Black Lives Matter
Many years ago there was a man who worked for me who suggested I take an implicit association test. You can take them for race, gender, age, and other traits (an example of one of the tests: “This IAT requires the ability to recognize White and Black faces, and images of weapons or harmless objects.”), …
Pause for Joy
I’ve been drafting a follow-up to the Returning post, and I’ve also been enjoying the holidays. Longtime readers might remember when I tried to cancel Christmas in 2015, was voted down in a landslide, and reformed my idea of what the holiday could be about. This post is a selection of images that show how …
Returning
I know it’s “old news” that these Crickets are back home, but returning is quite a process. Almost five years after we packed everything up and went away (which in itself was a multi-year process to prepare); three years after we “came home”; sixteen months after we bought a house … after all this time …
Mom
A lot of times in my writing, I find myself referring to or thinking of my mom as a life influence. I have a lot of shared memories with my mom, of times she was there for me, taught me, exposed me to some part of the world, and just all the fun we’ve had. …
zzzzzzz
We’re earning some good-night-sleeps here working on the cricket compound. Yesterday we rented a chipper and took care of the ugly brush pile that we’d inherited with the house and then added to considerably with our cleanup efforts. It was a solid day of work and very rewarding. I was talking with my mom the …
Y (Like it sounds, WHY?)
There was always the question of WHY stick with the cricket trip. It was because I needed (to learn/ do/ experience) something and, in the end, I/we got it. Even though it was hard, it worked! When I notice the way my life patterns are all different now, I feel largely it’s because of the …
X marks home
When we moved into our house in Ashfield, it felt like our Cricket trip had finally come to a close because we had found the perfect “campsite.” Here’s a sampling of the place; there’s a lot more to show but this gives you a flavor of the past year, from what I had handy. The …
Walter de maria
When we scheduled our visit to Walter De Maria’s Lightening Field, we only had a hazy sense of what to expect. When we were picked up by a large SUV from a dusty one-building desert town in New Mexico, piling in with a group of strangers to all spend the night and morning looking at …
TURRELL U V
It’s quite the desert mashup for T, U, V, and soon W on Instagram — Twentynine Palms (California, outside Joshua Tree National Park), Utah Salt Flats (somewhere near Bonneville), Victory (a funny story in White Sands), and White Sands (New Mexico, the missile range and National Park). After all my complaining about desert landscapes, these …
RED, SEDONA
From Valley of Fire State Park (in Nevada), to the wild vortexes of Sedona (Arizona), a lot of the American landscape is startlingly, breathtakingly RED. Although we wanted to see Double Negative (which is quite nearby) so we might have stumbled on it anyway, we really didn’t know about Valley of Fire State Park until …
Ocean, Pacific :|: Orange, Pink
I fell behind so today is a two-for-one special. A while back I shared this blog with a new friend and she read widely in the archives, concluding to me in the end that it was interesting how Chris wrote a lot of detail about the places we went, and I was focused on my …
Notre Dame
Looking at the images of Notre Dame last night reminded me of the following poem, from my thesis. I woke up this morning with lines from it running through my head. I wrote a lot about exploring and falling in love with these old buildings and so it felt personally devastating when this one in …
Marfa
Yep, Donald Judd concrete in Marfa again. I like this shot because you can see one of the old-military-buildings-turned-museum in the background … there are several of these buildings onsite, of all types from barracks to hangers, all repurposed as museums. It’s quite special and there’s a lot to see. I think that what’s in …
Lively days, love, light, lapping ocean waves
This weekend brought to you by the letter L. We’re already two-and-a-half years back into regular life and still, I can almost taste the salt spray and sunshine. The things that stick with me are sometimes fragments, not stories. Looking at these southern California shots I think of waking up and looking at this ocean …
Kateri kosek
Kateri Kosek, am amazing poet and essayist in her own right (for example), invited Stef Botelho and I to read at Stockbridge Coffee & Tea last night. Here’s a snapshot by our friend Brian Clements. It was a beautiful, joy-filled night and I’m so grateful to Kateri for having us to her reading series which …
Heizer: double negative
Michael Heizer is a contemporary artist and a pioneer of the land art movement. We found his piece Double Negative in a remote area of Nevada. We free camped outside Valley of Fire State Park (which was also amazing) and we made a trip up onto the mesa to see the trenches that make up …
ground control
GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM Ground Control to Major Tom (ten, nine, eight, seven, six)Commencing countdown, engines on (five, four, three)Check ignition and may God’s love be with you (two, one, liftoff) I was laying in bed this morning thinking about the letter G & and this gif I’ve been planning to post, and the …
Finally unFurling
Unfurling into spring, that is! We have several bunches of forsythia blooming, a yard to rake, garden to clean, wood to cut, and stone walls to straighten out. It’s quite exciting; today we went for a long walk and then worked outside a bit, it felt, literally, like a breath of fresh air. More birds …
e is for emergency
The baby’s finally sleeping, the Boston night is a dull hum, and every time the baby stirs it makes me jump because I’m not used to having a tiny human laying around. Sometime evenings don’t happen quite the way we plan, so I’m writing this a day late while one-year-old baby Diya sleeps in the …
Donald Judd |:| In the Desert
Marfa is this strange cultural oasis in the desert. Donald Judd bought several properties in town and turned it into a small arts hub in west Texas, starting in the 1970’s. I don’t think we’ve written about Marfa to much extent, other than Chris saying here, “if you ever get a chance to visit Marfa, …
coastal calder
Alexander Calder is one of my favorite artists. When I worked for the State of Connecticut I used to walk to the Wadsworth Atheneum on lunch break and visit the Calder mobile that hung in that beautiful room with the fountain, balconies, and skylight. I’d stand on my toes and blow air towards the sculpture …
boxes of books
I’ve been helping a client, D, disperse his large book collection, and that means spending a lot of time with his books sorting them, moving them, helping them get into the right hands. It’s a wonderful project for a bibliophile like me and I’m learning a lot because of it — I don’t just handle …
A is for adventure
A is for Adventure, and B is for Burning Man. This summer we’re sticking with A. Rather than go in for Burning Man tickets and three weeks away with the Cricket in hot, dry, dusty hedonism (which we so very much want to do) we’re saving that time for a trip to ALASKA. We won’t …
Crickets still chirping
It’s been a long while since we’ve written on here. Besides a few technical issues, I needed time to get my bearings in life after travel and to let some of the changes that had begun on the Cricket trip sink in. We bought a house in the country (with land to park the Cricket!) …
Thankful For
I still write longhand morning pages and I still make lists of the things I am grateful for almost every day. There are so many ways to do it — last year I wrote a numbered list of gratitude at the end of my pages; this year I write sentences about gratitude at the beginning of my …
The {Tiger Moth} Camper by TAXA
Designed like the Cricket but HALF THE SIZE! Sized like a teardrop AND you can stand inside. With two big doors, it opens to a comfy indoor/outdoor lounge space. You Tube suggested this video to Chris the other night, and it looks pretty cool! Check out the Tiger Moth: XO,
Getting Hitched
We got married! To celebrate, here’s a post about oh-so-sexy trailer hitches…! These wedding photos are by the amazing Cassandra Summer, who captured us beautifully and made the process so much fun. Now, for the stuff about trailer hitches. 4 Rounds of the trailer-hitch-install-and-repair process: 1: UHaul install on the Subaru in Connecticut before heading to North …
Seeking Adventure & Escape
Last night, one of us needed cheering up so we were watching movie trailers online and we stumbled on the very excellent video below. There are so many things to be grateful for about living regular life, but when we get tired and frustrated we crave the adventure and freedom of life on the road. (The grass …
This land mass we call home
I was recently choosing an image for another blog and I wanted to use a topo map of the US like this one — — but on my search I found a neat blog, Big Thinks, that compiles interesting data maps under the tag Strange Maps. My search led in a few directions from there. I’m fascinated …
This land is whose land?
I was recently singing and playing “This Land is Your Land” for a friend’s kid, and it got me thinking about our Cricket travels. So many of the verses speak to the beauty of places we’ve adventured in, and they make my heart melt with happiness. I also like the folky depression-era populism of Woody Guthrie’s message, and …
Heading to a state or federal campground?
Today while paying a bill “the old fashioned way” I remembered that I underestimated the number of checks I would write on our travels. Bring more checks than you think you will need! In “regular life” writing a check is pretty rare. I use checks for a few personal transactions and I do everything else with some form of …
Got #vanlife envy? Try it yourself.
We’ll be unwrapping the Cricket soon! There was recently a New Yorker article about #vanlife, the lifestyle brand and Instagram fad. (If you prefer listening, Marketplace covered it, too.) We’re not so idealized here at Curious Crickets and still we’re really excited to be getting the Cricket out of winter storage. Because waking up in fields and forests. Is. Awesome. …
Your money or your life. What about both?
The Wall Street Journal recently published an essay called In Praise of a Nomadic Life, by Andrew Blackman. It’s a story about a particular couple, a 40-ish man and woman who decided to live on the road, mostly in Europe so far, driving around in an old Toyota, staying in hotels, and living on about $100 a day. They both write freelance to …
Being a giant-sized kid
Play is awesome. A Google search will give you a plethora of information about play’s useful properties, both for children and adults. I believe in this research but I’m also a big proponent of play simply for the sake it. That’s why kids do it, right? Kids aren’t thinking, “this activity will help boost my creativity and bring me closer to …
Radical Ritual & Life in Action
These Crickets are pretty well settled back into (and enjoying!) the routines and rituals of everyday life. I miss the open sky and easy connection to natural landscapes, yet I’m glad to once again be part of the community structures within which I feel most intellectually and spiritually alive. There’s a richness to life within a community; …
How to Live Like a Digital Nomad (when you’re not one at heart)
The fact that I didn’t end up wanting to live as a digital nomad full time surprised me. I like travel. I like efficiency and technology. I like work. I like coffee shops and bars. I like digital nomads; their ethic and their methods make sense to me. Yet I also like creature comforts of an office that are …
How to Live Like a Digital Nomad (when you’re not one at heart)
Reasons to Slow Down
On our travels, I practiced a lot at slowing down. Decompression was harder than I expected, and the process of slowing down is one I persisted at. Habits that I thought would take a couple of months to slough off were actually much more ingrained. There’s a lot to say about how. Also: WHY? Here are a …
Confessions of An Ambivalent Blogger
This recent post on Adam Gopnik is a case in point. When I wrote the post, I knew that it insufficiently explained what was transformative for me about the talk; attaching my notes was a lazy way of addressing that and I began making numbered lists in my head that would more clearly connect the …
Camus to the Rescue
Adam Gopnik was in town recently with the Salisbury Forum. He called his talk “notes of a reluctant pundit” and opened with a funny story about what he called his first experience with punditry, in the mid 1980’s in New York. The short version of that story is that Gopnik gave a keynote, with almost no advance notice, to …
Standing Rock, History Repeats Itself
It’s been almost two months since we’ve ended our travels and already it seems like years ago. Time is strange that way, how it can stretch and elongate itself or compact and shorten depending on the situation. What once seemed distant can suddenly spring forward as memory is sparked from unusual sources. Standing Rock is …
Mendocino, where life’s such a groove
How to celebrate Thanksgiving on the road? Last year we could have been out of cell service, camping at a pullout along route 1 in northern California. We’d been hopscotching up and down this stretch of coast just south of the redwoods for several days. We’d met some hippy kids who were tent camping the same route, and …
Curious about the Crickets?
This December, these two crickets are the “artists in conversation” at Gallery A3 in Amherst, Massachusetts. If you’re local, please join us for an evening of photos, stories, snacks, and art! This event is in coordination with A3’s December “small wonders” show. Travel Tales with the Curious Crickets Join Chris and Alexis as they reflect on their fifteen-month road …
I want it brighter: movement and mood
When this travel adventure was still largely a fantasy, I wrote about the benefits of getting off your butt and I set a couple of goals related to walking more during my time off. And I did walk. A lot. I’m not actually an avid “hiker” by which I mean, I avoid big elevation gain. What I do …
The end and the beginning
When humor fails, there’s poetry. This morning after election night, Wislawa Symborska comes to mind, particularly her poem “The End and the Beginning” (to honor copyright, read it in full here; it’s worth it). There’s also running away. Another of Symborska’s poems, “Consolation,” begins: “Darwin. They say he read novels to relax, but only certain kinds: nothing …
What if we tried to fill Death Valley with seawater?
The awesome XKCD recently tackled that question, and suggests the result would be something like the Salton Sea. Yuck. We haven’t written about our visit to the Salton Sea yet, but that and Slab City will be a good post-apocalyptic story for … after the election. Yuck. Go vote today! If you need help voting, check out this resource …
Gratitude, data geek style
I write first thing every morning. (To clarify: first thing means after making tea or coffee.) Most days, I end my morning pages with a list of three things that I am grateful for. This practice helps to keep me positive (not always a simple task for this ever-striving perfectionist). There’s a little bit of science and a lot …
Garry Trudeau came to town
and of course, it was to talk about Donald Trump. I’ve written about my efforts to ignore the political fracas during our travel adventure. I don’t believe that I missed much. But all along I wondered (worried) about how I would re-engage as an intelligent member of a civil society. Like coming back to food after a fast; …