I Am Not Your Touch Tank Sea Star

So, for whatever reason, I've been feeling like putting some of my writing up, so here is a poem I wrote that I really love.


I Am Not Your Touch Tank Sea Star

When I’m a sea star
I hold the sea’s mystery in my purple
Yet I live at the tips of my spines
Erected like walls to protect
My soft center from being hurt or feeling
The hurt I’ve already been.
As I scavenge along the bottom
For bull kelp and sea lettuce
I cling to any steady surface
With tube feel like a miser who knows
I don’t deserve the water
And I don’t let anyone touch me

Sometimes I’m a sea cucumber
Spikes only ward my demons off for show
I let them go tender
And as I lay exposed
My past creeps up behind me
Slithering inside my open sores
Carrying their torches of truth
I feel them settle in my gut
So I twist it around them, bunch it up
With a hurl I eviscerate my organs
And scramble to grow new insides

Once I was an octopus
Used eight arms to lift the top of the holding tank
Squeezed out, dropped to the floor and crawled
Through the crack under the door
Famished on the sand, inching forward
Telling myself I will not let them
Make me let myself die
If I can give me a little slack and a lot of love
I might make it
Back to the deeper seas I knew before captivity
Where they can’t coax me back
To put me in the big tank, captive
For their audience
I am free

On a blue moon I’m a blue dolphin
On waves with deeper frequency
Intelligence unfocused on rational thought
Feel no shame for stranding myself
To help a member of my pod in need
Sensed out with echolocation
Weathered harsh, howling storms
By surrendering to their windblown frenzy
I know the patterns of Earth’s turning
I have been to blue depths

Today I just want to be
Myself
Deep down
I am
The sea.


I wrote this in the summer of 2003 so it's several years old now. That spring I worked OEE (Outdoor Environmental Education) on Orcas Island. During that season, I had to teach challenge and science classes to groups of kids, mostly in fifth or sixth grade (but there were a few groups younger and older). Some of the science classes included pond ecology, forest ecology, the water cycle, microforest, "Super Salmon" and most notably related to this post, marine invertebrates and marine mammals.

I had a rough time for a lot of reasons, one being that I was not so familiar with this material before I worked there. I had taken some basic environmental science class but nothing in depth on marine life. And a lot of these creatures we were looking at and studying were soooo small I could barely see them, much less make distinctions and identifications. So I was learning as I was teaching, and learning by teaching. At the same time I was going through some intense personal stuff, and felt stressed out always having to be so "on" for the kids. There were a lot of fourteen-hour days and I remember walking around, going from class to class at different locations around camp with this poem in my head, the words coming together around my own personal struggle and what I was learning about marine life.

And just FYI the octopus part is based on a real story that happened that spring. An octopus really did escape a holding tank by somehow lifting the lid and slithering out. I can't remember all the details, I want to say it died trying to get back to the water, but am just not sure if I'm recalling that accurately. I remember feeling so inspired by that octopus' instinct for freedom.

All in all, I am not absolutely satisfied with the poem - to me it feels too prose-y. And that is always my issue. I don't think poetry comes naturally to me. I don't read a lot of it, and blasphemous as this may sound, I don't like much of it. When I find a poem or a poet I like, it is a big deal. In fact, I honestly prefer some of the poetry written by friends and people I know (in a blows everything else out of the water sort of way) to most of what I'd find in anthologies, literary journals or acclaimed chapbooks. A huge percent of it just doesn't speak to me. I like the idea of poets and poetry, and even the word poetry, more than I actually like it. All this to say, I am well aware that poetry is not my forte.

I want to say this too, for anyone who isn't familiar, the title and the last line are a play on a song by Audioslave called "I Am the Highway." It's on their first, self-titled album and though I was not a huge fan of that album, there were a handful of songs I really loved, and this one was particularly fitting for my life at the time, especially the winter immediately before that spring working OEE on Orcas Island. I had moved out of my parents' house, which felt more like an escape than a moving out, and was struggling through life in Seattle, and this song just embodied a lot of my sentiments at the time. No wonder some of the rhythm and the music seeped into my own attempt at poetry.


Currently Listening:
"I Am the Highway" - Audioslave - well, duh. It relates to the post so I put it on (and actually realized I had never transferred this album to my computer, though I did have a few songs). Crazy how you can go so many years without hearing a song and how seamlessly the words come back to mind.

Pearls and swine, bereft of me
Long and weary, my road has been
I was lost in the cities
Alone in the hills
No sorrow or pity
For leaving, I feel

I am not your rolling wheels
I am the highway
I am not your carpet ride
I am the sky

Friends and liars don't wait for me
Cuz I'll get on all by myself
I put millions of miles
Under my heels
And still too close
To you, I feel

I am not your rolling wheels
I am the highway
I am not your carpet ride
I am the sky
I am not your blowing wind
I am the lightning
I am not your autumn moon
I am the night

I am not your rolling wheels
I am the highway
I am not your carpet ride
I am the sky
I am not your blowing wind
I am the lightning
I am not your autumn moon
I am the night

"All in the Cold Midwinter and at the Midnight Hour"

Or, what I did over my winter vacation.

I've actually been dying to blog about this but wanted to get some other things out of the way first. Like revamping it and updating it, for instance.

A few years ago, I wrote this post about my favorite winter memory, the second winter I spent living in the dispensary, a perfect cabin at Camp Orkila and how blissful that winter was, revelling in my connectedness to the natural world. I sometimes feel there aren't words for how satisfying in a soul way living there was to me. And it wasn't just the proximity to the ocean, the way I heard the owls and the creaking of cedar trees at night, or the thick woods I could walk through or even the months I lived there while having very little work, or all the great books I read, or the great company I had in my friend Tracy, or the walks by the coast.

Some of it was the house itself. I have lived a lot of places. I could romanticize a lot of them in memory. I'm a nostalgic kind of girl. But the dispensary was different. To me, it was perfect. It's really a cabin, all wood walls, and I just love the coloring and the light, it just really strikes something deep inside me and when I'm there, I feel like I'm sort of spiritually home. And it is not something that is only in retrospective nostalgia. I felt it the moment I first walked in, in late 2003. I remember it so clearly. The regular season at camp was over, there were only a few of us left and this girl who I didn't know too well was living there and she invited me to come over and so I went. When I got there she was on the phone and kept telling me she would be off soon and kept talking and I was just soaking up the surroundings, instantly struck with an affinity for the house, the adorable way the curtains hung on the windows, reminding me of some old camping trip or something. While I waited for her to get off the phone, I had a little notebook w/me and I took it out and wrote a poem about the house. If there is love at first sight, well maybe it felt a little like that. I am a place-lover anyway.

So all that to say, it's been years since I spent any extended time there, until a few weeks ago. I still don't know quite how it happened. I was planning on going to Orcas for the holidays, but was having some struggles arranging it, knowing where to stay, how to get there, and somehow it all fell into place. I took the train to Seattle, met with my buddy and writer friend/mentor Janet who drove to the islands, and some friends who are at camp this winter suggested staying in the dispensary. So I did.

It was blissful. In my heart of hearts it was exactly, EXACTLY what I wanted out of my winter vacation. It was like my own private writing retreat, and I desperately needed something to get me started. Something felt so comfortable there. I sat on the couch where I once read Mists of Avalon for a month, and wrote for three days. I slept in my old room, in my old bed and just tried to soak up every moment of being there. It looks a lot different, with different people's stuff there. In the summer, the house is the "health hut" so there were all these doctorly things in there, which just rocked my world of course, lol. In my bathroom there were all these anatomy charts on the walls. It was perfect.

My first night there, I got in late at night, dropped my stuff off and immediately walked by the ocean. I have missed the ocean. I have missed that stretch of ocean, even during all the years living on Orcas but off of camp, I have missed it. I have missed walking it alone. It had been probably close to five years since the last time I did that. It was weird. I used to do it all the time. I used to know all the trees and major logs and rocks. I used to walk there all the time. That got me through the early winter of 2004, which was my first winter on Orcas, and really hard, and really, really rewarding. I had so many insights and realizations and aha moments walking that shore. I walked in when I was sad, when I was working things out in my own mind, when I was caught up in grief, when I was inspired, when I was happy, and mostly when I was most deeply, really me. That shore, with its cold, softer Puget Sound waves, its inky dark water, its curved shoreline shape, its distant, unreal horizon, its other islands, its sky, became like a real, good, true friend to me and I loved it unequivocally. And knew it. There are so many experiences I could recount that took place there, like the time I went skinny-dipping in the middle of February and how gorgeously cold the water was, but most of the experiences were more internal, personally meaningful, subtle and intangible but palpable.

So it was weird to be back. Really weird. Disconcertingly weird at first. It made me think of that phrase, "you can't step in the same river twice." It was beautiful and somber as always. It was the same. I wasn't. I felt so viscerally the difference between me visiting and walking this ocean now from me who had walked and loved that ocean years ago. I don't know if this makes any sense, or even what it means, but the main feeling I got (aside from being a visitor now, rather than a regular part of that landscape as I felt before), was that I felt taller.

What? I don't know what that means. My actual height hasn't changed. If I felt heavier or bigger it would make at least some sense, but I just kept getting this unshakable feeling that I was taller than the last time I'd been there, alone, at night. It was such a strong, distinct and precise feeling, so unmistakable, but also so not actually true in reality. So I thought it might be symbolic, but of what? I don't know. I do think it meant something though.

I also felt like I couldn't re-enter that old self that used to walk that sea. Sometimes, I sort of do this thing, if I'm really hit w/nostalgia, where I can almost re-enter an older time. The almost part is painful, like it's just within my grasp, so almost there, but always not quite, just almost. In this state I can conjure up the old feelings like body memories and capture a sense or a "feeling" about the older time, something I never would have quite felt when I was in it because it's a sense or feeling colored in by memory. It's hard to explain. But I couldn't do it. I was so not the same person as I once was.

The distance felt so undeniable, an inarguable fact. I felt the distance and I felt like I was somehow more detached, more cynical maybe, though that doesn't quite describe it. Distant is really the word. The tide was out and I climbed up a huge rock that I always used to sit on. I sat there for awhile, thinking about what happened between back then and then. It made me feel sad, and I felt like I should have felt more profoundly sad, and on some level I did, but it felt like things were only getting to that level, and not to anything deeper.

It just got me contemplating, and thinking about how I haven't been writing much, for years. Not really. Not the way I used to. Not anything other than blogs or journal entries. No poetry. No stories. No memoir. When I start, I write for a few days and then I turn away and just don't want to go back to it. Something I've been sort of circling around for months now suddenly became crystallized.

I write because I don't want to feel.

And if I write, I will feel. And if I write, I will write about a particular situation and I don't want to feel one sliver of it. I don't. It was awful. I was in a horrible relationship - that is not to say the guy was horrible, I want to make that clear, and I was no saint either, not by far - but somehow the mixture of the two of us was destructive, to me anyway, in ways I couldn't see until after he left. What kills me, the part I have the hardest time with, is my part in it all, the fact that I betrayed myself. I betrayed myself every day, day in and day out, every day we lived together. I did it so much it became invisible and I stopped even seeing it. For whatever reason, of all the things that happened, THAT is the part I have trouble accepting and facing, that betrayal of self. I shut my mouth about what I thought. I didn't say anything when he would make these outrageously sexist comments that seriously offended me. I didn't say anything when he ridiculed things I believed in politically, I just stopped saying them, or pretended to agree, to keep the peace. And then there were the things that were actually directed at me, that I still would never want to say b/c I feel so awful that I didn't say anything. And those are just the surface-y things. It went so much deeper. I wasn't myself. I wasn't free to be myself. I've gone through a lot in my life, a lot of horrible shit in one way or another, and always I felt like there was some intrinsic, spiritual core inside me that survived, that sometimes was even enriched and deepened by loss in the right context, an inner guide of sort of led me through, and when things got really awful I would often have calming or sacred or healing experiences around nature. It always felt like that part of me didn't survive that relationship. Maybe because I suppressed it and abandoned it at every turn. I've felt really lost. Really afraid to feel. Ever since. It's been awhile now. I don't want to keep feeling that way.

And, sitting on that rock, I realized that continuing to not write is, in a way, just a continued betrayal. There are a million reasons not to write, but that, and the fact that it could be hard doesn't mean I shouldn't do it. All I know is, I feel like that story is inside me, screaming, clamoring louder and louder every day to be let out, to be put on paper so it can be real, so I can look at it and maybe see things I never saw, so I can write into truth that goes beyond what I consciously know, because that's what happens when I write, other ways of knowing surface, some sort of healing alchemy stirs into motion. And I always feel better after. Not always during writing difficult things, but I always feel better after. And a lot of times it's funny. I mean what can you do sometimes when things are really, really dark, how can you face that darkness without a way to laugh? So a lot of times it ends up funny in ways that surprise me, dark ways, ironic ways, funny ways that aren't really funny, not really because they're heartbreaking, but they're also funny. And laughter, like crying, is release. But most of all, when I'm writing, I am really, distinctly myself with all my complexities and not the face I put on for anyone else, or the self I put on in this shitty situation, but wholly myself. And it is terrifying! But also rewarding. So I decided for 2010 I am going to write. I am carving out the time. I don't know where it will take me, and I am really just writing for myself, longhand, but the point is, I am writing. At the moment I'm writing about writing, but still.

As I got off that rock and walked the sea back to the dock, I started thinking about an experience I had when I was living in the dispensary. One morning I woke up really early, just around dawn, and it was one of the most glorious mornings ever. I was in the middle of Mists of Avalon (which I will tell anyone, is a great book to read in winter, it just is). I was at this part where Morgaine, the main character who was trained as a priestess in goddess worship, who has sort of left behind her training to live in the world. Then, much later, at the point where I was reading that morning, she was reconnecting with her roots, rediscovering ley lines and the old ways. Something about the feeling and that morning was so infectious and filled me with this magical feeling like I too was waking up to something. It was winter, right before solstice, but there were some brilliant sunrise colors. I went on a walk through the woods to a place called Chapel Rock in the early light and just felt so inspired and connected to the natural world and like I was coming undone and blossoming inside myself.

Awhile later, when I left camp the first time and stopped living there, I was pretty heartbroken to leave. I feel like people never fully understand this because people are so used to loving people (which of course I do too) but I loved that land. Leaving felt like tearing a part of my heart out. I had never had a relationship with land quite like that and it really, really broke my heart to leave. I had my reasons, and I think they were good and wise, but really, really difficult. I was in mourning in the days leading up to my departure. And I remember my last day of work that time around, being there in the morning, and being really caught up in the mourning, thinking of all the things I was leaving, remembering fall mornings washing the lodge windows and seeing the brilliant colors of the trees, revisiting a tree I had once leaned on in a time of great sorrow, knowing my life wouldn't be quite the same after I left. And it wasn't. I always missed living there in fall and winter with a yearning that could cut through me, and years later, I still sometimes do. I was afraid I wouldn't be my true, in touch, soul-satisfied and whole self that I was while living there.

And I remember thinking that morning, as the hours slipped away, time feeling so unreal, that maybe it would be okay. Maybe we have to lose ourselves or just lose sometimes, so that we can have a morning of awakening like the one I'd had that winter morning, reading about Morgaine's. I even wrote something about it, because years ago, I wrote about that day. Let me go find it.


I’m a little worried still that I might just be numb, but then I think again, so what? Maybe it’s not so bad that we lose ourselves now and again, just so we can experience awakening. Maybe I will indeed have another day like that one in winter when I woke up so early with Mists of Avalon and couldn’t even contain my yearning for life in the wild early hours, when I felt acute and alive like the most divine lust. It’s never a straight path, there are so many spirals and levels that i’m sure there will be more euphoria mornings.

Okay, I must say, reading this years later, I am embarrassed by that last line, b/c it's a reference to Chris Cornell and it's kind of corny, and he sucks so bad now, but the words are perfect for the feeling.


So anyway, a few weeks ago, on the solstice and at night, walking back along the ocean, I was thinking kind of similar thoughts. Maybe it's okay if parts of us go underground for awhile. Maybe we need that for survival, even if it's surviving something that shouldn't be the way it is, something that needs to be changed. Survival always comes first. Sometimes those parts go underground because we need to live in the world, like Morgaine, and maybe that's okay because there is eventually if we allow it, the joy of rediscovery, awakening, coming home to ourselves. And it's somehow richer because there's some mettle behind it, if that makes sense. There's wisdom. There's life lived. Morgaine would have been pretty boring to read about if she had just stayed on Avalon, never joining the struggles of the world and living a human life.

It felt like that is what my journey to Orcas for the holidays was about. It was an inkling. It wasn't as vibrant or as innocent as the morning years ago, but it was a glimpse of how to dig up the buried parts, and for me, it's always primarily through writing and nature. So I'm writing.

I spent the next few days walking around, writing, soaking up the feeling of the dispensary, trying not to forget that thawing out and coming home may not be easy, but they are worth it. And now I'm back home in my new home, and I'm still writing. So, that's something. I guess I got what I wanted for the holidays, and I think I'd take this more difficult gift which might require some wrestling with over anything I could find in a store, any day, and especially in winter.

Speaking of, the lyric I used to title this blog is from a song that Tori does on "Midwinter Graces." And what shocked me is when I came home and had my own little holiday thing in my apartment, drinking hot chocolate and watching (yes, here we go again) the Christmas episode of Grey's (and I love, love, love, love it, one of my all-time favorite episodes, it's sooooo good) and another version of this same song was on there! Love it.



Currently Listening:
"Abnormally Attracted to Sin" - Tori Amos

mpeccable peccadillo
You are off your guard
Pussy will calls there by the church
"don't go in if you are
abnormally attracted to sin"
Abnormally attracted to sin

She may be dead to you
But her hips sway a natural kind of faith
That could give your lost heart
A warm chapel
You'll sleep in her bell tower
And you will simply wake
Abnormally attracted to sin
Abnormally attracted to sin

Impeccable peccadillo
I know who you are
Tales of longing sway
Lost without a verse
Hymns of swing lay low
there by the church
"don't go in if you are
abnormally attracted to sin"
Abnormally attracted to sin

She may be dead to you
Kind of faith that could give
Attracted to sin
To sin
To sin

My Love/Hate Relationship with Orcas Island

(Originally written on September 6th, but I forgot to finish and post)

So, I'm back on the rock. Some might call it Orcatraz and these days, I might be among them.

What I've been wondering a lot lately is if there is a danger in staying somewhere that is too small and safe too long? I feel like I'm living out some negative consequences of having done just that. It's like staying in the womb too long and then not knowing how to breathe in wide open spaces or something.

When I first moved here, life on a small Pacific Northwest island was exactly what I needed. It felt like a port in the storm that was my life. It's also one of the lushest, most beautiful places I have ever encountered. And not in a "oh look at that honey, isn't it pretty?" sort of cheesy way, but in a deep, sacred sort of way, with thick forested areas, fog, and the ocean. Perfectly contemplative. Before I got here, while living in Seattle unable to find work and stressed out all the time, I had this constant daydream that somehow, someday I would be living somewhere where I could see the ocean, somewhere quiet and dreary and maybe even a little melancholy.

And somehow, that incessant daydream that felt like an impossible imagining came true when I came up here (which was six and a half years ago). I lived on the camp property and could see the ocean from my window. I'd wake up to go to work early and see the moon reflecting on the water, or look up and see constellations, and take walks through thick trees. I wrote in detail about this once before in this post. So yeah, for awhile, Orcas was an idyllic haven.

But then I moved off of camp, and started to feel a little suffocated by the smallness of the island, the difficulty and time-consuming complications of getting off the rock while not being able to drive, started to feel extremely intellectually frustrated, and wished there were more people my age, and missed seeing live music more frequently, and (shit I really hope I don't offend anyone by saying this) felt frustrated about writing on Orcas, in terms of, I felt I always had to censor myself, b/c I was always the youngest in any local writing circle I've been in on the island and while some people really welcome the kind of irreverance I would bring to the table, some people really don't. A lot of times it felt like people were writing about flowers and sunlight and sweet memories and so I'd ask them to skip over me as we all read aloud in a circle, b/c I'd written about something less delicate, like say, porn. I started to feel like I had to watch my language in these circles, and my topics, and just felt uncomfortable being myself. I felt like I had to suppress my fire.

Last winter I had cabin fever so bad I thought I would explode, and then I went to India, and when I first came back to my apartment I felt the realization as clearly as if it had been painted on my walls, I was done with Orcas. It was too small. I spent most of my summer thinking of how to get out of here sooner. But it also was a nice respite. I mean India was so intense and overwhelming all the time, sensory overload at every moment, and sometimes it felt really fucking scary. And even after getting used to that and not feeling as afraid, there was still the intensity. So it was nice to be somewhere totally safe, somewhere where I would never think twice about walking home at all hours of the night, sometimes more than a mile walk, sometimes completed while drunk or high or both and feeling totally safe while doing so. It really was nice to come back and just rest a bit, be in familiar surroundings.

And then I went to Chicago and Portland and was kinda freakin' out. I mean this usually happens when I've been on the island a while, whenever I first go to the mainland, it's overwhelming, and big stores and getting around by myself seem insurmountable. Actually I usually get cranky when first off-island as a reaction to feeling a bit out of my comfort zone. It's like clockwork. But I've noticed that it's definitely gotten worse over the years, not better. I feel more overwhelmed and more rusty on travel skills every time I leave the island.

So yeah, Chicago, I was mostly with a group for the whole time, but when I split off to meet up with two girls from my India trip, I was freaking out, terrified I wouldn't meet back up with my group. It ended up being fine, though we did get lost trying to find the right metro station and train track. Still the whole time I was there I was just like, this city is fucking huge and it made me feel kind of lost. And then when we got to Portland after the road trip I felt the same way. I was just so out of practice of living in a city of any size, and didn't know my way around, and felt really overwhelmed. For the first few days, I just wanted to be back on my safe little Orcas. I didn't REALLY want to, but was craving safety, familiar territory, only three main streets to navigate, relief. My friend Elynn had to talk some sense into me. As someone who'd recently left Orcas herself, she knew what I was going through and that it would pass. She gave me a stern little talking to, something like, "Chrys, on Orcas you have no prospects for getting laid and you only have two people to hang out with year round." And I thanked her for the reminder, b/c I needed that, and then all the reasons I was sick of Orcas came flooding back.

After that I decided to venture out and go take the bus to my school, which was a complicated venture. The internet where I was staying wasn't working that morning, so my friend Rachel helped me out. She worked hard looking up bus routes and a local bank b/c I was trying to open an account. It ended up being a really unsuccessful mission at the time. I wasn't able to open one (though later in my second week in the city, everything totally came together swimmingly), and it turned out that where I had to catch the bus to go back wasn't all that near where I'd been dropped off, and I got kind of lost, and had to call Rachel again and work it out. The weird thing was, after that bus adventure, after I got back to my friend's place and all, it's not exactly that I stopped feeling overwhelmed, but it lessened immensely, and I had zero more thoughts about wanting to be on Orcas. I stopped freaking out, like somehow crossing that hurdle made all the difference. And from then on I had a blast.

But it did make me really feel that staying on the island for as long as I have has had some detrimental effects. I can't imagine I ever would have felt all overwhelmed and shit like that before I lived here. I moved to Seattle not knowing one thing about how to get around the city, and not really knowing anyone either, and yeah it was kind of scary at first, but after a few weeks I was answering other people's questions about which buses to take to go where. So it's like, I know I can do it, I just have been horribly out of practice. And that brings me back to my original point, that staying somewhere that's too safe and small for too long has its dangers.

And I must say, I'm hoping not to be here too long. I have been back for not even 48 hours and I feel the same way I did when I first got back from India, I am done with this place. There are lots of people I love, and lots of things I love about the island, but I am just done. I am afraid of being pulled back in to the nest so to speak. I want to be free and Orcas feels like Orcatraz right now. I hate saying that b/c there are sooo many great things about the island, I've just had enough. So I'm keeping myself busy.

I spent a day in Seattle on my way back up North and it was a good reminder that I can be fine in a city, b/c I felt pretty at home there, partly b/c I know its layout and it's familiar. It just reminded me that even if I go somewhere where I don't know anyone or where anything is, it will eventually feel totally navigable.


Currently Listening:
"Paper Planes" - MIA - already did this song once before so I won't bore anyone w/reposting the lyrics. Am loving it though! Love the very beginning the most, "I fly like paper and get high like planes/If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name..." She's cool in a badass way.

Can You Ever Go Home Again?

I don't know.

I woke up twice in the middle of the night completely disoriented, not knowing where I was and both times it took a few minutes to figure out where I was. It was weird, b/c I had something a little similar about halfway through the trip, when we had been moving around so much and slept in so many different places that as I drifted off to sleep, in that semi-lucid in between state I'd find myself momentarily thinking I was still in Calcutta or something. It happened for a few days in a row, but what happened last night was a lot stronger and felt so much more disorienting, like it really took awhile for it to register where I was and get my mind around it. Guess that could be expected for the first night sleeping at home in over three months.

I can't get over how weird it feels to be back. I honestly feel a bit uncomfortable with it. As I was saying at the end of the last post, a lot of things are the same as when I left. Some minor things have changed, like the local supermarket has totally changed their setup, and apparently my old job is just a clusterfuck of absurdities and people quitting and all kinds of trouble. And maybe that's good b/c it solidifies my resolution not to go back. Overall though, a lot seems the same, and it's sort of hard to reconcile that, b/c I am not the same.

I was wondering how that would feel. Everyone told me before I left that I would come back changed. My friend Becky told me she thinks of her life in terms of before a big trip she took to Jamaica and after. It's kind of a huge cliche, go to a foreign country, especially one like India, and come home forever changed, but it's also so true. What's hard to anticipate is how to integrate it all and how hard that can be.

I don't think I ever elaborated on the tattoo I got in Calcutta. For awhile three of the girls in the group, who I bonded with early on in Varanasi in week two of the trip, were talking about getting tattoos in India. At first, though I wanted to join in, I was skeptical - when I got my first tattoo I knew for over a year what I wanted to get before I had it done, and this time I had no idea. By the time we got to Calcutta, I had a strong feeling that the theme of the trip (and by this point I knew I wasn't coming home the same person I had been) was courage. I actually thought about getting something Durga related but decided against it. One morning while volunteering at the Mother Theresa home, doing laundry on the rooftop with the Willa and Graham, I kept thinking about it, thinking maybe I'd get "courage" in Hindi or something. I later looked it up online, and just didn't really like any of the translations I found for different Hindi words that meant courage or something similar, the definitions were all too warlike for me, more about power and dominance and I was looking for something more inner. So another morning I was again doing laundry on the roof and thinking about it, and was thinking that I wanted a song lyric that symbolized courage, and was going over Tool lyrics in my head, mainly the song "Lateralus" for whatever reason. And then I picked up this tiny t-shirt (there were some interesting ones with all kinds of logos and sayings) to hang up to dry and looked at it and it said, "Learn to Swim" on the shirt.

It was perfect. It's a Tool lyric that to me has everything to do with courage and finding one's own way, the courage to swim against the current. In fact, for awhile I was going to call my book Learning to Swim, and there's just been a lot of swimming and drowning symbolism in my life and I've had a lot of spiritual experiences involving swimming and water. So that's what I got, on my left upper arm (I knew for years that's where I'd get my second tattoo so that was a no-brainer). I got it in purple, in a style called Goddess Script, and felt good about it being on my left side, which is the side of the body that's traditionally related to moon energy, to the subconscious, the intuitive, the heart, the inner, deeper, the feminine, and these things all symbolized the more inner courage I was trying to get at.

What was really cool was that Graham got "water" in Hindi, Willa got an anchor and "deep" in Hindi (and a spiral), Hilary got "beauty" in Hindi, and we figured out that if you put our tattoos together, it's "Learn to swim in deep, beautiful water." And that was completely unintentionally awesome. It was such a bonding experience.

Anyway, the point, if there is one, is that the tattoo to me sort of symbolizes some of the whole bit about feeling like I'm not the same person I was when I left the country. What was cool was that both of the trip leaders referenced my "learn to swim" as we were leaving. Karen mentioned it in my "exit interview" thingy that I was writing about yesterday, and both of the leaders wrote us each cards and Andrew referenced it in my card. It just feels like the symbolic phrase signifying the inner changes.

But I also look really different. I've never really had short hair, and when it's been semi-short I've never liked it, but it looks different this time, and I do like it, and it's way shorter than ever before, and still pink. It really changes the way I look big time. And I think I carry myself differently too. Actually my sense of my body has probably changed more than my appearance. I was sick a lot as a kid, and always had the feeling I had a pretty weak constitution, below par immune system, susceptible to being blown about by the wind. Well, I was in the land of foreign diseases (one person in our group got e. coli and another got giardia) and was remarkably not sick. I think I was actually the least sick of anyone in the group, which I never in a million years would've suspected. And I never really felt jetlag. Even though my sleep schedule's been off and I felt tired from traveling, I really never felt anything yesterday and got up at a normal hour today. I never got carsick or even close to it, and trust me when I say we were on some carsick inducing bus/train/especially jeep rides (we also pretty much never wore seatbelts as most vehicles in India don't have them) and was just totally fine, even thoroughly enjoying the bumps and sharp turns and rockin' and rollin'. And I had zero trouble with the high altitude of Ladakh, and never felt lightheaded when we were on the really high passes or any of that. I knew the moment I stepped off the plane in Leh that I'd have no problem with the altitude (I'd been worried). Overall, I felt like I was a lot stronger than I give myself credit for, which expanded things for me in a way.

It's definitely more inner change, which is almost harder to integrate. I just don't feel the same inside, and coming back here, I'm afraid of losing that, of getting small, shrinking back, because things here do feel smaller. I do feel more courageous, more outspoken, less willing to take shit. I felt at times in the group that I drifted away in some ways from the ones I felt closest to, which felt sad at times, but I also think rather than a separation it was more me finding my own way and following my own path and following it. I think that's important, and something I was really looking for. Authenticity was another big goal for me, and I feel like I clearly made progress on that. I did a lot of journaling and inner work on the trip, and I feel like I covered some major ground and was in a really good place and able to see some things and have a lot of insights and realizations that were tremendously meaningful.

I thought a lot about myself in relationships, how though I've been single a lot, there's always somebody that I'm super into or someone I'm getting over, and I always have these intense crushes (at one point I went back to starting when I was like thirteen and went chronologically through my life and basically realized there was no time without this sort of intense feeling for an ever-changing someone else) and focus all my energy, practically live my life with someone else at the center, and usually that other person is like, the most unlikely person in whatever situation I'm in (including famous people and fictional characters, hahaha, I'm only sort of joking about the last one) so it's pretty much always unrequited, almost like on some unconscious level I'm seeking validation or love in places or people that won't or can't give it, so perpetuating a cycle of feeling rejected and unlovable and all kinds of bullshit. And in the meanwhile, always throwing my energy away. It's an incredibly unhealthy pattern and I realized that what I constantly seek for in others, I really have to find within. It's obvious, and it's something I've always known and thought about, but never really embraced, b/c it's easy to keep overlooking that when you're feeding yourself a constant stream of crushes on unavailable people and giving all your energy to trying to make them love you. That was the big picture, and I also had a lot of supporting realizations and observations about myself in love.

All that said, I have to say I do miss seeing lots of gorgeous exotic looking foreign men.

I also had a lot of insights and clarity about other areas of my life, and observations about how I operate and what I do and don't want to continue doing. I had a lot of ceremonial letting go of different things (my group knows I'm a big fan of ceremonial fire). A big unspoken goal of the trip was to re-awaken my spiritual side, which had felt a bit dead for some time. I felt beyond cynical, almost like I had an allergy to the idea of, and even the word spirituality for awhile there. I wasn't writing. I was avoiding everything, wouldn't even journal, didn't want to be alone with myself ever and my thoughts and had no belief in anything. This was all so unlike me, for my whole life no matter what I was going through, even when I was young, I always felt like I had an eye towards the spiritual (albeit in an earth-nature-sky-water loving way, and never a religious way), towards depth, towards self-awareness, personal growth, communing with the unseen, mystery, and all of that. So being without that made me feel a bit dead inside, but I couldn't seem to get out of the rut. That quickly changed in India, and part of that is because of Willa, who embodies spirituality and has so much wisdom. I found myself having profound experiences on rooftops under moonlight, or having spiritual revelations while rushing through the streets of Calcutta and felt that side of me re-awakened. I was writing like a madwoman during most of the trip, was seeking out and spending time in solitude, sometimes in nature, or just outside by myself on rooftops and felt a connection that had felt lost forever. It was amazing.

All in all, I feel bigger, stronger, and like I want different things out of life than when I left, and Orcas, though distance has made my heart feel fonder for the island and the nature here is nourishing to my soul in a way it was craving, just feels too small for me. And that really is factoring into what I'm thinking as far as school. It became really clear to me that what I'm looking for when I go back to school is not just academics or a degree, but to be somewhere where my spiritual and creative artistic sides feel nurtured and supported, somewhere that really fits me, and that it's a lot more important than the name of the school or anything like that.

Speaking of schools, I got rejected from my first choice school, which was a hard pill to swallow. As I told Nina at some point during the trip, I'm not used to academic rejection, at all. I only got turned down from one school when I applied as a senior in high school and by that point I didn't want to go there so it didn't really register. This did. I have to say a part of me felt relieved in a weird way, maybe just to know, or maybe it really wouldn't have been a good match - I think that's possible even though I had the most incredible experience there. But most of me felt sad. I only found out a few days ago, in Agra, soon after visiting the Taj. It's a loss for sure, but sometimes, as Julia Cameron would say, gain is disguised as lost. I do trust that, that it's probably a blessing in disguise. To add to that, my second choice school totally lost my financial aid papers (which I filed in January) and it's now way past the deadline and aid has been distributed and I'd need a considerable amount of aid to be able to go there, so, yeah, maybe another blessing in disguise as well. At least, it feels that way, like internally even though both of these things were big disappointments, I can't shake the feeling that they are also somehow right, and so I trust that feeling.

It leaves me with four major choices (and possibly trying to renegotiate my financial aid situation with the fifth), which all have strong pros and cons that are hard to weigh out. I know where I'm leaning, strongly, and I'm pretty sure that's where my ultimate decision will take me, but still questioning as well, b/c it has its cons and a few months ago I did not think I'd think this way, but again, times have changed. I'm also paying attention to signs and synchronicities, and the fact that an author I love and have blogged about is teaching a class there next semester. So we'll see, I have exactly a week to figure my shit out.

It's just sort of hard, being back here, sorting through the piles of mail from colleges, being in the same apartment I left, in a way going through the motions of my old life, to know where the newer self fits in. I don't want it to feel like I never went to India, which in a really surreal way I did sort of feel yesterday. It's just so strange being back to the place I was before with everything pretty much the same. I don't want to fall into the same patterns, go back to the spiritual deadness or other crappy habits. I'm not going back to my old job, I can't, it would be too much self-betrayal. I don't know who said it, but I'm thinking it's really true that you can never go home again. I feel really out of place. A part of me doesn't even want to stay on Orcas for the summer, but I also made a list of goals while here so maybe the integration is worth it and not something to flee from, and resting before rallying for the next big change. It just feels like this life doesn't really fit anymore, and I don't want it to, and that's okay.


Currently Listening:
"Chasing Cars" - Snow Patrol - another Grey's song that was stuck in my head a lot while in India. It randomly popped into my head during the first time I walked around Calcutta at night on my own, and was the one song that played twice while I was getting my tattoo. Graham and I were saying how this song comes up at such a crucial point in Grey's (she's my Grey's buddy) and how much we wanted to be able to watch the show together. What is interesting though is we were thinking of two different storylines that are going on when this song plays (she was thinking of Meredith and Derek, I was thinking of Alex and Izzie). Speaking of Grey's, I can't wait to catch up, though I've heard rumors that things are going pretty downhill. Anyway, the song.

Chasing Cars

We'll do it all
Everything
On our own

We don't need
Anything
Or anyone

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world?

I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel

Those three words
Are said too much
They're not enough

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden
That's bursting into life

Let's waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads

I need your grace
To remind me
To find my own

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden
That's bursting into life

All that I am
All that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes
They're all I can see

I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things
Will never change for us at all

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me
And just forget the world?

Home Sweet Home?

I miss India.

I've been home for less than twelve hours, and let me tell you, it feels fuckin' weird. Let me back up first though, because there was a lot in the last few days of the trip that I'd love to recount.

So, Ladakh was the shit, totally one of the most gorgeous places I've ever been, in so many ways. And it was kind of cool being in a smaller group (though I definitely missed the others) b/c we got to meet up and travel with other people traveling from other countries, like Erez from Israel who was hilarious and loud and talked a bit like Borat and wore these lime green pants all the time and was always making dirty jokes. The pronunciation lesson I couldn't share on the group blog (see link in previous post) was the difference between "fact" and "fucked." It was awesome.

On another funny note, we traveled with a German woman named Astrid who told us about some sex ashram in Pune called the Osho ashram (and strangely enough, I used to have an Osho tarot deck, which wasn't at all a sex oriented deck, unfortunately), and Desmond was having her translate Rammstein (a german metal band) lyrics, which was hysterical, b/c she had headphones in, so was talking really loud in the back of the jeep, on our way through Nubra Valley, yelling out translations like, "I don't want to masturbate!" and a whole slew of other crazy lyrics.

We also traveled with Ambre from France, and it was really fun sharing a room with her. She really bonded with Karen, and might actually end up working on an art abroad project with her.

I was not overstating in that last post about the military presence in Ladakh - it was everywhere. The first night in Hundar (in the nubra valley) the only place to eat at all was some army "restaurant." And there were Indian army vehicles everywhere. Coming back from the Valley, we had to cross the pass by a certain time b/c after that it was all the green army trucks. One of the days that we were in the Valley we heard something that really sounded like gunfire, though we never heard anything about it on the news or from our host family back in Leh. Our host said she thought maybe what we'd heard was from within Pakistan but I don't think we were really close enough. Who knows? Anyway Ben tried to tell me when we were hearing the gunfire, that it was nuclear war, and then he and Desmond made fun of me for how much I would freak out if it really was (who wouldn't???). Even in the city of Leh, walking around, you'd see tons of military dudes. I guess th at is what happens when you are traveling within Kashmir.

I also definitely didn't overstate the amazingness of Ladakh - just wait until I figure out how to load pictures onto the computer. I took over 600 on the trip and I think over 100 of those were from the nine days in Ladakh. I'm definitely going back someday, and also want to explore other areas of India as well, like Kerala and other parts of the southern regions.

So we flew from Leh back to Delhi and then took a train to Agra to meet the other half of our group and see the Taj Mahal, which like a lot of things in India, has lots of pot plants growing right around it. Okay I have to say, I was not that impressed by the Taj - it doesn't BEGIN to compare to the awesomeness of the Golden Temple, in looks, vibe, people, anything. And I didn't like Agra. I don't think there is any other city in India I can say that about, but omg we got hassled there way more than anywhere else. It felt like we got swamped anytime we ventured outside, just hounded left and right! And at one point, I was walking with Karen and Andrew to go to some sunset boat ride by the Taj which we never actually did and some monkey kept coming at us, mostly at Karen (it seemed to be reacting to her camera or something), which was pretty scary for a moment there!

I got my hair cut a final time in Agra, the shortest cut yet, almost a bob. I am loving it. It feels so different.

Then we took an "express train" back to Delhi, and we got some other sort of tickets, last minute, like standby tickets, which basically meant we could ride the train but had no assigned seats. So all those other times we took trains where random people would be sitting in our seats and we had to ask them to move, well this time we were those people. So a lot of us ended up having to get out of the seats we found and standing or cramming into seats. And to make it that much more pleasant, the train barely moved for the first, oh I don't know, four hours maybe (the whole trip was supposed to be three), just inched along. We got in sooooo late back to our home base in Delhi, the Shelton. The next morning, Willa and I were so conked out it took us like half an hour to realize our leaders were knocking on our door to wake us up.

Then began all the ending stuff that goes along with a trip like this. We each had a closing meeting with each of the leaders, which made me a little nervous, but actually both went really well. Karen told me she felt like I was the glue that held the group together, and we talked a lot about different parts of the trip, especially the trek, which felt like a real turning point in the trip for me. I think it was after that that I stopped wanting to go home. Andrew told me he was sure I would have been fine traveling in India by myself if I had decided to stay longer. That was cool to hear, b/c there's still that part of me that has doubts.

That night we had our last dinner, a fancy dinner in a rotating restaurant on the 24th floor of a building. It was cool. Since it was the last night, and no one could get in trouble for breaking the "group agreements" we (almost) all ordered drinks. I walked into a glass wall on our way out which everyone said is because I was tipsy but I've done that sober, and think it's more a vision thing. This was definitely not the first time I drank in India. There were a few "cultural exchange" instances when we were allowed to drink, like when we were on the trek and the villagers served us millet beer and rice wine, or when I kind of accidentally ended up going to dinner with Des and Andrew to the house of Mr. Sikkim, where we were also served millet beer, which I think actually tastes great and wish I could have some right now. Something about it was earthy and hearty. And then I got drunk twice in ways that weren't allowed - I went to a bar with a group member in Darjeeling (my idea) and got drunk with three others one night in McLeod Ganj, like obnoxiously obviously drunk, right before one of the leaders was coming over to have dinner with my homestay family! It was a close call, but somehow, to the amazement to everyone in the group who saw me wasted, rallied myself and played sober and pulled it off. It was incredibly fun, and I think part of it was b/c the experience was so rare. In the end of the trip, we all fessed up to whatever we had done during the trip, which was fun too.

Speaking of debauchery, during our last day, we were leaving at night, so in the afternoon were having a group meeting on the roof of our hotel, where there's a restaurant, and most of the group members, myself included ordered the infamous bhang lassi - how can you leave India not at least having that experience? So we ordered "magic lassi" and mine was especially loaded. It still sort of blows my mind that we could just order it like that, that it was on the menu, and that it cost about $1.20. Only in India. So yeah, we were riiiiiidiculous. I was still feeling it when we got on the plane, like eight hours later.

We said goodbye to Karen outside the Shelton Hotel, as she's staying to travel further, and is probably in Nepal with her boyfriend right now, doing some awesome trekking. I slept through the first flight (to Hong Kong) completely, and then when we got to the HK airport, we found a spot and all conked out. I passed out on the floor for hours. Then we drank champagne, ate lunch (time was just sooooo fucked at that point it was pretty much irrelevant), and boarded our cross-Pacific flight. THat's when I started to get really sad about saying goodbye and leaving India. I watched The Reader, Revolutionary Road and Slumdog Millionaire (finally) on the way home. Graham and I sync'd it so we were watching Slumdog exactly together on our personal screens. It made me miss India terribly, just seeing the trains and the people and the images of India.

At SFO, we started to trickle out one by one, Hilary and I being the last to leave. I had to get a hotel room b/c my flight was early morning and they wouldn't let me check in during the evening (I'd planned on sleeping at the airport) so Hill and I hung out and raved over the pleasures of using a REAL western toilet with toilet paper and other modern conveniences, and the whole room felt so luxurious it was almost disorienting. After Hilary left, I passed out, at like six in the evening, woke up four hours later, slept for a while later and then slept another few hours. I took a bath and felt the cleanest I had in three months (bucket showers and quick showers in freezing water, or hot water that could turn ice cold at any moment, just aren't the same). And oh yeah, drank some tap water, which felt really weird after being so vigilant about not getting tap water in me under any circumstances, it just felt weird to brush my teeth with tap water. It was nice to not be thinking about giardia (sp?) or dysentery.

I woke up at some point during that night, feeling really sad and out of place to be back in America, and really wishing I was still in India. The chaos starts to make sense after awhile, and I have definitely been having some reverse culture shock.

This morning I got up early, went to the airport, flew to Seattle and back to Orcas. THe lovely Jan picked me up at the airport. It feels so surreal to be back. My apartment is so tidy and wonderful and welcoming and the island was a really welcome sight - just the amount of trees and greenery was a comfort to my soul. Still it just feels so weird. I mean in one sense it feels like I never left, like the whole trip to India was just a dream. I'm coming back to the same place, which looks the same, with the same people, listening to the same music, and on and on. On the other hand, nothing is the same. I have more to say about all of this, but it's getting late and I want to get on a semi-normal sleep schedule.


Currently Listening:
"A Bitter Song" - Butterfly Boucher - I had this song stuck in my head a LOT during my trip, it was a random song that consistently I'd find myself absently singing, and once I had a dream about it.

All I need is a bitter song
To make me better
Much better
All I need to write is a bitter song
To make me better
Much better

It found me to hold me
But I don't like it at all
Won't feed it,
Won't grow it
It's folded in my stomach;
It's not fair,
I found love;
It made me say that.
Get back,
You'll never see daylight;
If I'm not strong it just might.

All I need is a bitter song
To make me better
Much better
All I need to write is a bitter song
To make me better
I feel better
I feel better

Is it dangerous to feel this good?

Am I tempting the fates here?

A complete 180 from last month, but I only continue to feel better and better. Tonight I feel downright ecstatic, not for any good reason, but there's movement coming in my life, and it's overdue. I'm psyched for my trip to India, and psyched for my trip to SF to fly out - not only will I visit schools (and all my visits are totally all confirmed and lined up), but I will stay with my friend Tracy, who is one of my favorite people ever, then stay with Elynn, one of my best Orcas friends who's moving south (who I just had the best evening with), then hopefully see my friend Kelly, and then see Luke C (BTW Luke if you read this, I think House will be on while I'm there in SF and OMG that'd be fun to watch together, I never get to watch with anyone who's super into it, so, let's make that happen) and Maryam. It's going to be a wild adventure before I even get on a plane!

Tonight, Elynn and I were playing with the love card and destiny card books, which are really fun to play with, and again it said I am going to have lots of unexpected money rolling in, and lots of love. I can dig it. It's unusual for these sorts of predictions to be so freakin' positive, but like I said in the last post, whatever positive power of suggestion that plants in my head, right on.

And I'm just feeling stellar about this college application stuff. I mean, I am just rocking it. It's a ton of paperwork, but shit, I'm just working my butt off and getting it all done and sent off, and it feels like it's starting to come together, getting those recommendation letters and transcripts. The financial aid stuff was the most daunting, it can feel overwhelming with all the forms, but I pretty much rocked those all in two days (not even full days). Now it's on to scholarship applications. There's still tons to do. I am leaving in less than three weeks, but it really does feel like it's all coming together! I'm psyched about that. I'm just feeling great.

On the other hand, I am having really freakin' bizarre dreams. Apparently my malaria meds for India can cause strange dreams, and I can only imagine, since they're already so weird (and currently really rich and vivid), once I start taking that stuff I'm going to feel like I'm on acid! Well, except I wouldn't really know.

The only thing I wonder is, with all this feeling awesome and hopeful and confident, am I tempting fate? The last time I felt this euphoric on life turned out to be the beginning of probably the most difficult year of my life, full of heartache and struggle and poverty and struggle, struggle, struggle. It was also at the start of adventure, much like now I am about to leave for India and embark on that journey as well as return to school. So it worries me a little. I want the euphoria to last, for things to pan out, to have shatteringly cool life-changing experiences in India. It was interesting, I went over to the big island for writing class today, and this writing teacher went to India four years ago (she was actually there during the tsunami, though not near that area), and I asked her, b/c I'm worried about the culture shock, which was harder, to get used to India, or to get re-adjusted to America after India? She chose the latter, and I would have put money down that she'd say that, which actually made me feel better about what I'm doing. It's going to be a huge adventure. And I do hope it turns my world upside down. I just hope it's not quite as challenging as the last time around when I chose adventure and really embodied The Fool in the tarot deck (which is a great card, but is also the start of the hero's journey, so to speak, and man it can be difficult). When I look back, that difficult time was so, so, so rich for me, in terms of growth, in terms of emotional richness, in terms of making me see my own strength in so many different situations, and in terms of feeling vibrantly alive.

But still, I'm worried about this euphoria. I don't want to crash. Funny how when things are good, it's like, oh don't get too happy, don't get your hopes up, it won't last, and it's hard to keep the same awareness of impermanence when things are all fucked up. In those dark places, it's easy to think I'll be there forever. So maybe I just want to ride the euphoria, enjoy it as long as it lasts, and realize that a lot of it comes from the fact that I've felt sort of stuck in my life here, much as I really do love the island, and that actually doing stuff to move things forward is making a huge difference. Taking action can be the best cure.

A friend today mentioned something about tipping points, how in any change there reaches a tipping point when you know the change will happen. In this case, she was talking about our local food bank (which she works with) moving buildings, saying that there's still some things to sort out, different ideas, but it's passed the tipping point, they know it will move (which is great, the way it is now, people have to wait in the freezing cold). I started thinking about how that applies to the story of my own life and reflecting on that. Because very few things are momentary decisions, and even the things that seem to be have usually built for a long time, perhaps burbling below the surface, before the actual change.

I've definitely passed the tipping point about leaving Orcas. That has definitely been brewing for a long, long time. I've thought about it off and on for years, especially starting in the summer of 2005, after I left camp for the first time, and more importantly, moved off the property. I loved that land so much, and the island wasn't the same for me once I lived somewhere else, and I knew it immediately and ever since. I've thought about going back to school for years too, and in many years, started applications, then got to a point where it just didn't feel right for one reason or another. I wasn't done here, I wasn't ready, I didn't totally have my heart in it, I couldn't get excited about it, I wanted to stay and save up money, and the like. A person has to be ready for the change to be right and meaningful, and now I feel like I am.

As for India, I don't know if there was a tipping point exactly, partly because I never fully believed it was real. I've been putting this together for probably close to five or six months now. I just did what I needed to apply, and then after I did, and got in, I sent in my deposit, but even then it didn't feel real. For the next two months, I was having serious second thoughts, to the point where I really thought I wouldn't go. Then one afternoon, I left to go to the post office, which is about a five minute walk each way. I had been checking my email all day, doing nothing, watching Grey's, and actually something on the show got me thinking (actually it was Meredith's shrink, hahahahaha) about being a quitter, b/c in some ways I feel I have been (in other ways maybe the extreme in the other direction), but then walking up to my apartment I said to myself, "I am not a quitter. I am not going to be a chicken. I am going to India." I opened my door, came inside and checked my email and that's when I found out about my scholarship, which just blew my mind. But it's interesting how those things happen, isn't it? I guess that speech to myself was my tipping point.

Which reminds me that a lot of times, a tipping point can be very subtle and internal. When I was living in Seattle and jobless and soon to be w/o a place to live (like in two days), it just was amazing the way that morning I made the decision that no matter what happened, I would not go home, no matter how dire my situation was, and within a few hours I had the job offer here on the island with the camp. I had been keeping a postcard of the camp in my room, afraid of how much I wanted the job, wanted to live in this beautiful place. All of this reminds me of that old famous quote:

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manor of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man would have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."

~W.H. Murray

I retrieved this quote from Derrick Jensen's Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution, which is one of my favorite books. He uses it at the beginning of chapter on falling in love with writing. This is a book I treasure and something I want to reread while in school, because it always reminds me to go to the root of what my passions are, dig deep, dig into what's terrifying, into what's real, into what's the questions, who are you? Who are you, really? What do you love? What do you want? There's also such a different approach to education in this book, an approach I feel that all the schools I'm looking at are (to varying degrees), in alignment.

Anyway the larger point was the tipping points of change in our lives, and beyond that The Fool, the archetype of the fool. It is not about some naive idiot as some seem to think. Instead it's about a wise innocence. A mix of the hope and excitement that comes from the start of new ventures, and the wisdom that comes from having gone through them before. Think of it like a cultivated childlike state of mind, where wonder and awe are alive, but there is still maturity and knowing. It's all about taking the leaps that our inner voices whisper about, leaping and waiting for the net to appear. I always think that in so many cases in my life, if I really had any idea what something would entail, I wouldn't start it. Reflecting back to any sort of innocence always chokes me up, it' so tender looking back on the self that just had no idea what she was in for. But it was also totally necessary for her not to know, b/c again, then it never would have happened.

Okay now I'm going to divert, because this totally reminds me of a moment in a book I read as a teenager, which was called The Starlight Crystal by Christopher Pike. I was a huge fan of his books, and would probably still love them if I re-read them as an adult. This one though, was difficult. I wasn't so sure about it the first time around. It later came to be one of my absolute favorites. Some of his books, though they're YA, just have soooo much depth to them. It was about this girl Paige. At the very beginning of the book, she comes out of the library and has a strange moment with this stranger, who she thinks for a moment might pull out a gun and kill her, but doesn't. Almost immediately following that, she meets and falls in love with this boy Tem. They have this beautiful once-in-a-lifetime connection but she has to leave on this spaceship (it takes place in the 23rd century) that is traveling at near the speed of light, which means she'll experience time dilation (I love a book that incorporates relativity), so while only a small amount of time will pass for her, centuries will pass on earth, meaning he'll be dead. So she's on the ship, and all these things happen, and it's been about ten years so my memory's a little blurry, but she is a teenager in love and grieving, and then a lot of other stuff happens, I believe she and the spaceship crew watch the earth die as well. And if I'm not mistaken, I think it's her father or someone else on the ship, actually maybe everyone else on the ship, also dies. I remember there's this great part where she's between the death of the universe and the birth of a new one, and I just remember that part being gorgeous, but painful. I mean our heroine here has experienced loss the scale of which we can't really imagine. And she watches things circle back around, till she arrives again in that place in the 23rd century outside the library. Except this time, she's the stranger, and she's looking at her younger self, the innocent self, that has no idea she's about to meet Tem or the loss she's about to suffer, and she is thinking of pulling out a gun, sparing her younger self that pain. But she doesn't do it, she can't.

There's a lot more to the book, I'd even say it's got spiritual undertones, and it's really gorgeous in a melancholy way, but the point is, whenever I think of myself in a time of innocence, of not knowing what I was in for, and there are many, I get that feeling like the stranger outside the library in a way, like if I could go back and talk to myself before I moved to Seattle, before I first left for college, before, before, before, what might I say? Probably nothing. I just have to have a tenderness towards that sort of not-knowing, that Fool quality, wise yet so innocent, because without it, no great journeys would ever happen, and every journey in some way is a hero's journey. And in the end, I don't really regret them. Even the really hard ones. Even the ones I probably should regret a little. I can't, because the journey always has some value in itself. We each have several in our lives, I believe. And I think the key is to just be open to it, to realize you really can't prepare yourself, you just can't. That's what I came to today about India. My writing teacher Janet was showing me pictures from her trip. I was hoping to ready myself, to somehow brace myself against the culture shock I'll feel (come on I've never left the US except for brief visits to Canada, that if you ask me, don't really count), and I felt like as we looked through these pictures, we both realized there was no way for me to really do that, and in a way it might even be better not to, to just be open. And scared too, I can't help that. But also to embrace the Fool archetype energy, and leap.

So, be the fool. Have the grace to be a beginner. Cross those tipping points. Go for what has passion and meaning and juice - that's what I always focus on in writing critiques, which at least one of my readers can testify to, I'm always wanting the writing to go deeper, to find that lightning electricity, find what is really alive. Be bold, with all its genius and power and magic. Err on the side of audacity, because even when those journeys lead to the darkest depths, I think they also give us the most riches. And it's pretty much always worth it.

I did not expect to end up here at all in this post. I didn't expect to talk about the fool, and definitely not about a Christopher Pike book. But that's the other thing about starting things, and leaving yourself open, you end up in unexpected places.


Currently Listening:
"Alive" - Jeff Buckley - His voice is sooooo good on this song, and I can't stop playing it to death. It's a live track, and in the beginning, he talks about how 96 is going to be a great year, how we'll have Newt Gingrich's head on a plate and put the fear of God into Bob Dole. And then he says, "Freaks of America unite." Sweet. I must play this a hundred times a week, it's pretty poignant. Here are the words:

I feel the time is coming
I walk into the night
Oh, I don't mind if the clock is turning
Cuz I'm going to the other side
You either die or you keep on burning alive

And I am burning
And I am burning
And I am burning
And I am burning

I walked a long, long distance
I'm feeling sore inside
Oh, I don't care if the sky is falling
Cuz I'll never get to see the light
You either die or you keep on burning alive

And I am burning
And I am burning
And I am burning
And I am burning

You either die or you keep on burning alive

I Am Going a Little Crazy

Slowly, but surely.

So, it's Christmas Eve and I'm awake and wired and have absolutely nothing to do.

It's been snowing like crazy for the last week and a half. When it started I was in Seattle at a Christmas party with friends, and the next morning we couldn't get through the road. The next day I came back to Orcas and had a semi (but not terribly exciting)-adventure returning. And then it snowed and snowed and snowed some more. It's the most snow I've seen in the northwest, and it's my sixth winter here. It's wild, and awesome.

I'm loving it. It makes me want to go make snow angels and snowmen and build forts and have wild snowball fights. The roads are a mess, I mean solid ice covered in inches of snow. Walking anywhere that's not a trodden path or shoveled walkway is deliriously fun, I sink in halfway up to my knees. I saw a drift the other day that's practically as tall as me. On a street corner, a bunch of kids made this snowman that is taller than me, with an orange traffic cone for a hat (though the snowman itself was taller than me, even w/o the hat). I wish I had a camera because I'd take zillions of pictures to immortalize this winter weather. Last year we got almost none and I was let down by that fact. So yeah, I'm loving it. It's been massively windy too, so sometimes I just stare out the sliding glass door to my little back porch and watched the snow blow around in these huge gusts. The shocking thing is that unlike other years, I haven't lost power, though I know those that have. I wouldn't mind it, briefly. I love storms, love them.

The only downside is, I have cabin fever like you wouldn't believe. Town seems pretty shut down, and the winter weather keeps on coming, which again, I'm all for, but I'm also a little bored. More than a little. I think I now know how my dog felt. The last few months I had her, the weather was awful and I was working a lot so I wasn't taking her out as much, and I could sense this feeling of frustration from her, like she wanted to go run eighteen thousand miles and instead she was cooped up in my apartment while I worked. Now I sort of feel the same way, a little shut in with all this delirious winter happy energy and nothing to do with it. Town seems totally dead. A lot of my friends have left the island over the last few months, and my friend Becky, who was the one person I was hanging out with during all these snowstorms, just left yesterday morning to visit family for the holidays. And my friend Elynn who I spent a lot of last winter hanging out with is living on the other side of the island now, and like I said, the roads are total shit. I won't be able to get to the Christmas concert that is a tradition on Orcas, given by Susan Osborn, who is such an amazing singer. It was a magical experience last year, but it is on the other side of the island as well. My phone keeps dying because I'm spending so much time talking, to connect, to kill time. I hope my ears don't fall off, lol. Even the mail is getting fucked up and delayed. I'm going a little crazy. I check my mail (which is by PO box, so I actually have to walk to the PO) twice a day, just for something to do, and an excuse to get budndled up and tromp through the drifts.

I finished watching Grey's and I'm resisting starting to watch it again from the beginning, because I ordered the DVDs and I don't want any chance of being sick of it by the time they arrive. Although there are some scenes I must've replayed a million times. Which is odd for me, I never even did that with House, not even the House/Cuddy makeout scene. I found a Grey's board game online, and I'm such a dork that I actually really want it, even though I don't know who I'd play it with, oh and I'm leaving for a third world country in less than two months, but still.

And I'm too hyper and stir crazy to read or write, I just can't sit still like that. It's been a difficult holiday season for reasons I will not go into in a public blog, but shit, it's been a tough one. Which surprised me, because last year was such a great holiday season for me, I was so into it, baking cookies, even listening to Xmas music and all that crap. I'm pretty sure I posted about that. It rocked. This year, I might as well be a female scrooge. It's not really that bad, but it is bad. At least I do have somewhere to go tomorrow, so the loneliness won't eat me alive or I won't kill myself out of boredom. But yeah, I can't seem to sit still. I haven't even sat still while writing this blog.

And the worst part is, now it's raining. It was snowing earlier, and I say, bring it on, but now it's raining, and I'm going to have to have a word with mother nature if all the snow melts so soon. Because that's at least giving me something to smile about. It complicates things, as bitched about above, but it also so rare here, and I don't want it to fade too quickly, even if it's making me stir crazy. I am a complicated woman.

Unfortunately I don't have a camera, but my computer does, so here is the view out my door:



Well, I think I'll go kill time by cleaning my kitchen, which is exactly every single girl in their late twenties dreams of spending Christmas Eve, lol.


Currently Listening:
"Criminal" - Fiona Apple - I've been on yet another Fiona Apple kick lately. In fact I just recently found these two songs that are "supposedly" by her, "Ugly Girl" and "If We Kissed." The lyric sites I've looked do attribute both to Miss Apple, but they just don't sound like her, especially "Ugly Girl" which I must say, I don't really like at all. Still trying to find out for sure if they are her. Anyway, Criminal, great song, I always sing this at Karaoke when I get the balls to sing, which hasn't happened in quite some time. I would love to sing Never Is a Promise instead, which they have at the local karaoke deal, but I don't think I could pull it off, so Criminal it is. It's deliciously fun to get up there and sing that first line, "I've been a bad, bad girl," LOL. And I totally relate to, "I know tomorrow brings the consequence at hand, but I keep living this day like the next will never come." And I love, "What would an angel say, the devil wants to know..." I will leave you all with that thought.