(Backyard) Wanderlust Wednesday

From time to time, I am confronted with nastiness.

The kind that someone will spit out in exasperation.

The kind that - regardless of the heat of the moment - is still rather hurtful.

But when someone once sniped at me "You have no desire to change the world, Baroness. You just want to redecorate it"?

Well, Missy - you are going to have to expand your repertoire just a tad, because I take this as nothing short of an extreme compliment.

Which is why I love Christo & Jean-Claude - wrapping shit up, one monolith at at time:

Reichstag, 1994

Don't like your trees?

No worry - they can do those, too:

so weird and intriguing...
(during the daylight hours only, though)
(I would probably squidge a little if I saw them at night)

The only issue I have with Monsier C et Co. is that they pretty much work in a monochromatic palette.

I need more.

Imagine, then, when one Michael Lin took on the task of decorating our downtown Art Gallery for the Olympics, in a project called "The Modest Veil":

Tres jolie, non?

Even more awesome is this angle, which not only shows the installation, but a tree that Christo didn't manage to get his fabric-festooning mitts on:

If I may, for a moment, remove this modest veil?

(because it's kinda scratchy and hot and it casts an unflattering shadow on my smug mug...)

Yuh.

It's a cherry tree.

In bloom.

In February.

Here.

Where I live.


Don't be hatin'.

A Whole New World

And doth proclaimeth The Baroness: The world is your oyster (unless you keep kosher).

So, travel. Wanderlust. I've been thinking a lot about the movie I recently saw, Into the Wild. I've been thinking about my friend's daughter who just returned home from a European romp. I've been thinking about how some people have no physical boundaries, and how they are completely comfortable roaming the earth, while others have distinct, small boundaries they erect around their world. Who's right and who's wrong?

I suppose the question really is "What makes some feel free enough to think the entire World their own, while others choose to create their own compact universes?" Why does this happen, and is the opportunity to learn equal in both scenarios? Hmm.

Sure, sure, the Baroness has travelled quite a bit. But not all the time. On most days, most weeks, most months, the world of the Baroness is fairly small.

For days on end, my entire world can be encompassed within the walls of my home. The universe, as I see it, consists of a laundry room, a family room, a kitchen and a bedroom. I have no clue what the weather actually feels like - I can only see it through the window. It looks nice enough.

Other times, it expands just a little to involve errands in and around the neighborhood. I go to the same places the same route and do the same chores and see the same people doing the same thing. Whoopdee freakin' do.

Imagine my shock and delight, then, this weekend when I went to take the Duchess up to the mountains in a neighboring suburb. For a time commitment of only 35 minutes, I had driven to a place so beautiful, so different from what I was used to - I couldn't believe I was actually in the same general area. I could have been a million miles away.

But I wasn't - I was only half an hour from my home. Here's a taste of the refreshing "new" vista I saw:

Ocean. Beach. Mountains. Ahh.

A little venturing, a little meandering - it was like a mini-vacation. As I drove around I thought to myself - I never come over here, and look how cool it is. I could wander around here all day, and feel completely like a tourist. I left to come home reluctantly, but feeling completely refreshed.

And then I thought - how often do we all get stuck in a rut, trudging from familiar place to familiar place in a closed loop? Yet if we took just a few minutes to the left or the right of our normal routes, we could find something fresh, something to give us a slightly different perpective. And really - all it takes is a few minutes. Out. Of. Your. Way.

This whole train of thought also reminded me of a lady I had the good fortune to meet on a road trip we took a few years ago. She lived here:
in Lucas, Kansas, home of the Grassroots & Folk Art Gallery (which is why we stopped there), and this:

The Garden of Eden.
Not like you thought it would be, huh?

Population 436, give or take. She was born there, and has lived there her whole life. She does not travel, and does not want to. One of her sons lives in "the city" - Topeka. She had visited him there once, but found it to be too busy.

I have no real way to conclude this. Only to say that, I guess, within each of us lies a barometer about what feels ruttish, what feels like home, what feels like adventuring, what feels like refreshment. And that maybe, everyone has their own definition of what "Into the Wild" means.

What's yours?