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I have a lot to say. I’ve got so many thoughts to put down! Where do I begin? You came and went yesterday and I barely noticed. I love how happily people on social media post Happy October! for you, but they don’t do it so much for any other month. There is something about you that feels like beginning. You in the sky in Arizona look better than anywhere else I’ve been so far. Long blue clouds that look like a repeat of the mountains. Repeat repeat. I’ve been thinking lately about what I am capable of. It’s funny that I can imagine myself in all these situations I could not imagine myself in before. Little things that were scary are now kind of exciting, like stepping foot into new territory that turns out not to be so unpredictable after all. I feel like I’ve opened a box, and there are lots of things I want to do. I want to try all the easily achievable experiences in life, like talking to people on planes, and stepping in public fountains, and following a bee to its hive, and seeing more than a thousand stars. I want to be able to crochet a scarf, and to be able to say something true and clear without room to take it back. There’s a storm approaching outside, so the windows in my office, where I am now, are a dull, dark lavender. They shake. You can hear the rain beating harder and softer from the little piece of the hurricane that broke off. The ceiling leaks in one spot.
October, you have a tendency to be dramatic here. Clouds are clear and billowy and numerous and every kind of texture, all over and forever, sometimes many different kinds along the same horizon, undulations high and low, a heavy vertical blur and a smattering of cotton, darks and brights and many blues, a line of blobby brightness, a smothering gray, two shafts of light. Then the next day there is nothing. Just blue above and I can’t tell what my eyes are focusing on. How far does it go? Just by the sky the days seem so distinct and vibrant. There are blue blue days and then a descending fog, showers and wind and no sunset, no mountains, no horizon, and then puddles for a day and back to the endless blue.
I sprained my ankle recently, for the first time. I didn’t realize it at first, but I’d been walking in the dark in an unfamiliar building, and stepped down abruptly to a step I didn’t realize was there and felt very sharply how careless I’d been. I limped to my desk and waited out the pain for 20 minutes, thinking it would go on forever. Afterwards my foot felt kind of weak but it was walkable. I don’t know why I didn’t think to look at it. The next day as I got into bed, I happened to glance down and saw that the left side of my left foot looked alarmingly large. I checked my other foot to make sure that’s not what ankles always look like, and realized with a dawning satisfaction that this must be a sprained ankle. It didn’t hurt much anymore, but the next day the lump grew to the size of half a tennis ball, which was fun to look at from different angles, and then abruptly the swelling went down and left a crescent shaped bruise. This was one of many first experiences I’ve had here. Here was also where I had my first bee sting, my first scorpion sting, first prick from a cactus (and many after), first sight of a bobcat, a javelina, a coyote, a mule deer, a roadrunner, a packrat, a wild snake, a quail, first experience of how the desert smells after the rain. Did you know, there are little rivers in the desert after it rains, in the wash?
Today I'm home, in my temporary home, which I will be leaving soon for new adventures. What an exciting, scary, optimistic time. I met someone a week ago when I was in Wisconsin, who I think may be fearless. This person was doing a lecture on architecture in Rwanda but I was more interested in his life. When I first met him next door, he said, Hi neighbor! We waved at each other, two feet apart in our doorways, and I said I’d heard he was the speaker for tonight, and he said, widening his eyes, Yes. Well. That’s what I’ve heard. After the lecture, while we all milled around with wine and little plates of cheese, I asked him how he could say and how he could be totally unafraid of certain things that make most people anxious. He said, smiling, that he thinks his problem is that he has always been extremely optimistic. Even when growing up. Later he said, exasperated, that is the problem with this country! People are afraid of certain problems because they don’t know what the solution is, so they don’t go forward to deal with it. But if it’s a problem that has to be solved, that we can’t not deal with, then we must go forward to collect it. So with architecture and probably life, he’s used to throwing himself into problems without knowing what the solution might be. I said often I want to be more prepared. He said everyone always wants to be prepared, but you should just go! We figure it out as we go. I think you must have a certain amount of trust in yourself to be capable of that, even with ample optimism. It’s easier to be self-defeating than to be optimistic—I’m not sure why people seem to link optimism with ease. My favorite part about him is that he is both an optimistic and a realist. When you tell a pessimist what they are, they say they are not pessimists, that they are realists. But optimists don't ever make that connection. Why is it believable that a cynic is more realistic, more in touch with the world? For this guy, optimism has better prepared him to deal with reality. Because he engages with things other people are afraid of. And gets a chance to see more of the world. He believes more things are possible, and so more things are possible. Doesn’t cynicism bat something down before it has a chance to succeed? It’s like people who reject themselves before others can do it for them. The world of possibility is so small. How does the light get in? Why is everyone so afraid all the time, he asked. With most problems, we are just dealing with people. When people are afraid, they close. So we must be open. Things are not so difficult. He takes the future as he goes. He said this drives his wife crazy because he never knows when his flight is. I asked how many flights he’s missed and he laughed and said, Surprisingly, only two! Because he has a general idea of when it’s coming up. As it approaches, he checks the time and remembers it more and more specifically, down to the week, then the day, the hour, the minute. He said he tries to focus on the present because he doesn’t see much of a point in focusing on the past or the future. Don’t we learn faster that way anyway?
I left that lecture feeling like I had listened to someone articulate something I already believed but that had not ever seemed so clear or so simple. It’s been a year and I’ve changed my philosophy, and I didn’t even realize I had a philosophy until it was suddenly different. Mainly, I’ve realized I trust myself to figure things out as I go. The world looks so much bigger that way. This letter’s been so long, can it count as two?
See you tomorrow,
Ruth
