Sandra Gail Lambert

Wake Up Without Losing the Dream

In this video, Henry Miller annoyingly talks over, corrects, and patronizes Anais Nin and she, annoyingly, lets him. Still, brilliant misogynist writers can inspire me. Miller instructs us on how to "wake up without losing the dream" in the most practical of terms (don't open your eyes all the way, stumble to your typewriter, etc.) but, for me, the phrase had different resonance.

I think that's because I'm heading off to the Everglades this week. Kayaking past mangroves trees that bear live young or over mats of periphyton where bacteria can photosynthisize or reaching up towards epiphytic cactus that wrap themselves around the branches of watery poison wood trees - it is a dream, a delicate one. Those same mangrove trees are diminished by rising waters and the sensitive periphyton is our first and best indicator of nutrient damage. "To wake up without losing the dream" seems to me a way we can travel through the natural world balancing joy and despair.

 

"Internalized landscapes remembered from travels"

 

This quote seems worth the whole, so-much-fun, trip to Santa Fe.  It's from Nancy Scheinman's artist's statement.  I never did get to see her work since the gallery was up many steps, but she has nevertheless inspired me. 

"Internalized landscapes remembered from travels." These essays I've been writing - I think this is what I'm trying to do.  

Just so you know, I'm not having any problem with jet lag, but my palate, whew, it is having a hard time leaving Santa Fe and adjusting to my home cooking.  Today, it wants that beef in pomegranate vinaigrette and fufu with goat stew from Jambo Cafe, the East African Restaurant. 

I'm Packed!

 
By tomorrow, I'll have made my first airline trip since 1992.  By tomorrow, I'll be in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I'm agog, I tell you, agog. 

Geologic Time Scale

Abyssal plains, block disintegration, planetesimals, and upwelling mantles - these are the latest additions to my vocabulary.  They're from the geology texts I'm reading in anticipation of a trip to Santa Fe.  Besides the words (seamount, subduction, spreading ridges), there is the extravagance of the geologic time scale to be fit into the folds of my brain. 

It helps that I'm used to the "publication time scale."  At first, I'd send something off and right away hold my breath, but now it takes six months before I think maybe that I should be hearing something sometime.  Right in this moment I have a full manuscript out to a publisher (query in January, request for full in May) and an anthology possibility (submission sent in February, "recommended for the second tier of editorial review" message this month).  Anytime now I should hear if my little planetesimals have been captured into anyone's gravity field. 

P.S. Does anyone anywhere understand the magnetic fields of the Earth?    

Bringing Her Home

Today I'm taking my mother's ashes to Georgia.  We're using her beloved teapot and cosy as an urn and interring it alongside my father's in the Marietta National Veterans Cemetery. 

And then it's one final trip to Roswell, Georgia for a memorial service.  For thirty-eight years this is the drive I would make to visit her.  And this is where I accompanied her to the sale of her precious house, loaded her (She was sobbing.) into my car, and delivered her to a retirement community here in Gainesville.  She was angry about this for a long time.

It feels good to bring her back.    

I am going to the Everglades!

 
I used to go every January.  I've whined about how wrong it is that I never get down there anymore.  No more whining.  My friend Ruby and I are stuffing both our kayaks in the back of my van and going to Flamingo.  We'll be there for the new year.  And yes, I've been upfront with her about the mosquitoes and cold showers.  She is not deterred. Especially once I mentioned the kayak trip on Florida Bay to see the mangroves where roseate spoonbills roost.   

The campsites don't have electricity so my writing goal is to have plenty of pages done on the current project.  I'll print them out for fussing with.  And, I'm thinking, being without computer means I should be in the writing moment more, fill yellow pages with what is around me, and maybe an essay or short story will emerge.     

Make your own writers retreat

I'm off to Little Talbot Island State Park with my yellow pads, computer, butterfly field guide, kayak, and camera.  The best writing I've ever done, especially the beginning parts of a project, has been done propped up by pillows in my van's bed.  At this park, the view is of salt marsh.  But across the road, where I'll probably stroll most dawns, sometimes, hopefully, after writing since four in the morning, the view is of the sunrise over the ocean. 

And this trip, I've enhanced my do-it-yourself writing retreat by bringing in one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite editors.  And best of all, besides all that writing stuff, they've promised to cook a dinner.  Yum. 

All these photos are from previous trips to Little Talbot.