During my first week as a Montana resident, I stood face to face with a politically conservative, devoutly Christian, Bikram-yoga loving, Scottish electrician who told me to have faith that the negative ions in this pure country air will cure all ills. I took an exaggerated inhalation and smiled at him. He proceed to share his idea that negative ions could be bottled and sold. It’s no news that our environment affects our health. However, it has become popular news recently. Nicholas Kristof devoted this week’s Op-ed to the topic, linking studies that show the low incidence of breast cancer in women living in Asia. But ethnic Asian women born and living in the United States have a much higher risk of cancer. Hmmmm. Oh, plastic. I’ve long feared microwaves and, despite my family’s incessant teasing, collect glass jars for storing leftovers. But I’m not convinced that’s going to keep me in the clear.
We can intend to shift our home environment (chuck everything plastic and eat well) and our external environment (live and work in a calm and nourishing place). But let’s face it, one or both of those is a complete luxury. Two other Crucial Minutiae-ers and I recently email chatted about internal environment versus lining all the externals up in a row. Perhaps an inner peace is the ultimate healer. Then the word “disease” came up and one of them passed on the reworking of that word into “dis-ease.” A brilliant understanding. You can live a pristine, wholesome, uncluttered, chemical-free life and still feel emotionally burdened and insane. Or you might, like a monk I once knew, live in the rush of mid-town New York surrounded by smog and the throng of unpredictable people, somehow maintaining the deepest ease in your heart.
When my mother turned 50, I sent her a card that declared joyfully “Congratulations, you are now officially a crone!” like she’d been reaching for that moment her entire life. She was horrified. She felt as if I’d labeled each one of her wrinkles with a proper name; but I, on the other hand, believed the word crone to be the most flattering thing to call a woman. As a child, I couldn’t wait to escape ingénue-hood for when oh when could I be that crone, an old woman who oozed grace and insight from having lived a life, a real gritty passionate life. I once dramatically confessed to my friend Maria, “I can’t wait to be old,” to which she responded in 7-year-old solidarity, “I can’t wait to wear lipstick.” She didn’t understand that “old” for me meant wise.
“The Killing Season” is not a spoof television show–it’s an eerie phrase used by Mongolians who live on those grassland plains called steppes. It’s not hard to imagine which season exactly is the killer. These nomads usually lose half of their herd (of camels, yaks, sheep, horses) during the brutal windswept winters. Since their herd is their livelihood, the death of the herd is a kind of death of human existence.
A brilliant healer friend of mine recently gave me homework: “You always write about the space around you, what you see, how others respond to their surroundings. Why don’t you spend some time writing about the inner space?” I am continually obsessed by the contention that our inner space is shaped by our outer space. But instead of exploring that orientation (again and again), here goes an attempt at only the inner space. 
I met an elderly woman on a metro-north train in Connecticut. Without any prompt from me, she began explaining why she gets off at Harlem 125th instead of Grand Central Station. Though Grand Central is closer to her home, it is a daunting space for her to navigate. 
I have an addiction. I admitted this yesterday while staring at the ancient lady–her bright-red, hair-sprayed beehive and two-tone glasses–at the New York Public Library. She is practically a fixture, and has been here forever, or at least during the three years I lived here, and even now when I stroll the marble halls as a visitor. She looks the same. She is still perfectly coiffed. I like that she’s still here. But my brain says, Ugh, how boring. I don’t want to be her, or someone who, at any point in time, is still anything. And therein lies my addiction. I am addicted to that shameful, self-conscious, liberal, privileged concept–new experiences in new places. It feels as strong and confusing as a drug.
Indian women have been granted an unprecedented break–8 women-only commuter trains. Was anyone else struck by 
High school economics was not my forté. Only one concept stuck: supply and demand. But recently, I’ve had market shifts on the brain. This September, the press has emblazoned talk of solar panels everywhere, from Nat Geo to the good old stand by NYTimes. Apparently China, noting a future demand, has jumped on it, creating more factories to produce the panels and polysilicion, the substance needed to make them. The US has done nothing of the sort. Prices have gone down, as happens with most things made in China. (that’s a whole other conversation)
Someone I revere and respect recently explained to me (paraphrased):
In exactly three hours, President Obama will be hosting a town hall meeting on healthcare reform. The town is the small Montana town I now live in. He’s here; he’s here; he’s here seems to be the refrain echoing in this valley. Last night at a dinner party, a friend told about how the preparation for the event had touched him. Working on a job up at the ski mountain, he heard a deep rumbling in the sky and waited for it to approach. He looked up as dark green helicopters skimmed towards him along the tops of lodge pole pine trees. Both helicopters were emblazoned with “United States of America” in blue. This man, a gentle horse-loving man, waved. One of the uniformed men in the helicopter waved back. “They were checking it out,” he explained, making sure no ill-doers were hanging in the woods nearby the mysterious lodge slated for the President and his family. I smiled at the visual. I also sighed with the relief of a common person. I am not the President or a famous person who, by sheer role, needs hundreds of people (and thousands of dollars) to scour a place before I go ahead and land.
How many children do you have or want to have? Oregon State University just released a 
I’ve been thinking about how people actively connect to place. Not everyone is active in this process; many let it happen to them; many do not notice. But my cousin Lauren is always in an active phase. She strolls through cities with her point-n-shoot in her pocket–looking for street art. I even had the privilege of her showing me around NYC, the city I lived in, and indoctrinating me into who painted what, who pasted up what, how, why. It is a knowledge she has cultivated. And done best in her own hometown of Chicago for the past three years. For example, her photo to the right is a “tip toe heart in hands paste-up, chicago.”
As my friend Eric puts the final touches on an electric fence for his six lambs, a ratty old blue Honda bumbles down the dirt road. It’s Eric’s neighbor, the woman he calls “crazy Jane.” We’re in Barnet, Vermont. She’s a New Yorker who moved here two decades ago. She’s approaching 70 years old. She has shaggy gray hair. She’s a writer. She’s a Buddhist. She is eyeing me, surely thinking, Who is this new person visiting our tiny community? What’s her deal? I tell her where I’m going, what I’m up to.
Have you ever looked under the lip of the ocean? I hadn’t. But last week in the Virgin Islands, I floated on the surface as the entire back of my body crisped red under the sun. An interloper. I snorkeled three times a day and marveled at the world beneath me. If only I could feel half as acclimated to my environment as these fish and sea creatures seemed to be. With each wave gust, they moved gracefully–never bumping into one another, never losing orientation, assured of place, part of a greater flow. The immediacy of this collective reaction is something I’ve rarely seen on land. These under water inhabitants seemed to have mastered a Taoist bending principle that I hadn’t (and haven’t).
I am moving.