We Shall Not Cease from Exploration

This is one of those years of tiny, big moments. It's the year where two years of labour and questioning evolved at last into one moment of standing on stage and receiving my Master's degree. All I heard in that moment was the fierce beating of my heart, pounding ecstatically against my ribs: I've no idea what was actually said. (Though that might be also the result of two years of school-related sleep deprivation...)

This is a year that will quietly watch me slip into the next age marker and I find myself reflecting often on who I am now and how I want to grow myself for the next five years. I look at pictures of a five year old me, an eleven year old me, and I wonder who that I was then is still now, and what of who I am now would I have wanted to be at that age if I could only have known to want it. Which makes me wonder how I will look back on this age, and on this age I am slipping into.

Today is the anniversary of when my family left my first home, my beautiful island in the Caribbean, so I am extra pensive and lost to nostalgia, to thinking about home and place and belonging.

When I ride in the cabs and talk with drivers who are from Ethiopia, Uganda, and elsewhere, they reminisce to me of home, spell out for me the language of land written on their hearts, and I see the place stamped on their being. Then I ask how long they have been in the States now, and each time--each and every time!--it is longer than I have lived here in this country. And they have been gone from their homes that long (longer yet if they were refugees at some point), and yet it is to them still the compass which guides them through their life.

I think, if they can have their homeland still affect them so, is it so strange that my own heart is often still awash in longing for the otherness I know? For my other worlds? Even though in every place I go, that longing persists because I have lived and loved in too many?

What is the limit of the human heart?

I have become very adept at making home wherever I am, at building place and setting down roots whilst still carrying with me the places and people I love, while still holding onto the many different and opposing things that have made me the strange person who I am--and I am enormously proud of this accomplishment. I think, in a life full of fracture, finding a way to some sort of wholeness is a pretty satisfying thing to accomplish, and probably explains why I have cared so much more in my life about who I am as a person than what I am doing or going to do. Being a person is a lot of hard work, and I cherish my beingness.

But what now? And how now?

Maybe that will be the next five years of learning for me.

I returned not half a month ago yet from a trip to Iceland. What a beautiful country. I don't even have the vocabulary yet to adequately talk about it, though I have begun to read Icelandic literature in hopes of discovering and growing that ability.

Going there, I hoped most to be able to step outside myself a little, to step into a place I do not know at all, have never been. To bathe in the strange newness of it all and so, being outside of my world, gain rest and better my vision. I wanted to celebrate what I have achieved (the degree) and reward myself. Wanted to dance with the Northern Lights and experience their magic for the first time, to ride on the back of the wind. I wanted so badly to find something that looks like the edge of the world and stand trembling on the brink of it full of wonder at life and the stark beauty of it all, raging and silent in a single breath, luminescent as the glaciers and black as the sand, rock, and night encompassing it all.

And the thing that I love most about experiences like that; it isn't the going there and then , eventually, turning back and returning to the place you were before. It's that you don't return to the place you were before.

I will always, forever, be homesick for something. My heart beats the song of saudade; an eternal song of melancholic loss for the other.

But that doesn't mean that I do not nor cannot love the new, the next, or the present. And I do, enormously and passionately.

But when you go enter a neverland or stand at the edge of any world, there is always a door. Though I did turn and drive back the way I had come, though the next day I got on a plane and flew back to my present home which I adore, that next portal has been crossed and I passed into a new place, a new world to explore which will become a part of the fabric of my being. I didn't even fully realise it then, but now, when I find myself reading new books since my return, writing new things and thinking in language I have not before, I know.

Know that for the first time, I have come to love and appreciate change as much as I have always hated and feared it. Many of us carry wounds and split hearts and live in between worlds with that continual ache for the otherness of home, but as T.S. Elliot said, "the end of all our explorations will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." Which in the end, means that the place and we ourselves are as new; reborn and more full.

Isn't the evolution of our being a wondrous thing?

In search of Alchemy

It's been a year now since I decided to leave my hard earned home of five years and go out into the wide world once more.

Once more with nothing. With no furniture, not even a bed. With my books packed up and left behind, boxes of colour and memory dusting in a barn. My piano gone, pictures locked up, papers destroyed.

I left with no job and limited savings to make my way alone in a place I had never lived. To move back into a city from deep rolling hills, back into all the languages of the world and the engine of city traffic from the kayikiki call of fox outside my window and coyote and bear in the woods. To make friends in a city of strangers after leaving those who would come by with homemade butternut soup and thermometers when I was sick or hunt christmastrees with me, swim in lakes and pools, and explore the surroundings of a whole wide state.

It was just this idea of where I wanted to be next, who I wanted to enable myself to become (again?) and what I wanted to surround myself with. An image of the lifestyle I wanted to experience next and opportunities to find.

How has it nearly been a year since I was packing all my things away to set out across the country?
And what has been done or found or left in that year?

    "To live without roads seemed one way

 not to get lost. To make maps

of stone and grass, to rub stars together,

find a spark."

~from "Spark," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye

I have travelled through and explored
New York, New Hampshire, Massachusets, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina
as well as
New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Guatemala

I have depleted my yatch savings fund to nearly the last dollar, but starting saving over again.

I slept on a floor and then an airmattress for three months.

I worked as a canvasser on the street, a cashier and hospitality hostess in a pizza place, and am in my second position doing development and marketing work in an awesome arts organization now.

I completed two residencies, two terms of grad school, a critical thesis, and am preparing to graduate with my first Masters degree.  (There is always room for another MA...)

I've missed my friends, people who have poured into my life over the five years who feel like family, who may themselves have moved, too, but many of whom still keep in touch, find ways to say hello and an "I'm thinking of you" and some of whom have even managed to visit.

I've made new friends and reconnected with friends from my past--discovering one college friend and I can see each other's bedroom windows from our rooms here in all the expanse and building jungle of this city.

There have been organizations to discover, to join and participate in. Women's groups, political groups, arts groups, writing groups, UN groups, groups from my life's many homelands, embassies, music, bellydancing, martial arts, concerts, all my favourite food groups, rake-leaves-at-the-monuments--so many different experiences to explore and wonder at. So many fascinating new people with complex backgrounds and stories far crazier than my own. Giving strangers in the metro or at a restaurant my name, my number, my smile.

I've made it to a movie theater five times. (LOTR the Hobbit II, Frozen, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Maleficent, and How to Train Your Dragon 2, again--if you were wondering...)

I sold my car.

My belongings are still in storage and I miss my books and my piano every single day.

I've acquired more books and learned how to use a library at last (though I still don't like them much!)

I've seen 2 ballets, 3 operas, 3 theater productions, 1 dance show, 1 musical, 1 concert (and I think more that I cannot recall offhand).

I have visited and been visited by my siblings more this year than perhaps the last two years combined.

I've run away to a nearby beach twice, and made it back to NY briefly twice, too.

It's been a scary year. A year of wondering, Am I going to make it? Can this work out?  A year of signing onto leases before having employment, believing that the job was around the corner. Believing what I was earnestly looking for would come.

On the hard days, I would draw up this wonderful quote in my head from Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

It has been a year of letting go of everything and finding a path through the sky.

And, in fact, doing not zero, not one, but TWO high ropes courses, despite vertigo and hating feeling out of control. And losing a friend to an accident, who two years earlier helped me first conquer those things, climb a 70something ft tree and jump off a 50 something ft pole.

This year has felt a lot like skydiving did last summer. At the beginning being excited, then going through the paperwork that lists in horrid detail every possible way you might die or worse, injure yourself and recieve nothing but a miserable life without any assistance. And then you see the little backpack that is supposed to let you soar and you think, no way. That will never work.

Yet still you get into a rinky-dink plane and you climb up two miles into the sky and you open that door and jump anyways and somewhere in that crazy freefall you discover what it is to fly, and you land on your feet ready to go up again, to fly some more, to see the world in a whole new way outside of itself and so far beyond your tiny little being.

It's one of the most beautiful things imaginable.
And it is my life.
And I am deeply grateful.

Thoughts from the Washington Mall, Post Migraine

More than half a year ago now, I came first to this new city. My seventh capital of the world to live or study in, I think? It is strange to me, that a year ago I came with my brother on a trip, thinking perhaps he would find work here after graduation. It never occurred to me that I would come, instead. Now I walk past every day where I celebrated my birthday last year in novelty. 

How is it that a person can love so much in this world, carry so much heart for so many very different places and people? 

I am so exquisitely happy in this place. Hearing every day languages of home. Walking beneath buildings of familial architecture, stepping once more into the paths of people whom as global expatriates you know your whole life. The fashion, the art, the galas. 

But I find my heart equally close to breaking as to bursting, from sorrow as from happiness. Only the sorrow is so much more difficult to share or even visualize. It is sometimes hard to embrace the wonder of my life right now when worlds I know feel like they are on the brink of chaos. Or have already fallen into it, fighting and despair and confusion. When I am reminded of how fragile life is, when countries can implode overnight. When places which (or who, because to me they feel like people, like family) have bled into my being are bleeding again and I am far away but the blood calls. Countries to my south, countries to my east, all north to my heart. 

And then you add the single stories. The rape of every person woman man child, rape of country. The kinds of rape and violation that make you sick in public on the floor and it is nothing, your waste is nothing, to what you responded to, what is happening. Even stories outside of my countries, stories like the kidnapping of hundreds of girls, enslaved as wives (is that at best or at worst?) and taken away from education that they risked everything for. I just risk debt for my education. 

I went and toured an opera studio workshop here in DC, and one room was full of clothes, racks of shirts and dresses and pants hung and freshly laundered. Shelves of shoes, boxes of props. Clean and waiting full of promise to be stepped into and I stepped instead back into my mind, my memories; to walking through Birkenau and Auschwitz with the rooms of piles of shoes piles of hair and glasses and suitcases labeled with names of the dead. Of the people I met who survived, who walked like ghosts the streets of the cities I grew up on and stopped me to tell their story, this old story over and again. I stepped instead of into opera, the schoolhouse in the countryside of Rwanda, where I studied, where I witnessed room after room of white limed shattered limb fractured bone bodies. I think there were some 17 rooms I counted but I tried not to remember that too specifically. And then a big room there, with clotheslines every which way, draping ornamentally, awfully, bloodied torn bulleted clothes of women men and children. But I kept on touring an opera studio, which was wonderful and amazing in itself! and reveling in the fine arts instead. Instead of what? 

I think of these worlds I love. I think of how fragile ideas are and how hard we have to fight for them and sometimes against them, of how much is often sacrificed and how only sometimes we come out whole. 

I work hard in myself for these worlds I love, to let them stay together, to find a history that works for them all even when the cultures clash, even when the different histories I have imbibed and come to embody over the years are so different as to make this almost impossible. But I like to hope that if somehow one person can come to hold the world, maybe one day the world will also be able to hold itself. Maybe more of us will come to reshape our world and fit the pieces so beloved to someone, together. 

The End of our Exploring

It is a rainy day here in the city, and I am curled up over a steaming cup of coffee at the Ethiopian cafe with a fellow writer friend. It's our writing day, only every time I bend my thoughts into story, what comes back to me are images of my life right now.

Steam has gathered on the windows, so condensed it runs down drops inside the pane of glass like rain and the strong smell of beans crushed and rushing into waiting mugs fills the air. I love this place. I love being here in this city where everything is always happening and changing and full of possibility.

Yesterday bore witness to the arrival of a real bed for me. We laughed in my flat, called it a rite of passage that I graduated from an air mattress to the real deal--something that all my flatmates have gone through, and with this same mattress now passed on to me. It was a day of rearranging my room to make space for this new thing, and a day of realising; I have been in this place for four months now. I have left my last home six months ago. Six months. That is a half year! How has that time passed without my count? How does it seem both so little and so long?

I have been in my new job four weeks now, and still love it. I love that I work in the centre of the arts  in a role which encompasses everything from theatre to opera to orchestra to ballet and on to touch every outer reach of this wonderful galaxy. Love that every week I meet new people and can begin a new friendship to enrich my world, to hopefully enrich other worlds. Love commuting to work and standing in this throng of people and voices and colours. Sound and motion. Love going for a walk in the city somewhere new every time, something yet unseen to find.

Today I made my first craigslist purchase: a chair for my desk. When I leave this coffeeshop it will be to go home to my room where I have a real bed now, to sit down at my desk that I pulled out of storage, to use this new chair to pour into words this story that will be written that will come out that breaks my heart and I have no idea the ending to, the middle of, the path.

I am reviewing my life in my head these days. Thinking of the many lives I have lived and how separate from one another they have so many of them seemed. I love how connected this life makes me feel to the rest of myself. Not as whole as living in London made me, but close. And beautiful. It is so much in the little things. New friends. A bed. A chair. Steaming coffee in the rain that tastes the flavours of another home. The three languages I heard in passing on the street one of which I share, one I recognise, and one as yet unknown.

Last summer I started thinking about moving on, but could not imagine that life. Seven months ago I decided to leave and launch out into this new somewhere. Six months ago I began, not having a clue what lay ahead.

I remember five years ago now, I wanted so very desperately to have a place in this world. To have my own place, my slot marked out for me and the path clearly stretched out before me. In many ways I think we are wired to want that, to look for our little slice of life and fit it, to be restless until it, to fear being without it. It is safety and comfort and clarity. Security and definition. I as a writer love definition, oftentimes too much. As a young adult with a unstable, roving childhood, I wanted that place of my own, or at least to know how to claim it, how anyone can ever claim something. Have ownership or be owned, perhaps. I wrote a lot at the time about how you find your path, about what that should look like, and I finally decided that perhaps the straight lined path is just an illusion. We are living in a world with a curved horizon, a lie of a line. Even the straightest path circles around the world and if we expect it to be even we are in for a rude interruption or two. So I slowly changed my thinking. I decided that maybe the curving route that can go anywhere, that can wrap itself around the world over and again and come from so many different places beginning again everywhere and coming always from somewhere else and going still elsewhere may be the most beloved best adventure infinitely satisfying experience possible.

Now I think that if I could see down a straight line to the end of my life I would be bored or crazed to an early death.

I love this adventure of discovery, the not knowing, the thrill of beginning ever again. Love how many chances we have to be new and renew. To begin and begin again. Greater and greater.

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.” 

― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

I have no idea what these next six months will hold. I couldn't possibly have imagined the adventures of the past six and I am so glad, because everything has been harder and more beautiful than I could possibly have. This is a beautiful thing.

Risking Life

Today is one of those days that begs talking about.

I had no desire to wake up this morning and I forgot to brush my hair, put on earrings, and grab breakfast before heading out the door for work. Then the metro was backed up for reasons unknown. I waited three trains before finally making it through the door onto one of them. I stepped hard on one poor man's (very nice!) shoe by accident, trying to avoid falling over because there was no where to hold onto and the train driver was crazier than Cruella in 101 Dalmatians. The road right next to my office got shut down because of a suspicious package scare at one of the embassies there and we all got some amber alert on our phones.

But it was the first day of Spring, and it didn't snow here. Both sun and blue skies popped out to visit. I successfully finished setting up my banking and I bumped into some friends when I went out to grab some lunch.

After work tonight, I went to a play at the Kennedy Center with one of my housemates. We saw A Midsummer Night's Dream together. My last experience with that play was actually as an actor in it--one of the most fun roles I've ever played, actually--and the lead make-up design/conceptual artist. I think we did a pretty spectacular job with it, too--from set design to choreography to costuming and make-up to actual presentation of lines and character development (etc etc). But this, tonight, it was spectacular. It was breathtaking. I sat there riveted and got a headache and spotty vision at more than one point only to realise it was because I was actually holding my breath for the splendidness of it.

If you've ever seen The Mysteries (and you should--and which I would almost die to see performed live!!!), there were a lot of element similarities to me between the two. This production of Midsummer was done including puppets. Not muppets (which are, admittedly, awesome), but real incredibly put together wood carved puppets. Sometimes tiny, sometimes larger than life. And sometimes a basket with three people holding different objects next to in order to animate. But it DID  animate. It came to life so amazingly.

And then after a performance that really couldn't possibly have gotten any better, an actor went and proposed to his girlfriend after the long standing ovation!! (and she said yes)

What what what!?

We took a taxi home tonight. The driver was Ethiopian, and he and I chatted all about Ethiopian food, and how a woman has to know how to cut a chicken just right, and life. Last time I was in a taxi with an Ethiopian man was on my way to the final interview for my now job. That driver told me he knew I would get the job if I wanted it, and I did want it, and I did get it.

Now here I am a month later going home. Home after a long day at work. A day of working at a place I am just so incredibly delighted to be a part of and bewildered just how exactly it came about. A day of movement and drama and art, of cross realities and playfulness. I got to ride home driving down the Mall looking at the monuments and then passing the Capital building, the senate buildings. Home to a street that I know and love to curl up on my bed.

I saw a card today that read something to the effect of, "life without risk is not an adventure." I think all of life is filled with risks whether we acknowledge them or not, whether we take extra ones or not, and it can always be seen as an adventure if you figure out a new perspective. But the fact is, I am just so very glad that I took the risk of moving to this city and searching for a job and settling into yet another world. Because it is a beautiful world, and the rest of my world is bigger for it, and even on days of complete ordinariness or terribly rough starts or interminable saudade, I feel like I have the whole of the universe dancing stars inside of me.

A Challenge of Imagination

As a temporarily unemployed professional, I have done a lot of thinking about this process of searching for work in which I find myself these days. People ask questions like, "how are you doing,"  or "what sort of work are you looking for," or make comments like, "man, it must be rough to not have a job," or "boy, I sure wish I didn't have to be working, too."

I find that being between work does indeed leave a lot to be desired--security and stability, in sum, not to mention the fact that I happen to love working and really miss it. There are times when the narrow reality of my situation presses in on me and I feel my stress rising; blood in my ears and bile in my mouth. Times when I toss and turn instead of sleep, or when my eyes fly open from a deep sleep back to this waking, unsettling insecurity. Many of those who know me probably also know that for all my adventuring, I do actually like structure in my life and I love to work. This is not an easy experience for me.

What I have come to find when I am not holding onto narrow reality or demanding impossible answers to temporally irrelevant questions, however, is that this place of searching for work is a beautiful place to be. There is always something wondrous in being lost and much of the wonder of that comes in what you find along the wandering way.

I think and talk all the time about translating culture across boundaries, about shape and place and space and being. But how often do I think or take the time to consider the possibility of translating the [non-cultural shape of] myself? Now, every day when I look at job descriptions, I think, Can I do this? Do I want to do this? What skills and experiences would I bring into this? Who are they looking for?

I left the realm of "jobs which I obviously and easily can do" behind weeks ago now, and spend time looking at jobs that I would have said were out of my circle of possibility. I think that is wonderful. Searching for work is teaching me to see myself anew every day, and not only to see myself, but to imagine and to re-imagine myself over and again.

It is like acting in a way, looking at a role and saying, do I have something within me that I can call upon and respond to the call of this character to me? Can I embody this being and be it so well that the crowds roar, that my heart soars, that the integrity of the character is satisfied?

But the fact is, it is not actually acting at all: it is a translating of myself: not an act, but a new form of being. Sure, there is this "one me" with the list of things I have done. But we are not defined--should not be defined-- by what we have or have not done. That is what traps people and creates the silent despair so many people suffer through in their daily lives. That is a form of death, I think.

It is our being which matters, and our being is expansive and ever expanding (I think when our being ceases to expand we are like the dead). Our whole, elastic being contains so much more than simply what has been done, what we have accomplished. We are not wearied check lists buried under dusty stacks on a desk.

One of my favourite historical figures (alas that now I no longer have the possibility of dining with him!) is Vaclav Havel. He wrote, in addition to many other world changing things, this incredible speech about the power of the powerless. The fact is, we all have power; we all participate in the shaping of reality. We can pull out from the realm of imagination and enact; we can expand our being and do differently--challenge ourselves and step outside of what we think is possible to discover the boundlessness of possibility and the feebleness of reality.

It is incredibly uncomfortable to push the edges of reality. I think of my childhood, trying to step into a mirror all the time to find the other world and the frustrations when it would not yield to me. Frustration, disappointment, the risk of feeling one's trappedness or smallness after all. But fear is the worst possible jailor, and I refuse to put myself in shackles. If there will be shackles in my future, they will not be because I held out my wrists meekly or shackled myself fearfully. Fear is what keeps us powerless. Fear is what keeps us going in a dead end job because we are too afraid to re-imagine ourselves in a new life, in a new world. Fear is what confines us to one possible reality. Fear is what never lands on the moon.

Imagination is not child's play in the grown up world, but maybe if we exercised it more, or if we played harder and dared longer, we could grow into it again. I do think for many people, there comes a time when we have left the imagining and re-imagining of ourselves and possibilities so long in the past that we no longer know how to do it. Perhaps we no longer know how to see ourselves at all or are afraid of what we will see when we do simply look in that mirror. Not even that should stop us, though; search out your muscle memory, try and try again.

I know that right now, far beyond the discomfort and the instability, I just love this idea that I could be and try so many different things. I am discovering jobs, lifestyles, endless universes I did not even know existed! And when I look at myself in light of those possibilities, I see there on the other side of the mirror myself, smiling back.

Exploring. Becoming anew. It is spectacularly freeing and empowering. Expanding the universe of self.

Right now we are reading in my workshop here at residency this book called 19 Translations of Wang-Wei. It is based on this one, 4000 something year old ancient Chinese poem that has been translated and retranslated throughout history. Every version of it still is itself, but new and delightful and rediscovered. I want to be that poem. I want to be fully myself, with so many facets that I sparkle like the most gorgeous diamond in the world. That some intrinsic intricate part of me resonates wherever I go and echoes still in my absence, touching and changing and challenging the world. And I cannot wait to find this next translation of myself to fully step into and develop.

I think everyone should join me in taking on and enjoying at least one of these actions this year

identify your fears and embrace at least one of them
take a long look at yourself--all of you, the whole entire beautiful wondrous and terrifying essence of your being--and then re-imagine yourself in some way

I'd add at the end of both of those, "be different," or "be re-imagined," but the fact is, I think if any of us try any of these things, that will be the result no matter how small or large that difference seems at first. We are not dead; we are gloriously alive. And since we are alive--living matter, breathing being--we can shape and reshape and expand ourselves to encompass possibilities we can (or cannot yet!) only dream about right now.

Rubbing Stars

"To live without roads seemed one way

not to get lost. To make maps

of stone and grass, to rub stars together,

find a spark." 

~from "Spark," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye

Sometimes it is in the wandering that we find ourselves in the most perfect of places. 

Just now, I am curled up on a couch in the lounge of a college in Vermont, happily tuning in and out of conversations around me; tuning in to hear discussions of publishing, of writing styles, point of view and audience. Tuning out to reflect on the day, on the last few days, on the end of last year. Last year when I came to this place of wonderfulness at the very end and after too long in transit. Tuning out to think of the next few days and the future smiling at me. 

To settle back into a small city, even if just for this period of 12 days, is beautiful. Walking everywhere--20 minutes down a slushy slide of a road to the downtown, dumptrucks loaded with snow driving past, clearing the way. On either side of the main streets quaint shops, local and proudly green or organic or handmade all. Espressos in honey-wooden rooms, crepe cafes and mad tacos and the most alice-in-wonderland sort of thrift stores. A sweater I have hunted for 8 years! Late night viewings of Les Miserables with my roommate at the old cinema by the capitol building and a taxi ride back through the night. 

Engaging in lectures on all sorts of wonderful subjects; of craft and of creation, of theories and possibilities and fascinations of all kinds. Readings that make you hold your breath, unable to breathe for the beauty of the words, of the particular arrangement of those precisely chosen words one after another in art and in meaning (and are those the same, afterall?). Losing yourself in workshops; reading and thinking and sharing--this wonderful back and forth--dialogue to take a work from what it is to even better; to impossibly better. Beautiful.

I love the new faces, the new stories, the new friendships being made. The fact that this place is obviously a community that exists across space and regardless of this particular place; the understanding so crystalline that when we leave this particular here we will still be together talking and sharing and exchanging. Pushing and encouraging each other and continuing these dialogues. Continuing this lovely engagement. To not only go out with a group of friends, of fellow students, but with professors you cannot wait to work with; have so much to glean from. 

I love that in all my wandering without roads, I am found here, in this perfect place. Ready to wander some more, ready to make maps of stone and grass and to find a spark--to make a spark. To write. 

Ski Lifts, Bucket Lists and Life

When I was a little girl, I remember climbing up the gate at our house to sit on the stone column next to it and wait. Wait for my sister to leave for and then come back from school. Wait for the car to take me to school later on. Wait for my dad to come home from work. There was so much eagerness in that waiting--the excitement of something coming.

Yesterday I climbed the pile of snow plowed up by my house. The last few years I confess I tunneled into these piles with pots and pans and so of course, I had to make sure no other person tunneled in yet this year. But no such thing, so up I climbed. It was like my own personal little mountain in my front yard, a wonderful hawk-eyed view of the streets, the passersby. Not so high as my magic carpet, but wonderful in the way of the tree fort, the hide-out. 

And again, I waited. Waited for some friends to come through so we could caravaan off to the ski slopes together. Tennis I wanted to play since I was a very little child. Skiing, though, I've wanted to try since I first left the Caribbean and got over the shock of the cold and winters. And though I spent so much time around skiiers, I was never granted that opportunity. These past few years, I've thought about it, watched it come around nearly in my reach, and then either slip away again or else I myself have chosen to grab some other opportunity. 

But yesterday--yesterday was my day for skiing at long last. Yesterday, in this marvelously surprising unforseen way, I got to go skiing and it was just so delightful. Learning this foreign feeling, this way of thinking with the muscles of my body, of hearing them in my head and focusing on their directions. The conquering the never-ending fear of heights to move up the mountain, shaking in the seat as I try not to look down, as I remember all the other things I have conquered in my life and how this is the least of them all. To glide down this slope of pure white, so intent on harmony and balance and the beauty of your surroundings and having only a sensory awareness of others on the slope passing nearby at varying speeds. The hilltops across the valley smiling back at me and the cold kissing my nose. It was wonderful. 

And it is the waiting for wonderful things like that, the eager climbing up a snow plow pile and watching for adventure, for opportunity, for pure beauty--I want to do that with this whole year, with the rest of my life which sometimes feels like too many lifetimes to me. I want to climb to this hill of new persepective, of bubbling childish excitement, stamp a spot and plant my feet solidly and wait, eagerly; expectantly. Wait and reach out and embrace all the wonderful new experiences that lie around, hidden from my sight til just that perfect moment. 

Today I ran away from home a while to start reading the next book on my school-list. Sometimes you just need to work from a clean slate, a new environment where everything isn't chatting away at you familiarly and intrusively all at once. I ran away to a coffeeshop where lots of strangers pass through; strangers whose lives seem oddly comforting and vaguely interesting, and it is not intrusive to tune in to their chatter. 

One huddle of women around the firepit near me, wealth sparkling off their particular clothes, their large rings and fancy materials and all; they were talking about their vacations, where they wanted to go next, when they were done this skiing holiday of theirs. Belize, the Caribbean, somewhere really exotic. 

From there, their conversation turned to bucket lists, to checking things off (one apparently is getting quite near to finishing her original list). And it got me thinking about my own list of things I want to do. Not much, really. I don't often sit around and think up adventures, or set life-goals or throw stones at the future in hopes that when I arrive there, I'll find the stone and recognise the significance of that place. But I do have a few things on my list, casual little ideas like flying a plane, walking across a country, seeing the northern lights, looking at the moon from antarctica. Higher education and telling stories that have little truths in them, stories that can resonante with something in all of us who claim common humanity. 

I know I don't value my life enough. I spend copious amounts of time imagining for myself beautiful deaths, epic ways to leave this life behind because I get weary of waiting for the unexpected, or weary of letting ago of another piece of life that I loved dearly. Dearly. And because there is some part of me that finds an aspect of death alluring--Peter Pan saying "to die will be an awfully great adventure," perhaps. But I am grateful for the luxury of dreaming, grateful for the wealth of opportunities that I can choose to take hold of now and, hopefully, over the course of my lifetime. I'm glad that my life is one that can afford even the idea of a bucket list, of langously floating through life coming up with new adventures to turn my rotor towards. I'm delighted that I got to ski yesterday, and that I might go again sometime. I'm eager, in spite of the worse parts of myself, for the adventures of the lifetimes I have yet to live before me. And I am grateful for my life and its many measures of wholeness.  

In Abstract

Sometimes as I sit at home, curled up on the floor toes tucked in and fingers curled around a warm mug, I catch myself wondering what in the world I'm doing. I'm the kind of person who lives a very very busy life--and not just busy, but deliberately full. That differentiation is crucial. Busy is mainly concerned with doing and quantity; full is rather more about being and quality.

This year has had an awful lot of busy, so that at times like this when I'm curled up at home, I wonder, what am I doing? What is my life about? Is it ok that I am taking a few moments of pure silence--not speaking to anyone for a few minutes or occasionally, whole days? How do I keep the balance for myself between just being "busy" and having a "full" life as I explore what life has just sitting around waiting for me to pick up and try out? I don't want to invalidate my existence.

I think that what I love most about my life is the people I get to meet going through it. People are also the hardest part for me because they are the most unpredictable. They come in, they go out. They live, they love, they leave. (And they will all leave, you know, even if it is just through death.) I love that my life is such that it allows for so very many people, and such different people at that.

And I think what I love even more about life is the beauty that can be found in it. The beauty of people, of their beings and how they choose to live their lives. Or the beauty of wonder. So much wonder! And the time to sit quietly like now and mull over the wonder of it all, this is good and still full. I think, I am so fortunate to be a witness to so much beauty, even the most painful piercing kinds of beauty that we find in the depths of life.

Just a thought.

A Brief Grief Journal

October has been such an exquisitely difficult month. I have felt the pain of loss keenly, reaching me from many different areas of my life. It has taken great effort to put energy into anything other than simply sitting and allowing myself to feel my way through sadness and pain to the other side of grief. Certainly I am not there yet, but I know I'm closer and that is good enough for now.

In the midst of hurt, though, I find myself thinking how fortunate I am to have things in my life that can hurt me. To have people you love so much that the loss of them is unspeakable agony--the kind that cramps your whole body up, the kind that makes you bend down over and curl up fetally, the kind that just turns you into a leaky sieve so that you start crying even in a happy moment. Funny how closely tied pain and hurt are to happiness and joy.

I think that while allowing oneself to experience grief is both good and necessary, giving yourself up to drown in it is not good. Wallowing is easy. Stasis is easy. After all, as I mentioned earlier, so much energy is spent just experiencing so much feeling at all, how do you have energy to do anything else? To move forward? And if there is one thing that I would look back at my life and say, it is that you cannot expect anyone else to pick you up when you are down. You have to choose to get up. For me, that means doing things even when I don't feel like doing them--especially things that give energy.

I derive energy from creativity, so I have taken on the project (BIG project) of painting one of the rooms in my house. Colours, primer, moving pianos and stacks of books and clothes and pictures and stuff stuff stuff. Painting. Creating. Repetitive motion.

I do derive energy from people. So don't cancel your parties, don't isolate yourself from others even when you don't feel like seeing anyone. Keep living and being and watching those around you live and be and remember how beautiful it is to love people, to love at all. If you are lonely, invite someone else who is alone. If you are hungry, make something and share it with someone, even if you don't see them, even if you are simply sending it to them.

Take conscious note of all the things you find beautiful. I was in Buffalo visiting one of my dear friends. I didn't feel social--I just felt sad. But I let myself let go and move outside of the sadness and enjoy something happy (and tasty!! mmm, Thai food.) And then, I went with her to visit an Nepali family she has gotten to know. It was so incredibly perfect, sitting on a couch somewhere in Buffalo talking about loss and exile and experiencing someone else's pain that you understand and drinking chai and knowing that life is beautiful anyway.

I've eaten sushi, picked pumpkins, receivedhugs, scheduled out things to keep doing til i'm finally starting to think a bit more spontaneously again.

Nearly a week ago now, I went to a fundraiser up there. What fun! Going on stage at Shea's--one of the biggest stages in the whole of the States! And going backstage and in the stars' dressing rooms, and underneath the stage where the trap doors are. I still have yet to shake my desire to go straight back into serious theatre. It's come in handy, though, with lots of costume parties the rest of this week. Snow White and Marilyn Monroe!

During the big "Frankenstorm" that just came around, I had a sleepover and pumpkin-carving and movie-night with another friend. Storms are one experience I hate to have alone, and it was so much fun to have a sleepover in response to my facebook post "now accepting applications for storm-sleepover-buddies" (or something like that) and to revel in good company.

What I know is that I hope November is a better month. No new losses to stagger under. No horrid storms, no deaths nor dying. To come out of this sleepwalking and back into smiles and quick laughter that just bubbles out again. To not have to work so hard at living and remembering the beautiful. Please, November--be restorative.

Thoughts from a Sunday Drive

Yesterday afternoon, I drove back to NY from South Jersey--about a 6.5 hour drive, really. Beautiful drive. Music playing; my brother buried in his book and I in my thoughts. Sometimes it frightens me--for the last few months the hills of NY have risen up to welcome me back. They roll in waves of home at me and swallow me up. I'm still not fond of their particular shade of green (except when the shadows hit them just right and they turn a beautiful blue-green and purple instead), but on this drive even that did not matter. Those hills were lit up in tongues of flame: it was like driving through fire, all burning glory and golden auburn bronzed beauty.

I am proud that I can feel at home in this place now; proud of the hard work I put into making a strange and foreign land become a home and a haven. Proud that I made a place to come back to--that I find myself thinking in my head one day I will return to. Where the whales go to die.

But who knows--I could say that of many places already, so I suppose there are many other places I may yet come to say that of.

I think of the way I have home in the people I love, so that I can go to a strange place and find it feels like home to me. Over a year ago, I spent 6 days traversing the West Coast--California, Oregon, and Washington all. (Yes, it was a whirlwind!!) And I had hardly a single set plan going there except the times of my flights and the airports themselves. But it was fabulous. It was home every single breath because of the people, because of the wonder, because of the space to be whole self.

This month has been a month of grieving and of loss, and I know that the experience of both for myself will continue on for some time more. But still I love the choice to smile anyways. The choice to live largely, to be bigger than oneself and to exist outside of the limits of immediate feeling. Time travel is unfortunately not an option (to me, anyways...), but what we do with the time we have? How much we can fill it with. Minutes are confined, but moments--aren't those forever? They stretch on and on in their own expanse somehow.

Nearly a month ago (how has time gone by so?!), I traveled out to Indiana to visit some dear friends. And it was wonderful. I jumped the midnight train, arrived around 8:30 a.m., changed at their flat and then went and volunteer worked all day alongside my friend in a kindergarten classroom (where she works). Never done that before... Then I saw my first highschool football game. Which also happened to be a homecoming game and the homecoming court was crowned. Then that weekend I also saw my first band competition, which was really fun! And of course, hours walking and talking and full of tasty foods and drinks and new people and dear dear people I already know. I think I like to have at least one new experience every day, though I do prefer them more happy than grievous.

Live as big as you can just for the breath-taking beauty of life which is bigger than you, and then live a little bit bigger than that.

An Inadequate Post.

I have coming up a trip I never wished to take; on Thursday I will travel to my grandmother's funeral. I cannot believe she is really gone, cannot believe that I speak of her in the past tense now. I loved my grandmother. Loved. Loved her so much.

I've never grown up around my extended family. Where my grandmother was concerned, however, this fact never mattered. She called every year on my birthday. She visited "all the time" when I lived as a child on the island. Who knows how often that really was? What mattered is that it felt like always. Since before I could even spell, we wrote letters back and forth, long missives in which I narrated all the exciting adventures of my life and she responded in kind. Thoughts, wisdom, and lots of love. When she visited, she picked me up at school, took us kids to the beach, went out for ice-cream, and played with us. She knew every boy I ever loved growing up, even when I wished she didn't!

My grandmother taught me things. She taught me to ride a bike, to learn my times-table in mathematics, to make beds beautifully (which mattered a lot in a family where hospitality happened all the time and it was fun to pretend you were a maid at a hotel!).

She taught me to love fiercely, even as she loved fiercely. I don't know anyone who loved more fiercely than she. In the last decade, I've done a lot she couldn't understand. Why would I ever want to go to some of the places I have visited or studied or worked in? Why would I sleep there or eat that or try this? How could I love it? But no matter how much my lifestyle and passions confused her, she always loved me firmly and supported me. She wanted to hear about everything. She kept a notebook with every single one of my blog-posts printed off, and maps tracking where I was or had been. She loved me no matter what.

And she invested so much! Hours over breakfasts when I was in the area--breakfasts at my favourite restaurants or else a special breakfast favourite she made for me at her house. We would talk long into the night and she would fall asleep in the big double bed in the special blue room with me, holding my hand. I think sometimes I fell asleep in the middle of a prayer. She even put up with my kicking in the bed!

She nurtured my creative spirit. Every piece of I-don't-even-know-what that I made from trash, she kept, and told me she kept. Beautiful. So interesting. Do you have more? What have you made lately?
All my drawings and paintings on her fridge, and she would write me--"so-and-so from church commented on your beautiful picture today."

She told me long stories about family history and connected me to a world of people which space and time kept me from. I learnt about genealogy and family loyalty and the price of loyalty from her. I learnt about hard work and sacrifice and so many other things from talking with her in a pick-up truck at farmers markets or in her beautiful garden or biking on back roads. So much, I cannot possibly write it out here in brief tonight.

She was strong, and I hope she passed along her strength to me.

I loved my grandmother, and I hope that I can carry not only the memory of her into the future, but that I can grow the beautiful pieces of her that live on in me long after today and yesterday and this coming Thursday.