Quiet Morning Lake Quinault: Peace has Settled In

Cozied in under the covers last night in our room overlooking Lake Quinault, trying to read my Northwest Gardening book to figure out what to plant and where in our newly barren yard, my eyes could not stay straight. Rolling into the back of my head over and over. You are going to sleep now, they protested. I didn't have much say. What can you do when your eyes are rolling backwards on their own accord?

It was only 8:30. 

I decided to give up. By 9, I was in another world. Justin beside me reading in the dark. Bailey zonked out on the floor. He has no qualms about sleeping anytime or too much. Unlike us over-productive humans. 

My dreams have switched tone in the last two weeks, thankfully. Night after night, I'd been dragged through vivid nightmares. From break-ins, to homeless people living with us swimming in the river behind our house. Avoiding semi-automatic weapon gunfire. Drinking cider beers and forgetting I was pregnant. Long drawn out, colorful dreams, persistent in their disconcerting nature. I almost dreaded sleep. 

But the last few nights, they've been colorful but more amusing. Like a lady whose maroon curly hair  (only part of her hair was a wig) got caught on my phoropter (the thing that has all the lenses in it in front of your face to check your glasses) and hung off the top when I pulled it away from her eyes.  It was funny, and oddly amusing and so colorful. It makes me happy to remember it.

I wake up on my back with my arms above my head, fingers intertwined like I'm praying, or maybe in my mind I'm out in the grass in a field looking up at the blue sky. I always know I'm relaxed when I wake up like that. It's weird, like babies sleep and I've only done this in the last few years since dating Justin. I wonder what we do at night. 

So some sort of inner calm has settled in. Maybe I'm finally relaxing into the pregnancy. It only took three months to relax. I'd guess this might be normal. 

We're happy to have this retreat from Portland. After months of adjustments to reality, endless efforts on the house, we deserved a getaway.

Charlie can't stop working in the yard. 

The floors will be sanded and finished on Thursday.

16.5 Weeks.

"life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

Rainy day. Coffee and conversation drift through the air. The clank of saucers stacking. Electronic music. The ceiling fan in my side vision. A yellow & blue Trimet bus on Albina. The man next to me leaves with the newspaper and his backpack. He was writing with his left hand in a large unlined notebook. Oatie sleeping on my lap. 

I'm waiting for my mom and Chuck to arrive this evening. The house is ready. My mind is calming. I look up writing workshops. Request library books. My soy latte nearly empty. Searching for houses again. Not the right one yet but getting closer. The girl at the grocery store told me not to give up- keep going. It's wet- the buyers aren't so hungry. Houses sit sadly on the market, prices drifting down. Less anxiety. More civilized. Less frantic. Less impulsive. Thoughtful. Pensive. Like fall. 

Justin bought a Suburu. He's wanted one forever. It's used but new to him. Less miles than my mini. But one year older. We can sleep in the back. It came with a plug-in cooler. And racks and heated seats. He's a cold weather wimp so they will serve as weather therapy. 

I bought a one-way ticket to Iowa. Overnight through Chicago on October 26th. I plan to take a week and a half off. Go trick or treating with my nieces. Hitch a ride back with Justin and see him through the mountains and the snow. He's still green in both areas, having only lived on the east coast. He wanted me to ride with him. At first I thought, he's a big boy, he can do it himself. Then I thought, you can be nice, you know. So why not. 

After months of working extra days, I can take two off. Besides I like driving the Wyoming to Oregon part. If we could delete Nebraska that would be nice. But not likely. I have a lot of friends from Nebraska who might get upset. So I think that it's perfect. Even though I thought I didn't want to. Drive back that is. We will for the first time, enter Portland together. Enter the west on the ground, a pair, taking a chance on a real life together.

domesticity

late nights revising and rewriting
hoping and praying with my fingers
on the keypad
for something more stable
my ankle boring into the wood floor
the fridge humming
where is the dog?
i wonder if I will get anywhere
i wonder if i was a gypsy too long
if no one will believe me
when i say
i want to lay down roots
-but i do-
i'm tired of traveling
i'm tired of moving
i want the boring life
a house
a family
a stable job
tea in the morning
and broccoli at night
my piano in the living room
my best friend at my side
he'll be home soon
with a van full of stuff
ready to start a new life
--together--

Traveling is a mindset, not a place

It's been two years since I returned to the states. In 2012, I did not take one flight. This year, I joined my sister and friends on a short jaunt to Iceland (which I wouldn't do again- I'm no longer built for those hasty American glimpses into foreign lands, skittering along the surface and returning exhausted). Though I've visited copious amounts of our fair country since arriving back via old-timey automobile transport, I'd say the theme of the last year especially has been slowing down and traveling in place. 

Traveling has very little do to do with actual movement, and much more to do with your mindset. I can travel just as easily in the Portland metro area, as I can anywhere else. My years of actual travel have honed my observation skills and opened my mind to listening to people's stories and interacting with strangers. I find myself traveling every day, in different ways. 

It's in the small interactions with folks around town. It's listening to my patients who are from all over the world and relating to them, having been in their home post office in Phnom Penh or their home town of Saigon or Lviv. It's visiting fill-in clinics not knowing what I'll find and making friends unexpectedly. It's seeing the light change in the sky and the weather shift from season to season. It's meeting couples on the hiking trail, and having them show up in my exam room another day. It's mulling things over and working it out on paper. It's approaching each day as an experience to be had with things to learn. 

My travels have made me a better person and better able to relate to others. I've learned to appreciate simplicity and beauty. I've learned to forgo shopping in favor of wandering. I've learned to be open to chance encounters and appreciate a friendship, even if it only lasts ten minutes.

It's been a strange experience not wanting to go anywhere. I feel rooted in a way that I could not have been before embarking on my time overseas. It's taken me a while back here to feel that I was on solid ground. I have a good relationship. I have family. And I'm in a place I love. I've been able to work and enjoy my patients. And bike and feel healthy with the great food we have in the Northwest. 

Maybe it's my age. I'd spent my entire childhood and early adulthood doing everything right, moving at the fastest pace possible, crossing off all the markers of adulthood, never taking time to understand what I thought was important about life. Now that I'm back, I feel relaxed and happy to be in one place. Hugged by trees and mountains, and free to breathe the fresh air of the Northwest, I think I've found home.

[looking at flowers and light]

[my bike takes me through the world, the best form of transport]

Before the sun

The darkest dark
before the seeping color of dawn.

I must go a while.
To the cave of blackness
to hide
silent,
flat.
Pulling inward with all my might.

Alone. Away.
Empty. Tight.

Unknown lies ahead.
The roller coaster of life.
Plunging through darkness and light,
forever intertwined.

The world

Bird squaking in the distance. Streaming light through lacy windows. Creaking from below. The tick of clocks, out of sequence with one another. My fingers clanking the keys.

Reclined in my bathrobe.

Life is quiet.

I wonder.

Feeling a void. The after-effects of achievement. Between relationships. Before a new job. Lacking meaning. A floorless existence.

Visions of my tiny blue car headed east. The feeling of freedom, of possibility, of exploration and new experience. The open road of life.

Time to calm, before the storm of change. December.

I long to hole up. To isolate. To silence.

Heater kicks on. They're digging a hole outside. Someone's new home.

Sunlit fingers. The world, a circle. No walls, no edges. No answers.

The Guest House - Rumi

"This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond."

Midnight thoughts, and good news

It's after midnight and I'm in bed. I can't stop reading the news lately.

The police violence associated with the OWS movement really bothers me deep in my heart.

It matters not that they are liberal or conservative or otherwise. It matters that they are people. Americans. Who have freedom of speech and assembly, and who should not be arrested for standing on a sidewalk. Or beaten for sitting on the grass.

For the photos are around on the internet, documenting people sleeping in tents for Black Friday or for concert tickets, or even when Apple came out with the iPhone the first time around.

I just can't get my mind around it.

I read a while back, "In the Garden of Beasts" by Erik Larson. A semi-biographical novel from the American Ambassador Dodd's perspective on the eve of WW2. I wonder what the correlations are between our time and theirs.

I wonder why we would not stand up for our fellow citizens, whether they shared our beliefs or not. I wonder how we can stand by and let things happen.

But then we have been doing this a long time. Everyone is separate in their own separate homes. Walled off with fences and curtains and security systems. Insular in our perfect families and perfect lives. Saving ourselves above all else.

When will we learn that giving is receiving? That our neighbors are ourselves? That things are not happiness. People are happiness. Life is happiness.

Security. Building up a bank account, and walls around us. When it could all go down in an instant. Just a misstep in time, place, of luck and life is forever changed. The only true sense of security is a false one.

Anyway. I just hope you can take this Thanksgiving and holiday season to look with love on everyone. To stand up for the little ones. To stand up for inequality. To stand up for your rights as Americans (or citizens of the world). For your children. And grandchildren.

My time for loafing with family and pondering the messes in the world will soon be limited. As I have good news: I was offered a job with the Virginia Beach Veterans Hospital, covering maternity leave, starting January 1st through March 31. I'll be avoiding the winters, and keeping myself busy. I welcome vistors any time. So drop me a line and drop in.

Thoughtful post to share

A Voice From The 1% does a good job of addressing the questions raised surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement. I've walked by protests in action and they appeared to be quiet people, clean and tidy, but still I did not know what I thought. I have always believed that while I have made good choices in my life, there is little that separates me from someone who has much less in life but a few strokes of luck.

Our country is in a state of demise in many ways and these protests are putting the our economic inequalities into question. For this I am proud- of the American right to free speech and that we are able to effect changes in this country. No matter what happens or whose side we are on, there is success in being reminded of the democratic process, of speaking up when we believe things need to change, of starting the dialogue.

On Choices, by CS Lewis

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, "If you keep a lot of rules, I'll reward you, and if you don't, I'll do the other thing." I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other?

Taking the overnight bus towards home

[Top Gun's playing in the other room, as rain plunks down outside.

Take My Breath Away. It is strangely comforting.]

I've revised my schedule over and over but I think I finally worked out something that's logical and can stick for the last twenty days of my holiday. Traveling long term is like an art project, always a work in progress, but you have to know when to quit before it gets ugly.

Tonight I have an overnight bus to Lviv, where I plan to spend at least three nights, then will catch a train to Warsaw, where I'll have four nights. I'd gotten a Belarus visa but then got nervous about visiting Minsk (political unrest), and decided that Brest was probably the best option since it is five miles from the border of Poland and the EU and only an eighteen minute train ride. Brest will either be a day trip or just overnight couch-surfing.

After Warsaw, I head to the Masurian Lake district of Poland (three nights in fancier lodgings), then to Gdansk for five nights, then down through Torun or Poznan before heading back to Berlin, where I'll stay with my friend Ruth the night before I catch a flight back to Chicago August 10th. It's an apt send-off from Germany, leaving from the city I love most with a good friend who I met on the road.

So figuring out a schedule and the ensuing lodging reservations frees me to wander with mind and foot through the rest of my days here. It's like being in the clouds for a while, drifting from place to place, knowing soon I will be landing in the USA, dropping into the country which was home for thirty-one years.

People back home fear that I'm going to be bored or regret returning, but I feel the time is right, and I'm ready. I read somewhere that home is where people accept you. Or home is where people miss you when you are gone. In that case, I am headed home, to family, friends and my country.

This last day in Lithuania, the sky is falling again. Hopefully there's a break in the clouds so I can make it to the station without a free shower. If not, I have a raincoat and waterproof backpack, so I am prepared for anything (I hope). Next report from the Ukraine...

The sky is falling!

A few remnants from yesterday in Kotor:

Reading under the tree behind a church. I was very happy, it was sort of a hidden alley, half fenced off so not a through way for tourists, who are in abundance in this small town.

This morning, I arose early and wandered after a tasty espresso. Seeing this hulking eyesore in the harbor, I thought, "I hope I never have to get on one of those things." I am sorry if that is close-minded, but I think it is probably true.

The sky, black like night at 10AM. I was quite fearful of an unintentional shower, but it never came.

Still, I love the dark foreboding clouds. Sometimes in life it looks like a storm is ahead and you prepare for it, but then it turns out to be a sunny day instead. It doesn't mean that it was a waste to reflect on the darkness. Darkness is what makes the light beautiful too. They work together like that.

Living deliberately- no destinations or borders.

"We're all fed such false messages about success in life, made to believe it's a point of arrival. So most of us spend our whole lives waiting to arrive. We expect that once we get there, the long story of the life we just lived will be infused with meaning. But while we're waiting our voices dry up. They forget how to ask, they forget how to listen, they forget how to tell."

I hope I don't forget how to listen or forget how to tell. I hope I don't get fixated on the destination, the arrival, checking the box, or making other people happy. I hope I can live with an open heart. I hope I see beauty in the world every day. I hope I have time for all people.

"And I go on making small promises to myself in the meanwhile: I will walk every day in between the trees, I will make some celebration, I will love without fear, I will create beautiful things, I will be unafraid to fly, I will move and speak and live deliberately..."

"In the end, the only thing standing between each of us and what we most want, is ourselves. We're our own border guards. And sometimes the crossing is easier than expected."
- from Off the Map.

Dreaming: The Idea & Facts

"Dreaming is a dangerous proposition; it dares us to risk everything, to walk blind into the hills, to do the hardest work in ourselves and in the world- and to reap the richest reward. Sometimes, possibly, our dreams urge us to reveal ourselves intimately to an audience of strangers, and hope they'll meet us where we most want to be." -from Off the Map.

The History: I've been doing it forever, back to childhood, when my mom thought I had a hearing problem, and my dad wrote letters to his grandmother describing me as "dreamy."

A Date: The movers are scheduled for May 24th, clearing up mental anxiety, making room for more dreaming.

The Bag: With the small green waterproof backpack that went to Asia in mind, I'm pondering what to wear to not look like a tourist and not look dirty; I still care about fashion even if I pretend I don't.

The Feeling: Rushing toward the mouth of the river where I'll soon be shot out into the open sea of travel and joblessness and wandering, the feeling of possibility overwhelms and envelops me, pushing me along and relaxing me at the same.

Riding through the maze of life (in Merano, Italy)

I've felt lately all of life is an obstacle course, and things which would normally be small feel big. The anxiety that occurs when I'm on the edge of a big transition. Or should I say in the middle. Everything is flying at me too fast, and even though I've done this before, I can't control my internal regulators which are saying, hold your breath, pay attention, watch out, run. It feels pretty accurate to say I feel like I am in eternal fight or flight mode. My sympathetic nervous system has taken over controls and will not yield.

But I know the peak is near and soon I will be on the slide down. In about 15 days, I'll have my household goods and car shipped, on the 25th work is finished, and the 27th I fly to Macedonia for the commencement of summer vacation 2011, ten years and eight days after I completed my optometry degree. It seems an apt time for summer vacation and change.

The photos I've attached are from our few hours in Merano, Italy. A town we ran into before driving over the Alps where they rented bikes for free. Joon was behind me on his bike having a gay old time with the camera (unbeknownst to me), so this explains the one-sidedness of the subject matter. I delight in bicycling, since the age of two. Hopefully this summer will bring more rides through unknown places, and meetings with yet-unmet friends. And I promise to write it all down.






So happy to be embarking soon on more travels...

Three Things

1. All the Pretty People by Ariel Gore.

I confess, I know the writer. (You may too- she started Hip Mama.) Right before I moved to New Zealand I took her class at the Attic Institute in Portland. I don't know why I signed up, and I felt like a fraud being there, but I eventually became comfortable enough in the class and really enjoyed it. So her book is a bunch of little stories (good for people like me who like to take reading breaks at work, or someone with kids, or a regular person too). The stories are both chronological and creative, and I could identify with a lot of the subject matter, as someone who grew up not traditionally pretty while wondering and trying to figure out what it would take to be considered attractive, and then led a semi-alternate adult existence. Ariel Gore has not led a mainstream life, but I think most people would identify with her thoughts. The book is not really about being pretty or not, but more about thought processes surrounding life events as she grew up in the SF Bay Area. (That's her on the cover.)

2. Listening to: Portishead's Glorybox.

Portishead: spooky, dreamy, artsy music. Perfect for intermediary life times, when the future is a black hole and a fuzzy dream at the same time. "This is the beginning of forever and ever..."

3. Weather & Life.

It's kinda summer here. 19C today. I ran the fields, hot and sweaty. It felt good even though I didn't want to go. The lame-duck-sitting-and-waiting thing that happens when your job is over but not quite makes me feel generally sluggish. I just want to sit and do nothing. Maybe with some chocolate. It's like I'm holding my breath until the end arrives. But it's a bit illogical. I should just keep living and enjoying my life as if it were going to continue, because it will, just in a different way. I'm not really waiting for anything.

I think Sylvia Plath & I are related.

But I'm not going to kill myself, no worries. (Maybe if I were born in 1932, it would be different, or if she had been born in 1976, it would have been better for her.) Somehow I've made it this far without really reading her writing, and what a jewel she was. In reading The Bell Jar, I found myself relating to a lot of her thoughts, and couldn't help but feel for her being born in a different era for women. I would love to read her later thoughts in life. It's too bad she didn't stay around to share with us.

Strangely, her life paralleled mine in a couple ways: her father dying at 8 (mine at 7), stating she never wanted to marry, then marrying a man in the same field who thought he was better, but then discovered that she was very talented and started womanizing on the side (oddly similar to my 5-6 year relationship with fellow optometrist Aaron).

A few things I liked from The Bell Jar:

"...I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old."

"The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equal time and let s equal the total distance."

"The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end."

"And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a mans showered on a women before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat."

"He didn't answer but reached over and put his hand at the root of my hair and ran his fingers out slowly to the tip ends like a comb. A little electric shock flared through me and I sat quite still. Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful."

"Buddy sat down beside me. He put his arm around my waist and brushed the ahri from my ear. I didn't move. Then I heard him whisper, "How would you like to be Mrs. Buddy Willard?"

I had an awful impulse to laugh."

Journaling

"I never travel without my diary. I should always have something sensational to read in the train." - Oscar Wilde

Oscar and I, we think alike. I ask myself sometimes, why do I keep a journal? Who'd want to read it? Or more importantly, who would I want to read it or not read it?

Joan Didion says in her essay, On Keeping a Notebook, it is to "remember what it was to be me." That is enough justification and explanation for me to continue my writings and staplings, diligently adding to the Rubbermaid full of my thoughts which is currently housed in a friend's basement in Portland.

One day, I will pull them out, sifting through words of a life worth living. Remembering what it was like to be me.

(Poor little guy who I found outside my window)

"Maybe we die twice, once when our heart stops.

Again when the living stop telling stories about us.

From "The Art of Pilgrimage"

"The pilgrim is a poetic traveler, one who believes that there is poetry on the road, at the heart of everything. Soulful travel is the art of finding beauty even in ruins, even in inclement weather, even in foul moods. Like poetry, pilgrimage is beyond time and space. It happens now or it doesn't happen at all."

------------------------------------

"To hear the pounding on the door, we have to remember to pay attention to what we have lost and what is calling for us. Not a day goes by when the world doesn't cry out for us, signal us with signs and sounds, calling us home. Listening closely is nearly a lost art, but a retrievable one. The soul thrives on it.

Words heard by chance have been known to change lives."