Happiness and gratitudes

• peanut butter s'mores. (social s'more-making is the one time I eat gelatin.)

• swimming alone at dusk on a day that had been hot, hot.

• swimming in open water, period.

• field trips with my anthro class.

• recognition from professors. my classmate wanted to know what the deal was between womanists and second-wave feminists, and my prof (the gender studies coordinator!) said to me raising my hand, "go ahead, you probably know more about this than I do." ahh.

• faculty panels.

• how it feels to not be scared when other people are.

• the promises of this summer.

• the women I'm sharing a cabin with this session.

• feathery moth antennae.

• canoeing late with some of my cabinmates into the mouth of a river, we saw bats: so unbirdlike, quick as thoughts back and forth across the water and around our canoes, hard to distinguish from the falling darkness. so many of them.

• scent memories striking like lightning. Germany in July: heat, green things, cigarette smoke.

• but on my clothing, the scent of bonfire.

Week in photos (167-172)

167/365.


168/365.


169/365. I took a picture and then I took a cell phone picture of it—I don't know why, but I liked it.


170/365.


171/365. Green summers are a foreign thing to me. (They are yellow in California.)


172/365.

Poem for my fictive sisters

You are with me
when I lower myself from the ladder,
with sodden summer cotton washing along
behind my knees,
watching my own white arms in the green-
brown water
(Strange fruit? No,
strange fish...):

All still with me like on my skin, like in my skin—

I am swimming alone, to nowhere
to the accompaniment of
a thick six o'clock sun
and you as much
as the late light on the water
are with me, are with me

Happiness and gratitudes

I am appreciating:

• what I can learn by asking for the thoughts and opinions of my friends and those around me

• that I have friends are clever and compassionate and take big questions seriously

• the sunshine and the wind off the lake, and the hour or so I spend most days after our early dinner just sitting on the swimming dock

• internet access being relatively limited here

• the prospect of a few days in Chicago next weekend to see my friends

• that my current class (anthropology: race and identity in the contemporary US) is interesting and well-faciliated enough that four-hour sessions don't feel too long at all

• the fresh perspectives of the non-majors in the class

• a reminder from the politics professor that as we are all Christians here, our primary relationship is that of siblings. Thinking this way really really helps me be patient and non-competitive with the other students.

Week in photos (160-166)

160/365.


161/365. Psychedelia, when you really notice it .


162/365.


163/365.


165/365. Sleeping in a room with an EXIT sign for the first and, I hope, last time. (It's a lot brighter.)


166/365.