Pothos

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.

x