Love of Camping

 I used to love camping more than anything. My love of being in beautiful places has always been expressed in where I chose to live. Do you lead a lifestyle that expresses itself in where you live?

Dawn

Currently, I'm living in a beautiful place in Hawaii near a stream, under a roof in a "coffee shack." It's been around two years that I've been carrying my drinking and cooking water from a purified source and using ice in coolers for refrigeration. I have a two burner propane stove top that needs to be lit. My water for washing drips off the roof (fortunately, it's not hot water as it is in some places in Hawaii where the plumbing travels over lava rocks and heats up.) On the Big Island, you can pick your temperature by choosing where you live in altitude, and I'm 1450 ft. up from sea level. This means it never gets too cold and rarely gets too hot. Although I don't have hot water at home, I have been able to get regular hot showers at the huge local public pool, which isn't far away. My place is so remote, I don't even have an address. My friend quips it's "third world middle class" because movies and Internet are possible with the generator running. I probably have the lowest carbon footprint of anyone you know personally.

Spiderweb on the front lanai

Previous to this lifestyle, I lived in an RV while it was parked in a beautiful spot, but without movies and only library Internet. So this particular lifestyle has been a slight improvement. But it's been more expensive, mostly because I'm a half hour drive from a food store. I need a car because it's too far for me to walk straight uphill that is a few miles from where the bus stop is located. But I do enjoy the quarter mile "hike" to my shack from where I park my car by the road. The road to is too rough for anything but a four wheel drive vehicle. Keeping the grass short that protects the road from turning to mud is hot work.

Accepting this lifestyle hasn't been so foreign or unacceptable to me, given my previous love of camping. If I add the time up I've been doing some form of "camping," it appears that I've been living in an extended camping situation for over a decade.

Perhaps because of my current situation, it probably shouldn't be surprising that I don't go camping when I go away on vacation anymore...which is what I used to do every time I traveled anywhere. I think that I'm finally getting tired of camping. So now when I go away, I stay with friends in their houses for a little bit of "civilization" for a vacation from camping. When I come home, again I'm happy to be there, away from the B-flat hum of electricity - for awhile longer. Who would not want to come home to something like this?

Evening Rainbow

 

Touchy

 I used to feel self-righteous about the level that my culture doesn't want to touch each other - almost to the point of "forcing" or "training" people to allow me to touch them and to invite being touched. I wrote a bit about that on my other more public blog. 

There were many other actions I did that violated people's cultural expectations about autonomy, independence, personal space and respect that I needed to become aware of and problem solve.  Lots of times, who I was trying to change showed me their sharp teeth and I had to learn not to take it personally. I've had to learn so much about body language to be able to deal with feeling rejected, isolated and misunderstood. For instance, being near-sighted and not comfortable with glasses or contacts, I tended to stand too close to people when talking, encouraging them to back away from me or flee during a conversation.

When I finally gave in and accepted that it was OK that people in my culture did not want to be touched, I think others lost out on the value I could offer them about the importance of being touched. But they didn't seem to want it.

It happened at the point where the mother of my stepson gave me this little talk about how the people closest to children are the ones who are most likely to be sexually molesting them. She got it from the news, so I could have merely cast it off as a fad. But I couldn't help but take what she had said personally. Because it resulted in her son no longer wanting to enjoy being read to while sitting in my lap, or hang out with the family and friends on the couch draped over each other. It was as if his mother was, in a roundabout way, trying to accuse me personally of molesting her six year old son by cautioning him not to trust people about an issue which he had no clue what it meant at the time. It really made me angry. But it also made me realize how an accusation like that is pretty much the same as a conviction. So I decided to let sleeping dogs lie and stop trying to get people to touch each other more often. I think my decision at that time was a mistake, in retrospect.

But I'm still on the fence whether it's a good thing to be "training" people to accept being touched - or to just accept them the way they are. In the last year, I have been adopted by a stray cat who doesn't like being picked up. But over time, he's learned to accept me doing that for him to hoist him up to where he gets fed, without scratching me. I reason that some day, I'm going to have to pick him up when he's upset and I don't want him to freak out and attack me. But it's really just that I like his fuzzy ass in my arms and I like enjoying his trust. It's a bit like that with my friends too.

Animal Portraits!

Do you have a favorite kitty or canine? Send me a picture and I'll apply my artistry... It's not expensive - Only $100. per drawing, unframed. You'll have a lasting keepsake of your charming, loyal or playful animal companion.

Lucky

This is a drawing I made of a very lucky tabby kitty cat named Grover. He was rescued out of the engine of a car after he got tangled up when the car started. His people were nice enough to put Grover back together. Now they have a kitty who winks at them a lot.

Drawing Kitties

Black cats are often passed by in shelters in favor of other kitties who are more brightly colored ...because they're black, I guess. 

Besides being tricky to take a photo of a black cat, they're also tricky to make a drawing of too. 

The nicest kitty I know is black. Her name is Jasmine.  She's the second black cat I have met with that name. What makes Jasmine such a nice kitty is that she never gets mad at her person when she goes away. Instead, Jasmine gets mad at the person who "took" her person away for ten whole days. (The only person she ever bit!) 

This kitty has never scratched or bit anyone. I'd tell you her name, but I don't know how it's spelled. Minjka? I hear that this kitty I have drawn a picture of here is a one-person kitty. This person gets to have this kitty sleep on their bed and happily snuggle up to them and purr. But this kitty really doesn't want anyone to know she exists, because - well, you know how faithful a dog can be. This cat is faithful like a dog.

Wish I could purr. 

Mitigating the Interference of Humans

Many people like to "rescue" insects. When funning across spiders, ladybugs, bats or butterflies in their house, many people go to the trouble of catching them and taking them out into the garden rather than the easier remedy of killing them. Doing such a thing such as that makes me feel that I'm doing a little bit to accommodate the fact that humans have eliminated the habitat of many creatures. This is a story about a mysterious thing that happened one time when I did something like that...

look closer

While driving across country by myself in the summer, I stopped to camp in Colorado in Dinosaur National Monument. Because I was driving at night and sleeping during the day, and because of the heat, I was spending nights awake and still wearing my shorts.

My campsite was a beautiful one on a ridge. I had made a fire in the camp ring to pass the time by burning the wood lying there that had been left by the campers before me. Without a moon, I couldn't see well except for the light of the fire. It was so dark that I could see the light of the fire slightly illuminating the other side of the canyon if I looked away from the light for awhile.

So it took awhile before I noticed a group of large carpenter ants who were running around on one of the logs I had put on the fire. I laughed to imagine what it would be like for these ants, because they were milling around very fast as if they had to dance to not burn their feet on the slowly warming log. To give them a way of escape, I found another stick and placed it from the log the ants were on to the edge of the fire ring, which wasn't hot. Delightfully, they figured it out at once and made a fast march toward safety.

After arriving on the ground, most of the group of perhaps ten ants set off. One ant reversed direction to come toward me. Eventually the ant ran into the road block of my bare leg. It stopped and touched my leg with its anntennae, tickling me for perhaps ten seconds. Then it turned around and trundled off in the direction of the rest of its comrades.

What I've always wondered was, was that ant saying, "Thanks!"