Lists of 50

When I was 21, I spent the summer in California, at 8,000-some feet, just north of Yosemite. I was working as an intern for a summer camp, fulfilling a requirement for my BS in Recreation. We had forest green t-shirts with our first names embroidered on the left-side chest that we had to wear each day. Every few weeks, it was the most liberating experience to wear a tank top and short skirt and leave this over-sized t-shirt crumpled in a pile next to my bunk bed and take off on an adventure.

I would have a few days off at a time, and I almost always spent these days in the Bay Area visiting friends and going to the beach, with occasional trips to Yosemite. One weekend I went to Berkeley to participate in a day-long workshop with my favorite artist at the time, Sabrina Ward Harrison, at her studio. I just happened upon this opportunity a few weeks before when I was working in the camp office and taking a minute to check out her website and noticed that she was offering this workshop. I immediately signed up.

It was a group of maybe eight or ten women who attended. We began with lunch on the rooftop of the building and then an activity in the small adjacent park. We spent some time doing some writing exercises on a blanket laid on the grass in the July sun, before we went inside her studio to transition into a more directly visual-arts activity. The first thing she had us do once inside, was make a list of 50. She spoke about making these lists of 50 for herself as an activity to organize ideas and moments she wanted to include in her art books. These lists contained words or phrases meant to trigger a memory, something like “elk in wetlands between Orick & Trinidad” – things that maybe only the list-maker would recognize as important. They could include triggers for a moment, a color, a day, a conversation, etc.

The List of 50 has lived on as an exercise in my life. Over the last nine years, I have made Lists of 50 (sometimes more) at transition points, after major events, and often on my birthday. These lists are how I organize my memories and they often give me a space to look back at what stood out for me at the time, and which relationships or places were most meaningful .

Often I use the List of 50 as a way to mark time and place. I always made one at the end of each school year while I was teaching, and always at the end of each summer. I made one on the airplane from Portland to New York in August after my 5-week-long Adventure Treks trip. I made a huge one of 123 at the end of my bike trip in September. Sometimes I will use the List of 50 as a way of mapping a particular theme, or generating a list of what I would like to write about or include in a series of art pieces. Often, that could include a series of moments that have a similar flavor, particular colors or songs that have the same feeling – whether or not I can name the feeling

As time is turning over, faithfully, into a new year, and as I find myself each day at this similar crossroads of question-asking, it seems like a good time for a list. Since we’re closing the book on 2010, it feels right to me to mark meaningful moments of the last year, not just specifically these last few months. Join me if you like and make your own. You can choose any paper or writing utensil --- my favorite is a large piece of newsprint and a black sharpie. I always number the page from 1-50 first and then fill in the spaces. Of course you can always add more numbers if you need them.

Here’s my list for 2010…let me know how it goes for you.

1.      Rancho Rico sunsets

2.      15-passenger van dj-navi pop music queen

3.      Bodega Bay Tecate tall boys parking lot

4.      Phieffer beach walking

5.      Mt Tabor tree conversation November 1^st

6.      Vignettes with Tajha

7.      Daniel’s birthday caroling

8.      Guiding rivers

9.      Olympic Peninsula mud, ultra-deluxe backpack

10.  Cleaning out my office

11.  Nights with Patricia, Melissa, & Tracy

12.  Saying thank you to Portland

13.  Ugly Mug with Laura

14.  Attic Writing class

15.  First blog post

16.  Evening of the best three things

17.  Playing pool with Pietrowski

18.  Living in the blue room at Ami’s

19.  Sauna with Ami

20.  Senior trip to Orcas Island

21.  Janelle’s birthday weekend at Cape Disappointment

22.  Riding my bike with Cmac

23.  Climbing Mt Shasta at sunrise

24.  Carol Ann’s wedding weekend

25.  Late night missed high-fives with Lindsay

26.  Por que no

27.  3520 SE 9^th #G

28.  Dressmaking

29.  Homeschooling

30.  Return to visit PWS – grateful & no regrets

31.  Anais’ pregnancy

32.  Lyndon, Kansas karaoke -- singing with my mom and Shan

33.  Trip home to Kansas in April

34.  Sunbathing in Ami’s backyard

35.  Packing everything into the car

36.  Trinity Alps snow descent

37.  Conversations with Heather & Sidney

38.  Phone call with Jaimen

39.  Provisions.

40.  AT outrageous fun!

41.  Pop music

42.  Brandi Carlile

43.  Time with Shannon – island of Alameda

44.  Being among animals

45.  Strawberry plants

46.  Pastry/bakery discovery!

47.  Open space

48.  Carol Ann’s visit for my 29er

49.  Breitenbush thanksgiving with Linds

50.  Lying in the sun… Ami’s backyard, so many bike trip moments, snow on Shasta, deck of studio in Big Sur, beaches everywhere, Shannon & Mere’s backyard, on the Willamette River docks with Linds…

51.  Spacial Dynamics…begin to end.

52.  Lost Coast Sea Otter and Ben

53.  Van talks with Emmy

54.  Taking time to remember…

55.  Christmas in Oakland with just my sis, painting & baking

56.  Map and compass through New Hampshire trees

57.  Vermont lake cottage with the Zinns

58. Fun with Andy

59.  Take me home stick…

Happy New Year and huge thanks to all of you who have been reading in this first month of the life of my blog. There are many more stories to tell, feelings to sort, days to live, fields to lie down in, and paths to walk. May your 2011 be full of love and adventure.

These Are the Days that Must Happen to You

If sadness is something that I have to feel, I would like to make it into something remarkable. If I needed to stay awake for four hours last night, wrestling with a physical heartache, then at least this morning I took myself hiking in the forest, through the trees and mud. It is the best I can do. And now, I feel better.

Although there is still fog and clouds moving across the sky, the sun has found us again in Big Sur and I feel a little bit more like my feet are on the ground. The longest night of the year has passed, and there will only be more light from here forward. Over a month ago, I told my friend Lindsay that I was ready for it to rain here; that I wanted it to rain so I could sink further into the ground. I do not feel settled, but I do feel calm, stable, somehow rooted even if I am still anxious at times, and mysteriously heartbroken.

I am good at thinking about things. I am good at being cerebral, problem-solving, seeing the many sides of a situation. More than once, friends have told me that they often do not know how to support me or offer advice in conversation because I have already dissected the situation so thoroughly. There must be something about seeing a situation and breaking it apart (what parts do I own, what part is someone or something else responsible, etc.) that is comforting to me. Still, it seems that this practice, however it came to be in my life, keeps me from fully feeling.

Not surprisingly, it is in situations where I am hurt that I tend to dissect the most. Maybe I am trying to see if there is a way out of actually feeling the hurt, if I can find a loop hole where I am to blame instead of any other person or thing actively hurting or disappointing me. If I can take responsibility, then I can get myself out of what I got myself into.

But then, there are moments like last night, when the whole thing I’ve been so carefully dissecting and asking questions about (what to do in my life, what to do with a man who has come toward me and then exited the scene for a whole myriad of unexplainable reasons, what is directing me, what do I believe in, what do I want, what wounds haven’t healed) --- when all of it explodes into a real emotion. It felt like an illness that was ravishing my body. I was sick to my stomach, legs curled in, on my side, under all the covers. Soon, it was as if this nausea transformed into a pulsing ache in my chest, just left of center. My heart was beating audibly, as if I could feel my chest thump against the mattress and bounce back, pounding, pounding. This was a backload of hurt that made the current circumstance shrink in its magnitude. I begged to fall asleep. There was no making sense of this moment, so I wanted out of it.

It was a moment that lasted hours and too long. A month and half ago, when the heartache connected to the man began, I went to a holistic pharmacy and purchased a sleep aid for the first time in my life. I also bought aromatherapy tea lights that are suppose to calm and aid in sleep as well. I’ve learned a lot since my last heartbreak, and I am not too proud to hold out hope that there are medicinal products to help balance me out. So eventually, thanks to the melatonin, I fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until almost nine o’clock this morning.

For me, there is only one thing to do when my mind has failed me and my heart is breaking, and that is to do something physical. A contemplative walk on the ranch or at the beach wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to climb a mountain, run up steep sections until I had to stop and catch my breath.  I slipped on some leggings and my trail running shoes, and drove down our dirt road and the half-mile on Highway One to the Big Sur Station trailhead. I pulled out my map as I finished my cup of coffee. I zipped up my rain jacket and tucked my car key in the pocket.

I chatted with two guys a few years younger than me about trail conditions. They were hiking-in ten miles or so to a natural hot spring along the Big Sur River, a place I hiked to in mid-October. They asked about stream crossings, and I could only tell them how much it had rained in the last week, and that the levels were sure to be high and to be cautious. As I started down the trail, I kept thinking about them, wondering if I should turn around, check if they were confident in whatever stream crossing techniques they knew, without being patronizing, just make sure they knew enough to be alright. I didn’t need a drowned 22-year-old in my neighborhood forest on my conscious. I decided I was over-reacting and I realized that I would be coming back the same way I was going out, so I was sure to meet them again.

I was walking fast, running up and down hills on the trail. The rain stopped. I warmed up and tied my jacket around my waist and folded my shirt up to expose my middle. I was not thinking about anything once I decided to leave the 22-year-olds in the parking lot to fend for themselves. I was breathing in the cool air near the river and between the damp redwoods. The river was a soundtrack, full and getting louder as I climbed while its path grew steeper through the middle of the canyon.

I left my heartache in the chicken coop. I left it in the longest night of the year, with the full moon, and a sky too heavy with rain to know the moon was there at all. Now, I am sweating and counting banana slugs. Now, I am watching the fog roll through the middle of the canyon. Now, I am going further into the forest, just to see what’s around the next curve in the trail, wishing I had no reason to ever turn around.

It is almost 11:30 and I have to be somewhere by 1:00. I salute the Ventana Wilderness, the Los Padres National Forest, and all the miles of trails I didn’t get to yet. I say thank you to the Big Sur River, to the fog hiding the bellies of the peaks, to the mud splattered on my exposed calves. I turn around, pleased.

At the only stream crossing in the section of trail I walked, is where I meet the 22-year-olds. They are climbing the hill toward me, seeming to have successfully crossed as they were still fully dressed and not soaking wet, and all accounted for. I stand to the side to let them past.

“How’s it going?” I ask, deciding that their eagerness should not be mistaken for naïveté.

“Well, we made it out of the parking lot finally,” the one in the lead answers.

“Congratulations. That can be the hardest part.”

Tension and Tenacity: More Things I Learned While Walking

We are fogged in and covered in constant rain. This might be my Big Sur scene for this whole week proceeding Christmas. When I woke up this morning, I pushed back my white down comforters and kept my head on the pillow, lying on my side. I counted on my fingers the number of dark hours we have right now, as the longest night of the year is tomorrow, the winter solstice. It was a bit hard to calculate with the fog and rain, as I am not quite sure the exact hour morning light appeared. It seems we are at about sixteen hours of dark, leaving only eight or so of light. (According to the precise sunrise/sunset times, we are at about nine and a half hours of daylight…but I’m going with my finger counter anyway.)

Now, I am drinking my second cup of coffee and picking out what clothes I will wear in the pouring rain. This place is a real sort of hibernation for me, even more so in a week of rain as winter approaches, marked by so many hours of darkness. It is the cabin I always dreamed of, a place to sit and write, to make things and go on walks. All those years of reading Annie Dillard stories and imagining her on an island in the Puget Sound, and here I am, in an old chicken coop with a tin roof, interesting neighbors, and miles of walking, in wilderness or on the beach. It suits me, if I don’t try to make it the things it’s not. It is simply this, a bungalow off a dirt road near the ocean. It is not a city or town with countless resources, places to drink good beer, classes to attend, stores that carry nice fabric. It is not a career that we go to for nine hours a day regardless of how many hours of light there are. It is not a bicycle ride to the grocery store. It is a deep breath. It is getting to go to sleep at eight o’clock in the evening. It is going on walks where my feet never touch pavement.

The romance of this place is a reality. It is not the kind of romance you only recognize about a place after you leave. In Big Sur, you are romanced and you know it every day. Even in pouring rain, maybe more so in the pouring rain, as different feelings and experiences become acute in ways they cannot when you are covered in sunlight.

The Ventana Double-Cone, the historic and mysterious mountain to the east, has a light dusting of snow on its peak. There is a fire in the woodstove in the kitchen. I am going walking in the downpour.

I begin up the road, as I always do, toward the ocean. As I turn the corner, opening and closing the first gate, the rain blows hard into my face. It is coming in sideways from the top of the ocean. I am turning my face, pulling my hood to the side of my cheek that is facing the sea, laughing with surprise at the force of the wind and rain. There are cows in the road, with glares that make me question how much I know about cows and their temperaments. I walk past one, and she continues to stare me down. I stop as I can see several more inhabiting the next curve. I wait and wonder if they would charge me, if they would dislike me walking near to them on their right or left sides on a narrow road. I climb up the mud and crumbling slope along an animal trail to avoid any possibility of an unfortunate cow encounter.

Water is gathering in the bottom of my coat pockets making puddles along the seam. As I walk through ditches, full like streams, something new is coming to me. All this time I have been wondering what to become. Trying to decide what to become next, as if becoming all the things I can imagine is the thing. As I walk in my rubber boots, I am instead taking a look at what I find myself doing. Every day I am writing. This is not a new development, but I have been doing it long enough to notice that it is something that I do. Most days I am sketching, ideating, making something. These are not the things I have to make myself do; these are the things I am doing.

As I wind around to complete my loop of walking, I am thinking about writing. My sister, Shannon, is a writer. She spent her childhood reading every book in our elementary school library and has spent the last ten years in academia, reading three times more than the average person and writing in various forms. I remember something Shannon wrote to me as feedback on an essay I was working on last winter. She said, “There needs to be tension.”

I am chewing on this as I round the corner and begin up the hill. I am saying it out loud, trying to recall books, essays, writers I love and how they create or rather, show tension. It seems I have tension with places, with landscapes. I very rarely have tension with other people, though maybe along-side them in a scene. There is tension with rushing water, with cows, and with ideas. Some weeks there is better conversation than others.

A major tension I feel is with this idea of separating what I find myself doing and pursuing a career. Maybe career is just what we do in the world – though it is too easy to think of it as income-based, what we do with forty-plus hours of our week and even more hours of our energy. I get hung-up on this, obviously. This is an idea that I feel a need to sort out, understand, or at least pin point my own feeling or opinion about. Sometimes small projects are just that, small one-off sketches; or even, though a bit larger, what I did for that year of my life.

It does not always have to be elaborate, or a more substantial part of me. Yes, I really like being outside, in the elements that I cannot get out of – I am gifted at logistics and leadership and being with teenagers, and I can figure out how to safely cross a snow field at 8,000 feet. That doesn’t have to be my career. What would we all do if we didn’t need to make or have money to be a part of this society? I categorize leading outdoor trips more as service than career. It’s not something I could do all the time (tried that one), but I can and enjoy doing it maybe two or three months out of a year. It’s a service I can offer in the world, as is my being with and teaching kids. I would rather not need to get paid for it.

Last night I watched a short video about the design-house business my old boyfriend Brian started with a few friends in 2007. Knowing a good bit about the challenges they have faced to get this thing off the ground, but also looking at their continued successes, as their project resume has grown; I am deeply impressed to know what it has cost him. In looking on their press pages, I scrolled through one of the slideshows of a recent collaborative project they did in Southern California. There was a photo of Brian that struck me as a story, a history. He is lying on the ground, in a sleeping bag, in a field of desert dust. He intense blue eyes are clear, accompanying a charming half-smile. One of his hands lies across his middle. This hand displays fingernails just long enough to gather dirt underneath, skin visibly dry with dirt and dust in the creases and cuts. Brian looks gratified in this image, caught in a moment of adventure, of progress, the product of years of creativity and countless hours of hard work. I can tell that for Brian, this is a pay-off moment – one where he can breathe deep, and as I always hope for him, that he can be proud. We do not get everything we want all the time, but there are moments where we feel exactly the way we had hoped we could.

Our choices always cost us something. It’s easy to wonder if they’ve cost us the right things, when really, they have just cost us what they have, no right or wrong. Maybe, I find myself just like this bungalow off a dirt road by the sea – completely magical if I love exactly what it is and not try to make it something it is not.

Still, this is a tension I know well. If Brian would have gotten a side job right after school instead of taking on this endeavor full time, he may never have found his way to this moment in the desert. He was stubborn and accomplished enough at the onset, as well as just foolish enough, to make the thing go. He gave the middle-finger to a financially safe and normative life to build and become something he wanted to be, and maybe to reveal something he already was.

I want to be brave, maybe somewhat foolish. Today, I think I want to be a little more ballsie like Brian Pietrowski.  Did I really sacrifice the career I did have to come and twirl my hair for six months? To tie myself in knots about what I might become next? I think maybe that is the choice I made. Today I would like to change my mind, make a new choice. In my view, that means choosing something more direct, something that requires a different sort and maybe deeper sacrifice, something that says, “Look at what you already are and don’t be afraid to just live for awhile, fiercely and dedicated, wherever you find yourself.”

Show Up Soaking Wet

The center of my belly is heavy with longing. I miss everything. I miss that far up North place that rains all the time. I miss every moment of my life that has already happened. I guess it is good to mourn what has already been to make room for what might come.

This week, my friend Daniel is headed to Portland for the first time. Daniel is a tall, long, lovely man that lives and works on the ranch. He is about as dear and honest as 28-year-old men come, and for that, among other charming qualities, I am endeared to him. I gave him a map and tried to help him orient himself. I also gave him a treasure-map-like list of my favorite places. He was excited and slightly overwhelmed, saying, “Wow. Portland is a big city.” This of course is totally sweet coming from a man who has spent the last several years in the remoteness of Big Sur.

This morning, at work in the café, my first customer was a man whom I have chatted with on a few Saturday morning occasions while I make his coffee. He remembered that I had moved to Big Sur from Portland and we both spoke kind words and affections for the city.

“Portland is the size of a town with all the best parts of a city,” he said.

Yes. Yes it is. I am getting a little tired of praising this place I have fled. My praises in general conversation are starting to feel like I am eating my words, as I continue to question if I am gone from that place for good, or if there is still a home for me to inhabit there.

I drove home in the rain, winding along Highway One, the mountains and hillsides blurred in fog, waves crashing relentlessly. I continue to think about Portland, about Oregon, about the long stretch of highway between here and there. I wish I could stop the car and go walking in the rain, get soaked to the bone, my clothing sticking to my skin. Instead, the tired winter sun is going down, and I am going to take a hot shower. I am going to set up the studio for teaching a printmaking workshop tomorrow.  I am going to go to bed early. I am going to try to not fall off the edge of this longing.

How come I know that I can become anything, but don’t feel like I am much?  I think that part of what I’m meeting right now is that I would like to do all the things one could do from 19-29. I want to have several careers, live in countless areas and towns. I want to be a farmer and grow garlic. I want to spend a summer in Vermont and one on Lake Michigan. I want to work at summer camps and take teenagers backpacking. I want to be a whitewater guide in several states and countries. I want to work in a bakery and make flaky pastries. I want to be a jazz dancer and wear legwarmers. I want to write songs like Patty Griffin. I want to work for a magazine and do interviews with interesting people and write reviews of places and things. I want to be a printmaker and make handmade clothing. I want to go walking every day. But it turns out, no matter my want to do this last decade over and over again in several series of choices, I am at the end of it, which feels remarkably different than any other point in life so far, and far more different than I expected it to feel. Time is a thing I cannot stop. And it turns out, I would like a place that feels like home.

I do not know what to do in my life.

After college, I lived for a stint in the southeast corner of Tennessee along the Ocoee River and in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina.  I was 23 and found myself in a personal place not too different than I stand in now – a profound sort of openness, but with six less years of decisions and living. In my final few weeks in North Carolina, before I moved to Oregon, I went camping by myself in the Pisgah National Forest. It was a summer weekend. I’d borrowed by roommate’s tent. I’d brought candles to set up on the picnic table to read Annie Dillard talk about moths getting burned up in candle flames in an Appalachian forest, just like this, a bit further North. Before I blew out those candles, I would also write about what I thought I was headed for, and what I was leaving behind. Once asleep, a great downpour began that would last through the night and well into the next day. In the morning, despite the rain, I kept to my plan and began hiking the few miles up to Looking Glass Rock – a hike I had done once before a few years earlier. The trail was more of a stream, water flowing steadily down the rocks and roots, steep enough to avoid making much mud.

I wore my favorite dress, one that still travels with me now, made of very thin fabric with a subtle and fragile floral print. It is sleeveless with inch-wide straps and an uneven hem, one side dancing even with my knee and the other near my mid-thigh.

 I wore it in the pouring rain with a pair of Chaco sandals. I do not think I wore a rain jacket. I no longer thought about what awaited me in Oregon or the few weeks travel across the country. I no longer thought about what I was leaving behind in those forests and old, old mountains. I was walking up a rushing stream trail, through the trees, along switchbacks, in a dress, in the pouring summer rain.

A few months earlier, I had made my first visit to the state of Oregon. It was late April and it was the first time I had ever traveled solo to a city where I did not know anyone at all. It rained, of course, though it was a spring rain where the sky was in constant motion, clouds moving swiftly, heavy rain falling for a few minutes and then the sky opening in sunshine. This pattern repeated through a whole day, with several longer stints of rain as well. I was deep on east coast time, and woke up around 5 o’clock each morning. I went with it. I would quietly locate my clothes at the foot of my twin bed at the hostel on Hawthorne Avenue and slip away without waking my neighbors. One of these mornings, I drove myself through the rain to the ocean. A woman who would later teach me how to make books and approach art as gift-giving, told me about a place on the coast called the Three Capes Loop.  She suggested I visit it during my weekend stay. So, at 5 o’clock in the morning rain, I was on my way.

This is a road I would end up driving countless times during my five years in Portland. But this first time remains vivid, with its rolling hills, and clear-cuts matched with deep, tall forests, covered in thick moss and lichen, all shades of green I had never before seen. It was foreign and soaking wet and it completely took up residence in my soul.

Once I arrived at the ocean, I navigated to a trailhead; one that, at least in my memory, is nameless. I followed the trail down a forested hillside toward the ocean. Here, on this mudded trail, I encountered my first banana slug, yellow and spotted, and as long as the tip of my middle finger to the joint of my wrist when it was elongated. I counted each slug I met on this walk, 17 in total. The trail ended abruptly on a muddy slope right above an out-cropping of jagged rocks with the ocean crashing into their fierce and sturdy faces. This moment, in an early morning coastal downpour, watching waves crash into the rocks, sending spray up to join the rain on my face, is when I decided to move to Oregon.

Maybe we belong where we end up. Maybe all this rain-walking is another way of lying on the ground and giving up. I am due for getting washed over and somehow knowing right where I want to be. I am ready to be affected, and show up soaking wet.

Another Thing I Do Not Know How to Say

Going outside
Shoveling snow in the driveway, driveway
Taking our shoes
Riding a sled down the hillside, hillside
Can you say what you want?
Can you say what you want to be?
Can you be what you want?
Can you be what you want?

Our father yells
Throwing gifts in the wood stove, wood stove
My sister runs away
Taking her books to the schoolyard, schoolyard
In time the snow will rise
In time the snow will rise
In time the Lord will rise
In time the Lord will rise

Silent night
Holy night
Silent night
Nothing feels right

Sufjan Stevens: That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!

http://www.kssos.org/images/Backgrounds/summer/paintedprairie.jpg

Sometimes I catch myself in a mirror. Right now, I am surprised by how tan my skin remains in mid-December. Often, I am caught by how old I seem, still in my youthfulness. I don’t know if I am a woman or a child.

I am in my mother’s house, though not the house I grew up in. I am here in Kansas, and it is always hard to know how to be here. Always hard to be here, always heartbreaking to leave. I sleep in the basement, on a daybed next to exercise equipment. The ceiling is unfinished, not yet insulated, so I can hear the cats running across the kitchen floor above and the television talking in the living room.

Last night I was at my father’s house, my childhood home. I played virtual games with his wife’s children and felt sick from overstimulation and had to lie down. I stayed in my parents old bedroom, the south room upstairs in the original part of the farmhouse. Every time I forget how dark it is out on that gravel road. I forget how quiet it is, except the way the wind howls across those eighty acres.

This time, as other visits to my childhood home, I am lonely at night. Somehow the darkness never seems so dark as when I am trying to sleep in this wide open middle of nowhere country place. I try to go to bed early and sleep long through the night. Instead, I lay awake in a foreign bed, thinking about my life, my parents, how near or far we feel from each other. I think about my finances. I think about my career or lack-there-of. I think about how nice it might be for my parents to be able to tell their friends and neighbors that their youngest daughter has settled down, chosen a clear path, married a nice stable man. I wonder why my phone isn’t ringing as the west coast is two hours earlier and surely someone over there loves me and wants to tell me so at 8:45pm on a Monday. I wonder why no one is calling.

I try to convince myself that none of that matters. That I am okay. That I am doing just fine.

I am good at talking about my life, even, or especially the ways that I do not quite feel okay or the ways things are hard, the things I am learning. I am fueled by the details of each day – the way the sun moves through the sky, the colors of morning and evening, the way the dog follows me through the garden. These details make everything a story, everything an event. My life has been and is an adventure. I treat it that way. I approach each day that way. I lie awake under stiff covers wondering why everyone always lets me leave and why no one ever asks me to stay.

There are things we know we can’t do. I cannot live in Kansas. It is too desolate. It is too lonely and presents challenges I do not want to meet, and maybe I couldn’t even if I did want to. The world has become larger to me – it has also become a place with more fresh vegetables. I am amazed and somewhat jealous of my friends who still live here and are really very happy. I wish I knew what that felt like – to be contented, to be happy and settled, but progressing along as well. Life is just life here. It is not the grand thing of possibility I wake up in every morning – that is equally as terrifying and paralyzing as it is invigorating and joyous. I wonder what it would be like to wake up here, in Kansas, next to a partner, in a house with a dog or a cat, kitchen cupboards full of dishes, laundry machines in the basement, and move into a day that has a long-term trajectory. What does it feel like?

It is possible that I will never know. It is possible that I will keep myself from it forever – because I am scared of what it feels like. Because I am scared of this cold, barren, earth. Because I am scared I will get too restless. I have to remind myself that this is okay. That actually, I do not really believe in the single-family home. Although I am a product of the American Dream, the possibilities of a boundary-less society, I do not necessarily believe the individuality of the American Dream is a worthy goal. I am comforted that my childhood and college friends have happy Midwestern lives -- that they have careers and continued higher education, that they own or desire to own houses, that they have babies and live near their parents and families. I do not necessarily understand their happiness, but I am beside-myself glad for it. It is also possible that I assume too much, as we only see each other once a year and even then, for a very few hours. I know very little about their lives or how they feel in them, what they want or what they are striving for and dreaming about. Again, we get so little of each other.

Still, it is a difficult thing to describe a great happiness for seeing their lives and, equally, not an ounce of envy. They might say the same for me. I guess that might be a solid key to friendship -- to enjoy and be proud of one another, in all our different choices, however little we understand them, without envy or judgment.

I struggle to sleep as the winter wind whips along the siding of the house. I struggle to feel any sort of sense of place, as so many contradictory places are alive inside of me, and no one is really asking me to stay in any of them. I want to believe that home is a thing cultivated in the center of my chest. I am not there yet, as I flip through the atlas and plot a course through small towns in western states.

It is clear that this is not merely a question of life logistics: where to live, what to do, who to live with. It is a bigger question that follows me like a ghost, that I do not yet know the words to ask, how to utter or how to listen for an answer.

http://www.kssos.org/images/Backgrounds/winter/winterfield.jpg

Sunday Mornings Were Made for Walking

Heather and I were both smitten by the early morning colors of the sky, how the grey and fluffy clouds moved fast across the mountains, looking like the only semblance of snow we might see here in winter. We took off in our rain coats around 9a.m. after tea and coffee and slices of pie for breakfast. We soon paused; awe-struck by the glowing Ventanas, the granite and rocky layer further east completely alight, like heaven opened only to that mountain. We eventually continued walking, along the hills above the ocean, on narrow paths across the pastures, our legs being blown by the wind as they were lifted to find the next step. We pulled our hoods up and leaned into the wind with our arms outstretched. We faced the wind, coming from over the sea, leaning all the way onto tip-toes, nowhere near falling. We turned and put our backs to the wind, shifting the weight to our heels, slanted but upright, held by the wind’s breath.

We walked back along the dirt road, out of the wind for a stint, hidden behind the hills. We emerged up and over, briefly blown, and then I followed Heather down the ciffside to a cluster of rocks and spindly sycamore trees. We saw our first banana slug of the season. We looked at the hillsides, mostly naked as we enter winter. We both spoke of enjoying getting to see the bones of a place once its’ abundant leaves and colors depart for the season. This place was sacred. I could feel it even as we walked down toward it. It was as if I was nine or eleven and this was the place I could go to get away from the rain and noise, lay underneath curling tree branches, sit on my heels and look down the ravine to the ocean, close my eyes and rest.

As we stood to continue, a condor flew above us, headed South and out over the sea, barely needing to flap its’ massive wings to keep momentum as it glided on the thick wind. We watched and walked faster to keep it in view. Two more appear a bit later, and we are speechless again for the extent of their flight. I want to lie on their backs and let them take me wherever they’re going.

Our feet walk us slowly to the top of the meadow, which we drop into, almost floating. The grass is green from an inch of rain and the debri shelters that the fourth grade class we hosted in October are still standing, but have dried and lost most of their leaves.

It is nearing the end of our walking, but first we duck into the woods between the meadow and the pasture-hillside where we watch coyotes walk each day from the kitchen windows. Heather has her eye out for good greenery to harvest for wreath-making later that afternoon. I smile as we pass the thousand year old redwood with branches spiraling low enough that we are able to climb it from the ground up. I have only climbed it once, during my first acquaintance with this place two July’s ago. It seems I haven’t given it a formal hello since I’ve been back.

I am grateful, to the point of tears. For invitations and friendship. For Sunday morning walking and birds with a wing-span larger than NBA players. For fast moving clouds and glowing mountains that remind me that heaven is exactly where I am. For sacred places from childhood that continue to open themselves for us to touch when we need them, or even, when we forgot we needed them. For pie for breakfast and a bright pink rain coat. For meadows that remember children’s laughter and trees that lend us their branches. For pockets for cold hands and wind that holds us up, effortlessly.