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.”
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