Going to the city…
SITTING IN THE ALBANY TRAIN STATION
I am just now sitting in the Albany train station, waiting for a train to ‘the city’. We feel we need to touch base with the outside world now and then, and experience the ‘cultured’ life.
I received notification by email that my organic potatoes are arriving tomorrow and I won’t be at home, + the temperatures are going to be freezing at night. Gardening in the Adirondacks is a challenge, as is living and doing everything in general. That’s part of why I love it so. Nothing comes easy, and I feel it makes me appreciate everything so much more. You learn to go to the grocery store every two weeks, make a list, plan ahead.
There are the dark months for contemplating, maple sugaring, spring fishing, spring planting, black flies, amazing summer days, then fall that is the best of all and picking cranberries, hunting season, and it goes around. The secret is that everyday, it’s beautiful, and we don’t need all the things at Wal-Mart they are trying to sell you. They say you will “live better”, DON’T BELIEVE THEM! Each day of the year, year after year, it’s amazing in the mountains, and I am in awe of living in nature.
On top of that, I have a great part time job, working at The AC, with energetic people who are creative, dedicated, and always smiling. As an artist myself, the mountains are inspiring, and being the Gallery Director in a town of less than 100 residents is awesome.
ON THE TRAIN
I’m on the train now, there’s human dirt around and it’s not The Arts Center, I mean not that it’s always clean there. Since I have been working there, for three months, we have cleaned and organized old spaces that are now renewed. In the Arts Center it’s clean artist ‘stuff’, which is always kind of cool and smells like oil paint and old easels and it makes you feel creative.
On the train, it’s just soiled carpet and a hint that someone smoked cigarettes here long ago. I am already longing for the woods and the moss to step upon and to see the first fiddlehead fern, ready to eat for dinner.
We just finished sugaring last week, that’s collecting maple sap from buckets, stomping around the woods, noticing something new everyday. Then, you have to sit in the sun and rain and boil forever. Forty gallons on sap later, you have a gallon of delicious maple syrup, handmade from the natural environment.
PULLING INTO PENN ST
In contrast, as we approach ‘the city’ the more ruin I see of what humans have made; garbage, piles of chemicals, fallen steel, and concrete; it’s very un-Adirondack.
COMING HOME
So, we are getting ’cultured’, we just left the Met, a wonderful place. We wandered the ancient realms, and what I find amazing is that I don’t think we have really advanced that far as a culture. I see the beauty and fine quality of art and objects produced so long ago, and I wonder what have we accomplished 5000 years later?
Granted, we have electricity, machines, and memory chips, and without them I could not be writing this blog, but we still have war, bad politics, and suffering.
Instead of hand blown glass, we have plastic dishes that are mass-produced in China, affordable to all. How can shipping half way around the world, using fossil fuels be that cheap that we can’t afford to buy things made in America? We can import what is dispensable, and what will become garbage that can never decompose, and we can build concrete buildings instead of living from the land… At what cost are we creating ‘stuff’?
Oh, I am missing the mountains, I am climbing back home on the train tomorrow, nothing like a little bit of ‘the city’ to make walking in the woods feel so good.
