique techniques and sprung rhythm make him a revolutionary figure in poetry. Hopkins was a Roman Catholic Priest with a surprisingly earthly view of divinity. One fascinating thing about Hopkins is the spiritual impetus behind his poetry, and the literary techniques he formed so that his writings would frame his view of God. This view found that every living thing is infused with a unique, flowing self that comes from the divine. "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same" - a sacred act of what Hopkin's calls selving. Each and all "fling out its broad name." God shines through the ordinary. The human sense of inscape is responsiveness to the divinity in creation, an is called instress. The holy breathing of particular selves. Much of Hopkins poems try to capture his human perception of selving beings and to find the sacred power that animates the diverse lifeforms of the earth.

Binsley Poplars is one of those poems that echoes in your mind, winding into your thoughts at the most unexpected moments - tossing a plastic Kind bar wrapper into the trash, ordering a stack of paperbacks. "Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve..." Unselve. When a life form is ended then an opportunity for human insight is "pricked" so that no "eye at all" will be able to see what was. The end of life forms, rural scenes, and local communities is - what is it? People have many answers for the end of particular things. For example, tigers. A villager, who has lived under the constant threat of being lower on the food chain than Shere Khan, will fire away at the threat. Other people vote with their consumer dollars for Endangered Species Tiger chocolate bars. Both wish that tigers could find a place in the wild- away, away. But does anyone wish that the tiger will completely disappear from the earth, its burning bright self lost? “What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?” What human eye will be left to see?

Hopkins thanked God for “dappled things” in another poem, because while the sacred is constant, the earth is wonderfully diverse. I find a strange parallel to the beauty of diversity in the science of energy and matter. Paul Hawkins in The Ecology of Commerce describes the second law of thermo dynamics, which finds that "chaos and entropy" result when energy scatters. Nature is able to defend against chaos through an organization of diverse life forms that exchange energy in their complex relationships, what Hawkins calls negenthropy. He comments, “Only life prevents entropy from extending to nature: the intricate, mysterious interaction of organisms that captures sunlight and evolves into higher levels of order and complexity.” Most human industrial systems are reducing the diversity of life. In another chapter he continues to say, “Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will survive the global market economy.” What about the scene in rural Conway Arkansas? UCA is trying to fell a portion of the forest on the Jewel Moore Nature Reserve so that it can advertise special, select housing for fraternity and sorority students. Future UCA students will not “guess the beauty been.” My good friend Patrick likes to bird watch in the nature reserve, and has recently eyed a pair of owls. I hope to see them too.

Dancing Lines and Climbs with a Friend

Last night at the climbing gym, my strength to tackle tough problems was not thriving because my energy resources had flowed into the paces of school, the tracks of my anxiety shortcomings, and journeys of inner curiosity and conviction. My veins were probably popping from too much coffee and too little water. As a the name of a boulder problem I never ascended said, I needed to “Eat more fruit :)” Yet, while I was not making calculable progress in my climbing, I was saturated in the movement. I was in my favorite climbing mode, the one in which the movement becomes a dance. How to describe the love of movement and being in the body? Grace and control, technique and forced explosions, all wrapped up in a synesthesia of sense in which I swing to the music of air behind me and crimp into the intense reality just with fingertips. My skin is left behind, but my blood flows stronger.

That night they pulled out the slack line, which disrupted my sense of movement. I resented the rope, because I could not hop on the thin string and find a place to step in the crazy world it created in my perception- balance in body and mind on top of the helter skelter. When my foot pressed into the rope, my leg jiggled and the convulsions jogged upward through my spine bones. My instincts frozen, I failed to stand up. I hate falling. (a constant overcoming for me as Climber) So I watched others- how they fell-their shaky steps, the focus of their eyes. Some seemed to own the air as they tripped down the line. Wayne Robin made me laugh with his crazy tricks. He tried to help me and explained wonderfully the best tips for positioning your body and focusing with mental clarity. My neurons replied to the task and sent this imperative: “Legs, turn to jelly.”

One of my close friends came over to talk. She said that she had never figured slack lining out, her body had yet to master that. Later, she joined a romping and laughing group at the slack line. I watched. She palmed the back of the rope and pushed upward to stand on her leg. Her arms rounded like a dancer mid leap, and her chest spread into the air. I could see her leg muscles rippling beneath her pants. She caterwauled off the rope and stumbled out of view under the Frankenstein wall. Yet, I had seen her body suspended in air as her eyes shined in self-sufficient flight. Do you realize the beauty of your face, my friend? After watching her for awhile, I went to the rope, grasped the back, and became a titan for moment on my jelly legs. By the end of the night, I was able to walk three steps on the line. My friend’s energy nudged my own body to take a risk, and now I can’t wait to keep practicing at the gym. I have found that this is often the case with this particular friend. She pushes me as a climber, because her style is very different and frighten ting to me. Yet watching the wonderful energy of her movement quickens my practice of dynamic and graceful movement. In other areas of life she inspires me and challenges me as a thinker, a feeler, and to be healthy and thrive. I am grateful for the moments we can know each other.

Sense and the Shadows

The possibility of dissolving- sweetly blending, my heart with the surrounding dark energy. For a moment, but I am distracted by a burnished crescent whose presence is magnified by the darkness.

Moon feels strange tonight. A honey gold moon and radiant. Yet, not fluid. Moon is sharp, made more so to me because of her scarcity power in tonight's sky. The night quickens my sense of illumination- first the heaven glows, then a fire, and then streets of buzzing lampposts. For tonight, the city pollution steals star beams, so Moon walks the air above, bereft her dancing sisters.

Slowly, I sense a rounded shadow pinned by her two points. Eclipse came to mind, yet not quite. A beautiful whole emerges in the shadow-land.