Making friends with new cities

Having had some passing familiarity with Dallas and basically feeling spiritually, emotionally and intellectually alienated on a few visits there, I had no idea what to expect from Fort Worth. 

I was very pleasantly surprised to find that Fort Worth has a completely different feel from Dallas, at the least downtown, where the hotel was. On a much smaller scale with a more soulful aesthetic. I hear from a Fort Worth native that, not too long ago, people avoided downtown as it was dangerous and decaying. The gentrification hit, but it incorporated local businesses and respect for the architecture and history, so it's less jarring than other urban gentrification projects. 

The botany conference featured a multitude of botanists giving talks in several rooms. It was strange to be surrounded by nothing but botanists. We're kind of the ugly stepchild of the life sciences at the moment. Less glamorous, underfunded, many of us laboring away in university departments that have been gutted. Witnessing the raw enthusiasm of botanist after botanist as they presented research findings over and over again restored some hope for me. I had begun to feel that I was in an increasingly ignored area.

One of the key features of the PhD trip ("a five year hazing process," one of my friends calls it) has been a gradual increase in self doubt. I went into the program sanguine and optimistic. I am now, after three years, deeply unsure. I think this is a natural dialectic on the way to becoming an expert in something. The more you know, the less you know. But, combined with A's total indifference all of a sudden to the work I was doing, and some tough feedback from my committee last semester, I had been feeling particularly shaken. The conference got me back on my feet, my own 15 minute talk was well received (on species distribution modeling over small spatial scales, and, again, I faced a room full of botanists who were not using species distribution modeling at all, a technique I honestly think will be ubiquitous in another 5 years or so), my botanist friends were supportive and by the time I left, on Thursday June 29, some hope and confidence had been restored.

One other significant factor in that restoration: a trip to Fort Worth's astonishingly good 20th century and contemporary art museum, The Modern. It was perfect timing, after all of the purely analytical, intellectual demands of the conference, to be present for some works by several of my favorite artists, as well as some new surprises. One of the things I most admire about my favorite 20th century art is how it presents insoluble puzzles to the thinking mind. It often serves to subvert our story telling, sense making habit and overthrow it into a sea of mystery. Being with the art was also an interesting trigger for me of what had been unconscious for probably several days: a growing sense of opening to intuition, mystery and spaciousness of imagination in myself. 

It helped also that I had the opportunity to go to an AA meeting with a Fort Worth Facebook friend of mine. My state of mind and heart was on the edge of opening into some of the wildness that was around the corner, and the meeting and conversation with one of my tribe provided some slight but important counterbalance. 

After The Modern, I headed out on the drive to Little Rock. My professional obligations had been taken care of. I felt the beginning of a lightness and openness that was a bare hint of where I was headed.