Christmas Wishes

This will mark my third Christmas as a Flotsam Diarist.

My third Christmas seeing the world through a different set of eyes. Eyes that seek out -- and thrill to find -- the unexpected connections in our world. Between nature's beauty & bounty and the threads we weave as we build our lives. Eyes that spy a glimmering grain of sand in my daughter's shovel on the beach and imagine it once high and proud on a now-lost mountainside. Eyes that see springtime rivers running strong with snowmelt, emptying into churning seas, nutrients mixing and spawning incredible plankton blooms. Blooms that feed an ocean and give us every second breath of life we take.

Eyes that grimace & wince at needless waste, thoughtless pollution, the harm we sow which our children and grandchildren will reap. Eyes that study the staggering costs of things we've been taught to call "cheap." That see, week after week, a gorgeous deserted cove ruined with newly-laid cast-offs of modern life.

I think of the incredible gift of being aware of the beauty around us, of a past that stretches back impossibly far, or a distant future that we are building today -- this very minute -- at the same time that it's molding and building us. The gift of knowing that there are forces far beyond us, and also that the smallest person can be the snowflake that starts the avalanche.

We may be the only species on Earth with the ability to ruin Earth. But we're also the only species that can appreciate it. To well up with emotion at a pink & golden sunrise; or feel the pull of the sea as we walk an undiscovered and unmarred stretch of shore; or smell the salt air and think on our distant ancestors and our distant descendants doing the same. To burst with the need to create art & song & beauty that had never before existed, in much the same way as we had never before existed.

To become bigger than the moment, bigger than we are.

To me, Christmas is a message of hope. A message that love and light are true things; that ugliness and shadow are mockeries that can't touch or harm those eternal truths. It's a message that the holiest and the highest could rest within a human heart. And that if we look inside, and then look outside again with new eyes, we might see glimpses of what we're all searching for. Guideposts.

The Flotsam Diaries isn't what I do; it's who I am. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

To you and yours, a very Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays!

XO

You Are(n't) What You Do

A few years ago, visiting Hadrian's Wall Country in northern England, I was talking with the landlord at the local pub.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45501032@N00/3726553037/

(Twice Brewed Inn -- a must-visit if you're in the area, especially for Tuesday Quiz Nights.) Something he said stuck with me - when Americans first meet at the pub, invariably they ask, "So, what do you do?" He said, "Whereas we Brits, we don't care!" And it's true. You can sit at a table full of Englishmen and women, share pints, tell stories, build memories, have a blast -- and never have a clue what half the people's day jobs are.

What "I do" to earn a living is copyedit college-level computer science texts. A new graphic design suite, the new version of Office, or of Windows itself -- the textbooks that teach these things to students, I make sure the words are right.

It's good work, and often interesting, though I've been at it for years. It's nice to be a fly on the wall, to get a sneak-peek at new software, to learn a little bit better how my own computer works.

But I am not a copyeditor. If someone asks me "What do you do?" the answer won't get them much closer to who I am.

Which is why the past few months of The Flotsam Diaries have been so eye-opening. Because I'm finding, this is who I am. Wherever I wander, I see bits & bobs lying in the gutter or the side of the road or a sand dune. Today our family visited a few state parks in Mid-Coast Maine. I couldn't leave Reid State Park without collecting all the jagged pieces of someone's water gun lying near our beach towel.

Before going to bed I noodle ideas for the Diaries, new posts I want to make, ways to try to make a difference. I want to learn how stuff gets on the beach, how long it will stay, what kind of damage it's doing -- both in my lifetime and in my daughter's and her descendants'.

Friends and family now always ask what I've found, what the most interesting piece was, something Flotsam Diaries-related. I'm awful at answering; whatever eloquence (or even basic literacy) I muster on the page evaporates when I open my mouth. But I'm working on it.

Like I've mentioned, I'm an archaeologist at heart. It's my first love. And a surprising lot of the Flotsam Diaries is still the archaeologist that courses through me. Archaeology is the study of the physical remains of human activity. Well, what else is flotsam?

But it's funny how life happens. How it pulls you.

When I first held my little newborn girl now almost 3 1/2 years ago, I was just a scared guy with a kid. Now I'm a dad. I don't know how or when it happened -- it just did. In the same way, when I picked up my first bag of flotsam at Ocean Park in March this year, I was just a guy with a trash bag. Now I'm a Flotsam Diarist. I still have no idea what that actually means in the long-run. But I know that I'm viewing the world now in a completely different way than I once did.

And I like it.