en plein air

“Adopt the pace of nature.
Her secret is patience.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

With an extremely rare weekday off, I chose to stay in town and write outdoors. Not only that, I decided to write on the Eastern Promenade- a writing perch I’ve enjoyed for many years, long before having to move from my home in a suddenly-gentrified West End building. Indeed, last autumn- until it got too cold- I walked to the “Prom” as often as possible, getting away from the puny apartment, just to be able to look upward. Going outdoors to write allows me to transcend “addresses,” and their confinement. People travel to Portland from great distances, to be able to perch along Casco Bay. The scenery continues to be inspiring to me, just as it was for me last month in the Berkshires. Getting out gets me away from oppressive and bland spaces, as well as from the static recirculating air of the workplace. “Retreat” needn’t mean extensive travels; it’s really about stepping back and away from structure and demands. I could be from anywhere and come here to write, at the same time as being from here (which I am) and forget about annoying confines. The outdoors also provide an escape from alienation. Open, and accessible spaces strike a needed contrast from offices, phones, and lit screens- allowing me to listen to my thoughts and make some notes. Skies provide a taste of ceilinglessness (and how cooperative that my typewriter doesn’t redden or rewrite my made-up words).

Writing at the Eastern Prom, which includes a busy playground, brings to mind the day camps that were lights to my adolescent summers in New York City. Asphalt jungle childhoods comprise scarce amounts of trees and clean grassy spaces for playing and perching. There was always a lot of broken glass to sidestep, along with other detritus I stopped seeing after moving here to Maine to begin college. No doubt, the air was a comparison I could immediately make, and since then has always been rolled into what I’ve come to know as “the outdoors.” But humble as it was, day camp gave me a taste of things easily taken for granted in northern New England. In the city, the change of context brought kids like me on long yellow school buses out to the lush and landscaped parks of Queens- namely Forest Park, and for a number of years Kissena Park. Hardly any of the other kids were from my neighborhood: the blighted and dangerous projects in Corona; they were from just about everywhere else. But we were all together, frolicking outside, jumping through sprinklers, and fanatically playing baseball every single day. We were easy to please, once we had time and space. Perhaps some of us retain those traits. There was no structure and no technology- even for the camp counselors that watched over us, also serving as our umpires through all those raucous ball games.

From my high school years:
Above: Greenway Terrace, Forest Hills, New York City
Below: High School of Art & Design cafeteria, as we all wondered what was really in those sandwiches.

I’m one of those adults that can still think very much as I did when I was ten. The ache to have time and space to muse, around those fettered and adversarial school days, resembles the ache to have time and space to muse between job tasks and inane meetings. Free time becomes increasingly costly. For most of us, liberation is rare and at best incremental. Reflecting back, childhood redemption arrived in an unwitting combination when I was 13. My year began as I completed rigorous and intense religious studies, thus declared an adult at that rather young age. In my naive determination, I survived my final year in what happened to be New York City’s most overcrowded public school, which went by the heartwarming name of I.S. 61. Its schoolyard was surrounded by housing projects and scrapyards. The city was a good 2 decades away from gentrifying, and my daily walks to school were imperiled by gangs and packs of feral dogs. Almost all the threatening and thrashing ended for me with the post-middle-school summer at a healthy summer camp in the mountains of Upstate New York, followed by my parents’ purchase of a house in a strikingly beautiful and safe neighborhood- still right in the city. And finally, still at age 13, I began my sojourn of secondary education at the High School of Art and Design, on the tony east side of Midtown Manhattan. A whole lot in a short year. My father gave me my first bicycle, enabling me to run a lot of errands, including grocery shopping. I explored all the streets of Forest Hills and contiguous neighborhoods, also toting my first camera- which had been a 13th birthday gift.

My Rudge-Whitworth bicycle, which I purchased used for $20 to replace the new bicycle robbed from me by muggers.
Above: Photo I took in 1981, in New York City.
Below: Photo I took (I still have the Rudge) recently at Acadia National Park, Maine.

The bicycle symbolized freedom and an enduring sense of self-propulsion. I would joke about drinking a glass of milk, then bicycling the length of Queens Boulevard and over the 59th Street Bridge en route to a library I frequented on East 38th Street. All on one glass of milk, as I’d say. One afternoon, while bicycling with a neighbor through Flushing Meadow Park, I was accosted and mugged at knifepoint, forced off my shining new bicycle. I still remember this well, and can recall the sheer powerlessness of that event. At my summer job in a supermarket, I saved my earnings to buy another bicycle- a used one that I defiantly considered to be too ugly to draw any thug’s attention. I still have it today, driving it throughout the Portland area, including all the carriage roads in Acadia National Park. Self-sufficiency continues to be its own brand of liberation. Alas, and as I’ve learned, childish and childlike are really two different traits. At best, that early spirit endures by adaptation. As well, self-sufficiency shows its hard limits, particularly in the powerlessness of housing searches, employment scavenging, and economics. Recalling Saint Augustine, “I do not know what I do not know,” and thus I want to know what I don’t know. If there’s any way to improve things, it must begin with avoiding prior mistakes.

Outdoors on the 2nd floor terrace at the Boston Athenaeum.

How much of a factor are our interpretations that are based upon our subjective perceptions? Obviously, something entirely subjective is my taste for perching outside to write and read in 40-degree temperatures, which I find perfectly comfortable. Then there’s the fascinating aspect of how syntax plays a role in how we view and depict our discoveries. For example, traveling to a location with a variety of cameras allows me to photograph similar motifs with different formats. The images will look distinct from one another, based upon the tools I’m using. Same with writing: pencils, pens of varied construct, typewriters, and computers will each lead to results reflecting the tools’ influences. Within this is the example of journaling with a dip pen, requiring many regular pauses to re-ink the pen, while the mind continues its train of thought. Those pauses surely reflect what is written. I’ll often switch writing instruments, when I notice aridity in my words. Varying the vantage point is also as effective with writing as it is in photography. Getting outside amidst the swirl of nature permits for an appreciation of Emerson’s description about the patient paces of nature. Light, skies, and horizons will surely affect how I interpret what I see, and how I interpret my thoughts. In a similar sense, I write during my mid-day breaks inside the Archives stacks, as well as aboard lurching city buses. What I notice and the ensuing words are affected by their situations of notation.

When I’m not on the job, and I turn away from doomscrolling online searches for apartments and employment, while the blaring and trampling from upstairs disturbs the peace, I know to go outside. Beneath the skies, there are no upstairs. Life gets to return to looking open-ended as it did when my friends and I would lie on our backs in green and sunny Kissena Park, just talking and looking up at airplanes going to and from LaGuardia. The paces of nature are surely not those of such humans as those among us who use the expression, hurry-up-and-wait. Coaxing the inertia out of the wheels of progress is exhausting. During the thick of childhood, time slogged like a schoolday. It felt endless. In retrospect, that was a brief period of time- its space on my timeline diminishes as the adventure continues. Looking back exclaims the necessity of looking ahead. My decades of tireless efforts have yet to pave ways to my profoundest wishes, to exercising and really seeing my best abilities coming to fruition. How close is success? Is it completely out of reach? I’m daring to believe it isn’t, notwithstanding my scarce resources and lack of influence or allies. Echoing Saint Anselm’s prayer in the Proslogion, “I have still to do that for which I was made.” Yet, the stuff of eternity does not include accolades or material. The moment and all subsequent time stands for me to redeem. Knowing how to redeem liminal time is a daily and constant challenge. Having little more than faith and gumption, I’m left to heeldigging trust, insisting upon finding the sacred in the ordinary. Such thin rations need the light and rain of the outdoors, for the vines of latent presence to proliferate and provide.

simple and plain

“A vocabulary of truth and simplicity
will be of service throughout your life.”

~ Sir Winston Churchill

Voyaging through the present pandemic is now beyond the half-year mark. Places of embarkation are long out of view. Horizons are yet to reveal lands of safe arrival. We were all told this would be a long haul; now we’re really seeing it, but are yet to see the other end of this tribulation. In short, the duration of this indefinite and provisional time is unknown. Respecting the rules concerning quarantining and traveling, all my scenery is limited to being very close to home. There’s my apartment, then there are the views from my apartment, the little streets nearby, and the ocean. Living on a peninsula, looking out to the Atlantic is how I can see horizons these days. Navigating these times is that part of a sea crossing during which traces of terra firma are not visible. All that tangibly remains is the going; the baroque philosopher Suárez would’ve said the transition between substances is the modal distinction. And the transit is somehow an entity. Had he lived in a place like the Maine coast, he might’ve left us observations about boat wakes. But the present is one of being at sea.

Enduring these months is a learning experience of what to eliminate or change. There are shortages and there are pinched resources. Less money, in the face of inflation and reduced pay, but less to buy. Three full tanks of gas in my car, in six months. Having less causes a discipline of needing less. As the workplace began requiring a weekly on-site workday, I’ve simply treated my department like a quarantine: A straight-out eight-hour day, with granola bars and thermos of coffee. There are no places to go for lunch, anyway. Then it’s become two days on-site. More granola bars for the perpetual motion. I just want to get the work accomplished, plain and simple. Perhaps it’s an imposed austerity, but the workplace is the place to get work done; there is no more socializing, and it’s hard to tell how much longer the situation will last. I’ve noticed myself working faster and more strategically, as I cram all I can into those hours. Working from home is no less industrious, but it’s much safer. Most of us are under pressure to make the best of a bad situation. I’m grateful, at least, to be working. Life is surely muted and compromised, but I’m always brought to step back and consider this context when I see the clusters of those encamped in the city park with no place to call home. The pandemic forces us to learn to not take tomorrow for granted.

Along with adapting my perspective as necessary reactions to these times, there remain ways to turn the can’ts into how-abouts. For things that can’t be done, how about this-or-that? I’ve occasionally made my desk at home look like a table in a café. The price is right, and I chose the music myself. No traveling has meant no healthful, renewing retreats; my last sojourn was in late January, and there’s no telling when I can do this again. I tried a “virtual pilgrimage,” offered by a contemplative community in France. There were reflective texts, art works, even views of mountain scenery. Well-intended, indeed, but melancholic for me to be away from fellowship, the aromas of the woods, and the promise of the upward roads. Not every can’t has a compensating how-about. This recent half-year has been a combination of restlessness, sedentariness, and exhaustion. Yet, still, I’m very conscious of my hope to be able to write about this odyssey after it becomes safe again to move about and congregate normally.

Survival thus far has meant isolating, doing without, muting energies, wearing a facial covering when outside quarantine, and noting the passage of irretrievable time. And then there’s simplicity. Ambiguous, to be sure. The first sentence in this paragraph lists some of the negative aspects in the unfortunate simplification of daily life. Up against this, positive simplicity needn’t be portrayed as the upside of down. To continue simplifying every side of life is the most responsible thing I can do, leaving some room for creature comforts. After all, this voyage is about survival and sanity. But the positive side of plain and simple is in finding the good in the unextravagant. Running my nuts-and-bolts errands, such as what I call “stealth grocery shopping,” on a weekend day at 6:30am- an ideal time to socially distance- I ponder the better sides of basic. Stopping for a treat at my favorite doughnut bakery, steeped in the perfumes of pastries and so many flavors, I chose a plain doughnut. No doubt, these are fantastic in their plainness, such that I could taste the nutmeg. A old-fashioned just-made plain from Tony’s has the slightest crunch; perfection in its very simplicity.

Shaker Community: Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

Just up the road apiece from here is the world’s last Shaker community. In the 19th century, a member of that community wrote the song “Simple Gifts,” which is known around the world. It begins with:

‘Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free;
'Tis a gift to come down where I ought to be.

For the Shakers, simplicity is regarded as a liberating gift. It’s a gain along the pilgrimage of life. This kind of perspective is also found among many spiritual communities and monastic orders. A Quaker’s reference to a person as plain is a great compliment. I remember an elder of the Portland Friends Meeting speaking reverently about a person he admired as being “substantial,” and having “deep roots.” A beautiful, eloquent plainness.

Whether it was during many years of being extremely busy in social circles, or now in spartan isolation, I’ve seen the value of keeping things simple. This is how thought processes and methodologies retain clarity and structure. That “gift to be simple,” as the Shakers taught so many to sing, is also the grace to be very clear in thought and intention. Simplicity, like honesty, is great cause for taking stock. And when we say “simple as that,” we’re describing something highly complex! A photograph such as the one I made of the coffee, journal, and doughnut (at the beginning of this essay) may be “deceptively simple.” The composition is designed so that viewers’ eyes move through and around the image, not landing statically in one place. Simple and somehow elaborate.

Contending with this global health crisis demands compromises, paring-down, simplification. When I stop to write in my journal, noticing how quiet downtown streets have been for months- in a part of the world that always has bustling summers- that’s when I realize the complexity of my tactics that have centered around regaining semblances of normal. The comforts are humble, but their meanings are profound: writing, reading, sending and receiving letters, music on the radio, familiar foods. Parallel to my hours of compressed work commitments is a conscious fermenting with hope to emerge from this as one who will be better cultivated. The basic is the basis, and the most understated forms of modal distinction are conduits to real treasure: written words and spoken words, sounds, tastes, musings, prayers. A Franciscan Brother in France once said to me, “Go to God with trust, simplicity, and affection.” I could gather that beneath his phrase were strata of education, lived experience, and deep roots. From such complexities traversing the cycles of time, the simplest solid truths emerge.