Today we sprang forward! This is a good thing as I do love the light, and find I appreciate it more and more as the years pass. But it also meant we slept in later than usual (well, that and we stayed up quite late last night). So today has been very ordinary with floor cleanings and breakfast cookings and laundry washing, though we did have one exciting thing come to our minds which we spent some time discussing, but that will have to remain secret for the moment!
Now it's late afternoon and Eric is at the river looking for rocks to form a pathway to the back door (we have a lot of deer and turkey and other wildlife here and the turkey can be especially problematic for the mess they make) and I am reclined here in the corner by the window indulging in some reading, dark chocolate, and a piping hot mug full of matcha.
My typical reading habits have always tended toward non-fiction --health, history, spirituality, philosophy, politics, economics, psychology-- but sometime last year I started feeling drawn to fiction and have just gone with that impulse. For the past few months though I've been intrigued with Emily Dickinson (I think it started when I came across this documentary on YouTube) and have been reading a very in-depth biography. Once this is completed, I have a couple of Appalachian stories I want to get to, then maybe I can resume my usual non-fiction tendencies. The shelf is full of so many books and life is only so long...
My career requires a lot of mental effort. So much gets packed into a single hour just to get all tasks completed by week's end, that I find I have to detach from who I am at my core a great deal to pull it off and do what needs to be done each day. So when the weekend, or any time away from work comes, I try to use the time to reacquaint with that woman who I am at my core- I stitch back together the spinal threads of what matters to me, collect the flashes of inspiration into a reel I glimpse as a spark to rekindle some inner flame, I draw the energy down out of my head and back into my body, my hands, hips, heart.
I was thinking this morning, as we wound over a mountain pass and through dense snow-forests on our way to visit our favorite antique shop, how that pathway back to our own unique creative otherworld is crucial. When I feel that it's time to visit that place of my own mind-making, that place that restocks the inner coffers, I have certain imagery, certain poems, certain books and films and music that act as little waymarkers, lanterns to light the way back home.
That otherworld-creative-home of mine is hard to describe- it can feel Celtic, but then Saami, medieval, then ancient Egyptian. It contains sun and storm, mossy oak and desert rose, quiet solitude and energized connection, sitting in a tobacco-smelling book-filled room in thoughtful conversation with Tolkien, then in ritual dance around a fire as part of a wild tribe, my feet stomping up clouds of dust under the starrier-than-ever sky. Serene and unbridled. Sacred to the core.
It is a feeling, of course, not an actual place, there is no specific time, no specific characters or location, but I feel when it is right, when it comes together just so, and when it is familiar, and it is this place I go to that connects me back to myself, and to the glorious pulse of life lived deeply.
Many things have become more apparent over the last couple of years, here are a few: that I need intimate connection with others, conversations full of protein, dance, movement, my garden, more frequent time with friends and family, to be of service, and original creative expression that is mine. Now I am thinking on the best place for all this to come into symphony, and slowly piecing together a plan to make it so. ⌛
I heard an artist I love mention this route back to the creative place we must cobble together for ourselves, those of us who are maybe more short on time, and need a quick road in so that we can sit and feast for a moment in that nourishing ethereal space that we imagine into existence, that sustains us and is essential. I wondered, do most people have this? Do most people need this? Is it rare, or common? Do some drown out the deep impulse with drink and corruption? Then I thought, wouldn't it be just incredible if we could somehow bring another into this feeling-place of our own making, the imaginative landscape of our inner world? Just so they could feel our inspirations? Would it closen or estrange us?
Now I am off to visit that world for a while before the just-as-mysterious sleep world beckons. Today I found a vibrant green kantha quilt, a painted Mexican crock, and a medieval memoir at the antique store. Two weeks ago, I attended a workshop with the loveliest women and attained my doula certification. In a couple of months, my husband and I will take a boat to Alaska where he'll be getting recertified as a massage therapist, a craft that he truly excels at. Bit by bit, pieces are being moved into place, for a future on the horizon that comes more into view each day. The path really does go ever on and on.
“Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.
Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. “
Sunday afternoon, over a foot of snowpack outside, and I've finally been able to carve out time to catch up on reading and writing.
I've been so wrapped up in work these days that my old hobbies now seem like luxuries, and when the evening comes and all work and chores are finally completed for the day, I typically have only about an hour left to decide what to do with before it's time to crawl under the covers.
But I don't want to complain or come across as ungrateful for my work. For me, it is just a matter of making sure to eke out these little blocks of time each week, wherever I can find them, to keep from losing the essence of myself. While career and domestic duties take up the bulk of time, still it is crucial to keep the fires of heart and hearth tended as best I can too. I assume many of us are in this same boat, going about it all in the most sincere and balanced way we can.
So after checking off all the work tasks and deadlines this past week, and having finally shaken off most of the jet lag from our cross-country flight back home last Saturday, I spent yesterday doing one of my very favorite things: riding with my husband through wild and winding mountain roads, listening to our favorite music, enjoying a breakfast sandwich and coffee, off to explore new territory.
We ended up clambering up Kruger Mountain, which was 1,000 feet of elevation gain in 3/4 of a mile - not the most gentle first hike of the year, but certainly served to shake the dust off!
Eventually, we ran into hard snowpack and weren't able to go any further, so we sat a while and looked out over the Similkameen River, toward Ellemeham Mountain and Nighthawk, and listened to coyotes oo-yip over whatever little [unfortunate] snack they had just procured before side-shuffling our way back down.
This morning, I slept in only a little, as glimpses of a blue sky and sunshine teased me on up and into the day. The local mule deer were knocking at the front door, as they do most mornings for me, so I quartered a couple of apples which they took from my hand.
After a hot shower, we teamed up for some house cleaning, and then with the house smelling like Palo Santo and Dr. Bronner's eucalyptus (which I use to mop with), we enjoyed some butternut squash pancakes before each parting ways to get into our respective inspirations. I have tinkered, washed all the linen bedding, organized, enjoyed a conversation, started flower seeds, but mostly read, with my beeswax candle companion swaying alongside.
Now, I sip a hot cocoa, while the light outside weakens and blues. It's nearly time to start dinner, and to curl up on the couch with my love, before tomorrow morning's alarm sounds again. This week is full of meetings and tasks, lots of talking to people about websites and their search engine rankings, and while I am in it, I must switch my brain almost entirely into a world of other concerns. But restful and grounding weekends like this help bring me back to what I am, what I love, and give me something to glance at sideways throughout the week when I begin to feel overwhelmed and thin.
"... I love Pascal’s phrase that you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And I have often — like in times when it’s been really difficult for me, if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness." (John O'Donohue, The Inner Landscape of Beauty - listen here)
...For the settled, in their suburbs, steeped in that stagnant and tepid sink, time is sluggish with routine: a bleary sunrise and a blearier sunset. There, the past is framed in a fixed photographic grin, and the future is tamed with a pension plan. Nothing in nature is suburban. Nothing wild is phlegmatic and complacent. Nothing compares to the grotesque infantilism of the suburbs, sucking the dummy of the supermarket and every week squirting out the waste into giant plastic nappies, the bulging trash bags by the closed gate. In the suburbs, the alertness of all wild creatures is degraded into neurotic curtain-twitching. The curiosity of all animals degenerated into bingeing on Sky News. Queasily obedient, here life is just dull lull, tethered to a bungalow, an index-linked nap between two sleeps. [...] We were made to walk through our lives wildly awake: our minds mobile, quick, changeable. We all are mercurial, our minds as winged as our feet, receiving signals and responding, volatile by nature; sunshine and showers, storms and dog days, we are various as the wild weather on the way and wet with it."
--Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey
Does dreamtime ever seem more real to you than objective reality? I don't mean just sleeping-dreams, but the dream-state like on a forest walk when your mind breaches its usual confines and curls out like mist and flirts intimately with the birdsong, the Aspen leaves quaking in the wind, the sound of each step landing on soil and snapping twig ringing so crisp, your breath, the mind clearing and emptying and connecting to this ever-present realness; or a daydream state one can fall into while watching the leafy tree shadows dance across the curtain when you find yourself lying in the middle of the made bed on a Tuesday at 1:00PM, in momentary rebellion against Zoom meetings and answering emails and "being found well." This state, it's the least we can do for our overstimulated modern minds, the precious things, bless them. What an era we've been born into- we, who are still archaic up our spines, staring into various blue-lit screens and trying to make sense of this big new world, giving all sorts of diagnostic names to what boils down to going too fast, having too much [but never enough], and feeling alone.
The world is a weird place these days, and maybe it has always felt this way to the people of each time. But I don't think so. There are so many accounts of indigenous cultures talking about the connectedness they once felt before time and money were ever introduced to them. Depression isn't heard of. Not even back pain! Somewhere in the world, right this minute, there is a woman who has birthed a baby and is being tended to by the other women of her village. She doesn't have to look or act a certain way, be edgy nor politically correct to be loved by them, they have grown together, they know one another's grandparents and have sang songs together under harvest moons and on amber-lit dewy mornings, and she isn't alone in the threshold-crossing, or ever.
I don't feel lonely, and I think this is because of my connection to the land and nature around me, which I feel so fortunate for as any reader of this blog knows well, but I am aware of what we have let go in some distant past, and I do long for that, and reminisce...
Do you remember the mornings the village would wake singing together and the song would be carried throughout the day, like in Los Angeles circa 1870, each person stepping in as needed to keep it alive. Such songlines are in our blood, and in our bone-memory, we can recall how it felt to sing the rain in, to sing the morning in, to sing a weaving song, a wheat threshing song, to meet our lover in a shared song, that dissipated into a hum, then a rhythm of breaths, that boulder-old sacred dance of oneness, mmm.
"It was the custom of the town of Los Angeles in all of the families of the early settlers for the oldest members of the family to rise every morning at the rising of the morning star and at once strike up a hymn. From house to house, street to street, the singing spread, and the volume of musical sound swelled until it was as if the whole town sang."
We are made to move and we are made to have meaning in every single act of life. We are made to rejoice and cry and be held and to hold, to sweat and be covered in wild dust from dancing around evening fires with our kith and kin.
In Old Tahiti when Europeans had first met the place, it was written how the people, those mystical Polynesian bloodlines, were upright pillars of health. I read an account of the women bathing in the natural pools, rubbing the oil of coconut over themselves, and scenting their skin with the gardenia blossom. Can you feel the warm sun of that pre-industrial past?
Can you imagine the vitality of a Mongolian reindeer herder riding out across the grass steppe, a song forming in his throat, harmonizing with his horse's whinnying. All he knows is freedom, and light, fur of beast, and hoof-printed earth.
Or the Himba people, still holding onto the remnants of root-gathering women, sitting relaxed on the earth in the mid-day sun, braiding each other's hair. At night, dancing together, singing, happy, celebratory, in harmony still with a natural order.
All of the unique cultures of the world are now being blended together under globalism and multiculturalism and as boundaries blur and world travel becomes a norm, we lose these distinct lifeways, each unique color of the palette smearing together into a muddy blah.
I crave the richness, the distinction, the sharp raw realness of life lived true and potent, under the sun, sprinting barefoot through the woods, singing with galloping untamed voices. I want to be with my husband in some highland canyon at noon in the nude, not in front of a computer screen. We need work that is real, and we need to sit together around fires and not worry about seeming some certain scholarly Western way, but just opening our hearts in song and dance and earnest connection. We need true rest, and we need ancient rhythms.
This society is dying for something to change, dying for some heart to come back into life. I don't mean Sunday morning in a building singing hymns kind of heart, but a divine daily exuberation that was once inherently ours, before we domesticated transcendence, before we tamed powerful pure expression.
Do you remember the look we once had in our eyes before cameras and mirrors everywhere made us so aware of our own faces? It was happy and honest, curious and present.
We are weakened by too much artificial light, too much noise, too much complacency. The world now a mere simulation of the myths and tales we used to live inside of, so we curl up on couches alone clutching our wine glass, desperate to find some story we can fall into, some other story, one that is not our own.
It breaks my heart to see a man who would have been a valiant warrior, you can see in his eyes, now made soft and skinny by the modern world. Or a woman who could be out under the sun growing flowers and vegetables, taking a noon swim, smiling instead of furrowing her brow behind a 9-5 desk.
We wanted progress and we wanted to extract, and we wanted these things because we wanted to ensure our survival, but at what cost? The long-term vision is blurring, if ever there was one. Now we are unwell, and we've normalized this way.
I don't type out this stream of consciousness tonight because I'm unhappy. I feel contented in life while also noticing utter societal disfunction and having-gone-awryness. I have made peace with what is and am grateful for my work, my home, my love (who is thankfully as untamed at the core as I), this land. But, I have a streak tucked down in me that is alive and sometimes writhing with restlessness, so writing about these thoughts is an antidote I suppose to disrupting my safe routine, which is needed, which I must maintain, to function well in the world as it currently is.
From my little campfire at this mountaintop to yours, a light in the dark, a flickering in the foggy night. Is that vital force still in you? Don't let it go out. Remember the wild water, the freedom, real laughter, how your body feels when it's strong and open, how your mind feels when it's clear and serene and confident, remember loyalty, and honor, remember pure love for no gain whatsoever, remember sacrifice, remember dark starry night, remember the dew of morning, remember divine connection, remember what is at the center of you that wasn't born and doesn't die, because it will be there when the sun casts a flare that shuts the modern world down and we have to return to something more real, when we have to rely on one another again and lay down all the pettiness we currently have the gluttonous leisure of wasting so much destructive time on. Remember goodness. Remember non-destructive pleasure. And the sacred balance of all of it.
How he experiences pleasure, or the blows of fate;
How he looks on the meaning and depth of things,
Accepts his destiny and trusts in God"
—Frithjof Schuon, Autumn Leaves and the Ring, 51.
A stream in the snow, by Oska Bergman, 1910
Some--most--need others to hold them accountable for good behavior.
Someone I used to know told me that morality doesn’t apply when it’s a life or death survival scenario, but that seems like a weighty conjecture. On the contrary morality might matter most when the situation is intense, dire, exaggerated, life or death.
The world has probably always been full of deceit cloaked in virtue. But my observation in modern times, the only time I can truly observe, is that deep and real goodness is .01% of the population. Most people cannot be trusted, and the more one masquerades as good it almost seems to imply the opposite- in my experience it is the pastors and deacons of churches who have the darkest skeletons in their closet, and it is the women who preach “female support” and “sister love yasss queen” who will be the first to try to seduce a taken man; so-called humanitarians who abuse children in other countries. In the end, most of us are mere slaves to our desires.
Goodness does not have to imply dogma or a puritanical life. Goodness can be wild, as it exists naturally, not boring and not mundane and not beige. Goodness is aligning with truth and virtue, yes, but are those things not high and beautiful and the very threads that run through reality? Is truth not exhilarating? Why do we see "darker" behaviors and aspects of reality as intriguing and exciting? Is it the mystique of the hidden?
We use each other to hold ourselves accountable, but I find such beauty and strength and honor in the rare person who is good and righteous for goodness' sake. No one needs to hold me accountable for right action- I find joy and fulfillment in frequent house cleanings of the mind and spirit, of keeping that vertical axis centered through my spine and up, up, up. Of course, there is a reward for living this way. It is felt behind the forehead, it is felt in contented smiles worn throughout a solitary day for "no reason" at all, it is felt in divine connections and relationships, it is felt in the ease and depth of the breath, the upright torso not weighted down by an unclean conscience and a sick desire to gobble up what it can for itself.
Here is a question to ponder, especially if you consider yourself decent: what would you do if you knew no one would find out? If there was no one around to judge or label, what sorts of acts would you delight in indulging in? It's good to be honest with ourselves, at the very least. And ultimately, let us learn to be principled without the presence of others, as a divine pact, as soul-nourishment, in celebration of the goodness and beauty and truth of this life that we're currently getting to wear a while.
"We are lived by powers we pretend to understand."
--W.H. Auden
Have you ever learned something new, but simultaneously had the sensation you knew it before?
I've had a couple of these experiences that are easier to explain, like coming across a piece of alternate history that resonates so deeply it seems like it aligns with a timeless memory that lives somewhere at the core of me.
And then there have been occasions that are more difficult to explain. I'm thinking of moments riding passenger with my husband, listening to a song, looking out at the forests pass by, with their angles of light striking this land that I love, and feeling something I've always known come into me, like a download, like an orb of knowing that just then inserted itself into my spine, but I could never put words around or make sense of in any linear timeline, or categorize under any specific branch of knowledge, and usually I'm moved to tears, but joyful grateful tears. These are lovely moments, but I wish I understood better what is happening right then. Despite, I welcome it.
I've returned now to my home, to this golden mountain land that holds me best, and it is a similar feeling here- I've long felt I knew this place, even when I first came upon it. I learn of a Davidson family who were one of the first settler families in Chesaw, and grin. There is Tiffany Resort a few miles north from here. I hike to the top of Tiffany Mountain, in the Tiffany Range of Okanogan County, and think, what are the odds?
I know that much of this existence is shrouded in mystery, despite us thinking we've got it figured out. And I like to brush alongside that mystery all throughout the day. What finer, more inspiring, more charming companion is there? I like to figure out, and I also like to let be, and to wonder.
Back in the mountains I know and love (and who I like to think feel the same way back), and I got to spend one lovely day with my husband before he was abruptly called back to wildfire camp.
We have spent only a handful of days together since mid-July and are at such an exhaustion with it all. Were it not for work keeping me so busy Monday through Friday, I think I'd be struggling much more so. But the loneliness and longing and missing creep up sometimes and I feel anguish, then irritated, then sad, all before managing to distract myself and get over it.
I'll not groan on any further about that, though I certainly could, instead I'll mention the lovely Sunday we did get to spend together recently, riding down the roads we know so well, in the land we love, to our favorite spots in the middle of complete nowhere together. We had breakfast at our favorite little place on Bonaparte Lake, then Eric did some fishing while I photographed rosehips and light hitting the water and all the other things. Then we hush-walked through the forest hunting grouse, and sang our favorite songs up into our Chesaw Highlands. And it felt so...good...to be with my husband again, in our life, our place, our way... and I'll hold tight to that until he finally gets back home for good.
I have learned something about myself: I don't just love big, wild places, but I require to live in one. Nothing pleases me more or connects me to What is Real so much as being in a quiet and undisturbed land, and that being my home. I spent the summer living in the most quaint spot, and I have a love for bucolic towns and even the rolling green hills of my old Kentucky home, but I can only spend so long in even these places as each day I feel a special part of my spirit slip away, bit by bit, and I don't know why it's this way. The countryside is nice anywhere you go, but I just get so much inspiration from big open landscapes where there is hardly any sign of human life for big distances. It feeds into me like the deepest nourishment imaginable. I also find that my health vastly improves in the high, dry Rocky Mountain landscape. Here in our Okanogan Highlands, we're perfectly nestled between the North Cascades and Rocky Mountain ranges, rarely dipping below 3,000 feet in elevation even in the valleys, with very low humidity, and it has done wonders for my sinus health. When I spend more than a month in lower elevation, wetter climates, I start to feel bogged down, watery inside, like my head is a fish bowl. But this is just a lot of almost-midnight digressing, isn't it?
This does make me think about something I find interesting, though. Something I truly wonder about. It's an observation that I've looked at from several different angles to test, and it seems that it is really the case. Maybe you can chime in with your thoughts. I have wondered about our affinity for development. When I say 'our' I mean primarily the European culture, and particularly Americans. I've long picked up on a sentiment from family members of a clear preference for development, and for the marketplace. I recall riding in the car with my grandmother once and her pointing out that the [undeveloped] forest felt "sad" to her. I've noticed that even a plowed field feels better to most than just a purely wild or untouched area that has simply been left alone. Better even than a plowed field though would be a new neighborhood or restaurant. Most everyone I know back home would find this land that I love and call home to be terrible, or empty.
Then, over the past few months I watched Ken Burns "The West" series. And maybe it's propaganda or one-sided not in favor of the conquerors? Certainly possible. But the stories seemed very real, many of them firsthand accounts, and I noticed there too this natural tendency and preference for development amongst "my people" (this is a long and nuanced conversation of course, as "my people" were arguably themselves conquered long ago as Rome took out the Gauls).
I'm certainly not anti-development. But I am anti-development for development's sake. If development is thoughtful, well-planned, considerate of the future, beautiful and helpful, then yes, yes! But my goodness- that is rarely ever the case, and especially here in America. And I can't help but notice how consumed we are with all of it, this development that makes us crave more, and distances us from any kind of divinity. Yet, so many think that development is "God's way" and that this is bringing order.
I find order in the architecture of a medieval cathedral, sure, but I truly find it standing in a grove of Aspens as the wind whips through and the leaves quake, dropping to the ground to cover their own root-feet for the incoming winter. I am witness to order in the gliding hawk and the rattling tail of the snake, and the doe who licks the urine from her fawn to keep predators from noticing. This order too is in the predator, the emotionless way it kills, unlike us, no hate or psychosis pulsing through its blood, just hunger- simple and innocent, and orderly.
And now that I've rattled on past my bedtime, I'd better scurry off and get myself to sleep. Tomorrow morning I lead my hiking group out into the mountains, then Sunday I go help a friend harvest and clean up a large greenhouse jungle-garden.
Wishing you lovely Fall days, as the sun falls lower and lower. I'll be back here soon.
Outside the night is still and dark, with Venus visible again in the evening sky, and fog horns echoing from the bay, which is never too far away on this skinny island I inhabit now.
Here, life is very easy: the temperature lingers right around 70 most of these summer days, there is a salty brackishness in the air that feels soothing to the respiratory system, the eyes consume a constant feast of mountain, cerulean sea, and fertile fields, the shops are interesting, the food is diverse and healthy, magenta foxgloves grow wild along the roadsides, speckled fawns nibble on blackberry bushes, I swim under the moonlight in Mystery Bay in a sea of neon-blue bioluminescence... there is just so much storybook goodness.
One recent afternoon, in the local theatre, which was originally a vaudeville house opened in 1907, I sat in a velvet chair in the very back row, with a bowl of organic buttery popcorn, as thick black curtains were drawn over the big windows looking out over the sea, a projector slowly descended in front of the room, and the show about to begin.
Earlier that afternoon, I had stopped into a favorite tea shop to grab a proper scone with clotted cream (they were out) and some fennel tea while I read a chapter of my book, a maritime book of course, which is the only right thing to read when you're living on a little island just off the Olympic Peninsula in the far northwest reaches of the contiguous United States, and "town" is a Victorian seaport village.
Then, last week I took a sailing class, and while I love old wooden boats and tales of sea voyages and shipwreck, I found it to be complicated and not something I care to put effort into learning at this point in life. Shame because a nice man at the general store down the road offered me his 29-foot sailboat, in good condition, for $1.00 (!).
What’s happening in this video is called heeling, where the boat is tilting. As you can see here, the other students were not too happy about it, but I thought it was the funnest part of the whole class!
So you see how idyllic life is here on this small bucolic island, and yet...I miss my home. I ache for my husband, and our beloved Okanogan Highlands.
As beautiful as it is here, so explicitly, so obviously beautiful... the spirit, the essence, is lacking somehow. I miss the rugged wild, the vast expanses, the untouched natural order, the toughness, the warmth. It is certainly the strangest and one of the deepest relationships I've known in this life- being so tethered to a place, to the point that I almost feel I have no say in the matter, I have to be there, even though it is often difficult, even though no houses ever come on the market for sale, even though the summer wildfires come, then winter snowpack, nature always striking fiercely, and life lived right to the bone, it is so truly my home, and I knew it when I first arrived there in 2012 on a weekend exploratory drive. I remember driving from Portland, where I lived at the time, through what seemed like hours of scablands, finally arriving in Omak for the evening. I wasn't impressed, but a serendipitous conversation with a hotel worker that night led me toward Republic the next day. I remember climbing up from Tonasket that morning, driving a while, the forests returning to the landscape, and some feeling I had never experienced beginning to permeate the air. We rose into Wauconda and it felt like a dizziness, like how a wave of deja vu feels destabilizing for a moment, and I felt so enamored by what I was seeing and feeling, like I knew it and had been waiting for it. We drove further, exploring the area all weekend, and the feelings deepened, the land beckoned, I felt in my blood that this was home.
The American West, the interior high dry mountainous areas, are a world away from the bustling west coastal towns. Every single thing is different, in fact: the people, the climate, the landscape, the lifestyles, and certainly the spirit.
We've hatched a plan to reorganize the reasons why we came over to the coast this summer to begin with, and soon enough I'll be back home. Eric is away at fire camp now, living in a tent beside a lake at night, a lake that he bathes and swims in each evening to get the smoky dusty residue off. I miss him so deeply. Having grown up an only child, I'm quite proficient at being alone and keeping myself contented, but despite being together for almost nine years, we long to be close, as lovers, and as best friends, I miss his warmth, his love, his very essence.
So, it's turned into a summer of longing. I planned for a summer of swims in the freshwater lakes I know so well, and picking gallons of huckleberries for the freezer, harvesting fireweed and fermenting the leaves into Ivan Chai, hiking with the womens hiking group I just formed this Spring, nurturing the connections that get forged more and more with my community each year... just enjoying the cycles as usual. But, things have gone differently.
Now, we wait. The right timing and circumstances need to be aligned before we reconvene. So, I'm left to my longing for home and for husband, and like the ancient Greeks I too believe there to be an intrinsic value in the unfulfilled longing, which they called pothos. Longings put us into relationship with the beyond and add another dimension to our days, even though the chest can feel heavy and the world one is in more grayscale than the one longed for... there is still something important in it, and I have the good fortune of knowing this particular longing will be fulfilled soon.
"The steed upon which to journey through this valley is Patience."
.::*::.
Before I sign off, I realized I never showed my most recent embroidery here. This is "The Sacred Marriage"...
...Rebis, the individual containing lunar and solar principles in perfect balance...
the Great Work, realized and embodied. Wholeness remembered and regained, while corporeal.
~
I hope your summer is going well, and less scattered than mine! Now it's off to bed with a hot mug of nettles, to read a little then doze off into that mysterious world that sleep returns us to each night. I'll no doubt get woken by distant fog horns a time or two, a hazy reminder in the dark that we're all out here, just trying to illuminate the path ahead, moment to moment.
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