Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • My inner Rick Steves

    View of Regent’s Canal from our Airbnb canal boat rental

    Travel guru, guide and inspiration Rick Steves gave a great interview recently to the New York Times. He’s promoting his new book (out in February), On the Hippie Trail. Steves revisits — using journals he kept at the time — a 1970’s trip he took that inspired his life-long love affair with travel and with helping others explore Europe.

    The urge to wander may well be baked into all of us, the leaving for unknown places as wonderful as the coming home. And having a guide like Rick Steves to offer suggestions, heck, even to plan and build out the trip can be a real boon.

    But there’s a unique joy that comes from creating a personal itinerary based on what excites me. The pictures here come from a trip to Europe, three weeks of travel that began in London where we stayed on a canal boat on Regent’s Canal. We spent five days on that little boat, home base as we explored the city. We learned about the canal boats as a lodging option because of Airbnb.

    Our travels took us through France and into Switzerland. A couple of pictures from the France portion of the trip: kayaking down the Ardeche River and taking a boat tour along Calanques National Park east of Marseille.

    The Ardeche River from a kayak

    Amazing cliffs of Calanques National Park

    How did I know about the Ardeche and this French national park gem on the stunning Mediterranan? Reading and previous trips. Just, you know, paying attention to things I find interesting.

    Eclectic German filmmaker Werner Herzog made an amazing film that premiered in 2010 about Chauvet Cave that includes stunning scenes of the natural stone arch over the Ardeche River, which is near where cavers discovered the 30,000-year-old art that Herzog’s film so beautifully displays. That part of the film just stuck in my head. I wanted a closer look, not at the cave because it’s closed to visitors to protect the art. (There is a replica of the magnificent Chauvet Cave, which is kind of stunning and surprising and I’m glad I saw, but still, somehow, diminished in my mind for not being actually 30,000 years old.)

    Other places I’ve visited in Europe prompted my interest because they were places described in novels I really loved.

    I highly recommend becoming your own Rick Steves, exploring other places based on your own curiosity, what you read, what you learn from friends, what pulls at your inner wanderer. It’s January of a brand new year. I know I’m going to build out the itinerary for another trip. I don’t know where yet, but I have a few ideas. I’ll write about my process in case anyone else needs a little inspiration in becoming their own tour guide.

  • Anything, not everything

    So many ways to use time, so many alluring possibilities, so many things to try, so many changes to attempt.

    There’s a productivity guru — David Allen — who has written a book and created a website titled “Getting Things Done.” He offers strategies for getting more accomplished “with ease and elegance.”

    In my experience, getting things accomplished often involves a mental struggle, getting over a speed bump that seems huge before I cross over from thinking about doing a thing to actually getting started doing a thing. In the rear view mirror, the speed bump doesn’t look like much. But there’s nothing easy for me or “elegant” about the mental effort to get from “I’m going to…” to “I’m doing….”

    But here’s one thing I really like about David Allen. He bluntly says that you can do anything you want but you can’t do everything. That is such a gift, reminding myself that time is not endless and choosing one thing means letting go of something else.

    This year I hope to build a balance between striving for accomplishment and simply enjoying the processes — writing a novel, cleaning my office, cooking dinner — enjoying what I call the messy middle.

  • Gifts from poets past

    Looking for some William Butler Yeats poetry today brought me around to singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, with a reminder of how powerful writers from the past seed the future.

    Mitchell’s rich lyrical legacy is her own, of course. But for one song, she recast Yeats’ poem Second Coming and put it to haunting music. I didn’t know the Yeats poem until coming upon it today and the first two lines stopped me cold: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

    I knew those lines well from Mitchell’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem on her Night Ride Home album. If I were a more careful reader of liner notes, I’d have seen the credit she gave the Irish poet and not been so surprised when I stumbled upon Second Coming.

    Neither the poem nor the song give up their meaning easily. It’s not like reading Mary Oliver, whose work I love for its clarity and simplicity. Reading Yeats, who received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923, feels more to me like watching waves crashing against headlands, powerful and complicated.

    I’m intrigued by “spiritus mundi,” a phrase in Second Coming referring to a kind of universal muse for poets and writers.

    Of all the poets available to ponder, I don’t know why Yeats beckoned today. Besides the sheer enjoyment of reading poetry, I feel like my own writing benefits from seeing how poets play with words. Going forward with this new phrase for the muse feels like a good omen for the coming year.