Vancouver, Denmark, the Mediterranean Market: My Untidy Rambling Walk Through It
It's been almost a year. If this were my journal, I'd skip a page, X it out, write on the next:
I have been here, I have been writing, I have been busy with kids, dog, so much. I have been marketing my book endlessly. Probably for most writers, the task of marketing oneself is akin to pulling a plug, letting the water drain out. The water is your soul. But it is necessary these days if you're going to scrape up those few Amazon reviews, get bookstores interested, get some Instagram followers. Social media is, I've found, solely self-perpetuating. It is a ravenous beast. If you don't feed it, it doesn't grow. And it wants to be fed every hour, every day, every blessed minute if you have the energy.
I much prefer today's Quiet Room. This is where I am, in Vancouver, WA (cue line from You've Got Mail), in the top floor of the elegant library with its many windows, rooftop terrace, view of the hills and nearby Portland, and the not-too-distant roar of traffic. I've been here for a few days now, and I realize that living in a town on the coast of Puget Sound with its familiar coffee shops and high-end grocery stores has really spoiled me, and not all for the better. There are many homeless people here in Vancouver. I admit a certain discomfort around them, their smell, their heavy packs, and the way some of them mumble to themselves. I grew up Nairobi. I have lived around poverty almost my whole life. And now I find myself thinking as the person I of course always was--an entitled white kid with layers of safety nets, used to comfort, a level of perceived security, and now, familiar, homogeneous streets and shops. It is discomforting to realize these things about oneself, but this is the age of reckoning for so many of us, and I am part of it.
I've been reading A Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell. I've been on a real Scandi kick for years now (that and being a dedicated Anglophile really takes up too much space in my mind altogether). I am on a constant search for hygge and have long been fascinated by the concepts of democratic socialism, most especially when it relates to healthcare and higher education--two things that we are all directly impacted by. The consequences of not having either as a basic right are enormous and lingering. My daughter is two years away from college. We are still paying off our student loans. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Let me pull myself back from the brink of panic and find my thread again.
Ah, okay. Homogeneity. This is what I was thinking about. Denmark has historically been and continues to be a place of great sameness. This is, in many ways, what binds Danes so intimately to their identity. They are all one big family; there is little diversity in race or ethnicity. According to Helen Russell, Danes even dress alike. You literally can't fly any flags other than the Danish flag unless you are living in an embassy. And the Danish flag means some pretty specific things: you are most likely white, you are proud of your heritage, you live in one of the most socially progressive countries in the world, and you share the same ethnic traditions with almost everyone else, and that's part of what makes your country feel the way it does. (It's just a bit like being Norwegian and living in our little hometown of Poulsbo. I feel I am acclimatizing fairly easily because I am 1/4 Finnish.)
The juxtaposition with my enjoyment of Living Danishly and my week-long trip away from my comfortable home has really sparked some inner dialogue for me. How much do we long for the comfort and perceived security of homogeneity? How many of us describe ourselves as "happier" when living in a place where everyone looks like they're distantly related? How much easier would it be to create a democratic socialist utopia in a place like Denmark with little diversity? How heavily have I bought into the idea of a cultural echo chamber without even acknowledging it?
In Seattle before we left, my parents took us to their favorite Mediterranean grocery. Most, if not all of the men who worked there, were Muslim. Slabs of goat and lamb hung close by to cases of olives and overflowing bins of flatbread. The girls wandered around, picking things up, exclaiming, slipping treats into our cart. It was different, of course, than our perfectly appointed, high-end grocery in Poulsbo, but it felt equally fantastic to me, if not a bit more so because it reminded me that there is such richness in the world. I was born in a Muslim country and grew up with friends I love who are Muslim, and when I step out of our sweet little town, I realize I've been so hungry for diversity. Martin struck up a conversation with the butcher and the men at the front threw in a few beautiful eggplants for free. We exited with sticky baklava and renewed spirits.
What does it all mean? It means our souls long to love at capacity, and they can never truly do that when they are dwelling in homogeneity. It means that we were built for more than a small window into comfort. It means that happiness is not about living in an echo-chamber, but discomfort and soulfulness are more often than not linked. I think we're realizing this more and more as a society in the last year. I hope at least many of us are moving toward open and honest dialogue about what a truly great society looks like, and how our prejudices are stopping us from moving toward it together.
I have no way of wrapping this first-entry-in-a-long-time up. It is, as always, a rambling journey into my untidy mind--in fact much akin to the walks I've taken through Vancouver, half-lost or entirely lost, in the past three days!
I do want to tell you about our new teenage dog, Jemma, and how she can open sash windows with her paws and how she's jumped off our roof twice and how she stripped my car down from the inside. I do want to tell you about my new picture book (actually, I am tired of that but I will). I do want to tell you about the front-yard gardens here in Vancouver and the girls and my endless quests for direction, hygge, meaning, community, solitude, a truly comfy reading chair, and the perfect pot of tea. But I've accomplished no real work today, and I need to. So I'll save all that for later. It is good to be back with all of you!
May 3, 2018!!! A lot of time has passed!
I have been here, I have been writing, I have been busy with kids, dog, so much. I have been marketing my book endlessly. Probably for most writers, the task of marketing oneself is akin to pulling a plug, letting the water drain out. The water is your soul. But it is necessary these days if you're going to scrape up those few Amazon reviews, get bookstores interested, get some Instagram followers. Social media is, I've found, solely self-perpetuating. It is a ravenous beast. If you don't feed it, it doesn't grow. And it wants to be fed every hour, every day, every blessed minute if you have the energy.
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| The gorgeous Vancouver, WA library |
I much prefer today's Quiet Room. This is where I am, in Vancouver, WA (cue line from You've Got Mail), in the top floor of the elegant library with its many windows, rooftop terrace, view of the hills and nearby Portland, and the not-too-distant roar of traffic. I've been here for a few days now, and I realize that living in a town on the coast of Puget Sound with its familiar coffee shops and high-end grocery stores has really spoiled me, and not all for the better. There are many homeless people here in Vancouver. I admit a certain discomfort around them, their smell, their heavy packs, and the way some of them mumble to themselves. I grew up Nairobi. I have lived around poverty almost my whole life. And now I find myself thinking as the person I of course always was--an entitled white kid with layers of safety nets, used to comfort, a level of perceived security, and now, familiar, homogeneous streets and shops. It is discomforting to realize these things about oneself, but this is the age of reckoning for so many of us, and I am part of it.
I've been reading A Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell. I've been on a real Scandi kick for years now (that and being a dedicated Anglophile really takes up too much space in my mind altogether). I am on a constant search for hygge and have long been fascinated by the concepts of democratic socialism, most especially when it relates to healthcare and higher education--two things that we are all directly impacted by. The consequences of not having either as a basic right are enormous and lingering. My daughter is two years away from college. We are still paying off our student loans. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Let me pull myself back from the brink of panic and find my thread again.
Ah, okay. Homogeneity. This is what I was thinking about. Denmark has historically been and continues to be a place of great sameness. This is, in many ways, what binds Danes so intimately to their identity. They are all one big family; there is little diversity in race or ethnicity. According to Helen Russell, Danes even dress alike. You literally can't fly any flags other than the Danish flag unless you are living in an embassy. And the Danish flag means some pretty specific things: you are most likely white, you are proud of your heritage, you live in one of the most socially progressive countries in the world, and you share the same ethnic traditions with almost everyone else, and that's part of what makes your country feel the way it does. (It's just a bit like being Norwegian and living in our little hometown of Poulsbo. I feel I am acclimatizing fairly easily because I am 1/4 Finnish.)
The juxtaposition with my enjoyment of Living Danishly and my week-long trip away from my comfortable home has really sparked some inner dialogue for me. How much do we long for the comfort and perceived security of homogeneity? How many of us describe ourselves as "happier" when living in a place where everyone looks like they're distantly related? How much easier would it be to create a democratic socialist utopia in a place like Denmark with little diversity? How heavily have I bought into the idea of a cultural echo chamber without even acknowledging it?
In Seattle before we left, my parents took us to their favorite Mediterranean grocery. Most, if not all of the men who worked there, were Muslim. Slabs of goat and lamb hung close by to cases of olives and overflowing bins of flatbread. The girls wandered around, picking things up, exclaiming, slipping treats into our cart. It was different, of course, than our perfectly appointed, high-end grocery in Poulsbo, but it felt equally fantastic to me, if not a bit more so because it reminded me that there is such richness in the world. I was born in a Muslim country and grew up with friends I love who are Muslim, and when I step out of our sweet little town, I realize I've been so hungry for diversity. Martin struck up a conversation with the butcher and the men at the front threw in a few beautiful eggplants for free. We exited with sticky baklava and renewed spirits.
What does it all mean? It means our souls long to love at capacity, and they can never truly do that when they are dwelling in homogeneity. It means that we were built for more than a small window into comfort. It means that happiness is not about living in an echo-chamber, but discomfort and soulfulness are more often than not linked. I think we're realizing this more and more as a society in the last year. I hope at least many of us are moving toward open and honest dialogue about what a truly great society looks like, and how our prejudices are stopping us from moving toward it together.
I have no way of wrapping this first-entry-in-a-long-time up. It is, as always, a rambling journey into my untidy mind--in fact much akin to the walks I've taken through Vancouver, half-lost or entirely lost, in the past three days!
I do want to tell you about our new teenage dog, Jemma, and how she can open sash windows with her paws and how she's jumped off our roof twice and how she stripped my car down from the inside. I do want to tell you about my new picture book (actually, I am tired of that but I will). I do want to tell you about the front-yard gardens here in Vancouver and the girls and my endless quests for direction, hygge, meaning, community, solitude, a truly comfy reading chair, and the perfect pot of tea. But I've accomplished no real work today, and I need to. So I'll save all that for later. It is good to be back with all of you!
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