I'm one-third of the way through my MFA program. Last week, I turned in my final papers and began transitioning out of the apartment I've lived in for the past 9 months, the first place I ever lived alone. On Friday night, I stood at the door before pulling it shut and locking it, never to return again. I couldn't remember walking into it the first time. I will never forget leaving. I paused in the threshold as I thought about the transformation that transpired within its walls, over the course of the school year, in the span of spring semester.
Change is constant, but it seems to go unrecognized until those moments when I am forced to reflect - a final paper, a move. Hey, I can meditate more than five minutes without wanting to flee the room. Wow, I can now hold an intelligent conversation about James Joyce's Ulysses. Suddenly, I can write without paralysis. Whoa, I learned to be alone without constantly needing to fill space and time. And so on ...
I wrote an email to a friend that week and noted how change becomes most obvious at its "conclusion," like the May mornings I'd wake up in Minneapolis to find the peony bushes in our yard finally popping their blazing hot pink blooms.
Lately, I've been thinking about loneliness - in a productive, non-depressed way for once.
Every now and then it sneaks up on me. I believe it is normal to be lonely once in awhile, to indulge it for a spell, and then let it move along. When goes, it leaves me contemplating the oddity that is moving 1,000 miles (give or take) away from most of the people who love you in this world only to find yourself the most mentally health and content you've ever been. I feel so completely at ease, contented, centered, strong, like I belong here right now.
I think about this quote from Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat. Pray. Love.:
And I think about how when I moved out here, to Colorado, I consciously decided not to do what I've always done: rush to fill the empty spaces. I left my apartment minimally furnished. I did not rush out to join every club and activity I could fit into my schedule. I embraced my truly introverted self for once and did not attempt to create a packed social calendar to prevent the many nights spent eating solo while reading or watching TV online.
My motto became: Only that which fits.
This meant furniture within my budget that I truly liked and could move on my own. It meant commitments that truly enthused me and enhanced my life. It meant allowing various interpersonal relationships to serve their intended function - no more, no less. It meant acknowledging that I do like my own company even when it's uncomfortable.
I realize now that the empty spaces feel full and free.
Every now and then it sneaks up on me. I believe it is normal to be lonely once in awhile, to indulge it for a spell, and then let it move along. When goes, it leaves me contemplating the oddity that is moving 1,000 miles (give or take) away from most of the people who love you in this world only to find yourself the most mentally health and content you've ever been. I feel so completely at ease, contented, centered, strong, like I belong here right now.
I think about this quote from Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat. Pray. Love.:
“When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
My motto became: Only that which fits.
This meant furniture within my budget that I truly liked and could move on my own. It meant commitments that truly enthused me and enhanced my life. It meant allowing various interpersonal relationships to serve their intended function - no more, no less. It meant acknowledging that I do like my own company even when it's uncomfortable.
I realize now that the empty spaces feel full and free.
Today began with meditation in a glowing red room where my uterus burned and the rest of me turned to ice.
When I arrived home, a package containing The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers waited at my doorstep. I began reading it five minutes after another friend - a friend who entered that red meditation room upon my departure - finished it.
These lines:
[I sit down to write this post. I start up Pandora. The first song? Band of Horses serenading me with "On My Way Back Home."]
Roots. Red. Home. Moving. I'm on some sort of spiritual scavenger hunt. All the clues are red. They are being given to me by everyone from my physician to my cycling coach to my professors.
They appear in nature.
A few weeks ago I was assigned walk to red by the woman who wrote those beautiful words. I hiked up a volcano on a tropical island. Red palm roots exposed themselves, and I reached to feel these vibrant, exotic strands still nourishing an entire tree while taking in the sunlight. Red roots blazing like my root chakra.
They say the root chakra develops from conception through age 7 or 8. I thought about this while walking to my car. I spent the bulk of those years in Colorado and Wyoming. Ever since, the West pulled me with gravitational force. And here I am touching my roots, healing, nourishing, growing.
When I arrived home, a package containing The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers waited at my doorstep. I began reading it five minutes after another friend - a friend who entered that red meditation room upon my departure - finished it.
These lines:
"I should have seen my future then, in the way that woman carried what she loved along the length of her spine: her home / kept moving."
- Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
In them I see my future. And my past - the past before I knew this to be true. Until I wrote these words: My home is a highway. On my 2010 roadtrip following my childhood path I found that one former residence had quite literally become a highway. Last year my fellow workshop attendees at Aspen Summer Words pointed out the metaphor. I decided to embrace it. There are many ways to live a life. Home is within. My roots are in motion.
[I sit down to write this post. I start up Pandora. The first song? Band of Horses serenading me with "On My Way Back Home."]
Roots. Red. Home. Moving. I'm on some sort of spiritual scavenger hunt. All the clues are red. They are being given to me by everyone from my physician to my cycling coach to my professors.
They appear in nature.
A few weeks ago I was assigned walk to red by the woman who wrote those beautiful words. I hiked up a volcano on a tropical island. Red palm roots exposed themselves, and I reached to feel these vibrant, exotic strands still nourishing an entire tree while taking in the sunlight. Red roots blazing like my root chakra.
They appear at my feet.
In the past 12 months three pairs of ruby red slippers have joined my wardrobe - red Bont track shoes, red Adidas lifting shoes, shiny red high heels. Footwear in which I build power and move with passionate intensity as I manifest my dreams. They remind me that there is no place like home - sprinting my bicycle, writing my story, falling in love, exploring the world.
My exploration has expanded beyond my inner landscape and the landscape of my childhood into the territories of world religion, C.G. Jung, dakini, geography, physics, and physiology.
My exploration has expanded beyond my inner landscape and the landscape of my childhood into the territories of world religion, C.G. Jung, dakini, geography, physics, and physiology.
Red keeps finding me. I could list 300 significant ways it has appeared in my life physically or symbollically in the past year. These lines only hint at the story - the story I'm preparing to birth.
Last spring, before the choices were made, a white rabbit appeared in the lawn across the street from my Minneapolis home. He existed. My mom first pointed him out. He visited for several months, then disappeared. I believe he's still nearby. I think I've been following him to red.
Over Thanksgiving, a friend visited and we took a weekend trip to Moab - Moab, like many other beautiful places, happens to be close enough for a reasonable weekend trip. We camped. We hiked. I felt reinvigorated and ready to take on the semester's final stretch. Winter break turned out to be another type of adventure all together - driving to and from Colorado straight through with a feline hostage in the back most certainly qualifies.
But now, life quit rocking and steadied itself. I know my creativity soars when I move about in the world and explore a bit, which led me to think about how to fit more adventure into my life. I think it starts with noticing adventure. It's in every day.
So here's the plan: I am committing to an adventure a day. It might be planned. It might not be. This one will be small, such as making a new recipe or being chased by chickens near downtown Boulder (it happened). I am also committing to a medium-size adventure a week - Adventure Saturday. And, finally, I will commit myself to a bigger adventure each month, something a little bigger that takes me away from my Boulder-area bubble.
I plan to write about my adventure experiment here, and I challenge you to look for and create some adventures in your daily life!
The word that allows yes, the word that makes no possible.
The word that puts the free in freedom and takes the obligation out of love.
The word that throws a window open after the final door is closed.
The word upon which all adventure, all exhilaration, all meaning, all honor depends.
The word that fires evolution's motor of mud.
The word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar.
The word that molecules recite before bonding.
The word that separates that which is dead from that which is living.
The word no mirror can turn around.
In the beginning was the word and that word was
CHOICE
- Tom Robbins, "Still Life with Woodpecker"
Choice. I count it among my favorite words. It's powerful. It's beautiful. It's transformative.
One year ago this week I made two choices that dramatically changed my life: I decided to aggressively treat my depression, and I decided to focus on sprint as a track cyclist. On this anniversary of sorts, I realize that making choices means exercising great bravery. Maybe that's why it's so easy to settle into life and just let it happen. These choices required going to places I'd spent years tiptoeing around.
The first choice meant digging deep into the past and getting brutally honest about more than a few things, which led to making more choices, which led to more scary places, which eventually led me to strange realm where pain and joy mingled, which took me to Colorado and an MFA program at an incredibly special school I wouldn't have heard of had I not gone to the scary places and I can't even begin to map it out in a simple blog post. Besides, I've learned to keep some things sacred, which is why I've been rethinking blogging and memoir and how to say all the things I want to share with the world.
The second choice meant deviating from a different comfort zone. I'm built like a sprinter, but I'd been a fairly average endurance athlete since high school. There are plenty of options to be an endurance athlete - or even an ultra-endurance athlete - as an adult. The cool thing is I chose a sport (track cycling) that presented both pure sprint and endurance events. I liked that sprinting meant weight training with lots of squats and finding a way to pour all of your power and speed into short race, and that started to sound way more fun than rationing out energy for the long haul and striving for a body type that doesn't come naturally to me. I quite simply had endured enough for this lifetime and just wanted to get strong so I could burst forth with everything I had. Metaphor? Absolutely.
These decisions became intertwined on day 1. They fed one another. They had a few tricks up their sleeves, too. The universe most certainly has a message when people from unrelated worlds start giving you the same advice and observations about completely different situations. Or when symbols start popping up everywhere you go. You know that line from Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble" that goes "these are the days of miracle and wonder"? Well, they run through my head at least once a week.
January always takes me into deep reflection. It marks a new calendar year as well as a new personal year since it holds my birthday. In the past few days, as I've thought about the past 12 months and set my intentions for the next 12, I noticed that I am now void of two things that haunted me for years: paralyzing fear and constant concern over what others might think. I hardly remember what either one feels like, and it hasn't been that long. They just slipped away. In their place I've found contentment and strength. It's a new normal. It never seemed possible.
I guess choice is constant. Each morning we get up and choose how to live, how to act, how to react. If we're unhappy with where they've all led, we can start making different choices. If we're patient and keep making them - they can be itty bitty, microscopic choices, one after another - bit by bit, things change.
I'm living alone for the first time ever. People keep telling me you learn a lot about yourself this way, and they are certainly correct.
It hasn't been long, but in one month I've come to discover that I ...
[Editor's note: My fear has lessened significantly in recent years. I now respect these creatures and even find them beautiful in the wild. Still, if I find one in my home or on my person, well, you'd think someone was trying to physically harm me. My reaction to such an event ticked up a bit now that I have no one to rescue me.]
Have you heard about the horror-movie-caliber spiders they grow out this way? Google Colorado spiders. Or don't. You won't sleep well if you share my ridiculousness.
One black and yellow, spindly variety visited my bathroom over the weekend. He or she fell into the jumping variety. I pulled out my trusty canister vac and poised the nozzle toward the invader. I froze. With my other hand, I called Mom to coach me through the sucking. I survived. However, the people next door - and two buildings down - probably thought I'd been murdered given my shriek.
Since I was raised to believe that all strangers could be Ted Bundy, seeking help from a neighbor seems unwise. Getting a roommate doesn't sit well with me. And, I'm sorry, I'm just not a good enough person to guide these little (more oftentimes, quite large) guys into a jar or other vessel before transporting them back to the great outdoors. I try. I guess I'll need hypnotherapy or illegal drugs to work up that kind of bravery.
Last night I went to the hardware store and purchased the AK47 of spider spray. This shit is serious business. Aim. Fire. Kill. (Never mind that I've been making my apartment as chemical-free as possible and now use all-natural cleaning and laundry products either purchased or made myself. See, this is a REAL phobia!) As I perused the selection of chemicals and traps (yes - actual traps are available for some god-awful types of arachnids, the kind I have nightmares about), my skin began to crawl and my fight-or-flight instinct kicked in.
Why, dear god, do they put pictures of the spiders on the spray? WHY? This is the same reason I fear doing google searches about spider control. I don't want to see a flippin' picture of the very thing I'm deathly afraid of. The bottle I passed up was truly horrific - right on the label, in the name, it listed three very menacing varieties it kills and pictured one that looked like it wanted to leap off the bottle and kill me with its fangs. I opted out despite how effective it sounded. (Again, serious phobia!) I selected a brand that kills the same varieties - also on-contact. That bottle showed a less realistic spider crumpled in agony on its back in an almost-humorous pose. Die!
I love mammals, birds, insects, amphibians, reptiles, fish and other creatures. I detest violence in all forms. I just can't get over this spider thing. If any recovering arachnophobes have tips, please let me know. I'd like to learn that my independent, compassionate, pacifistic ways can also encompass pest-control.
It hasn't been long, but in one month I've come to discover that I ...
- am truly the minimalist I've always purported to be
- am much cleaner and tidier than I thought
- like my own company
- enjoy a TV-free existence
- will eat odd combos such as vegetables and popcorn for dinner and gladly call it a meal
- can be sent crying to my mother upon spotting a spider
[Editor's note: My fear has lessened significantly in recent years. I now respect these creatures and even find them beautiful in the wild. Still, if I find one in my home or on my person, well, you'd think someone was trying to physically harm me. My reaction to such an event ticked up a bit now that I have no one to rescue me.]
Have you heard about the horror-movie-caliber spiders they grow out this way? Google Colorado spiders. Or don't. You won't sleep well if you share my ridiculousness.
One black and yellow, spindly variety visited my bathroom over the weekend. He or she fell into the jumping variety. I pulled out my trusty canister vac and poised the nozzle toward the invader. I froze. With my other hand, I called Mom to coach me through the sucking. I survived. However, the people next door - and two buildings down - probably thought I'd been murdered given my shriek.
Since I was raised to believe that all strangers could be Ted Bundy, seeking help from a neighbor seems unwise. Getting a roommate doesn't sit well with me. And, I'm sorry, I'm just not a good enough person to guide these little (more oftentimes, quite large) guys into a jar or other vessel before transporting them back to the great outdoors. I try. I guess I'll need hypnotherapy or illegal drugs to work up that kind of bravery.
Last night I went to the hardware store and purchased the AK47 of spider spray. This shit is serious business. Aim. Fire. Kill. (Never mind that I've been making my apartment as chemical-free as possible and now use all-natural cleaning and laundry products either purchased or made myself. See, this is a REAL phobia!) As I perused the selection of chemicals and traps (yes - actual traps are available for some god-awful types of arachnids, the kind I have nightmares about), my skin began to crawl and my fight-or-flight instinct kicked in.
Why, dear god, do they put pictures of the spiders on the spray? WHY? This is the same reason I fear doing google searches about spider control. I don't want to see a flippin' picture of the very thing I'm deathly afraid of. The bottle I passed up was truly horrific - right on the label, in the name, it listed three very menacing varieties it kills and pictured one that looked like it wanted to leap off the bottle and kill me with its fangs. I opted out despite how effective it sounded. (Again, serious phobia!) I selected a brand that kills the same varieties - also on-contact. That bottle showed a less realistic spider crumpled in agony on its back in an almost-humorous pose. Die!
I love mammals, birds, insects, amphibians, reptiles, fish and other creatures. I detest violence in all forms. I just can't get over this spider thing. If any recovering arachnophobes have tips, please let me know. I'd like to learn that my independent, compassionate, pacifistic ways can also encompass pest-control.
Life overlaps in space and time. This may include the mundane - your daily commute, the route you walk the dog each morning. It also encompasses the sacred - the restaurant you and your partner went to on your first date only to celebrate your anniversary there years later. Having lived so many places, I assume this happens less to me than most. When it does, it typically occurs across miles. And oftentimes decades.
For instance being here, in Colorado. I find myself on hiking trails important to family lore and happiness. Yet, I cannot recall them because I didn't walk them myself. Thirty-three years ago, I viewed them from a pack carried by my mom or dad. Somehow they manage to feel familiar and sacred anyway.
Tonight, I met some classmates to workshop prose. We sat on a coffee shop patio in Boulder. As we settled and discussed the evening's writing prompt, I looked down at the piece I brought for critique and glanced back up. The gas station across the street came into view. Chilled by the October air, I drew my hands into my sleeves and crossed my arms for added warmth. I then became more aware of my thin, gray long-sleeve shirt. As I did so, my eyes settled on the gas station once more. I clutched the first five pages of my manuscript, and shivers pranced lightly up my arms and into the nape of my neck. Recognition.
Two years ago this month, I fueled my car at that exact station while wearing the same shirt - a shirt I'd purchased a few days previously in Glenwood Springs. While doing so, I spoke to my husband and sobbed. Present exhaustion overflowed. Long-repressed sorrow began to seep.
I would leave Boulder then next day to continue on my trip - the trip I'd just begun. I did not want to continue. I wanted to forgo the many places I'd been picked up and moved to - the footsteps I planned to retrace. Here in Boulder, my spontaneous respite from the road, I felt soothed. It seemed the perfect place for an exhausted traveler to stop. But I'd already stayed a day longer than anticipated.
My itinerary never included Boulder. It just pulled me in when I was leaving Colorado for Cheyenne, Wyoming. It then asked me to stay, but I could not. So I cried. I cried for all the places I left before I wanted to leave. I cried for the painful and joyous memories I planned to revisit, all the while wondering "what if?"
The pages in my hand tonight contained my account of that very trip. At this realization, my eyes moistened with aching sadness and absolute wonder. On that journey, I sought clues about home. It took me awhile to find it. Now I'm here. I've been looking back in awe quite a bit lately. But this moment required no review of events. Past and present intersected. And all I can think is how I never, ever would have imagined.
For instance being here, in Colorado. I find myself on hiking trails important to family lore and happiness. Yet, I cannot recall them because I didn't walk them myself. Thirty-three years ago, I viewed them from a pack carried by my mom or dad. Somehow they manage to feel familiar and sacred anyway.
Tonight, I met some classmates to workshop prose. We sat on a coffee shop patio in Boulder. As we settled and discussed the evening's writing prompt, I looked down at the piece I brought for critique and glanced back up. The gas station across the street came into view. Chilled by the October air, I drew my hands into my sleeves and crossed my arms for added warmth. I then became more aware of my thin, gray long-sleeve shirt. As I did so, my eyes settled on the gas station once more. I clutched the first five pages of my manuscript, and shivers pranced lightly up my arms and into the nape of my neck. Recognition.
Two years ago this month, I fueled my car at that exact station while wearing the same shirt - a shirt I'd purchased a few days previously in Glenwood Springs. While doing so, I spoke to my husband and sobbed. Present exhaustion overflowed. Long-repressed sorrow began to seep.
I would leave Boulder then next day to continue on my trip - the trip I'd just begun. I did not want to continue. I wanted to forgo the many places I'd been picked up and moved to - the footsteps I planned to retrace. Here in Boulder, my spontaneous respite from the road, I felt soothed. It seemed the perfect place for an exhausted traveler to stop. But I'd already stayed a day longer than anticipated.
My itinerary never included Boulder. It just pulled me in when I was leaving Colorado for Cheyenne, Wyoming. It then asked me to stay, but I could not. So I cried. I cried for all the places I left before I wanted to leave. I cried for the painful and joyous memories I planned to revisit, all the while wondering "what if?"
The pages in my hand tonight contained my account of that very trip. At this realization, my eyes moistened with aching sadness and absolute wonder. On that journey, I sought clues about home. It took me awhile to find it. Now I'm here. I've been looking back in awe quite a bit lately. But this moment required no review of events. Past and present intersected. And all I can think is how I never, ever would have imagined.
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