"My house is me and I am it."

My favorite book growing up was a little gem called The Big Orange Splot. Mr. Plumbean lives on a "neat street", where all the houses are the same, until one day a mysterious bird drops a can of orange paint, A BIG ORANGE SPLOT, on his house. From that moment on Plumbean is inspired to defy conventional thought, embracing and welcoming this opportunity for change and the discovery to be, well, just himself. He paints his house every color you can imagine, sets up a hammock in his front lawn and adopts an alligator. His neighbors soon find themselves exploring and implementing their own expressions of who they are. It's a children's book, but as often as they are, it is about so much more: individuality, creativity, acceptance, exploration, sharing, listening, enjoying. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cPfjzYJcok

"I have nothing to sell, I have a lot to share."

3 weeks. Or tomorrow. Or a week. Or right now. Three hours. Or 45 minutes. I can leave at a moment's notice. Just as my car can move in one direction, I can always navigate it back to the places I have been. I can come and go as I please, and though things might be different when I do, that freedom is enough to feel good about change and motion. So, on the note of change and motion and returning to places both mentally, physically, viscerally, I'm composing an on-going list of the things in my past I have appreciation for:
Growing up with a best friend, Blaire who allowed me to learn how goodit is to share in the face of change, who when I see now after a month or a year or two I am just as connected as ever with her. Worry goes out the window in her presence.
Two parents with all their faults and folly and glory and love and acceptance and humaneness who to this day want me to be utterly happy and healthy and thriving and alive.

“You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.”

"Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.”

I lie to people all the time.  When someone asks "Why did you leave Hawaii for Logan?", my automatic response, a blatant lie really, is "It was expensive, I wanted to finish school."  While, yes,  I did want to finish school the truth is I very well could have at the University of Manoa; I could have claimed residency the month we left.  But in reality it wasn't that expensive for me, Mike was paying rent and I was working full-time, paying whatever miniscule bills I had to pay-phone, credit card, utilities, food, not even gas because I owned only a bike while there.  I really had it quite easy, I wasn't struggling to stay afloat.  We went out to eat, we drove to the North Shore on days off and went out for lunch at Big City Diner or drinks in town(Honolulu) at a little place called Coconut Willy's that has since gone out of business.  The truth is, perhaps, I was just unhappy, with myself, my job, a relationship that has since become an occasional swap of texts, a friendship I know still exists amidst the distance and across landscapes, but one that almost feels the same even when we slept in the same bed, and there is no longing for that, no longing for the person I was then.  Sure, I was tan, fifteen pounds lighter, living in the middle of the Pacific, but there was something I hadn't yet grasped, some concept of acceptance or contentedness or gratitude or maybe there wasn't something I had yet let go of, like the desire for more or change, and maybe I still haven't. I tell people this, without thought, because it seems easier, it seems like the kind of response or reason any sane person would leave something so seemingly "good", so aparently "put together", but sometimes we leave the facade of perfection to others simply for the sake of what feels right inside.

"'Is this normal?' 'For here it is.' I cannot imagine a better question, or a better answer, to explain why I am here. To explain why any of us travel. To explain our hopes as well as our desperation." -Gravity-

What is this all for?  This is the ongoing question.  Preston and I pondered this last night over a beer at the Hive and I believe the only conclusion we came to (well, I’ll speak for myself) is that we will never know what the hell this is all for.  Why do we wake in the morning, why  does it matter if we choose pancakes over omelets or to sit in a coffee shop all day or go to work for 8 hours, or does it even matter at all?  So, what keeps us going?  Is it the prospect of an enjoyable conversation with a close friend later that day? Is it the sunrise we might witness upon waking?  Is it the giggle of a little girl playing in the snow?  Is it the light that makes patterns on the down comforter midmorning, the taste of dark chocolate or beer, the feel of sand and seafoam, or good sex? Is it possibility itself that propels us forward?  Is it mystery?  Is it the unknown?  Is it just to feel ourselves smile? How minute do we feel when we look up and around?  How amazing is that thought in itself?  What if we just did what made us happy, right now, without a reason?  What if we could just relinquish our obsession with the word, why?  What if we learned to live comfortably in the undefinable?  And in the course of twenty-four hours, there are also the moments of undefinable desperation... like the moments you watch a friend of a friend crying in front of you over her son who is killing himself, been slowing severing his ties with life for the past seven years of addiction, and you hug her, not knowing what to say, not knowing anything else about her, and knowing there really is nothing to be said and she quietly fills the silence with "He's going to die.  He doesn't want to live," and she has stopped crying and you feel the pulsing in her body even after you've let go, and you feel the acceptance in her words but mostly the resistance and the reluctance and the desperation and the false sense of security in the smile she tries to wear.  And then she tells you she sits in her closet in the evenings to purge tears after finding him hudled in the snow close to hypothermia around the holidays, not knowing how to help even herself, or her husband who can only handle ten minutes of conversation about him at a time and you can feel mostly all that you can't feel or know and never will, and you step back and look at her and think how can we not ask why in these moments?  How do we attempt to explain what that is all for?

"Here, looking up at a mountain I've never seen before this morning, my sense of where I am holds nothing more than rock, than water, than birds and trees and bush. Here, apart from the insistence of others, I am able to catch a breath of the Other. There is no past in this place today, and no future. Just a tremendous present-filling eternity. It's enough to fill the soul." Gravity:The Allure of Distance

I like getting burrs in my hair.  I like digging the blades of my snowshoes in powder, then sliding down a hill on my ass.  I like watching a Schnauzer snowbunny in front of me, and Jeremy plowing his way through the trees, swinging from branch to branch to keep from tumbling down the side of a hill.  I like stopping to look down at the houses off Sumac, to feel taller than I did just a moment ago.  I like going uphill, knowing there will be a descent.  I like not thinking about tomorrow.