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.

Take Your Performance Fleece... and Shove It

Our friend Rosella is staying with us this week, and she is just about the loveliest woman that ever was. She is likely somewhere in her fifties, tall, long thin legs, glorious hair, soft, fair skin. She is always saying something positive, like how our dinner is divine or the best dinner in the whole universe. She has been staying in the room next to mine and I am sad to see her leave as she continues her vacation south.

For the chicken coop dwellers here at the ranch, we have mens and womens bath-houses, and last night I had the great privilege of going to the bath-house after Rosella had taken a shower. I would bet my first-born that I have never made a shower room smell so lovely.

For six years I’ve used Dr Bronners peppermint or lavender soap, and I guess my shampoo smells alright, but it’s nothing special. I use unscented deodorant (let’s be real, when I remember to use it). The only time I’ve ever even owned perfume was when I worked for an insurance agent as a receptionist and he gave all of his employees Mary Kay perfume for Christmas. And I can guarantee that it never got lifted from out of its gaudy purple and electric blue box.

For this first decade of my career, I have been a camp counselor, a whitewater guide, an afterschool program leader, a high school PE teacher, an outdoor educator, and the very occasional side job of floral delivery, t-shirt screen-printing, and the afore mentioned insurance agent receptionist. The insurance agency was hands-down the job where I needed to dress the nicest; and it was during my year at Oregon College of Art and Craft where I would show up having not slept in two days, my hands covered in printing inks. The last four years of teaching at the Waldorf School in Portland meant that I wore yoga pants, a t-shirt, and a fleece, with the very occasional Assembly Day where I chose a skirt that was still likely made out of stretchy polypro material. It seems that the majority of clothing I have bought in the last decade has been for outdoor adventures, things made of performance materials, down pullovers, waterproof what-not.

One of my most feminine statements...girly mountain bike fashion.

As I approach the beginning of my fourth decade on earth, I think I’d like something made of cotton. I think I’d like shoes that are just cute and not 100% functional. I think I’d like to smell nice, not even just better than I have, which let’s face it, would not be hard. Maybe I’d like some jewelry that is not made out of string.

I mean, I’m not talking about stilettos here, I’m just thinking maybe something non-fleece, non-stretchy, something with a little shimmer. I’m not talking Mary Kay perfume sets, but maybe a fancy Dr Hauschka lotion. Last night around the dinner table, Heather and I laughed hard as I asked Rosella, “How do you even put on perfume?” And she responded with, “Well, just go to the Dolce & Gabbana counter and try it out.”  (P.S. I definitely had to look up how to spell Dolce & Gabbana)

Last spring my friend Lindsay and I went to our local New Seasons Market after drinking margaritas at our favorite Portland eatery. We found ourselves in the personal care section, probably looking for a tube of travel toothpaste for me to take on a backpacking trip, and ended up in the make-up aisle. We proceeded to engage in a tequila-induced makeover, trying on eye shadows and lip gloss like we were 14. The New Seasons’ employee got a real kick out of us and suggested I purchase this “steal” of a make-up set that is half-made of glitter. It quickly found its way into my shopping basket and into the “girl you’ll be a woman soon” section of my heart. The New Season’s personal care section is no Dolce & Gabbana, but that has to count for something.

I told Rosella how nice it was to walk into the shower room after her and how I desire to reinvent myself in these feminine ways. She said, “It’s a form of nesting.”

Ah! Nesting! That makes me want to curse! There is maybe no word more terrifying or blasphemous in these first 29 years! Still, I maintain my composure and she continues…

“It’s a nesting right here,” she gestures to her heart, a thin and strong hand clenching the intersection of her ribs at her chest.

I stop holding my breath. The curse words disappear from the tip of my tongue. I realize I’ve been had. Not by Rosella and her thick red hair, petite structure, and glorious smelling lotion. No, I’ve been had by a decade of waterproof attire and sweat pants.

It’s not that developing that sort of rustic femininity is a waste. It too is glorious and important. What’s more attractive than smelling like outside, dirt under your fingernails, and awkward tan lines? I don’t struggle terribly with body image, maybe because I have always been strong, always been pushing rubber rafts down rivers, hiking along rugged coastlines, or fishing in creeks behind my childhood home. Maybe because I’ve only had stretchy pants and never noticed if my thighs or waist got bigger or smaller, pants still fit, who could tell? Side ponytails are totally hip, right? I mean, in the last year I did start brushing my hair…Oh my, it’s been a slow process.

Pre-Hair-Brush-Life

It is like getting to reinvent myself, even if only in the context of fashion. Maybe I am adjusting the outside to match the changes I’m making inside? Maybe I am becoming more comfortable with putting new parts of myself forward in my appearance just like I am with my soul or personal interactions.

I did transition from 70-some nights in a sleeping bag on the ground to a wood-frame bed with down comforters pretty easily. Maybe this transition to non-yoga-pants, skirts with zippers, and aromatic shampoo won’t be so hard after all? I’ll keep you posted.

Until then…here’s a yoga-pants-hoodie-sand-in-my-half-brushed-hair-cartwheel.

Buckets of Roots

Yesterday was spent in the garden, digging up strawberry plants, separating the mother from the babies, trimming their leaves until there is only one for each small plant, discovering new roots and clearing the old.

Heather said it felt like spring in winter, a sort of new birth as we dug, separated, and replanted. Rosella commented on how nature is very generous, taking one small plant and having it grow into a family of plants in the time of one year. I was happy to have my hands in the dirt, sitting on the earth, wearing a tank top on the first of December. Happy to have hands and soul engaged in an activity that was peaceful and satisfying, for a myriad of reasons I may never be able to articulate.

This morning I received a phone call from the mechanic who is working on my broken-down Volkswagen. He explained the estimate of repairs, the majority of which is labor costs, and the total expense being more than I could make in one month. For the first time, I wished I knew how to replace a water pump and thermostat. For the first time, I started crying at the end of a phone conversation with a car mechanic.

Immediately after I got off the phone with the mechanic, I got an email from one of my closest lifelong friends, sharing about a hard moment she is finding herself in. At the end of every paragraph was a reminder to herself: to breathe, to be gracious, to feel the choices she’s made that are also remarkable gifts. She expressed feeling those choices and gifts, in the moment, as points of no return, having made commitments to people, places, and possibilities. She shared this moment of both happiness and fear. I cried harder, in my deep love and appreciation for this friend’s inspiration, life, and ever-opening heart to the world around her. I cried harder, knowing that I too have made choices to have the life I am having; that for the time being, means a certain level of financial strain, but in no other way an experience of poverty.

I walked out of my room, circling the brass door knob with my fingers, stepping into another unseasonably warm December morning. I looked at the Ventana Mountains to the east, golden and green hillsides coupled with silvered granite peaks, well-worn and well-praised. I took a few deep breaths, let my fingers twirl my hair, and remembered the soft and strong roots of the strawberry plants, that I will cradle and work again this afternoon. Everything can build up all of sudden. We can start with one small plant, and before we know it, we have eight or nine new ones growing out of the original. They may all bear fruit, may all produce, but not forever. We have to dig them up after just a little while, separate them out, find our way to each singular plant, and clean it up. We have to spend our fingertips, spend our whole day, over and over, to discard the roots that have gone black from use. With each pull we are saying, “Thank You.” With each drop in the bucket, we send them to the compost so the new roots, full of color, can breathe and sink into well-turned soil.

Today it seems I am feeling what it truly means to make choices. How sometimes, maybe always, we have to choose one thing so fiercely, that it means mourning the loss of what has been or the infinity of possibilities. That we have to tend to its growth and in doing so, discard what might keep it from maturing.

I want my life to bear fruit. I want to pluck it from the vine in mid-summer and taste its divinity on my lips. I want to rejoice in its becoming, want to share it with the neighbors. I want to bake pies with it and make preserves to last through the winter. I want to can it and give it as Christmas presents.

Maybe that means I can’t always let it grow wild, let it get unruly or overgrown with too much greenery that will suffocate it. Yes, I think Rosella is right that nature is generous; and that sometimes being grateful means digging it up, breaking it apart, and starting over.

A Long December

Each year on December 1^st, my friend Nathan and I race to see who can wish each other a Happy December, and remind the other that we can now listen to A Long December by The Counting Crows as much as we want for a whole month without shame. Nathan and I met during autumn of my sophomore year of college, so it seems we have been at this contest for a decade. Last night I received a message from him, which in the past would have been cheating since it was not quite December 1^st in either of our time zones, but considering that I had completely forgotten for the first time ever, I had to concede to his win.

Me at 19, Julie & Joe, Nathan at 18 --- the inception of my friendship with Nathan.

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Yesterday I rode my bike to the beach, maybe three or four miles from where I live. It is all downhill on the way there, and then a steady, sometimes steep climb back to the ranch. As I was climbing, I was thinking about how many hills of much greater stature I climbed on a bicycle just over two months ago. Granted, my dear friend Christen was behind me the whole time yelling obscenities at the woman who wrote our guidebook or to Angela Lansbury who could not have possibly ridden her beach cruiser on the hills of Highway One around Mendocino on Murder She Wrote.  I admit that Christen’s banter made the hills go by easier. Still, post bike tour, it was clear that our leg muscles were considerably stronger than when we began, and we were both excited to transition to our mountain bikes and continue riding. My new rural life has not included  much bike commuting, and only an occasional mountain bike adventure…so today’s climb was a good reminder that if you don’t use it, you lose it.

Me & Christen towards the end of the bike trip, having t-shirt/no jersey day along Tomales Bay.

During my time on the beach, I read a few pages in A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield, a book on meditation and spiritual practice that I am just beginning to explore. This was a part that struck me:

Spiritual work requires sustained practice and a commitment to look very deeply into ourselves and the world around us to discover what has created human suffering and what will free us from any manner of conflict. We must look at ourselves over and over again in order to learn to love, to discover what has kept our hearts closed, and what it means to allow our hearts to open.

If we do a little of one kind of practice and a little of another, the work we have done in one often doesn’t continue to build as we change to the next. It is as if we were to dig many shallow wells instead of one deep one. In continually moving from one approach to another, we are never forced to face our own boredom, impatience, and fears. We are never brought face to face with ourselves. So we need to choose a way of practice that is deep and ancient and connected with our hearts, and then make a commitment to follow it as long as it takes to transform ourselves.

I am reminded that all of life is a practice. This is something I have believed for a long time, but not something I have necessarily put into action. The things I care about in life require practice to keep them good and to make them better. Sometimes this means working to love someone well that we are naturally inclined to love. Sometimes it means baking the same scones over and over until they are divine. Sometimes it means freeing ourselves from carrying a particular burden – which is almost never a one-time deal.

The Long December practice is one of staying connected to an old friend. We don’t really care anymore about listening to the song. Last year this contest sparked a series of letters between Nathan and I about what we were facing in our lives and our wrestling with truth and meaning and ideas of God. It was a discipline of deep listening and responding, and sharing a part of ourselves with each other we hadn’t asked to see in a very long time.

As I was riding up the hill, I thought, “If I did this every day, this would get easier.” It is also true that it would be more difficult on certain days, sometimes simply because of the possibility of boredom in trudging the same known path. It could become the struggle to see or feel something new. It could also be frustrating if my lungs and legs didn’t build in stamina as quickly as I think they should --- the same way I rush myself along to be something new and perfect and somehow arrived, almost immediately after discovering a new way I would like to be in the world. What kind of unfair monster am I anyway?

It is a practice every day to be the person I want to be, and I am realizing that it is acceptable to focus on one thing at a time. Not only is it acceptable, but maybe it is the only way I will ever arrive.

What is something you practiced today?