ERIC WENNINGER

  • Empathy on the Spectrum

    Anyone can see that we are living in a politically divided country—so divided, in fact, that it often feels like we inhabit two alternate realities. As each side gets more and more entrenched in its own camp, I wonder how we will find a way forward. Can the United States of America become united once more? Was it ever?

    I used to teach US government to adult immigrants and refugees who were learning English while studying to earn their high school equivalency degree. It was a fun subject to teach because there were so many visual representations of government that I could incorporate into the class to support concepts and reduce language demands. I remember showing them a basic diagram of the political spectrum, much like this one:

    The political spectrum (via Britannica)

    The US government, I would explain, is made up of two primary parties that are both needed to keep us somewhere in the center of the spectrum—the sweet spot. If you swing too far left or too far right, bad things happen. I’ve seen variations of the political spectrum, for example, that label the center as “life” and either end as “death,” or the center as “freedom” and either end as “oppression.” I wanted my students to understand that democracy in the US depended on both parties working together in an ongoing cycle of give and take. While each side of the spectrum—left and right—represents a separate ideology and offers a different vision of how government should be enacted, both balance each other out in an effort to solve problems common to all of us. I would talk about how our founders developed a pretty incredible system and my students were eager to learn about it.

    Today, it seems that our system is in the danger zone. We are increasingly more polarized and less prone to engage in productive civic discourse with those on the other side of the spectrum. While technology has given us an incredible amount of access to information and connects us to different parts of the globe, it has also made us more isolated and insular in our worldview, susceptible to the algorithms and echo chambers that prevent us from engaging with diverse perspectives. The very nature of our virtual discourse can distance us from those personal interactions that allow us to truly understand someone else’s story. What’s more is that truth is constantly being undermined through the spreading of falsehoods and conspiracy theories, to which greater portions of our population are falling victim.

    It’s difficult to find the space to genuinely listen to each other in the midst of so much noise. We often discuss the right to free speech, but in an article on the right to listen, author Astra Taylor writes:

    We’ve been slow to see that, if democracy is to function well, listening must also be supported and defended—especially at a moment when technological developments are making meaningful listening harder.

    Whenever I struggle to find my place or direction in life (or become disillusioned by politics), I find it’s best to simplify—to cut out the distractions and narrow in on the basics. Like with my students, visuals can help. Here’s a more detailed view of the US political spectrum:

    A deeper dive into left vs. right (via Information Is Beautiful)

    I like this visual because one of the first things you notice is the many ways in which the left and right preserve a balance in our government. The left, for example, looks to the future, while the right looks to the past. If I remove myself, for a moment, from my own political beliefs on specific issues, I can see how each orientation might be useful in certain situations. It makes sense. I think this idea of momentarily “stepping out” of your belief system is important.

    In his TED Talk on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives, psychologist Jonathan Haidt proposes the idea that we are not born with a blank moral slate. Rather, we each possess five foundations that make up the “first draft” of our moral mind. Liberals and conservatives modify these first drafts in different ways as they experience life and go on to develop divergent manifestations of these same moral ingredients, illustrated here:

    Moral foundations by political leaning (via The Righteous Mind)

    Liberals value care and fairness above all else while challenging the foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Conservatives, on the other hand, value all five foundations, but more so authority, sanctity, and loyalty, at the expense of the others. To have a healthy and stable world, Haidt argues, we need them both—the change towards a more just society that liberals seek to obtain and the stability of our establishments that conservatives seek to preserve. But he highlights a problem—our moral values unite us into teams, divide us against other teams, and blind us to the truth. In other words, the value system we develop predisposes us towards division, a fact that our current use of technology is only exacerbating.

    To overcome this division, Haidt proposes moral humility—the ability to suspend judgement and extend empathy towards those who are outside of our group. He refers to it as “stepping out of the moral matrix.”

    The Buddhist sage Sent-ts’an describes this process beautifully in Verses of the Faith Mind:

    If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worse disease.

    This is no easy task. We all have things we are for or against, and many of us will defend or reject them passionately. Opening ourselves up to hear another perspective is an act of moral humility that combats the pride that blinds us. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes:

    As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

    C.S. Lewis is talking about a top-down positionality between God and humanity. We might also apply this idea to left-right positionality between liberals and conservatives. Just as the proud individual is blinded to the God above them, so might the proud liberal be blinded to the conservative on the right, or the proud conservative to the liberal on the left.

    Searching for common ground (via Harvard Business Review)

    I think part of the solution lies in turning towards one another—in opening our eyes and seeing each other. In doing so, we might find a common ground to stand on. Any time I have overcome a blindspot in my life, it has been through getting proximal to the person I was blinded to and learning from their experience. We cannot show someone empathy if we do not see them.

    In the video below, Brené Brown eloquently explains the process of extending empathy to others. She talks about the impact empathy has on those who are struggling as we come alongside them and identify with their struggle. It’s interesting to view this video with a political lens. How can we come alongside someone from an opposing political perspective who is simply looking for the government to help resolve an issue they observe, be it personal or societal? Maybe it’s the same issue we ourselves care about.

    The effects of entering these personal spaces in a tangible manner are indeed powerful. This past summer, a group of students from the University of Pennsylvania participated in a traveling Political Empathy Lab (PEL) that put their empathy skills into practice through connecting across political difference. The students themselves represented diverse political leanings and the mutual understanding they cultivated with folks leaning opposite of them reveals the impact of empathy:

    Research shows that people’s attitudes towards the opposite political party gets better if they perceive they are being genuinely listened to by a member of the other party.

    One student discusses three important aspects of relating to others—belief, behavior, and belonging. Typically, if a group of people share a belief, they will also share a sense of belonging. In the absence of a shared belief, however, you can instead focus on your behavior to create a sense of belonging. The Political Empathy Lab showed that behaving in an empathetic way can foster a sense of belonging across differing political beliefs.

    Showing someone empathy may even go so far as to persuade them. In his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini writes about the reciprocity principle, which states that if someone receives a gift from someone else, it is human nature for the person receiving the gift to feel an obligation to repay the person who gave it to them. He goes on to describe many areas of life where this principle applies, including politics. Cialdini provides a great example of how Lyndon Johnson used the reciprocity principle to effectively gain support across party lines during his presidency. He writes:

    Political experts were amazed at Lyndon Johnson’s success in getting so many of his programs through Congress during his early administration; even members of Congress who were thought to be strongly opposed to the programs were voting for them. Close examination by analysts, such as Robert Caro in his influential biography of Johnson (Caro, 2012), has found the cause to be not so much Johnson’s political savvy as the large score of favors he had been able to provide to other legislators during his many years of power in the US House and Senate. As president, he was able to produce a truly remarkable amount of legislation in a short time by calling in those favors. It is interesting that this same process may account for the problems some subsequent presidents—Carter, Clinton, Obama, Trump—had in getting their programs through Congress. They came to the presidency from outside the Capitol Hill establishment and campaigned on their outside-Washington identities, saying that they were indebted to no one in Washington. Much of their early legislative difficulties may be traced to the fact that no one there was indebted to them.

    I would wager that extending political empathy to our adversaries could do the same—showing empathy to someone and receiving it right back as a response. Living in a world with more empathy would not be that bad.

    In fact, I recently learned about the Apple TV+ series Dark Matter, inspired by the book of the same name, which involves the main character entering a black box that contains doors to alternate realities. An opinion piece on media literacy and empathy describes one of the episodes from the series:

    During one episode, he opens a door to find an idyllic world. People are living in harmony, technology is highly advanced and problems like poverty, war and pollution seem to have been solved. When he asks a person living in that reality how all this was accomplished, she lists three concepts: people agreeing on basic facts, committing to use technology in a way that does not destroy the environment or humanity, and valuing empathy.

    We obviously have many problems facing our nation, and there are many avenues available for us to fight our way forward toward a better day. Yet I would suggest, as I did to my US government students way back when, that cooperating with one another is another avenue, one that we are taking less and less as our elected leaders and We the People become more divided.

    I think we are misguided if we paint any one group as being composed of the same individuals. As with any group, there’s a great deal of variation. I can step outside of my moral matrix, as hard as it is, to know that there are good people who voted for Trump—family members, coworkers, neighbors, community members. There are people within my circle and outside of my political camp to whom I should try and show empathy, even as I should join the fight to stand up for those who will be negatively impacted by extreme right-wing policies. It seems a contradiction, but that’s what makes our system work. It’s the contradiction of the US system. We fight and we cooperate. If we remembered this, maybe we’d get more done, maybe we’d come back to the center, and maybe we’d find the balance that we all need.

  • Halloween Suzuki

    The Halloween Suzuki — #NotMySuzuki

    Happy Halloween from Grenada!

    In last week’s newsletter, I suggested some scary shorts from the page and from the screen:

    One of my favorite times to be a teacher is during Halloween. I love incorporating eery music and stories into my classroom. I’ve played the music video for the song, “Drácula, Calígula, Tarántula,” by the Chilean sitcom, 31 Minutos (similar in content and esthetic to The Muppets). It’s a total vibe that you’ll pick up on even if you don’t speak Spanish. I will also use movies without any narration or dialogue in class, like Alma and Úlfur, and then work with students to build language around the story. Alma is a creepy animated short involving children and dolls, neither of which is creepy, right? Úlfur is another animated short that confuses the line between dream and reality in a circular fashion, reminiscent of two of my favorite short stories from Argentinian author, Julio Cortázar. Continuidad de los parques (English version) and La noche boca arriba (English version) were both introduced to me during my college days as a Spanish student. Both are well worth the read. Cortázar was a master of confusing what’s real and what’s fiction—perfect for Halloween!

    You can read the rest of the newsletter here.

    In other Halloween news, the following picture came up today as a Facebook memory from 2016.

    Cal Pumpkinhead from our Vietnam days

    Of course, we miss Cal and the fun of being around the hood tonight to hand out candy and play terrifying tunes for all the children. Angie and I are still planning on watching a scary movie or two though, be it tonight or tomorrow night. Studying is the horror consuming most of the time around here these days. Movies currently in the running are:

    • Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
    • I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
    • Coraline (2009)
    • It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)
    • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

    Last but not least, I was finally able to put together a Halloween playlist for 2024, just in the nick of time! You can listen to it here.

  • Negative Spaces

    Charlie and Sally Brown, revealed through the negative space surrounding them – Image via “How ‘Peanuts’ Created a Space for Thinking”.

    I learned a new term this week: negative capability. Rebecca Solnit talks about it in her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

    She writes that in December 1817, the English poet John Keats penned a letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, in which he described negative capability (from Selected Letters):

    I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

    Keats is speaking here of creative pursuits, in particular those of writing and literature. While fact and reason are important matters indeed, much of life is not so easily defined. There is a real skill and perspective in being able to accept those things that are unresolved and yet-to-be worked out—things like learning to do something new, adapting to a different culture, dealing with the unexpected, and putting in the effort to grow a relationship. Negative capability is something I embrace. I knew how it felt before knowing the name Keats ascribed to it.

    The term got me thinking a lot about what it means to use the word “negative.” In mathematics, of course, “positive” means addition and “negative” means subtraction. In the case of negative capability, the answers are subtracted, or taken away, and one is left in the space that exists before arriving at an answer.

    Negative might also imply that something is nonexistent, as in the negative space surrounding an object in art. Sungi Mlengeya (via kottke.org) is a Tanzanian artist who deftly uses negative space to create beautiful paintings of dark faces and bodies. In perhaps less-striking, yet no less profound fashion, Charles Schulz’s drawing of Charlie Brown and his sister, Sally (at the top of this post), uses negative space to reveal the two characters as they look out into the black night sky.

    Pencil drawing by Charles Brown (not to be confused with Charlie Brown) of his close friend John Keats, 1819 (via The Examined Life)

    The negative, by nature, removes the nonessential, leaving space for a minimalist perspective to shine through. It can be said that the Peanuts comic strip was minimalist in this regard. I recently read Nicole Rudick’s article, “How ‘Peanuts’ Created a Space for Thinking” in The New Yorker. Quoting David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography throughout, Rudick writes of Charles Schulz:

    To draw the readers’ eye, Schulz opted for the less-is-more approach, aiming to ‘fight back’ with white space to echo what he once called the strip’s ‘very slight incidents.’ The usefulness of that simplicity became clear as Schulz’s writing deepened. ‘The more they developed complex powers and appetites while staying faithful to their cut-out, shadow-play simplicity,’ Michaelis writes of the strip’s characters, ‘the easier it would be for Schulz to declare the hard things he was set on saying.’ Had Schulz filled his panels with visual distractions, the business of examining interior problems might have proved less successful.

    It’s no secret that modern life is filled with distractions. If negative capability describes a person’s ability to experience peace in the midst of discomfort and contentment in the absence of answers, then negative space, perhaps, can be said to remove those distractions that are obscuring what’s important, bringing life’s profound truths more clearly into focus.

    Negative as the removal of something to reveal something else—it reminded me of Nazca lines. I just read about the discovery of over 300 new ones. Nazca lines are geoglyphs—drawings on the ground that were made by removing rocks and earth to create a negative image. They were created by the Nazca people in the desserts of southern Peru between 500 BC and 500 AD (you can see more of them here). The dessert rock is a deep rust color due to oxidization and weathering, and when removed, a lighter sand color is exposed, creating a high contrast that reveals the drawings when viewed from high above (via National Geographic).

    Nazca lines revealing a hummingbird (via &Beyond)

    There are theories, but it remains largely a mystery as to why these drawings were created. Nor is it known exactly how the Nazca people were able to create them with such precision, given their magnitude and the lack of a means to view them from above. Some have speculated that the lines were pathways, tread upon by the people.

    There’s an ancient Tibetan proverb that goes like this:

    Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves.

    In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit unpacks the proverb by describing the deep meaning behind “shul,” the Tibetan word for “track.” She writes that shul is:

    a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by—a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All of these are shul: the impression in the ground left by the regular tread of feet, which has kept it clear of obstructions and maintained it for the use of others. As a shul, emptiness can be compared to the impression of something that used to be there. In this case, such an impression is formed by the indentations, hollows, marks, and scars left by the turbulence of selfish craving.

    Negative describes the removal of earth to reveal the Nazca images, just as it describes the removal of those barriers that hold us back from becoming centered. “Centered” here does not mean whole or complete, because these states are unattainable as imperfect human beings. According to the proverb, however, becoming centered is within one’s grasp, if only there exists a willingness to let go. The experience of suffering—both the self-inflicted kind and the living-in-this-world kind—is something that knocks us off balance. It’s at the moment of letting it go that we become aware of the emptiness filling the impression of its absence. That emptiness, existing in all of the impressions made by things that used to trouble us, is what reveals the path, or shul, upon which we can become centered.

    Solnit also likens it to purposefully getting lost in order to be fully present. She contemplates the words of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin by writing:

    In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.

    This too is negative capability and is something that’s achievable only through intentional physical and mental movement.

    Negative capability is a valuable skill to cultivate—especially because while some things resolve over time and with effort, there are a great many things that don’t. The messiness of life is unavoidable, and oftentimes the only means left to overcome it is through acceptance.

    In Rudick’s same article on Peanuts, she writes that:

    through Peanuts, Schulz wanted to tell hard truths about, as he said, ‘intelligent things.’ But the main truth he tells is that there are no answers to the big questions.

    There’s a Peanuts comic strip mid-article that, to me, perfectly highlights the acceptance that comes with negative capability:

    Snoopy finally embraces acceptance (via The New Yorker)

    Yes, there are solutions for Snoopy’s predicament and he actively seeks them out. But in the end, Snoopy accepts that he will have to weather the storm, just like so many of us. Can we accept it?

  • O’Rourke’s Fast Car

    Cover art from Jim O’Rourke’s 2002 concert in Japan, featuring an image of O’Rourke obscured and blended with Chapman’s original, much like his version of “Fast Car”

    Last week’s newsletter started out with my post on contemplating blue. It wrapped up with an impromptu concert from Jim O’Rourke, featuring a 33-minute version of “Fast Car.” I wrote:

    I’m a big Jeff Tweedy fan, and “I celebrate the guy’s entire catalog”—especially the Wilco albums from the early 2000s, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born. At the time they were recorded, Tweedy was collaborating heavily with the musician and multi-instrumentalist, Jim O’Rourke. It was O’Rourke who first introduced Jeff Tweedy to Glen Kotche, Wilco’s current drummer who has been with the band ever since YHF. The three of them even formed a side project called Loose Fur that put out a couple of albums during those years. I was recently listening to an episode of NPR’s New Music Friday and learned about a 2002 impromptu concert that O’Rourke did in Japan. He was asked last minute to perform and had to piece together a set using borrowed instruments. I found a bootleg (if the Internet Archives site is down, you can still listen here) of the show, which closes with a beautiful cover of Tracy Chapman’s iconic song, “Fast Car,” one of my favorites. O’Rourke’s drone-infused and atmospheric version goes on for a whopping 33 minutes! In the days of streaming, it’s been a while since I’ve downloaded an album and had to go through the process of adding the files to my Mac’s music library and then transfer them to my phone via a USB cable. It was well worth it.

    Jim O’Rourke (via Cover Me)

    If ever you’re in need of some peace, I recommend kicking back and listening to the full set. You’ll be transported to another place, one where the mental noise inside your head begins to fade away.

    You can read the whole newsletter here.

  • Contemplating Blue

    Painting of Grenada and its two smaller islands, Carriacou and Petite Martinique
    Painting of Grenada and its two smaller islands, Carriacou and Petite Martinique, to the north — a happy discovery while paying a campus parking ticket in the Chancellery building at SGU

    Fall is my favorite time of year. As the days get shorter, the nights get cooler, inviting you to put on something cozy and warm before gathering round a campfire with friends. By the time October rolls around, football season is well underway, as are the yellows and reds scattered amongst the once-green leaves of the Northwoods. To me, fall is comfort. I love how it leads into the holiday seasons of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas—joyous times that each conjure their own moods of nostalgia mixed with anticipation.

    I’ve always been grateful to live in a place that has four seasons. While living outside of any one season, you gain a fresh perspective of all the wondrous elements that season holds and look forward to the moment it will arrive again. It’s a constant cycle of welcoming back something that’s both novel and completely familiar at the same time.

    The following image from kottke.org struck me in its representation of how seasons bring change to one, isolated place, in this case a Finnish island, which is surprisingly shaped similar to Grenada.

    Four seasons in the life of a Finnish island (via kottke.org)

    Living abroad brings with it a strange juxtaposition of missing where you’re from while embracing where you are. I’ve been missing fall in the Midwest and all its delights, the changing of the color of leaves among them. In Grenada, there’s a rainy season and a dry season. We’re currently in the rainy season, which ends in late November. Other than scattered showers, I’ve started to wonder, “What aspects of Grenada should I be embracing while it’s my time to be here?”

    This was on my mind one morning when I picked up Rick Rubin’s, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. I’ve been reading it every morning as a kind of devotional. The chapters are short and accessible, and offer a wealth of practical wisdom on cultivating creativity in your life—a perfect way to start the day. In a chapter on nature as teacher, Rubin brings up the seasons and other ways nature changes. He writes:

    Nature is the most absolute and enduring. We can witness it change through the seasons. We can see it in the mountains, the oceans, the deserts, and the forest. We can watch the changes of the moon each night, and the relationship between the moon and the stars.

    He goes on to talk about the wide range of color available to us in nature:

    If you step out in nature, the palette is infinite. Each rock has such a variation of color within it, we could never find a can of paint to mimic the exact same shade.

    Reading this really primed me (no pun intended) to intentionally embrace all of the new colors around me. As is the case with most things in life, when you catch onto an idea, other connections to that idea seem to pop up everywhere you look. Shortly after reading Rubin’s description of nature’s infinite color palette, I stumbled upon the following video from thurstonphoto.

    The wave crashing beautifully in slow motion reveals a wide spectrum of blues and greens, a nuance that might go unnoticed in real time or casually missed by the unattuned eye. Anyone who comes to Grenada can see that the ocean surrounding it is made up of a vast array of blues and greens. I started to wonder if I might pull some meaning from them in the same way I would while reflecting on the reds and yellows of my home during this time of year.

    Looking out over the Caribbean Sea from the campus of St. George’s University

    So this October I’m contemplating blue. In his book, Theory of Colours (via The Marginalian), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe writes:

    We love to contemplate blue — not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.

    I relate to being drawn into a thing. Strangely, I think we are drawn into gazing out at the immensity of the ocean in a way that’s similar to how we are drawn into staring at the intimacy of a fire’s flame—one large and one small, yet both inspiring a sense of awe. Considering the connection here to the fall (warmth of a fire), I was motivated to dig (or swim?) further.

    I discovered Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, via The Marginalian, and am currently working my way through it. In her book, Solnit contemplates the color blue. She starts by providing a scientific basis for why we see different shades of blue in nature and goes on to describe blue as the color of desire and longing. She writes:

    The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

    For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

    I found this so applicable to my current feelings of wanting to embrace Grenada while at the same time missing home. Solnit goes on to caution against fulfilling our desires through closing the great distance embodied by the blue of the ocean, in an attempt to grab hold of that which we seek. She writes:

    We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond […] Something is always far away.

    The idea of owning your “longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed,” speaks an overwhelming truth to my soul. There is such empowerment to be found in accepting whatever uncontrolled adversity you face, and embracing those aspects of life that are within your ability to control. A shift of perspective is often all it takes. As humans, we are always longing for something, whether it be within our control or beyond it. What if we made peace with this fact and were contented to live in harmony alongside that longing instead? She concludes:

    The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not … abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
    […]
    Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.

    It is indeed a complex terrain we traverse, filled with surprising contradictions.

    Various shades of ocean blue I’ve found in Grenada

    I see shades of blue all around me here. The ocean is reminding me of all the beauty to be found in this place just as it reminds me of how much I long for home.

    Yet, if the blue of the ocean represents a great distance between me and home, I think it also provides a connection. Wisconsin is no stranger to expansive bodies of water after all. As I sit on a beach on the southern shores of Grenada, I know that two buddies of mine may very well be sitting on the northern shores of Wisconsin. I’m content to think about them, along with many others, while I welcome new waves upon my shore.

    My buddy Joe J’s tattoo, revealing the blue and green shades of Lake Superior

    As a final note, I love the music of fall. For the past couple of years I’ve put together a new Halloween mix each October. The Charlie Brown holiday specials are also some of my favorites, and I love the mood that the Vince Guarldi Trio brings to each season. So in honor of where I come from and where I am, I put together an October Oceans playlist. I intentionally made it to blend together the blues and greens of the Caribbean with the reds and yellows of the Midwest. You can listen to it here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Wenninger is an educator and writer. He teaches language and culture and writes about his thoughts and experiences here.

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