A Little Earthing, Maybe
I meant to let you know last week that I wasn’t planning to send a welcome to the weekend on Fridays as I usually do (or, you know, as I sometimes wait to do until Saturday) during July, because R. and I are now and will be out of the country the entire month, for a week of vacation, a grad school intensive, and work. (Thankfully—and although this detail is placed inside parentheses, it’s not at all a side note—one of our sons and his wife are living with us now, and they will of course be at the house in our absence, giving us enormous peace of mind and our plants a fighting chance at making it through a month of Texan summer in the climate change age.) I’ll be writing daily during this time of exploration, observation, and contemplation, but most of it will never be read by eyes other than my own; it’s the private practice that can often lead to the most significant developments. August marks one-third of the schedule slated for my PhD program, and I’m at a high-productivity time—or, certainly, at a time when I need to be highly productive!
Right now, I’m writing from the couch of a snug one-bedroom Air BnB apartment in Edinburgh; a view of the castle that looms over the city is framed by the window over the kitchen sink. We’ve just returned from a long walk that included barefoot trekking through Princes Street Garden on the other side of the castle from us; on this cool and partly sunny day with winds scuttling clouds across the sky that connects Scotland to Austin and everywhere else, we would have laid our weary bodies in starfishes against the mossy ground and gotten our bare toes into the short grass and clover that has not a single fire ant or chigger anywhere even if we weren’t aware of the possible benefits of “earthing” as one of the ways to address jet lag. We may or may not have eaten gelato for dinner (and for the second time today), regardless of purported jet lag benefits (none that I know of!) because great gelato = great vacations, pretty much. Add hiking up to a castle after getting lost in a used bookstore, and you know, you’re there. First day of vacation, and goals achieved—especially considering that, in this summer of worker shortages and travel disruptions, our checked bags landed with us, at the same time in the same airports (even if we were in transit for 19 of the 24 hours).
I’ll reach out again welcoming you to the weekend on the first Friday in August, perhaps with some news of our journeying and some developments in my work; in the meantime, I’m hoping to post a daily photo on Instagram that gives some impression of our rovings, and I would love to hear about what summer will hold for you.
