Look Around, Choose Your Own Ground

Fifty Years Later: Still Looking, Still Choosing

Breathe, breathe in the air
Don't be afraid to care
Leave, but don't leave me
Look around, choose your own ground. ~~~ Pink Floyd, 1973

That Pink Floyd classic came to mind the other day, and for some reason it reminded me of Sally Cregan.

I had a crush on Sally and I guess you could say she was my "girlfriend" for a brief period during the Spring/Summer of 1975, our Senior year in High School.

Sally was a Catholic school girl before attending public High School (“hear the softly spoken magic spells”). She wore those plaid skirts - just above the knee - with a brass pin, accompanied by a white monogrammed shirt, blazer, and knee socks. She was smart, pretty, popular, liked to laugh, had a great body, and was head of the twirlers (majorette?).

Our "relationship" didn't get very far. Although Sally was willing, it seemed that I was unable. I was afraid; of sex, of a relationship, of being vulnerable.

I still remember that Sally used a different line from that Pink Floyd song as a quote under her yearbook photo ("all you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be"), so she must have been a cool person too. But we never progressed to any kind of intellectual relationship and shared our ideas. She went to the University of New Hampshire and we wrote letters during college freshman year, but not for long. I wonder what became of her?

Anyway, getting back to reality and the topic at hand.

Currently, in the bleak and dark reality of the accelerating climate catastrophe, I've been thinking of photography and writing as expressions of joy and a kind of therapeutic pursuit of truth.

In terms of activism and "work", I threw in the towel several years ago and live as a nomad.

The "ground" or the "place" is wherever I happen to be, but I do seem to gravitate to the Salish Sea for summer and the Sonoran desert for winter, with mountain and forest travel in between.

But throwing in the towel is not surrender -

I still keep an intellectual oar in the water and sometimes write to hold the bastards accountable in the only "place" I really have a working knowledge of - a practice an old professor of mine (Barclay Jones) once called "mapping decision space" - in NJ environmental circles.

A policy cartographer! Yes! That's what I want to be when I grow up!