Musings of a student from "the Cities" transplanted to the "City" of Morris. June 1998 Graduation is less than a week away and my black gown hangs on my closet door, awaiting the ritual send off. While returning to the buzz of Twin Cities is something I am looking forward to, I have grown an appreciation for west central Minnesota. I think appreciation is something which does grow, like a living entity. It is not developed as a synthetic object can be developed, it grows, slowly or rapidly, like the plants on which the economy out here depends. And it can be cultivated; to grow an appreciation for something you should be conscious of it, though it can also creep in like a sneaky but welcome weed.     Many aspects of rural life require the explanation or even interpretation of a native to the area. When I first made Morris my home, I wanted an explanation for the disproportionate number of furniture stores. I think there are as many furniture stores as there are gas stations in Morris. The whole economy is different here. This is what I was told. Farmers only get paid a couple times a year rather than monthly or weekly like the rest of us. Therefore when the money comes in, it's time for big purchases, like furniture. Or cars. I think there are quite a few car dealerships for the size of the population. But I suppose this is the county seat (I think) so maybe other people come here to buy cars, and furniture. I am left in awe of grain elevators. Every time I drive down Pacific Avenue and pass the few that dominate Morris' skyline I look up with a little bit of reverence. I also usually comment on it to whoever is in the car with me; they get that curled upper lip look and raise one eyebrow if they have that talent. Both of my eyebrows rise up when I try to get that sassy look and I end up looking surprised rather than sardonically questioning. Back to grain elevators.  A skyscraper is just another skyscraper; they house businesses like most others usually. But grain elevators... grain elevators, in my quaint and ignorant citified reverence, represent the hub, the connection, the heart exchanging blue blood for red blood, of the whole agricultural foundation of our society.  There is a nobility to this. We seek meaning, and here it is. For life, food is necessary, grain of any kind is either going directly to feed us, or indirectly to us through livestock.  Our nation depends on this and in order for the circulation of food to continue the grain must be harvested, brought to the elevators and shipped who knows where. So maybe the grain isn't exactly oxygenated while in the elevators, but the trains certainly run along metaphorical arteries, and the grain is pumped out and sent along. With the exception of this being a "college town" the whole economy of Morris seems to depend on farming. The city exists to keep this process in motion, so everyone is related to the production of food. That's real. As a biologist, I'm trained to look at the farm fields and mourn the loss of the great prairies, the diversity of plants, and the thunder of buffalo.  It would be hypocritical of me to say that I don't wish time could reverse and the prairies would return, but I also love the rows of beans and corn. I love the geometric harness of power lines that streak through the fields. I love the endless highways, the peeling paint on the city halls that seem to exist without the cities, and the silos that stand taller than the few token trees. I love the beat-up pick-up trucks with three guys crammed in front that pass me as I balance on my car with a camera smashed up against my face. I imagine to myself the comments that might pass on the strange girl in long skirts that seems to think mundane things like power lines are worth a photograph. But then I egotistically think to myself that they are blind to the beauty that surrounds them. I may swell a little when I see the skyline of the Twin Cities after a month or two in Morris, but I would never put a picture of a whole city on my wall. I'd much rather look at a field with a building or two during one of those perfect moments when the sky is overcast, it's about a half hour before sunset and the sun peaks out near the horizon electrifying just the ground and the outcrops of civilization with bright light against a dark blue sky. I have never seen a more photogenic location than Morris and the surrounding area. You can only take so many photos of the ocean and sunsets and sunrises on the ocean (they almost all look the same); mountains are beautiful and impressive, but I find them to be moody subjects; famous cities have too many postcards anyway so everything is commercial or overdone. But I could easily take ten rolls of film a day (probably much more) and never run out of shots here. For though the land is flat, and the buildings are stationary, a photographer's passion is light. Everyday, almost every moment, the scenery changes with the changing light. And the clouds... the land lives and the sky moves.  back to top   Fall 2002 Victim of Convenience I find it interesting to live in an age where the proximity of Starbucks Coffeehouses can be used as a measure of distance; a short measure of distance. An acquaintance may ask, “How far is it to your house?” And I could answer: “Oh, about three Starbucks’ away.” We’ll tell our children that when we were young, we actually had to walk three blocks to the nearest coffee shop, or if we lived in the less trendy areas of town, eight blocks. And they’ll roll their eyes and say, “Yeah, yeah Mom, sure you did.” Everything is now at our fingertips. Or so we think. Life continues to get easier and easier, but we aren’t taking advantage of that fact. We simply take on more and more responsibilities. If I were to give you and your ancestors the same task, you could probably accomplish it ten times faster than they could have; yet, our lives these days seem much more complex than our ancestors’ lives. I like to blame our consumer culture. Having lived “with,” it is very hard to live “without.” We are now consumers of convenience, miserable dupes of the concept that if we just buy this one thing more, our lives will be that much more easy, less complicated, and we will be that much more happy and have that much more free time. I’m guilty. I love office supply stores. All those binders, shelving units, and desk organizers. I dream of the uncluttered area, not once thinking that if I just went home and threw away half of the stuff I owned I would be moving in a better direction. Before the advent of cell phones, there was a popular move towards simplifying one’s life. I remember shopping in a trendy little gift store and seeing a handsome little illustrated book full of instructions on how to simplify. Have we become so lost in our conveniences that we no longer know how to live without them? Unfortunately, many people probably read the book, nodded in agreement, and then put it on the table and picked up the phone to order pizza. When cell phones first became the rage, I scoffed. “Never” I swore, “will I own a cell phone.” It seemed to mostly be a way for people to advertise to the world that they had friends, had someone to be talking to, even if they were visibly alone at the moment. It was a way to hide in one’s insecurities, rather than facing up to and overcoming them. My message to them: There are strangers in the world, and sometimes you have to interact with them, so get off the phone. Granted, there were, and are, some reasonable reasons to own a cell phone. I grew up in Minnesota, and on harsh winter nights when I was driving home alone along deserted country roads in the dark, it would have been a good idea to have a cell phone in case of an emergency. And now I live a long way from family and friends and cell phones offer a cheaper deal for long distance rates. Finally, I move a lot, three times a year on average, and a cell phone would give me a constant phone number. But to tell you the truth, the reason that cell phones are becoming more attractive to me, is for the convenience they offer. I find myself thinking more and more, “Oh, if I had a cell phone I could call so and so and let them know I’m running late (a problem in itself)” or, “Hey so and so, do you want to do this…”  Or I find myself wishing that the person I wanted to contact had a cell phone so I could reach them, right then. Once you’ve had a taste of that convenience, it’s hard to give it up. I can’t imagine my life without e-mail, yet I survived for almost 20 years without it. This was the first year I actually invested in an organizer, the notebook kind with refillable pages: a space for addresses, a space for “to do” lists, a calendar, a notes area, etc. I was proud of myself. Organization is power. And now I’ve been handed a Palm Pilot. I was so fond of my little paper organizer! The palm pilot still sits in my desk, untouched. I like to believe that my life is not so complicated that I need a little computer to keep it straight; but they really are amazing things. It allows you to “beam” one another your contact information, thereby eliminating pesky business cards. Thanks to a little antenna and GPS device, that same handheld computer could tell you where the nearest Starbucks is located, or tell you about the weather in any part of the world. I might secretly set it up and use it in a dark corner somewhere. I’m not suspicious of it; it is simply still in the same category as cell phones and I would rather not run with that crowd quite yet.  But eventually the day will arrive when I will run into an old acquaintance, beam them my e-mail address, and then whip up the antenna and find the nearest Starbucks so we can go catch up over a latte. So, does life lose some of its meaning when it becomes too easy? Did our grandparents who had to drag themselves fives miles to school through snow banks “that high” and then home again at the end of the day, find more value in daily life? I get about five e-mails a year at least reminding me to “stop and smell the roses’ for life is slipping away. As a culture we certainly are worried about not enjoying life while we are living it, but it stops at worrying, very few seem to do anything about it. They continue on sketching appointments into their Palm Pilots, and talking on their cell phones. Is that so wrong? Not necessarily. I traveled in Nepal and had the distinct impression that people there were happier than those living in the United States. The people who I interacted with, those who I classified as poor in comparison to my standard of living, were not poor at all. They did not worry where their next meal was coming from, and by the standards of their country, they were relatively well-off. Maybe they didn’t have electricity or running water in their homes, but then neither did the people living near them (I’m referring to rural areas now). But they were not burdened by the material luxuries that we surround ourselves with. Their depths, their riches, were spiritual. A majority of them envied Americans. Meanwhile, we envy them. Superficially at least. Or rather, some of us like to think we envy them. But they see our pleasures as more abundant because we “are rich;” we envy them because they “are happy.”  Do our riches make us less happy? A part of me screams “yes!” but I also know that one can get caught up in assuming that if one is surrounded by things, one cannot be happy. While I concede that there may be an ultimate happiness in renouncing materialism, a person must avoid using their possessions as a scapegoat and reason for procrastination. “I can’t simplify or reassess life until I get rid of all this stuff!”  You can change your value system, and change your thought patterns, before you hold the garage-sale-to-end-all-garage-sales. You don’t have to wait until the next sunny Saturday morning to start re-assigning your values, and treasuring the things in life that really matter. You may find that you can really put your Palm Pilot to good use, and use your cell phone to call your mother. --The US slipped into a state of apathy, and it was depressing. The tragedies of September 11th ended a lot of the apathy, and we may soon, and some already do, wish for the luxury to be apathetic again. But many of us found some meaning that day. We remembered to treasure life. -- back to top poem from the beet generation  8/9/05 Most of the time when you meet someone for the first time your impressions are not complete. They can’t be. They can be informative, but just not …complete. The person you just met may have had a bad hair day, they perhaps had just been fired, maybe just ran into an ex now attached to someone else who is younger/prettier/sexier/smarter etc. Or maybe you’re seeing them in a certain environment which portrays them in a completely different way from how they are in other environments. The person you meet in the office is probably a different person from who you would meet if you met them in their garden. And perhaps if you didn’t like the person that you met in the office, but liked the one in the garden, you would see them in a different light the next time you saw them in the office, because, though still not as likeable, they are reminiscent of the garden personality and you can appreciate them for that. Such it is with beets. I met beets in a can. That makes it sound like I was in a can. Well, I wasn’t. But the beets I met were the canned variety. In the environment of a can. They were shaped like a can and appeared to be artificially colored. They were can slimy. I did not like the beets I met. I next met beets in borsch. It was too much beet. Too intense. Too full of itself for the modest Minnesota classroom where I met them. I was not impressed. But this summer I contemplated meeting the beet once again as I stood in a large garden looking down at the plants. Here was a beet in the ground. It was not in a can. It was not in borsch. I was going to be the first to make this particular beet’s acquaintance. No middle man, no canner or soup maker. Just me, and the beet. I pulled it out of the ground and that seemed to go well. It was already pushing itself out so I felt like I was just helping it get to where it wanted to go anyway. I placed it in my garden basket along with the lettuce, peapods and carrots I had harvested and toted it up to the house. Then, a phone call to mom. “How do you prepare beets? Can you eat them raw or do they have to be cooked?”  I was still a beet initiate. “You can boil them like potatoes.”  And then there was a discussion between my mother and father about whether you should peel the beet before or after boiling. The consensus was after. So I chopped off the root and leaves of the beet (this seemed self-explanatory) and put it in a pot of water to boil.  I checked it several times for cooked-ness and when I felt like it was done I pulled out the beet, eyeing it with interest, and proceeded to peel it and put it on my plate. It was very…deep colored. I know beets have been described many times before and there is even a term “beet red”. The most recent discussion of beets I read was in Tom Robbins’ “Jitterbug Perfume” in which his lusty description of beets probably persuaded me to give the vegetable another chance. What is notable about the beet is that the color and texture is so uniform without. It’s not just the exterior which is percolating with caffeinated color “beet beet beet beet” it is the interior of the beet, which I assume is why it’s been likened to hearts. Of course, hearts beat, that may play into it too. There is no holding back for the beet. It’s a hyperactive, yet sedentary vegetable. Content to sit there, but if you took a high power microscope to it you would expect to see it vibrating ever so slighting, humming and whirring away, plotting somehow, to take over the world. Or maybe they’re just small purple buddhas and the energy I’m sensing is internally directed meditation. Humming mantras. Do Tibetans eat beets? back to top