Mary Panttaja

Sitting on a ridge after dinner (maple schezwan pork with garlic green beans and salad; Seghesio Zin). We still need to wash the dishes but the ambiance of the sunset is hard to pass up. The sun has dropped behind Mount Whitney and we are watching the shadows climb up the Inyo Mountains.

We are between The Alabama Hills and Mount Whitney Portal. We visited Lone Pine today. (I want to call it a village because it’s small, but village sounds like a corner in Vermont, and doesn’t fit our hot, raggedly, dusty small towns.) We hiked up part of the Mount Whitney trail—just a little to get a taste. It feels good to be able and confident about taking off on a trail from 8400 feet and head up. It wasn’t very steep, an easy trail. And everyone else there was more able—a common problem when you get off the beaten track—but we headed up an hour and then back down. Trouble with my knee—the muscles seemed to want to freeze up. But all good.

We are here in the Alabama Hills (named by miners who were Confederate sympathizers after a war ship) because, through a weird adjustment in time and space in my storyline, I needed somewhere John and Sarah could camp in March. So we ended up in this desert. The Alabama Hills have been the site of numerous film projects. A very strange and unearthly place of rock formations and desert chapparal.

The moon is up and I guess we’ll have a full one before we leave the desert. Tomorrow we hope to take a run up to Bishop and see the Galen Rowell studio, Mountain Light. He was an inspiring artist/adventurer who really seem to have caught his updraft. I am in the midst of the retrospective book they published after he and his wife died in the plane crash.

The mountains are a gentle fading pink against a wispy cloud cover—dark is coming. The quail are ‘chawaka- ing’ in the brush.

Saturday April 28th

Driving across the central valley on our way to the desert:

• As we come down the hill from Altamont pass, the flatness of the land before you is abrubt. Out of the winding curving coastal range—the horizontalness impresses itself upon you.
• 92 degreees
• The western reaches of the San Joaquin valley are so desperately dry. It’s only the end of May and I am very sure that no grass has grown here this year. It must be last year’s scrapings —brown and gray and dusty. The rolling hills are shorn close like old grey stubble.
• 94 degrees
• A small stand of young steers stare up from their fence line at the hill before them. They are sure they are lost for in the heat there is no shade, no visible water, and nothing possible for them to eat. A forlorn mystery hangs about them. What are they doing here?
• 96 degrees
• The vineyards and the almond orchards are startling in this dessert, verdant green, water oozing from the pipes that drain the giant canal along which the highway runs.
• 98 degrees
• A black and dead almond orchard of formerly full-grown trees— thousands of trees—despair, all hope lost—clearly someone has just shut off the valve of their artificial life’s blood and they are not fit to live in the place without it.
• 10 miles down the road someone is planting new baby almond trees; the meaninglessness of pipes and ownership and regulations.
• The aqueduct has little roaps with buoys across as it passes beneath the freeway: don’t swim beyond this point. Could you float it into Los Angeles. Though the turbines, of course.
• A mirage appears to the east—a vast lake of water and rushes.
• 100 degrees—only April 28th
• Someone is planting nopales along the fence—they, at least, look like they belong here.
• Kern County Line: chamisa (a desert shrub) appears along the roadside; dust devils stack up on the horizon— or maybe a line of tractors plowing five mile long waterlesss rows of dust.

Good news. It’s a beautiful, organized dustdevel swirled into a lean tower…not a truck or a tractor or a car.

The is such a strange place. If you brought immigrants from the east coast here instead of to Palo Alto or Monterey or San Diego, they would never dream of moving to California. No wonder Jim’s family kept moving west until they hit the ocean. �

So, we’re traveling. And working. A little. Sitting now with a cup of coffee in a little cafe in Lone Pine.

We both got in two hours yesterday while driving. (Okay, one of us works while the other drives.) I’m writing. Jim’s researching. Carrying your network with you is a dream. Though last night at Lake Isabella we didn’t have any cell coverage. That was okay though, because we spent two hours yesterday in traffic backups because of serious accidents—so we barely got in a bike ride before the sun set. Cooked dinner and off to bed. Not a lot of extra time to work.

So this week’s postings are a test to see what can be accomplished while traveling. The next post was written while driving yesterday as well as a post for Catching the Updraft! which includes illustrations. (CTU is also now linked to the domain updrafting.com. “Updrafting” has much higher specificity in the search engines.)

Heading up the Whitney Portal Road to camp—maybe up there a couple of days and might not have cell service. I guess that’s the test.

I was in the orchard this afternoon checking out the fruit set. It looks good; especially after last year’s debacle. We had one (count it) Santa Rosa plum that fell off the tree before it ripened. This year there will be hundreds. There are dozens and dozens of tiny red fruits on the pear trees. The apple set and the oranges aren’t done yet—though because of the incredible bloom, it should be good.

I heard a shrill scream overhead. And then a second. I look up to see a large white-tailed kite, brilliant against the sky, sail right over my head. Followed by a second. They proceeded to chase and circle around our hill. They swirled and chased up into the sky. And then they seemed to clasp their feet and, in a spinning cartwheel, began to fall out of the sky with a fling and flare of white wings. Down almost to the tree tops they cascaded.

In the last minute, they separated and began their climb back into the sky.

Are they brave? Do they need courage to take such a plunge? Or are they simply surrendered to who and what they are? They are so completely themselves, so completely the embodiment of white-tailed kite-ness; completely free of any ideas of worry or fear. And as they perfectly reflect their kite-ness, it turns out that they really are safe, and that any idea of danger or safety we might have for them isn’t meaningful to their lives.

They were so free and so beautiful.

In reviewing the comments on the earlier noted Guy Kawasaki post, I found this interesting site:  The Janus Center: Changing the World by Changing Its People: The Hero Workshop.  Matt Langdon also picked up on the reference to teaching our children to be heroes-in-waiting. It seems to be what he does. It’s a bit of a compelling idea.

Guy Kawasaki posted his interview with Dr. Philip Zimbardo this morning.

I love this concept for all of us, not just children:

“…to promote in our children this heroic imagination, to make them accept the mantle of being a hero-in-waiting for a situation that will come along sometime in their lives…”

A “lite” version of the bodhisattva vows to help others—”for those who wish to go across the waters, may I be a boat, a raft, a bridge”.*

* From Shantideva’s prayer in “The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life”.

I was reading the latest Gary Snyder book last night: “Back on the Fire”. It contains a series of recent essays on a variety of topics relating to nature, art, writing, and the preservation of our world. (Snyder has always been one of my favorite thinkers and important resources. I discovered once that a close friend and I were two young adults who actually wanted to be Gary Snyder. Strange. But then again not every young poet has a famous novel written about his life: “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac is actually about Gary Snyder. So we actually wanted to be the hero of a story.)

In his essay, “Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder”, Snyder talks about poetry and literature in relation to the language and patterns of the natural world: ecology, environment, nature.

We speak of the ‘ecology of the imagination’ or even of ‘language’, with justification: ‘ecology’ is a valuable shorthand term for complexity in motion.

He quotes a wonderful passage from “The Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry” by Jed Rasula which develops a metaphor for the artistic process, but which can also be used to understand the creative process in all its forms.

Detritus cycle energy is liberated by funghi and lots of insects. I would then suggest: as climax forest is to biome, and fungus is to the recycling of energy, so ‘enlightened mind’ is to daily ego mind, and Art to the recycling of neglected inner potential. When we deepen ourselves, looking within, understanding ourselves, we come closer to being like mature ecosystems. turning away from grazing on the ‘immediate biomass’ of perception, sensation, and thrill; and reviewing memory…blocks of stored inner energies, the flux of dreams, the detritus of day-to-day consciousness, liberates the energy of our own mind-compost. Art is an assimilator for unfelt experience, perception, sensation, and memory for the whole society. It comes not as a flower, but—to complete the metaphor—as a mushroom: the fruiting body of the buried threads of mycella that run widely through the soil, intricately married to the root hairs of all the trees. ‘Fruiting’—at that point—is the completion of the work of the poet, and the point where the artist reenters the cycle: gives what she or he has re-created through reflection, returning a ‘thought of enlightenment’ to community.

The concept of recycling and liberating neglected inner potential really resonates with me, that inner potential really being an updraft of our own lives (or in the life of our societies) with which we have not really connected.

We flew home from Seattle today. A beautiful day at both ends: starting on the ferry from Bainbridge Island, ending with the drive up the lane through the wine country, the Russian River idling flowing by the side of the road. I napped and worked the first half of the flight, taking down some notes on Illumine feedback, adding things to my task list. But at one point I looked out the window and was startled.

The light was so bright and clear. Every little bit of the earth was illuminated and stark. More snow than I expected dusted the tops of the Siskiyous, ridges winding east to west across the edge of northern California. After a while, we came across a lake which, after study, I resolved to be Clear Lake in Lake County. Mount Konocti standing sentinel on the southern shore. Now I knew I was home. I could follow the highway and then the Russian River south to the Alexander Valley, tracing its radical meanders that carve up the neighborhoods where I live. But I couldn’t deplane here, and so we passed by my town, and continued south over Marin.

The mud of Tomales Bay was greasy in the reflecting sunlight, each drift and swirl in the sandy mud another smear of color. The San Francisco Bay was startling in its multiplicity of hues—mud in swirls, sandy bottoms, drifts of teal water, all lace-edged with the snow white bloom of the waves crashing on the shore. The sharp daylight etched each house and road and trail into a bold image of the earth.

After we cruised over San Francisco, we banked left to head back to the airport and circled the salt flats at the end of the bay. So many colors and patterns I couldn’t track them. Red, oranges, and pinks of the salt ponds, colors of algae and brine shrimp. Native mud flats in ochre and green, intense fractal patterns of water traces and creeping plant growth. Every plot was worth a photograph.

I don’t know why the colors and images where so brilliant today—was it the sunlight or the air? Or was it my willingness to see? Most likely, a little of both.

The expo wasn’t large—there were more vendors at a utility industry conference I attended in March. The topics covered seemed to be:

• Development tools for Web 2.0 applications
• Development platforms (software as a service) which included tools
• Interactive writing platforms (wikis, primarily)
• Social networks with different spins on how to manage one’s digital life
• A few consulting companies in this space

My perusal of the expo floor and the offerings suffered from the variety of my interests. Right now, I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for—I’m looking to discover what it is I’m looking for. So, here are a few things that caught my attention:

• Buzzword. I had heard about them and, as a writer, I was very interested in seeing where they are going. I will be very excited to see their new editor—I can image many ways to make the writing life better. I was hoping for an editor that could be embedded into a larger application that could manage the meta-structural context of my writings (on which I’ve written before). I was also hoping for an editor that was open enough for me to manage the target object type and where it lands—an xml database, a blog, a wiki. I’m getting a little grim with working with a variety of not-so-efficient editors. So while, I’m still interested in it as an editor, it doesn’t look like it will meet my other demands.
• Yoono. These seemed like nice guys. Another thing I’m looking for is a way to capture and share my research with my partners. We want to choose a platform for our evolving information base. They are currently in a private beta of a social-based home page where you can track your site/links/research and share it with friends or the world.
• Coghead. I stopped by the Coghead booth. Coghead is an online application development tool for Microsoft Access-like database applications. They host the resulting application for a subscription fee. It’s a clever idea in an always-connected world. They were demoing a pretty complicated application. I tested the early beta and felt a little short-circuited by the limitations; it will be interesting to evalute and see where they’ve gone with it. The application in the demo looked like it had more depth.
• Wikis. I briefly looked at Mindtouch and Socialtext, but didn’t go into a lot of detail. They don’t seem to provide one feature I’m looking for in my personal writing environment, but are leading wiki-platforms. Wikis are group collaborative writing environments that organize the material through tagging. I will be evaluating for their appropriate use for our business.
• Adobe Apollo. This is something we are very interested in. Jim’s team at Sapias has been using Adobe Flex (which deploys in the Adobe Flash player) for their relatively complex application which runs as a “rich internet application”. As a developer-geek, Flex looks like a lot of power and control (and fun) for a development environment. Apollo then allows one to deploy Flex and Flash applications not only as web-based applications but also to the desktop for disconnected work. This is a new area for web developers, though it’s a circle back to the applications we were building in the nineties. If we decide that our future includes choosing a platform, the Adobe Flex/Apollo direction would be high on the list.

What I didn’t find was any type of meta-structural writing tool (context, threads, streams, etc.), or the components to put one together. I obviously have to look into other markets and technologies. Some of the responses I got was that folks in the areas of ontologies and semantics have basically “given up” on trying to solve the problem I described to them. We’ll see. I’ve got more research to do.

New topics for the rest of the week.

Yesterday morning I headed out of our hotel in downtown Seattle to hit the street and head down to the harbor. Having been writing for a few hours, I kept noticing things I wanted to note down—will have to get some technology working to help me out in these situations.

Some of what I noticed:

• A young woman was settling herself in front of Barneys New York. She was striking with her very delicate skin, pale red rastafarian-like hair (not unlike my granddaughter’s). She was having a gentle moment with her dog, comforting him, settling him in on his cushion next to her. She spread her blanket and sat carefully. She began to unpack her violin and I saw the glimmer of a silver flute. Everything arranged, she began to put the flute to her lips. I caught her eye as I turned back to look again.
• There was Lush—the soap store. And I had walked blocks out of my way in SF the day before to check it out. We like their hard travel shampoos and travel with them everywhere. I was hoping to find other useful travel accessories—but most of their options are a little bit extravagant for me. I remember this company from about 30 years ago—having long ago used their little round tins of solid shampoo.
• Seattle waking up is cleaner and more pristine than most cities I know. Having shuffled around San Francisco in the lunchtime crowds this week, it felt very shiney and barely used.
• An image caught my eye. A Miro-like picture framed in a window—a floating sphere, a stem, a flower, orange against cream. I notice that there is a series of them. I look again and see spring hats and flowers in a department store window. Someone with a wonderful eye has taken much care.