Every Day Feels like Sunday Baby

Last Thursday when I returned to the ranch from a mid-day trip to the beach, Sidney asked, "And what adventure are you embarking on now?"

"Oh, I'm coming back actually. Just a trip down to the beach," I said.

"How nice, what a great thing to do."

"Well, I may not have much to show for my days, but I sure know how to spend them."

I am trying to get more comfortable with this life philosophy; considering that in action, I come to it quite naturally, even if not so easily in my mind. So. The truth is, I don't have a piece to post, since I've been spending my sunshine-filled January days adventuring or following artistic rabbit holes. But! Here's a few photos of my last week. I hope they bring you inspiration for the week to come...

How I spent my entire Sunday.

Great Sparkley Toms! My Carol Ann brought these to me at New Years, as she was inspired by my entry Take Your Performance Fleece and Shove It. Suh-weet!

Toyone waiting for me at the top of the hill on the Pine Ridge Trail.

I mean, C'mon people. Short walk at Julia Pheiffer Burns SP.

Friday's dawn-breaking/sunrise from the farmhouse.

Thursday's Sunset. Looking for whales. Afterwards, we played Cow Pie Discus.

So. Here's to the days you can't stay inside. The days you can't write and can hardly make yourself read and in general, it feels like a failure to start. The days where everything seems like a failure (and maybe it is), and all of your decisions seem wrong. I have those too. I know them well.

And here's to the way that family and a good walk can save us. What a sunset can do, and how gracious the late-morning winter sunrise is...thanks for waiting to come at such an attainable hour. Here's to great music and hip hop dance parties while you clean the house or drive to work. Here's to happening into friends and seeing where the day takes you.

Spend the day. And go to bed with nothing left.

So. Here's to the Monday morning sunrise...may you rise to meet it, wherever you are. Even all of you in Portland, Oregon. I watched it all last winter from my 9th Street apartment sun porch. It's there, every day, believe me.



Light in the Separation

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

BY WALLACE STEVENS

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms,

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbirds must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1954 Wallace Stevens.

We are lying in a bed, large and soft. It is neither the first nor the last time we have lied next to each other, but it is one of the few that we have held each other, even if the holding is loose and distant in a moment, strong and tight in the next. I am curled against his back, my arm resting on his waist, my hand held under his against his chest. My knees do not quite reach his. We are back and forth, between anger and tenderness. This is not playful. This is not light. It will be a surprise if either of us can fall asleep.

My eyes are open, staring at the back of his neck, the slightness of his broad shoulder. In a few hours, I will be gone, physically, but not gone the way that he is gone from me, even in this proximity. I lift my hand from underneath his and turn onto my back. I begin to cry, a few quiet tears. I have been holding him tight to devour the distance I feel with him, and now, I am backing away because I cannot find him.

He awakens, not from sleep but into awareness, and turns towards me. I turn my face away but not my body, squeezing my eyes closed, holding my breath. He may have asked me what is wrong, he may not have. I am overcome by an uncontrollable ache, as if my heart is physically breaking apart. I may have said this to him; I may have only given expression and no words. He takes his right hand and places it on the center of my chest, sliding his left hand against the mattress and under my back. I feel only his hands and the space between them. His hands and face are tender. His body is near mine, but it is only his hands clenching this heart shaft that I can feel. He is letting me cry, letting my heart break into a million pieces. His hands hold the space, making it easier for the pieces to crumble, explode, shatter – or just separate like tectonic plates, growing a space between them to be filled with a vast ocean, deep and blue and full of mysteries.

Maybe it will take lifetimes for someone to engineer a craft to cross these oceans, just like the early explorers, like Shakelton and his men, sailing to the Arctic, and surviving in the shipwreck.

This is a man who believes that a broken heart is the best medicine; that we cannot begin to live and grow with a heart bound up, tight, locked, sealed. At first, I twist to get away from him. I do not want him to coax my heart open. I am warm with anger, wrestling in terror that my heart will explode, and that he will be there to witness it and will not be the one to build a boat to cross the divide. Soon, I forget about the space between the pieces or my idea that another person needs to swim across them. Instead, despite the pain and tearful breathing, it is as if flood lights are ignited at the bottom of the ocean, sending light through the deep sea of separation. This light is the thing the space is for. His hands are warm; hot with light, bright enough to be fire.

This story is not about a man, even if the we is a man and me, even if the events are true.

We, you and me, can kill it all day long. We can tell the story several ways – where it is about a relationship, about loss and plummeting love, about confusion and questions, distance, lies, and truth. We can act like gossiping women, out to dinner around a bottle of wine, being boisterous with our anger about the unfairness of our relationships; mostly, being rowdy with our hurt and disappointment. There is nothing wrong with turning hurt into laughter – sometimes it’s the only way to survive. These are the actions, the events, and all of these ways of telling the story can be true. None of them are wrong.

I am reluctant to say this, because there is a part of me that wants to be the game-playing, upper-handed, gossiping woman in the corner – but I will say it anyway, because that is a thought to plow through and not indulge. Two nights ago I was re-reading a section in A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield (let’s call him JK from now on), titled Necessary Healing. This chapter is broken into four parts: Healing the Body, Healing the Heart, Healing the Mind, and Healing through Emptiness. I have found that a few things in the Healing the Heart section have stayed with me. As I continue to look at this moment lying in bed with this man’s hands pressing into my chest and catching the force in my back, I chew on them and digest further:

Oscar Wilde wrote, “Hearts are meant to be broken.” As we heal through meditation, our hearts break open to feel fully. Powerful feelings, deep unspoken parts of ourselves arise, and our task in meditation is first to let them move through us, then to recognize them and allow them to sing their songs. What we find as we listen to the songs of our rage or fear, loneliness or longing, is that they do not stay forever. Rage turns into sorrow; sorrow turns into tears; tears may fall for a long time, but then the sun comes out. A memory of old loss sings to us; our body shakes and relives the moment of loss; then the armoring around that loss gradually softens; and in the midst of the song of tremendous grieving, the pain of that loss finally finds release.

Most often this healing work is so difficult we need another person as an ally, a guide to hold our hand and inspire our courage as we go through it. Then miracles can happen.

It is important to not lose context, as JK is writing about work through meditation, not necessarily moments of intimacy between friends or lovers. I am not saying that they are the same thing, though I remain to be unsure if they are not.

Maybe our Guides are not always, or often, considered great spiritual teachers, leaders, or gurus. No matter how messy and confusing it can be, I would like to believe that miracles can begin to happen when we seize the moments we have with each other. In this moment with the man, I do not know his intentions or his clarity, but I do know what I felt. It was not a transformation of our being together or of the clarity or context of our relationship or love. It was a transformation of my heart; of rage into sorrow, sorrow into tears, a softening of armor, a deep feeling of loss and the beginning of releasing it. I also believe it was the hands of an ally, holding a space, and inspiring courage to enter.

Neil Young sings, “Only love can break your heart.”Whether it is a love we feel or give, or one that we receive; I believe him, and thank God.

Lists of 50

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.      Rancho Rico sunsets

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

3.      Bodega Bay Tecate tall boys parking lot

4.      Phieffer beach walking

5.      Mt Tabor tree conversation November 1^st

6.      Vignettes with Tajha

7.      Daniel’s birthday caroling

8.      Guiding rivers

9.      Olympic Peninsula mud, ultra-deluxe backpack

10.  Cleaning out my office

11.  Nights with Patricia, Melissa, & Tracy

12.  Saying thank you to Portland

13.  Ugly Mug with Laura

14.  Attic Writing class

15.  First blog post

16.  Evening of the best three things

17.  Playing pool with Pietrowski

18.  Living in the blue room at Ami’s

19.  Sauna with Ami

20.  Senior trip to Orcas Island

21.  Janelle’s birthday weekend at Cape Disappointment

22.  Riding my bike with Cmac

23.  Climbing Mt Shasta at sunrise

24.  Carol Ann’s wedding weekend

25.  Late night missed high-fives with Lindsay

26.  Por que no

27.  3520 SE 9^th #G

28.  Dressmaking

29.  Homeschooling

30.  Return to visit PWS – grateful & no regrets

31.  Anais’ pregnancy

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

33.  Trip home to Kansas in April

34.  Sunbathing in Ami’s backyard

35.  Packing everything into the car

36.  Trinity Alps snow descent

37.  Conversations with Heather & Sidney

38.  Phone call with Jaimen

39.  Provisions.

40.  AT outrageous fun!

41.  Pop music

42.  Brandi Carlile

43.  Time with Shannon – island of Alameda

44.  Being among animals

45.  Strawberry plants

46.  Pastry/bakery discovery!

47.  Open space

48.  Carol Ann’s visit for my 29er

49.  Breitenbush thanksgiving with Linds

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

51.  Spacial Dynamics…begin to end.

52.  Lost Coast Sea Otter and Ben

53.  Van talks with Emmy

54.  Taking time to remember…

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

56.  Map and compass through New Hampshire trees

57.  Vermont lake cottage with the Zinns

58. Fun with Andy

59.  Take me home stick…

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

These Are the Days that Must Happen to You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Congratulations. That can be the hardest part.”

Tension and Tenacity: More Things I Learned While Walking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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