Couch surfing....

It surprises me sometimes to realize that I am getting older.

That my mind and my body are different things.

I have been recovering from a re-injury of my knee. In college I had a ACL replacement, and apparently my knee decided it wanted attention again. So since New years I have been sitting on my couch, nursing a swollen knee, and traveling to Fairbanks for doctors appointments. The doc thinks I will have to have surgery again....

It has taken me a few weeks to go through the seven stages of acceptance of a major injury: denial, anger, annoyance, chocolate, depression, chocolate, and then realization that it will suck but it will pass. It always can be worse.

A few good things have come out of it though. I can't run away from my muse and apparently she has me in a headlock. Too many ideas can be as bad as no ideas though and so my laptop and sketchbook and ipad are littered with half thought through literal and digital notes to myself of ideas that will probably never be seen. I have read a few books since being couch bound, which has it's pros and it's cons.... I have caught myself staying up till the wee hours of the night with my nose glued to a virtual book and have suffered from the few hours of sleep I have gotten.

The bad part I guess is the mash of ideas and images and notes I have....that I have yet to arrange into anything coherent. The lack of completion gnaws at me. Eventually it becomes a sort of guilt, for doing everything only half way through....

So I thought that maybe for a few posts I can reveal my piles of notes in a random way....maybe it will strike some and maybe it won't. I do apologize to my high school speech and debate teacher Mr. Bartley, who has hammered into me the importance of organizing ones thoughts so they are coherent and rational..... I would also like to apologize to him because he has become THAT voice in my head.

This pile I call...'Being civilized'....

In a documentary I saw recently there was a section where an Inupiaq Elder sat talking to the camera guy, around him sat his family, he paused during his recounting of the history of the area and smiled as he tried to find the words that would describe the meeting of the western world and of his ancestors. After a few seconds of silence and contemplation....he replied... "I guess that's when we became 'civilized'"....and he smiled a tight little smile.

My husband traps in the winter. Many people believe trapping to be a cruel practice. But most people I think believe that because in their minds animals are very dumb. Very predictable. Very driven by things they cannot control. Like auto-minals, programmed by nature, unable to fight against our vast human intelligence. But I would argue that in order to trap an animal, you must love that animal. Love it Beyond. You must see their intelligence, intelligence granted by natural selection and thousands of years of survival. I see it in the way these animals become such a big part of my husbands world. I see it it the time and thought and respect and awe I see on his face. Last night he sat at the dinner table and told me about the wolverine. About how many babies the mother has, and how long they stay with their mother and what they meant and how it affects their borrowing practice. He told me about how they protect their food source. About how fierce of a creature they are, fighting grizzly bears and polar bears and fending of packs of wolves. He talked about the diamond pattern on their backs....and I wondered if any person who wore leather ever talked with such love about about where that leather came from...or even if anyone knew about what a cotton plants life consisted of....and even now I have the urge to google everything about cotton plants.....

An older friend mentioned to me once about how her and her gang of happy brown faced children went and visited a small village somewhere far west and south of us. They were visiting another family. They had harvested a caribou and had prepared a large pot of caribou soup. The two families sat around the table, watching their children laugh and play. When the food was done a woman from the other family went to the freezer and pulled out boxes of pizza pockets and hot pockets and started heating them in the microwave. She turned to my friend and assured them that they had enough for her extra kids, which my friend then replied, "my children will want caribou soup!" The woman was visibly stunned and told her that no young person ate caribou no more, that it was only for the older group as the young people did not like it. The visiting children gathered around the caribou stew pot and dug in with hunger, completely ignoring the pizza pockets. She was surprised to see an elderly woman at the table crying......

I got into a debate once with a loved one (who lives in a native village) about the practice of subsistence hunting. He believed that in this modern day and age there was no need to hunt anymore. That we were now 'civilized' and can get passed all that. I was mostly fascinated by his use of 'civilized.' I argued that being civilized had to do more with how we treated each other has human beings, than to the distance we are putting ourselves from nature. He argued that separating ourselves from nature was a sign of higher civilization, of evidence of evolving. I still am trying my darnedest to understand where this idea came from.....

What's-her-name Palin .....she said on drilling in ANWR: If a caribou needs to be sacrificed for the sake of energy independence...I say 'Mr. Caribou , maybe you need to take one for the team.'

I always find it puzzling when people talk to me about saving the wolves of Alaska. For one thing their population is stable and even overcrowding in some areas which is causing problems for those unfortunate to live nearby. They tell me it's because they are 'beautiful' and relate to me how they feel when they see an animal as powerful as these wolves are. But when I think of wolves I think of them in a completely different way. When I saw a tall lanky black wolf off my front porch, eyeing my dog in heat, iI saw how unafraid he was. I felt his intelligence. When we were out in the wild on a cold winters night, our snowmachines cooling. And the sound of wolves howling surrounded us, and fear burst bright in my chest, I did not think they needed protecting. Even the best hunters fled when a pack decided to surround them. I guess in a way I see them as equals, as part of the cycle, as a fellow predator. And that in itself is pretty different. I guess I don't see myself as dominant of them..... and to me the problem is a human one......

Random thoughts.

But they will probably change tomorrow....and the next day......who knows....