journeys of a restless mind

last post for awhile

It's seven a.m. on Saturday and I'm sitting here at the table by the window for the last time.  The movers will be here in three hours and hoo-boy do I still have a lot of stuff to do.   I have loved this apartment, this neighborhood, this city.  Part of me thinks I may never live here again.  Once Hijo is grown, who knows where I might land? 

So much of what I'm doing now is simply trying to grow up.  Who thought it would take me so long?

My deepest hope for the new year is for Hijo to be happy, to adjust well to our new life, to thrive. 

See y'all in 2007.

a realization

I think a lot of this grieving that I've been doing that I've labeled as being sad over leaving Seattle is actually a mourning of the parts of myself that I had to push down for so many years to work at eVil corp, followed by a re-welcoming of those dreams, desires, and ambitions as they rise furiously  back to the surface of my consciousness.

the luxury of my problems

It's going to be another stormy night here in Seattle.  Many thousands of people still don't have power from the last storm.  There is a death toll from the last storm.  Most of the deaths are from carbon dioxide monoxide (doh!) poisoning.  People who still don't have power are burning things inside their houses  without proper ventilation and then they are dying.  The front page of the paper today had warnings about this in many languages: Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian, Chinese, Somali because it is immigrants who are dying.   If you are poor you are fucked, no matter where you are.

Hijo is at my parents' house and I miss him.  I am worried about this move even as I know that everything will work out.  This transition period is hard, this limbo that we're in right now, my work-life limbo, everything just has me sitting in a very uncomfortable place.  I can hear Pema saying to just lean into it.  Don't try to make it better.  Just sit with it.  Can you just let it be?

When I was at my friend's house, she got a phone call from a member of her husband's extended family.  She took the phone into another room and spoke to him for a long time.  Later she told me that his oldest son had died in Mexico unexpectedly and he was unable to go to the funeral because he didn't have papers to get back and forth across the border.  I had been going on  about the difficulty of my situation when she stopped me.  "Yes, yes, I undertand," I told her.  "It's a luxury to have the problems that I do."

Don't try to escape them.  Try and see them for what they really are.  Just sit with them.

Can you?

This seems to be turning into a foto blog.  Not my intention I assure you, but the things going on in my life now are sucking up a lot of my emotional energy, energy I'd normally put into writing here.   It's been interesting to see how much this move to PT is shaking me to my very foundation.  I've moved to new cities lots of times and geographically this move isn't that big of a deal. Emotionally, though, it's huge.  I've come to realize that motherhood (and perhaps middle age) has made me choose the safe road over and over again and that I've worn a deep rut into my path.  Pushing the wagon up out of that rut and onto the open prairie is taking a lot of work. 

Now that the huge burst of energy that I got when I made the decision to move to Port Townsend (and therefore leave eVil corp) is waning, I'm faced with the "oh-my-god-what-have-I-done" stage of this process.  This stage involves lots of crying.  But do not be alarmed (yes, mom, I'm talking to you)!  I cry easily,  I cry often, even when I'm not going through a major life change.  Much like writing, it's a way for me to process things.  It's also very cathartic and, ultimately, healthy.   I'm a great believer in bodily catharsis be it through crying or, like yesterday, sweating.

I'm also buying a lot of cards.  In my family we often say things in cards that we neglect to mention in the course of our daily lives.  Cards are the place where we tell people how much they mean to us.  It is the place where we forgive each other and try to make up for all the nasty things we sometimes do to each other because we are tired or grumpy or we have spent too much time in the same house together.  If you've got something really important to say, you put it in a card.  So, I'm buying cards for people that I love and am moving away from.  I'm buying cards, but when I open them and try to write I get stuck.  Because sometimes there is just too much emotion or meaning to be contained in one little folded up piece of paper.    And the thought of all that messy emotion spilling out face-to-face in front of those people that I love and am moving away from is also rather unacceptable.  Nor can I just up and leave without acknowledging the price I am paying, we are all paying,  by my imposing this distance between us.

Which is all a rather long and rambling way of saying that if you get a card from me in the next week or so, it won't have the perfect thing written in it, because I am incapable of saying perfect things now.  Or if you don't get a card from me in the next week or so, it doesn't mean that I don't love you or am not sad about moving away from you.  It's just me being rendered speechless by my sadness.

For all of you who only know me through this blog, not much will change between us at all.  We can carry on our love affair with hardly a thought about whether I live in Seattle or Port Townsend or Katmandu.  And that makes me very glad indeed.

still no words