Twilight

In little moments that I can steal, I've been re-reading Louisa May Alcott novels: Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, An Old Fashioned Girl. I hadn't realized how deeply her work had influenced me and my thinking. From behind her characters I see Emerson and Thoreau peeking out with subtle smiles on their faces, waving an acknowledgment of my discovery of how my young self soaked up their philosophies. Some days I feel like a character in one of her stories with my odd combination of old-fashioned and quite radical thoughts.

Last night winter blew into Butte and it lingers into this night. I decided to forego my evening stroll - the sudden jump from the 70s to the 30s was more than I wanted to deal with. Instead, I cooked up a stew with organic Montana beef and potatos from the farmers market. I settled onto the couch with a warm bowl and looked at the piles growing around me ... semiotics ... rhetoric ... wildlife management ... intercultural communication theories ... ethics. On one side of the desk is the Jesuit, Michel de Certeau writing about every day life and on the other side is the radical feminist Donna Harawy with her manifesto on companion species. Everywhere I turn, I have the opportunity to immerse myself in a different universe of thought.

What do I want to do? Drowse in front of a fire with music playing and my beloved nearby. I want to watch the flames dance and fall into a reverie that leads me into my own world.

Instead, I quietly wash up the dinner dishes and sit down to outline a chapter in one class, to fill out the outline of a paper for another class, I see a journal article on Red Riding Hood peeking out from my notebook that is hiding another article on the Greimas analysis and I want to read them both.

I do appreciate all this. I am deeply aware of what a privilege it is to be sitting in a warm apartment that I have, over the past year and more, made more beautiful for me with plants, curtains, artwork, and and more. To be faced with the choices of scholarly pursuits rather than faced with the choices of how to put a roof over my head and food on the table.

I sat talking with a professor today about the meaning of meaning and I wondered to myself - what will I be suited for when I leave this place? I have already been changed so much by the glimpses of these different worlds. I know that so much more change is on the way. In another class we talked about our culture shifting away from a belief in unstoppable progress and growth to an understanding and acceptance of our limits - as individuals as well as culturally.


I've been thinking about my own limits and learning to not just respect them, but appreciate them. I'm not yet 'old' and I'm no longer young. Approaching the twilight of life perhaps? Perhaps. It is my favorite part of the day - that time between day and night. Here in Montana, the twilight seems to last for hours the sky slowly slowly emptying of color to leave the stark shimmer of stars in the black endless skies of night.

I enjoy the borderlands - the in-between states of being - neither here nor there - always leaving... always coming home.