I Bet the Whole Damn World: vignettes for the first 2/3 of summer

I am hiding out in a make-shift coffee shop in my hometown in eastern Kansas. I am trying to collect the colors and tastes of these last several months – the way you can feel something different once there is conclusion. I have lead 50-some days of whitewater rafting, backpacking, sea kayaking, hiking, in five states and two regions. I have cared for teenagers and laughed so hard that I fell on the ground. I have smiled so big it hurts in the beginning creases of my eyes. I have made amazing new friends and stayed up late drinking cheap beer, spinning fire poi, and skinny dipping in ponds. I sang every song I know into the sweet morning, noon, and night air. I have slept in a bed only ten nights in the last three months. I finished a five-year course and created a performance with friends and colleagues that I will not soon forget; and I pray not to neglect them, through our new unpredictable distance. I went to New York City for the first time and watched the sunset from the Empire State Building in the arms of dear and distant friend. I failed at giving up coffee. I experienced the passing of my grandmother and celebrated her life with my mother and sister through late night beer-drinking talks on the back porch in summer Kansas heat. I was a witness to the birth of my best friend’s daughter. I am full of life, with skin full of sun. I am invigorated and ready for more, and simultaneously lost in a life of so many happenings. I am packed full of landscapes, from Blue Ridge Mountains to the Pacific Northwest Coast to the cityscape of New York City to the imgination of those golden Big Sur summer hillsides. My senses are buzzing, honed, and in moments of rest, a bit on the fritz.

The following vignettes are brief moments of quiet, just long enough to sort experiences, if not long enough to feel into their complexities.

Hometown Glory                                                             

My parents are both working. It is a Friday. My father is stressing about the weather, the need to pump water from the ground in order to continue digging. He carries the world on his strong and aging shoulders. The memory of my mother’s displeasure of his long hours from sun-up to sun-down rings eerily as he hears the same displeasure from his now-wife. I do not want to hear his bitching, but I deeply wish him happiness and rest.

I am like a celebrity at my mother’s work-place. I stand confident in her gleaming pride. I wish this lunch date was a weekly affair so she would miss me less. I wonder at the distance in the world, where families live so far from each other, where I have been on ten flights in the past three months, and am readying myself to drive some 800 more miles to another temporary home.

I have lost my appetite (though apparently not for fossil fuels). I feel thrown back into a life of air-conditioning, of being inside, of a cell phone always turned on. I am heavy with correspondence – reconnecting with people and things that make up my “real life” – an idea that is, of course, an illusion.

My step-father and I walked the dogs to the vet this morning. We waved at all the old men in button-up shirts on their way to or from a cup of coffee. After the visit with the vet, we sat on a bench outside the neighborhood grocery, drinking coffee with powdered creamer out of Styrofoam cups and having the same repeated cordial conversations with these elderly wavers in wranglers.

If anything, I have learned to embrace the moments where I find myself, secretly giving a turned-up smile, thinking that it will all pass too soon.

We're Gonna Make It Yet to the End of the Road                                                          

"Ever since I was a little kid I didn't want to run away,

but it scared me half to death to think that I might have to stay...

had a hundred scarecrow certainties, built a wooden draw bridge for my brain...

but they all burn up, when I see your face against the window pane..."

- Don Chaffer, Waterdeep

This morning I awoke early, in a bed that is as much home as anywhere. As I lay there, eyes fuzzy from newly waking, peering at the little bits of early morning light through the basement windows covered in thin curtains, I am savoring moments of collapse. Most are moments of restfulness, and few of tightness...the kind of tight-chestedness before jumping from boulders high above a flowing river. The kind of feeling that doesn't necessarily get you anywhere except a stronger claim that you are human, a momentary consciousness of risk that makes the exhilaration of falling more meaningful by its consideration, as if jumping is truly throwing your life into some pool of possibility with an unknown outcome. I think to myself in my own moments of tight-chestedness, "Thank you for arriving."

I am living with an unpredictable feeling of home. It is a feeling that seemed to weasel its way back to life from some six-feet underground, however newly laid to rest. I found it with my hand in another’s, with my head on a man’s chest, his heart beating against my cheek. I did not fight it, even if I did not give my permission for home to reside in such a place as another’s chest. His eyes looked at me, deep and long, with love and fear, and the sort of clarity that is too unbelievable to be clear. I looked back at him, kissed his mouth, saying hello and goodbye in the same breath.

Now, I am watching the chain-link gate swing open in the breeze, to the tune of old mid-western trees rustling leaves above me.  I am boulder-hopping, having surpassed tight-chestedness for the time being. The world is wide and I am headed east. As my feeling of home heads further west, it is clearer and clearer that I am calm in its possesion, whether it is possessing me or I am its keeper. It is no matter. It is coming and going, like affection and laughter, tears and summer itself. My brow is without worry and my heart is without trouble. It is the thick Midwestern air's turn to speak to me of home. Then, it will be something, somewhere, someone elses' turn.

It has been years of circling, spiraling out to the edges of old landscapes and new, and somehow my head on his chest is home with each point of return, with or without a welcome mat.

Here Comes the Comeback                                                  

Although Big Sur is all the way across the country, and several months of movement and travel exist between all those months of quiet...the coastal walks and long nights sleep in the coop continues to fuel my soul. Autumn is on the horizon, full of outdoor work in the Blue Ridge Mountains, turning 30, and 20-some days of rafting through the Grand Canyon. Gratitude remains fresh on my lips, with hope as bright as a mid-summer sunrise.

So. Here's to another month of summer and a whole life of moments of "just when you think you know nothing can happen."

I Think They Call It Perspective

So Facebook is bizarre, right…and really good at what it does. Earlier this week I was hit with a memory of a kid I sat next to in 3^rd grade. He asked me to the Winter Dance in 7^th grade – 7^th grade when I finally grew my hair out and became the picture of pre-teen stunning for all of five seconds. Awesome. In 5^th-8^th grade I was close friends with his neighbor. They lived in a culdasac. We played capture the flag with the natural crack in the asphalt as the center line. Once, when we were in high school, I gave him a ride to the gym to lift weights.

He and I were friends, all through growing up, and now, I couldn’t remember his name. After a half-hour of his name not appearing in my brain, I thought, “Alright, our teachers weren’t that creative with seating arrangements, so his last name has to be close to P in the alphabet.” This was the winning train of thought, and voila! there it was.

So, although I have mostly refused to spend time searching for long-lost 3^rd grade loves on Facebook, I totally went for it – like a reward for remembering. After a few misspellings of his last name, I found him, asked to be his friend, he accepted. I posted something on his wall about my memory-lane experience, to which he has yet to respond.

While I was on the Facebook memory train, I decided to look at his list of friends to see if there was anyone else I hadn’t thought about in a decade that I wanted to reconnect with or at least challenge my mind to do memory tricks to keep it sharp in its almost 30 years of memory-holding. Low and behold, there was my 8^th grade best friend Kris. I was so excited, loads of funny moments returning…so I asked to be his friend and sent him a little message to say hello. And like magic to my luddite heart, he wrote back.

We each wrote brief descriptions of this last decade, where we went to school, what career-type things we’ve done, what our lives look like in general. He lives in our hometown, got married, became a lawyer. He was writing about some of his career and academic misadventures and said, “Getting with my wife is by far the smartest move I've made since high school. I use to worry about whether I was making the right career moves. Now I don't care so much thanks to her. I think they call it Perspective.”

Yes yes yes...Perspective...that is what they call it I think. I thought about this a lot in the hours after I received it from him. In those hours, I went to a surreal natural hot springs retreat in Big Sur with my friend Daniel. Imagine...cement and rock baths on the cliffs of the sea, filled with fresh hot spring water, looking out on the Pacific on the edge of the continent.

Daniel and I arrived at about 4:30 in the afternoon, and sat in one of the baths just above the ocean, watching sea otters play and crack shells open with rocks. I happened into some interesting conversations – two ladies from San Francisco celebrating their 40th birthdays, a guy walking from Vancouver BC to Mexico, another man in his mid-50s who draws people's auras and was apparently the son of some Indian guru in another life (who was actually way more down to earth than he sounds)...these aren’t the kinds of people you generally meet on the prairie in Kansas, my home state, where this old friend continues to live. Perspective.

After dinner I went back to the baths and sat in one of the baths all to myself, looking for stars in the foggy night sky, rain drops falling intermittently. I was thinking about this story I have been writing, about the last five weeks of my life where much has happened and converged...about how I have been writing it as fiction, with 95% of it being true, hinting at so many moments and adventures I have actually experienced...and how it has begun to give me some Perspective on how epic my life has actually been...all this time of wanting it to be so...and it has been.

I also continued to think about hearing from this old friend, how nice it was to hear from someone I have not encountered in over a decade, who has had a very different path than my own, but seems conscious, confident, and pleased in it. I was thinking about the simple thing he said about Perspective...and how he had found it in a big way through his relationship with his wife, with another person.

I have had a handful of important relationships in this last decade, but it seems it is my experiences that have given me the most astounding Perspective. Often, in a moment like last night, when I am in a surreal sort of landscape, an unbelievable kind of moment when I think about growing up in the flatlands of Kansas, the middle of the country, a child of working-class parents, no fancy education – and it makes me marvel at where I am and my life in a very different way. Again, Perspective.

Also this week I have been reading short stories to absorb myself in how other people write fiction in short-story format, how they connect and introduce things, how they deal with time and tone. One of the books I have been reading from is Waltzing the Cat by Pam Houston, a woman who writes about relationships and extreme outdoor and travel adventures. Of course even if I am reading as a study, I am still reading, exposing myself to whatever power or ideas are on the page. There is a passage from one of Houston’s stories (Like Goodness Under Your Feet) that has kept reappearing as I walk along the cliff sides, hike back into the river canyon, sit in the hot springs looking out over the Pacific. The narrator has just moved from San Francisco to a ranch in the Rockies, saying: “I am here, I keep telling myself, as an experiment. I have come to get away for a while from the sharp edge of the continent, to see if maybe I am done with edges generally.”

As I look back over my life, knowing that on Saturday I will be exactly six months from turning 30, knowing that in just over a month I will leave Big Sur, leave the dramatic West Coast altogether and return to Appalachia, the mountains of Western North Carolina for at least five months of leading backcountry trips. I am thinking about this “sharp edge of the continent”, what it has meant for me to be here these last six years, especially this last year of cycling down the coast and living in Big Sur. I am wondering at the idea of being “done with edges generally” as I walk along the ocean cliffs on the ranch, feeling like never before a space and peace in me for settling down in a certain sense, for generating “home” wherever I find myself.

While I was in college I did a semester study program in Western North Carolina, the same mountains I will return to in June. The program was in Outdoor Adventure and Humanities, and it was my first time exploring those mountains and rivers that would become my first true home away from the Midwest. The Director of the program, Jeff, who was also one of our professors and the head trip leader, gave me advice I have lived by since: I was 21, a semester away from graduating college, and trying to decide if I was going to spend the summer sailing in Maine or at a summer camp in the High Sierras near Yosemite for my final internship. I had a long-distance boyfriend who was living in San Francisco who naturally was trying to persuade me to come to California – it was a tenuous relationship, and I kept half-trying to get out of it and half sticking it out for the possibility "it just seems like it should work". Jeff and I were talking about this on the edge of the ocean, our feet in the sand on an island we had sea kayaked to in the Everglades, our group the only ones on the island or anywhere in sight. He said to me, "We just make decisions, and we make them the right ones."

As I think about all of these decisions I’ve made out here on the edges, I am grounded by the circling back around of people and places, and the kind of Perspective we get from the past and seeing our lives from outside ourselves – like writing my own story as fiction or telling the real version to an old friend. It seems that what Kris helped to give me, writing to me simply, about his own life, writing to me from our hometown in the on-and-on middle prairie lands of this country, in this moment of turning toward an “experiment” of time away from this dramatic landscape, this edge of the continent… I think they call it Perspective.

Phoenix Rising: an Experience of Finishing

Well, it happened. I made a book, from the ground up. I designed the cover from a sketch I did in the first few days when I arrive to the ranch in October. I revised six essays I'd written and posted here through the winter. I did ridiculous formatting on ill-fitted computer programs. I carved six linoleum blocks and hand set lead type and printed the covers on a Challenge press at a collective letterpress shop. I trimmed a gazillion pages on a guillotine. I stayed up late. I got up early. I rolled the press arm over 1300 times. I rode my bike through this fine city like it was my job. I did not make the paper, though interestingly enough, making paper is the first thing I taught when I went to Big Sur in the summer of 2009. Still, this was quite an undertaking. And now, I live in the same room as a box filled with stacks of handmade books that are finding their way into the hands of others. This. Is. The. Coolest.

It is a phoenix rising moment as there are many things that have happened since I left Big Sur two and half weeks ago that have complicated this moment for me, to say the least. My car broke down (yes again and seemingly forever), and she and I are likely terminating our relationship. However, she is in Grants Pass, Oregon, 250 miles south of Portland, where I am.

Complicated.

After being in Portland less than 24 hours, I got word that a section of highway One in Big Sur had given up the ghost and fallen into the sea. A detour of several hours was put in place, having to travel to the southern edge of Big Sur and then drive up the coast to get back the ranch. In the meantime, it kept pouring spring rain at the ranch and a landslide occurred to the south, making my Big Sur an island, not to be entered or exited for the time being.

I am not in a rush – as the universe is making it perfectly clear that this moment in time for me, is meant to be here. I have so enjoyed creating this project in Portland, being with a family of friends, touching in with my Waldorf school colleagues and students, riding familiar bike routes and drinking fancy Portland coffee. It feels almost like a re-entry, and I am watching my perceptions. I am watching how my old Portland life habits have changed into awareness that feels present and not nostalgic, not shrouded in longing. Still, I am hopeful and excited to return to the ranch by the end of next week, fingers crossed.

The land has stopped sliding in Big Sur, and I’m sure there is much progress to opening entry. I look forward to my final six or so weeks of being on the ranch this season, another experience of finishing, an experience I would like to give myself more often.

***Notably, I would like to thank a few people who I was not able to include in the gratitudes in the printing: My friend Lindsay who came to the studio with Guinness on St Patrick's Day and helped me collate all. those. pages. Thanks Linds for all the laughter and making editioning tasks into a party. My friend Andy who has given me a place to stay, let me borrow his car to pick up supplies and finished books, and been nothing but supportive and encouraging of this project and process. Thanks Andy, for letting me make a huge mess in your spare room. My friend Patricia for being my publicist at the Waldorf School. Thanks Patricia, your art room will always feel like home to me.

Time to Quit Sleep

Light is happening as spring is pushing its way in. The days are getting longer and I want to quit sleep altogether.

In the last few weeks I have been revising a handful of the pieces I wrote through the winter to print and bind in a small collection. A physical book. I am headed to Portland in a few short days to letterpress print book covers at a printshop collective called Em-Space for BookArts. I will post photos of the making as well as how you can purchase a copy --- of which there will only be 150.

Not that this is the kind of blog where I write about my life as a journal necessarily, but thank you for excusing my almost month-long absence -- and for reading in the first place. Readers responses are one of the main reasons I chose to create this book project - so above all, thank you for reading over these last few months.

I am discovering that winter is the easiest season for me to write --- hunkered down with so many hours of dark. Now there are six baby cows galloping like long-legged puppies on our hillside -- how is anyone suppose to get any work done?

Somehow, there is still a lot of work getting done, just of a different variety. I am drawing and printing and carving like mad. I am beginning to churn out finished work. I would like to call you all on the phone and celebrate the way this feels. I am amazed at these moments when I find myself in a place in life I want to stay for awhile -- even if they are just moments. The moment is the thing -- maybe the only thing we'll ever get of happiness -- but we can get it over and over again.

It is 7:30 in the morning and the sun is already high in the sky. There is much to do; and sleep, our daily experience of dying, will find us too soon.

Sound and Silence

Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.

My shoulder is against yours.

You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms, nor in

synagogues, nor in cathedrals:

not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own

neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.

When you really look for me, you will see me instantly –

you will find me in the tiniest house of time.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?

He is the breath inside the breath.

-Kabir

We are in a downpour and I am running out of dry wood for the fire. I want you to hear this sound – the one the rain makes against the cedar shingles and walls of our lightly insulated structures. In trying to describe it to you, I keep finding myself telling you it sounds like something else, metaphor, when this, what it is, is the only thing it really sounds like.

The tall redwoods along the top of the pasture hills are waving their branches in the wind, slightly, almost a timed back and forth. The smaller, lighter trees are being blown, with greater motions, branches being tossed side to side. The cows care nothing for the rain, one way or another. They are in the pastures, as slow and still as ever, mouths chewing cud at the same rate and temperament as when the sun is shining.

I am newly on the other side of my Vipassana meditation experience, having only been back on the ranch for a few days. The activity of Vipassana is much like the cows’ constant chewing in the same fields day after day, unfazed by weather, temperature, or scenery. It is the practice of awareness and equanimity – observing and experiencing sensations, or thought reactions to sensations without losing the balance of your mind. In my ten days of silence and 128 hours of meditation, I began to meet and touch the places in myself where I want to bolt instead of endure. I began to meet the places where I feel bored with subtleties and alive with intensity. I began to meet the ways I prepare to avoid, build ideas and images of possibilities, rather than wait to meet the reality of the thing.

This is all a lot to take in. It is too much to tell you about everything that occurred. There were many discoveries, observations, tears and laughter – alongside new perspectives of my reactions, words, behavior, and actions or professions of love in my life. And to cap it all off, new ideas and further transformations of what it is to live a life of devotion, to move into a type of salvation, to see God as a new idea, taking on a new form. There are days to come where these stories and moments of awareness will unravel; but to begin, I will stay with the cows.

In all of my sittings in the meditation hall, there was a breaking point – whether it was one of physical or mental reaction, a loss of awareness, or something more visible as tears or a smile or a shift in posture. The steady and even-keeled cows seem to have a breaking point as well. Hail. Apparently being pelted with hard, round objects is the end of their equanimity. I respect this. The large mother cows are walking a bit faster but not fast, changing their direction and heading for the redwoods for cover – while their babies run quick and awkward by their sides.

Sometimes in meditation I felt like the baby cows, just waiting for someone else in the group to decide enough was enough and then I could bolt and not have to endure it any longer. Of course it seemed that everyone else could walk away slowly like these mother cows, with nonchalance in their movements, like it was just time to move to another part of the pasture. The erupting in emotion or bolting from the scene is something I was working on, and something I will continue to work on. It has been my pattern to fall apart in overwhelming moments, to lie on the floor, asking for a way out. It is important to note that the way out I was asking for always meant to be snatched up out of the thing; and it was certainly not my responsibility to take myself there.

My friend Andy has a yoga teacher that he has been devoted to and practicing with for many years. Last night I was looking on her website about an upcoming course she is offering. In the description she says, “I have never been disappointed by a single deep practice, quite the opposite; whether I have sustained it or not, I have always been healed, amazed, elated, humbled, lit-up and erased in the best of ways.” This statement speaks well to my meditation experience, and gives me hope for continued practice in my life of the activities of my devotion.

Soon enough this morning, I will pull on my rain gear and tend to the farm, hauling in wood, bringing food to the goats and chickens, checking the blanket on the horse. The world does not stop when unpleasant things find us. The chickens still need fed and the wood still needs chopped. And as the beginning of my meditation experience has taught me, everything is an opportunity for observation, and I can choose and practice how I meet each sensation.

Sitting in the kitchen and watching the storm roll through our hillside over the last hour continues my lesson in Anicca – that everything will change, is impermanent. From moment to moment, the sound of rain changes, as does its direction, magnitude of size, and multitude of drops. For thirty seconds there is hail and thunder, with an immediate dessert of thick fog that stays again for only so long, minutes maybe, and then passes or rises to bring the garden and animals back in view. With the sound of hail, Toyone, the resident Australian Shepherd, leaps off his bed in the corner and finds his way to be hidden under my feet.

I have a habit of being declarative – to say out loud, in word or action, “This is the way things are.” I have resolved to let things simmer, like how well-steeped tea tastes so much richer than immediately drinking, or how soup is always better the second day after the flavors have fused together. Everything is in constant motion, always changing, rising and passing away.

Toyone has fallen asleep underfoot, while the wind has continued to push southwest, the rain has ceased for the time being, and we are left with the undertones of the fireplace clicking from its heated metal container.

All of this time, in the many places life has taken me, I have still been looking for God – in characteristic, and likely, in my own image. I do not mean that God is like me – rather, I mean that I am beginning to wonder – if as followers of any major world religion – if we have made God out of our own human image. I could always really get behind this idea that God was someone to know, that God was a pronoun. I could be moved by the idea that God was someone I could have a relationship with, feel close to by pursuing certain practices, or read the happenings of my life to mean that God was pursuing me. I wonder if God is personal in the ways I have thought for so long.

The meditation we were learning and practicing is known to be the meditation of Buddha – the meditation that Siddhartha Gautama experienced, attained full enlightenment, and then taught as a service to many people each day for the last forty years of his life. Most of the discourses spoke about how we are in our own misery and that we create it by reactions and patterns of craving and aversion. The meditation is meant to move one out of these patterns and reactions, therefore bringing one out of their misery and generating a greater capacity of compassionate love for all beings.

It seems that a longing or craving for God can exist similarly to other longings. In Christianity it is often looked at or talked about by saying that all of our longings are really longings for God. I wonder if a conscious longing for God is really just a longing to get outside of oneself, one's situation – and it is easier to pray and ask to be snatched up or saved by some force or hand other than our own. I do not know what seeking God really looks like – and I have stopped being upset by this mystery. I guess, it is not that I don’t think God can save me from my situation or my own mind, but I don't think that God is in the business of doing so. I think maybe God is doing other things – or that God speaks and moves with far more subtlety than any of us would like.

If I were to tell you to read one book – one book once or over and over again for the remainder of your days – I would tell you to read Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard. If there is a spiritual text that I retreat to in my life, it is this one book of short stories. If there is one thing I have truly practiced in my days, it is reading this book, with devotion, and always with pleasure.

The title story in this book is among the most meaningful to me – a story I have kept close to my heart, like soothing balm on this longing for God. She writes about silence, about nature and the ways that God use to speak to us loudly, directly – and now, how we are looking for God everywhere, praying for God to open his mouth.

Once, in Israel, an extended family of nomads…heard God’s speech and found it too loud. The wilderness generation was at Sinai; it witnessed there the thick darkness where God was: “and all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking.” It scared them witless. Then they asked Moses to beg God, please, never speak to them directly again. Moses took the message. And God, pitying their self-consciousness, agreed.

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind use to cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few. Birds may crank out sweet gibberish and monkeys howl; horses neigh and pigs say, as you recall, oink oink. But so do cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and thunders break the air in lightning storms. I call these noises silence. It could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water – and wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song and dance, the show we drove from town.

I would say that all of Dillard’s writings are about these subtleties – this looking and finding of God in insects and silence, rocks and walking from here to there. Every word is an observation.

Writing is proposing. It is a perspective of a moment; and like all moments change, so does the perspective. Even if I say that God is or is not this way, it is the god of the moment, in this perspective of time. Writing is playing with ideas, and often, finding truth, however enduring.

If you were to ask me for another title, I would give you two more Dillard books: Holy the Firm and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And then, if you asked again, I would be like any good teacher and tell you I will give you no more until you have thoroughly practiced what has already been given. And so it is with spiritual life and teachings. We are so hungry, feeding off so many different things, never satisfied. We are digging shallow pools instead of deep wells – and if you are like me, to truly meet someone who has been digging in the same place for many years, their tone and resonance is striking, like they have met God and come back to tell us about it if we ask.

Spiritual life is hard and can leave us hardened. The experience of Vipassana, along with the teachings that accompanied the meditation experiences, left me with an old and refreshing idea of what it is to be a follower or a devotee, to anyone or anything. To begin with the most known example in my life would be to say: Find what you love about Jesus and practice it in your own life. Maybe discover what you love about other enlightened persons from spiritual history and employ those too. Maybe rethink if God is a person to get close to or if God is a thing, many many different things, or even, just a force. Maybe it is changing the idea or enacting a kind of practice or devotion that will heal the wound, rather than trying and trying to reconcile a distance that is likely unquenchable by the means at hand.

I am constantly amazed at what appears in my mind and life when I keep my eyes scanning, looking for contact.

Sippin' on Gin and Juice: and other moments with God

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
as few human or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft
my voice so tender
my need of God
absolutely clear.
–Hafiz

I am in Orange County visiting my 6-months-and-some-change pregnant friend Carol Ann. The sky is blue, sun is out, and it's warming up for the day. Cherry blossoms are in full bloom around here, which Carol Ann assures me is alright for late January. I am listening to The Gourds version of Gin and Juice, remembering to take a nice long laugh at life.

Orange County was about a seven-hour drive from Big Sur, which I decided to drive on Saturday evening, mostly in the dark. Driving has always been a sort of passion of mine. I love road trips, and this late departure after a whole day of working made me feel like a 21-year-old version of myself. Long drives by myself have always created great containers for prayer to be formed as conversation – with plenty of time to speak and plenty of time to listen. The first two hours were spent along Highway One, in the dark, fog, misting rain, winding, curving, narrow, ocean hundreds of feet down the cliff side to my right. In these first two hours, I practiced a lot of forgiveness -- of myself mostly, as I laughed out loud at my poor judgment of departing so late, however unavoidable. I kept thinking of my bike trip, remembering the moments when it seemed impossible to continue or make it to the top of ridiculous hills, and how I had to just keep pedaling, moving forward, letting the miles roll away -- and it was easier if I didn't fight it. This drive along the One felt this way to me.

The juice of that experience was more so that I became anxious, more than a little bit, in the process of letting the miles roll away. I was talking to God, wondering why this anxiety is so close to me, so much closer to the surface than in the last few years of my life when I seemed to feel it so often. In these last few years, I truly always thought it was situational -- that it was living in Portland, having a full-time job, doing the specific work I was doing -- and all of the anxiety that was produced from those things, matched with the restlessness that I felt so strongly, which felt so often like a true longing for God and for nearness to God. What I am realizing, and what really came down the pipe on this section of highway was...well...two things:

1. However much I thought I was making decisions to get further away from this feeling in my life, I have only moved in more closely to it. It is near the surface, easily accessible, often, the only thing there is. I had to get closer to it instead of further away -- and I have to go through it instead of bypass it.

2. Active belief makes all the difference. The drive made me nervous, like the first few days of being alone in very remote wilderness. I couldn't see very well. I had never driven this section of the One to be intimate with its twists and turns, narrows and grades. I can recognize that part of this anxiety is equal parts wanting to die, pass through this thing and into the next life --- and --- being nervous that I will die. The active belief comes in, as I am praying in tears, wondering in desperation at the gravity of this feeling, and as always, what it could be for (of which there are countless possibilities). I know that we do not all necessarily get the chance to enjoy calm or peace before we die -- but I felt very strongly that in this particular struggle, whatever it is about, and however long it lasts, however many years it takes to get close enough to it to finally move to the other side -- I will get there in this life. I do not believe that I will have to die to get there, as I have honestly thought (and in moments asked for) in these last few months. That was an interesting and important moment of active belief -- which I admit, has felt at times so far away in these last several years.

Then, the road straightened and small towns began to appear. I scanned the radio for pop music and sang all the way to Orange County.

When I was a small child, I remember loving God, feeling a nearness to God. From the time I was twelve until I was 23, I pursued a relationship with Christianity, with the Church, with the Bible, with a Christian God and culture. I went to a Baptist college in Southern Missouri where I met some of the best people I will ever know. People, who like me, loved God with a deep love, the kind one is born into the world with. People, who like me, were not motivated by guilt or spiritual perfection, but by love and devotion. In the years since college, several of us have stayed in close contact, but with physical distance, we share our spiritual journeys less directly and quite infrequently. It is also quite likely that we have shared less because our views have changed, sharpened or fuzzed, and our pursuits of God have a new or different language. I do not feel as if I have been shy about sharing my ever-altering perspective of Divinity, or what I believe, but it seems that it is only in the last year or two that I have had words to begin to describe it.

On Sunday morning I awoke to an email from my friend Melissa, written to a few of us from college. She was compelled to share some recent developments in her faith journey, to which we have all responded with some of the same from where we stand these days. I admit that I have to plow through my own thoughts that I am the odd-man-out in this conversation – that my experience for many years now does not have to do with a Christian God, with Jesus, the Church, and least of all the Bible. I feel like the odd-man-out less and less, and now I am at the point where I am not hesitant to say anything. I can just let those thoughts be there and roll on past, just like miles of highway underneath my Kona or VW tires. This makes for far richer conversations.

From time to time over these last few years, I have found myself in written correspondence with one of these old friends about questions and wonderings of God. Something that I have employed is the format of the I Believe poem. This is an assignment that the 10^th graders at the Waldorf School would complete during their poetry block. I was always so impressed with their 16-year-old versions of the things they believe in, that I have been encouraged to write my own as part of these conversations where I know less where to begin and where I want to be clear that I hold no animosity as I have walked away from this certain set of beliefs.

The I Believe poem is simply what it sounds like. Each line begins with I Believe and it can exist in many forms. Though not my best example, here is a little bit of what I wrote to my friends this morning:

To be honest, I do not think of Jesus much -- which is not to say that I do not think much of Jesus.

It is also true that I have chosen or maybe most honestly, I have come to not believe many things any more. I do not believe in heaven and hell. I do believe in many lives, in reincarnation. I do believe that it takes our souls more than one pass through this earth -- not to "get it right" but to get further along, become more full. I believe in the poetry of Rumi, of Hafiz. I believe in sunsets and natural rhythms. I believe in purpose and daily possibilities for transformation. I believe in my eight-year-old self, full of an overwhelming love of God. I believe in that -- simply, and alone.

Much of our conversations a decade ago and still today are filled with playing with or trying our hand at different forms of spiritual discipline. I trust that there are countless ways to deepen ones’ soul life with a dedicated spiritual practice – but for me, I believe in mixing compost, art making, writing, physical endurance and sunsets as spiritual activities. Beyond those and a side of yoga, I feel very much like I'm at the front door of the spiritual discipline shop, looking through the windows, waiting for the sign to be flipped to "open". One of these days, I am going to realize that mixing compost is enough.

Still. There are things I have chosen, things I am trying on. In fact, I am in Orange County, of course to be with Carol Ann and the growing baby in her belly (a spiritual experience and practice all its own), but also to have a few days of quiet and clarity before I drive North to a small town near Kings Canyon, on the edge of the Sequoia National Forest for a 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat. It is with the sort of impulsiveness that I come by naturally, but also nonchalance and intuition that I have chosen this experience to explore. This will be my schedule from Feb. 3-12 -- beginning with an evening opening on the 2nd and ending with a final meditation early in the morning on the 13th.

4:00 am                      Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30 am            Meditate in the hall or in your room
6:30-8:00 am            Breakfast break
8:00-9:00 am            Group meditation in the hall
9:00-11:00 am          Meditate in the hall or in your room according to the teacher's instructions
11:00-12:00                Lunch break
12-1:00 pm                 Rest and interviews with the teacher
1:00-2:30 pm             Meditate in the hall or in your room
2:30-3:30 pm             Group meditation in the hall
3:30-5:00 pm            Meditate in the hall or in your own room according to the teacher's instructions
5:00-6:00 pm            Tea break
6:00-7:00 pm            Group meditation in the hall
7:00-8:15 pm             Teacher's Discourse in the hall
8:15-9:00 pm             Group meditation in the hall
9:00-9:30 pm            Question time in the hall
9:30 pm                      Retire to your own room--Lights out

I am new to meditation. By new, I mean, barely out of the womb, or maybe even in-utero, still absorbing the nutrients of the idea of the thing. It is hard. Mostly, I have chosen to pursue meditation in these last few months, without particular diligence, and very intensely in these next few weeks, because I desire more tools to deal with myself, to recognize our interconnectedness with all things and the way that will change the ways I move through the world. This of course, first and foremost, begins with the way I deal with myself. Maybe I walk away with a remnant of something that gets me a little closer to this anxious place – the one I have resigned to go through instead of around, the one I actively believe I will move to the other side of in this life instead of the next. Maybe it will be like Hafiz says, Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly. I will have endless hours to live in it, and I am only curious what it feels like, with no expectation of a particular outcome.

Do I believe this meditation experience will offer me something richer than mixing compost, watching the sunset, or going on a long drive? Unlikely. But it will offer me a new way to search my soul and touch the void – the void between me and God, a void that exists, however small or large, whether real or imagined, inside my own chest or out somewhere between the soil and the stars. And, it is likely that all my writing and all my days are about this very thing – and that they will continue to be. Don’t worry…Gin and Juice will be playing in the background.

While the Sheets are Drying on the Line

I have finally stopped being completely dumbfounded by the weather. Apparently, it is just 70-degrees and sunny on the central coast of California in January. It’s just what is. I might marvel at the weather like any homegrown Midwesterner should, but there is no sense to be kept captive by its being surreal.

No matter how lovely or how warm, it is still winter. I can tell by the way my soul feels when I try to fall asleep at night. I can tell by the location of the sun in the morning and the way the light has more of a haze at dawn. The way the full moon is bright in the thin, cool night air.

Today I woke with ideas of becoming a bike mechanic. I looked up bike mechanic school and jotted down the information in the Great Idea Book of Career Ambitions. Then I sat on my heels and wondered at the day. What should I do first? What should I do next? What do I want to end the day having done?

I feel myself be born, live, and die each day, with waking and sleeping, with the light and the sun, and the darkness of night. I do have a memory, but in being here, it seems shorter than ever before. Some days are filled with questions and uncertainties and homesickness -- where I am running forward after my juggling balls, not wanting them to drop, and wanting so badly to give them a place to land. Most days though, are just full of this being born, this living, and dying. Waking with no memory, into whatever it is that will make this day the experience, the life, the god that it is.

Monday was an anxious sort of day, the kind where I chase the juggling balls and am heavy with missing and question. I wandered through the morning, unable to let myself engage anything with a semblance of satisfaction. Frustrated, I got in my car and drove up the coast for no physical reason. There were no provisions I was in need of in town, no errand to run. As I drove on the marvel of highway that spans this coastline, curving down to the base of canyons and back up the other side, the vast Pacific on my left, it appeared that I left Big Sur just so I could re-enter it. As if it was a lover that I wanted to meet again, fresh and new. Asking, will you take me like the first time? Will you melt my soul and every piece of the past like that first time I drove into you well over a year ago?

Once in town, I bought a tube of red paint from the art store and found my way to a decent cup of coffee. I walked around, as if stunned by a life of too many possibilities. I held the paper cup in my hand.

On my return trip, I stopped at the Garrapata pull-out, looking ahead at the coming hills, curves, and rocky coastline that is Big Sur. Fog was being blown in by fierce wind coming across the sea, creating clouds that swirled up as the air met the warmth of the hills. I sat. I stared at the wind-blown waves, hopelessly blue. I cried for the ways I cannot escape time – afraid of what time can do and also what it cannot. I watched the wintered green and grayish-gold hillsides, with steep grades and grazing cattle. I felt myself as a great unfinisher, an unaccomplished monster who is terrified of growing older and never finding something I can devote myself to.

I am a series of fireworks that burn out before they finish falling from the sky.

But if I am honest, and scientific, that is the nature of fireworks – to explode, fill the sky with color, and disappear before they touch the ground. Maybe too, this is just my nature.

I tried to explain this feeling to Andy, late that night, over the phone. It had been weeks since we had last spoken. I was lying in bed, unable to sleep, and I sent him a message that said, “Do you have the time to tell me that I’ve made good choices and I’m right where I should be?”

He called me minutes later. He was laughing – which is something I have learned to love about him, because being frustrated with it takes too much energy. I began to peel back the layers of this feeling, this wondering at this time in my life. “It is hard to stay in a place that I do not know what it is for. Why does it seem like I am farther from having my shit together than when I was 21?”

He laughed again and replied, “Well, that’s certainly not true. And maybe this time is just so you could get homesick.”

It is sunny, warm, and clear in mid-January. I am sleeping with my windows open, in underwear and a t-shirt, under a bright full moon, on the cliffs of the sea. I do not even need a flashlight to go to the bath house. Is it even possible to be homesick for rain and gray? For a soggy, cold life? Of course it is, though I have to twist my own arm to believe it.

As our conversation continued, I spoke more clearly with each layer of bull shit that came off the top. He said something to me that I cannot remember the precise words, but I will tell you what I recall:

I have talked with people recently about spiritual life, and it has reminded me of the term spiritual materialism – an idea of spirituality that is not-grounded in experience, but rather in books or language. It is full of generated experiences, but not true experiences.

You are not this way.

Every day is your spiritual activity – and every activity is a true experience in your world. You do not need an explanation in a book, or an adopted philosophy of God or the world, or time. Every experience is of a spiritual quality.

I sat, holding the phone to my ear, fourteen hours South, biting my lip and crying – because it is good to be seen, and to be overcome with the kind of sorrow and passion one feels when you had forgotten what it is to really miss someone.

We sat in silence. Maybe I thought that if I let it sink in, that I could believe him – that I could believe that about myself – that I could stop long enough to believe that this daily activity of being born, and living, and dying, is all there really is. I do not remember who spoke first, but eventually I spoke from the bottom layer, the core of the big fleshy peach that is all I know of the world, saying, “Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like if I could just let it all go – all these ideas of accomplishment or this need to finish. I wonder what it would feel like to just let myself devour the world, like I am so inclined to do, and to not feel like I have to make it into anything else.”

I want to go to bed full and let myself die, each night, as the sun sets low into the sea.

Maybe life is just about what it is – I mean, what it actually is. All the tastes and colors and sensations that make up a day.

The sheets are drying on the line, and I am calm. The moon has been bright in the winter sky -- a moon I have missed in such brightness and clarity for too many years now. Earlier this week, Heather and I were walking back from the beach after the sunset. As we curved up the hillside, finally high enough to see the full moon lifting into the sky, I said out loud how I have missed the winter moon for so long. Heather just put her arm in mine and we continued walking. 

At the Hideout: Memories of a Chocolate-Cake-Filled Life

My coffee is dark and chocolaty this morning. I am curled up on my neighbors’ loveseat. They are away for a week and I am tending to things; mostly, having this quiet, just up-the-road-space is tending to me.

Their house is about a quarter mile up our dirt road, just past the goats and Daniel’s converted-goat-shack-home. I have been walking up here, sneaking away, all week long; and last night, I could not soften the urge to stay here the whole night. It seems that sleeping in any particular place, has more to do with waking up there. That’s what I was going for, and that was the desire I could not curb: I wanted to wake up, watch the sunrise in silence, and sit all morning, writing, drinking my coffee, and looking around.

It is true, this option is available to me every day, but it has a different flavor than waking up alone in your own place (however relative that idea is) – and that is the thing I have been missing.

So. Last night after dinner, I sat in my room until everyone had retreated to their rooms for the night. I waited until I could no longer hear footsteps walking along the gravel path, or antique door hinges talking into the night. I gathered a few things, my toothbrush, eye glasses, camera, and my favorite book. I am like a clever-fourteen-year-old version of myself, sneaking out and sleeping in the tree house, returning in the morning before anyone wakes up. Over the hood of my down coat, I fixed my headlamp and walked to the kitchen. I ground coffee, poured the sweet smelling grounds into the press and added it to my bag. I poured cream into a small jar. I flipped the light and walked out the door.

There is something about being secretive that appeals to me. Quite often, I find myself not wanting to say where I am going or where I have been. Maybe it is because I live with so many people, a few in close proximity, and many more on the ranch, short distances from each other. Maybe it is because I actually prefer to be alone for 80% of my days; a percentage and a feeling that I find astounding and at times, a bit shameful.

After years of living with other people, anywhere from twelve to just one other, I did manage to live alone for about a year. It took me six months to build up enough courage to give up my large upstairs room at the old Victorian on Commercial Street, where I had lived for 18 or more months with a rotating crew of folks. During that decision period, I was already gone in many ways. I worked all the time and would catch myself avoiding going home. I paid $100 each month to set-up an art studio in another friend’s house, likely, just so I could have another place to be. I really liked my roommates, so why was I staying in my office until 7pm or sketching ideas at a house across town that could have been sketched in my own living room?

It was not that I was scared to live alone – unfortunately, to me, it was something else. It was the idea of living alone that seemed wrong to me; an idea that in theory I did not believe in. I had spent my whole life living with other people – and by living, I mean with intertwined lives and purposes, sharing meals and responsibilities, sharing conversation and parties, cups of tea and occasionally, kegs of beer. Every summer from the time I was twelve, I spent at camp – and even during college and into my twenties I worked at summer camps or as a whitewater guide. These were book-ended communities, formed for specific purposes and most of us, exploding out to the edges of this country or even across an ocean to another one for the nine or so months in between.

My time in Portland was different from all of these experiences. Over the course of my first three and a half years there, I lived at four different addresses, in four different parts of the city. The first two were with one other female roommate, the third with a boyfriend, and the fourth was the large house on Commercial with 3-4 others. Each of those felt less like the cultivating of community I had felt in my younger experiences, as we were all on our own paths throughout the day and there was never a clear or counted upon meeting point. There was rarely sharing of meals – even with the boyfriend, our schedules quickly became opposite and we saw each other late in the evening if at all.

While I was staying late in my basement office, I began to examine why I didn’t want to go home, but also why I couldn’t make the decision to live on my own. Some of it was money, a thought I despised – I didn’t want to live with others just to save on rent. I wanted to live with others because I wanted to build a home together, share meals and cups of coffee. The problem was, we all lived together to save on rent; and, so we could live in a house with a yard instead of a white-walled apartment complex. The other problem was that I was finding in myself that I didn’t have the energy or interest to build community in my home – especially being a teacher and cultivating a community in my classroom and with my colleagues on a daily basis. It seemed that what I really wanted was to live by myself.

It just seemed so wrong to have all that space to myself, all those kitchen utensils, and all that energy usage. It felt wrong to contribute to the part of our culture that says we are all entitled to these things; that independently, we can own cars and houses and cookware and not have to share them with the neighbors. We don’t even have to know the neighbors. Still, I was sick to my stomach for wanting that exact thing. I wanted to come home after work, park my bike in the basement or my car in the drive, walk up my steps, not talk to anyone, and make dinner in the kitchen, alone. Maybe I would take a bath. Maybe I would sit on the couch and read a book all night. Maybe I would talk on the phone to friends in distant zip codes. It was a secret life that I didn’t have to share with anyone. I. Loved. This. And, each day, no matter how good it tasted, it felt indulgent like a three-layer piece of rich chocolate cake. I ate this chocolate cake every day, like a woman who had starved herself of sweets for decades – tentatively at first, with remnants of shame, until I could devour it with nothing but great pleasure.

The apartment, as a structure, was a dream. It was a long corridor of perfection on the inside, and a mediocre four-plex on the outside. I lived on the second floor with windows that lined all the exterior sides. It had wood floors for sliding in my socks, a large bedroom with two slender windows; one that I could climb out of and onto the roof just like my childhood bedroom on the farm. The living room was spacious and open, with only my large work table, boxes of art supplies, a stack of books and a small couch. The living room spilled into the kitchen that had tile counter-tops and space enough to twirl while baking pies. The bathroom had a tub for lounging and window ledges for candles. Off the kitchen was a door that led to the back porch; a dilapidated two-by-four structure that was encased by old storm windows and a layer of chipping paint. This porch was the selling point, and it is where I ended up spending countless hours, writing, watching the rain come down, the squirrels jump through the trees, the trees change through the seasons, and the sun rise each day.

I borrowed furniture, a tea kettle, and cookware – maybe as my way of saying, “This isn’t how I will live forever.” Or maybe, as a way to incorporate other people into this space, as it seemed too overwhelming for me to fill all of it with things that belonged only to me. There was also a form of inter-dependence about borrowing a loveseat and casserole dishes that made me feel like I was keeping my foot in the door, so I didn’t fall off the edge into absurd independence. Other people might do this by finding a therapist, or working with a yoga teacher or being part of a supper club. I just borrowed couches.

And who knows what does what in the world, but it seems to me that that piece of cake apartment on 9^th Street catapulted me into this next phase of my life. Whether it was all that space to be alone, to do as I pleased, and on nights where I felt trapped in my aloneness (like all of a sudden waking up to a body that had gained 15 pounds from too much chocolate cake) I could go on a walk around the neighborhood, among other tactics. Maybe it was the rhythm of nightly baths and mornings spent watching the sun rise beyond Mount Hood from the porch, wrapped in blankets, writing. Whatever it was, once I had made the next series of decisions in my life, I was ready to meet them.

I left that decadent apartment last April and moved in with my friend Ami and her two children for two months. There, I lived in the sunroom with glass French doors on the east and west sides, opening to the kitchen and the back deck. The walls were painted a bright turquoise. From this room, I tasted again what it was like to live with people I loved, to share coffee in the morning, to play legos at the breakfast table. Ami let me stay for free so I could save money for my unknown, career-less future, which was the beginning of a huge leap for me in accepting and receiving others freely given generosity. I didn’t have anything to prove, and I was in a situation where I had to accept other’s kindnesses – quite similar to how I continue to find myself here in Big Sur.

As I roll along in my 29^th year, having lived so many different ways and in different structures, I am finding that there is not just one that is right, and even my favorite ones are not right all the time. Secretly grinding coffee and sneaking up the road to the vacationing neighbors’ is a fine way to deal with my desire for a place of my own in the early mornings. I find, it only makes me better during the rest of the day – better at participating in life on the ranch, where giving and accepting kindnesses is the name of the game.