reality for pausing: sea urchin graveyard

Thursday, December 4, 2008

sea urchin graveyard

why are there thousands of dead sea urchins on the shore of siesta key? this evening, moments before sunset i rode my bike to beach access 12. i was finally getting around to meeting my first sunset as a semi-official resident of sarasota. more startling than the sunset were the thousands of dead sea urchins on the beach. is this normal? super snark, on his own bike ride, saw the same occurrence further north on the beach. i've tried to research it online, but can only find a few more documented cases (march 08, for example) of uncountable amounts of dead sea urchins... but nothing official explaining WHY this is happening. i really can't imagine that this is natural. i'll see if i can find out more...

here's a link to wikipedia info about siesta key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siesta_Key,_Florida

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in other mediocre news, super snark found a grapefruit tree in a vacant lot near our home. he also asked a woman if we could pick some of her sour oranges from the tree in her yard. she was kind enough to say yes, so we made a big batch of grapefruit OJ (with honey and agave to sweeten the pucker) this afternoon.

2 comments:

Courtney said...: This looks like such fun! How did the juice turn out? And have you talked to the locals about the sea urchins--how strange.; December 5, 2008 at 12:47 PM
sassy said...: the juice i made filled about two thirds of the sombrero ice tea jar and we drank almost all of it in just over 24 hours! super snark made another batch last night. deeeeee-licious!; December 6, 2008 at 6:40 AM

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about this blog

Originally, I created this blog for family and friends to stay updated with our location and happenings while we were traveling the country. But only a few months after I began blogging about our travel adventures we drove into the sweet, slow town of Bisbee and ended up staying. We actually moved five times while living there, thanks to generous neighbors who asked us to long-term housesit in between our rentals. We are on the move once more, and so it seems we are habitually in transition.

Traveling and moving so often stirs up questions for us about what we really need to feel content, comfortable, and energized about life; it emphasizes for us our relationship and attachment to things--ours and other people's things that fill our living spaces; and it encourages me to appreciate the value in staying put, while realizing that frequent physical change underscores the uncertainty and occasions for choice that exist in all moments of life.

MARCH 2011

After a three-month pause for reflection, I'm coming back to this blog with a renewed perspective on what I want to share. I stopped blogging because with so many transitions happening in my life (moving, traveling, moving, and moving again in only a few months)--and, well just ordinary life happening--nothing seemed particularly notable for the sharing. I was feeling tired, overwhelmed, bored, dispassionate, stressed out, worried, weighed down. What did I really have to say? We all feel that way regularly enough, and who needs to hear more?

Pema Chodron touches on this in an article I just recently read in the March 2011 issue of Shambhala Sun: "When we look at the world around us--our immediate world and the bigger world beyond--we see a lot of difficulty and dysfunction. The news we hear is mostly bad news, and that makes us afraid. It can be quite discouraging" (48). Sometimes it takes unthinkable effort to stay encouraged by life when surrounded by so much obvious sadness and negativity--and it's difficult enough to summon the energy to reach beyond the anguish to share the beautiful moments. Maybe we even convince ourselves that the ordinary pleasures of life are insignificant in the face of such suffering. I don't understand the tricks of mind that I play on myself, but I know I repeatedly lose my vision for pausing in everyday reality, for seeing the smallest moments of magic.

Chodron tells us, there is a "basic queasiness that leads us to all kinds of self-destructive and other-destructive habits" and a "whole chain of events that emerges from our fear of uncertainty, of not knowing what in the world is happening or what is going to happen" (49). I feel an urgency to interact with this chain of events; to interfere knowingly--though perhaps innocently; to respond to my abounding fears and uncertainty with intent. I want to return to the primary assumption of this blog--a reality for pausing in: to not overlook or disregard the small points of joy, but to connect them; to appreciate the magic that is present in that which is obscured by routine; to actively express gratitude and to meaningfully alter the "chain of events that emerge" from my thoughts and practices, my surroundings.