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Good Night, Irene: Among Storms and Spirits, the Sea Carries Me Home

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  There’s something strangely familiar and magical about the eye of a hurricane—how it can be so quiet and full of repose while everything around it breaks. Seemingly a paradox, but more of a metaphysical dialectic—the center of the storm being still and pausing time for a moment-- like so many of nature’s sublime offerings fr om solar eclipse quietude to surreal sweeping devastation of a tsunami. Hurricanes feel unique in the ability to encompass an entire catalog of attributes that touch each aspect of human awe. The eye, especially, as it offers us awe quite like the stillness that feels briefly a lot like death. Or maybe like being born. My grandmother died just after sunrise on August 26, 2011, in Wilmington, North Carolina, as Hurricane Irene reached her peak just offshore. A Category 3 system, Irene spun her spiral right past the coast I’d grown up on. It wasn’t the most powerful or devastating hurricane I, or anyone had seen...
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Resilience, Remembrance, and Lane 3

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Today is my son's 17th birthday. I’m watching him swim deliberately, doggedly. He, as always, is swimming his heart out. We are at a swim meet in Greensboro, North Carolina. Greensboro Aquatic Center. Lane 3. The same pool he’s raced in countless times. The same town my mom once called home—briefly and begrudgingly—when she attended what was then the Woman’s College of UNC. She was a Wilmington girl. A coastal soul just like me who missed the ocean every day she spent inland. Greensboro never really clicked for her, and I have to admit, I’ve inherited that discomfort. I used to think I hated this place. I still don’t love it. But it's complicated—because every time I come here, I remember things. I learn things. My mom used to talk about how proud she was to go to the Woman’s College—at the time ranked just behind Vassar. She loved what it stood for: women pushing forward, making space for each other. But she was also fuming when the college went coed (years after she graduate...
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(Rough Edit )First Southern Thunderstorm in a Long Time (Rough Words)

For over a year I think, in a variety of subconscious and conscious, ways I’ve been waiting for some fucking epiphany to appear (dictation said “help heal” proposed for epiphany) .Tonight, I finally think that happened. After leaving a toxic job, marital and familial devastation, plus a cross-country move I felt what seems so normal to me my whole life. A thunderstorm and a threat of a tornado that never comes... frogs and hopes of lightning bugs and everything North Carolina. Rooted in place. Everything in its right place.   We sat on the porch as a family and I’m not sure my wife or my son was content or less anxious or happy… I’m pretty sure they were not. But in my bones something finally reconnected. They both went back to their computers or games and I realized that that’s my  strong connection between place and felt experience was what was happening. I have not had that in so long.  I remember a Hal Crowther essay decades ago in The Independent ....I don’...
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Leaving the Northwest, Never Easy, I Saw the Light Fading Out

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    I write this post in-flight back home to Portland, Oregon where forest fires have decimated nearly one million acres of Oregon forest in the past week.   The air quality in Portland is beyond hazardous to breath and the city is under a declared state of emergency.   On my flight, I am also wearing an N95 mask to help protect myself and others from the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.   The United States continues to reel from its reckoning with racial injustices and societal division.   Not being able to breath is both literal and metonym in these surreal times.   I am not really sure what I am flying back to.   My wife and son have evacuated the city due to the toxic air quality and Portland has been shut down for months on end due to COVID-19 and nightly protests.   It’s been hard to sort through the delirium of my existence in a place that was once a welcome refuge and beacon.   I feel trapped by nostalgia and m...
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The Magic of Refraction

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One of the aspects of living on the West Coast that I still can't get enough of is the sun setting over the Pacific.  I grew up in southeastern North Carolina, seeing sunrises over the Atlantic...possibly taking them for granted.  The sun's daily greeting and parting salutation are different, but equally magical, experiences.  Both can be preceded by (sunrise) or followed by (sunset) a green flash.  I've never seen one at sunset, and long for that...enough to make me chase sunsets ad infinitum.  Here's a photo from last week in Cannon Beach, Oregon.  It intimates so many points of happiness and connection.  We did not see a green flash, but it does feel like we go right in matters of the heart  which is a supposed blessing of the green flash.
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Draft: A Christmas Story of a Boy's First Wetsuit

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FIRST DRAFT (30 minutes) My mom took this photo Winter 1984.  This was the first winter that I surfed and I'm holding my first surfboard, a Dick Brewer (shaped by Gary Linden).  The year before, had started surfing and was hooked.  I surfed every day, whether there were waves or not...I was in the ocean thanks to my mom, grandmother, and the parents of my surfing mates.  I had sat the previous winter out, due to not having a full suit.  As the fall turned into early winter, the water got colder and my Piping Hot 2 mm vest no longer kept me warm; I wanted/needed a full suit.  I couldn't sit another winter out.   During the summer and fall of 1983 my parents were fighting, probably due to my dad's gambling and unwillingness to get a job, as that would interfere with his bar and poker time.  My dad hated that I was a surfer for a variety reasons, mostly due to his ego wobbling under the weight of his son not being devoted to a "real sport...
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Green Paths and Golden Rules "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."  -H. D. Thoreau I spend a lot of my day on a school campus of some sort, be it grade school or university.  I've been doing so for my whole life basically, either as a student, teacher, or administrator.  For the past five years I have been spending time on school campuses as a parent, which is pretty cool when juxtaposed with my role as university professor/administrator.  Increasingly, one of the characteristics that I thrive on when I'm on any campus is its relationship to nature.  Here are just a few pics I snapped today. What I like about all of them is that they are the path I take to either teach or drop off a young scholar.  The peace, tranquility, and inspiration I derive from moving through these spac...
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