Red Cedar

Some weeks I have so much to say that I can’t help but spill line after line, an unbroken textual flow onto paper and screen. And then there are other times where I feel the enclosure around my heart go rigid, the snaking wire that binds my lips held fast against the truth escaped. An appearance of placid silence hides the flung anxiety of someone who has not quite got over it. Who is, in her darker moments, never getting over it.

I am reminded in large and small ways that I am not yet sufficiently distant from what has happened. Twenty months and counting, and I am still anxious. Stopped dead in my tracks, paranoid or crying if one of the ghosts should slip into a space still left void. Each time almost free, there another reminder to my fear. There another reminder to loss. There another reminder to hurt.

It is less lately, I acknowledge. But still it feels as though this obsidian fear has come to live in me permanently, though it may flake away bit by bit. How deeply this sits. How foolish I feel for it. And angry with myself for not controlling the heart better in the first place. For letting it be taken from me as though it were not mine after all.

Though perhaps it is not really a solo affair, this heart, but joined and a part of everything. How then do I wall it away? Secret it into a safer place? Not real I suppose, this fantasy of isolation. Not real for me in my need to be understood, to be heard. A sucker to the warm red that livens my lips and my fingertips. Shuffling my feet and grinning ever so slightly as I try to explain the way I make myself break just so.

And then she finds herself again, writing poetic and wondering who cut away the wire. Both hands free, palms tilted towards the sky.

Perhaps it’s hormones. Perhaps it’s the return of the rain. Whatever it is, I am grey today. Flat, grey, weathered. I feel trapped in the city without a car and I need to get the fuck out of it soon. I think the last 3 weeks is the longest period I’ve spent here without going anywhere in over a year. Not good. Not good at all. I wish Jess was returning with my car sooner.

Meh. Whine. This will pass shortly, I am highly aware.

It’s been awhile since I just provided an update. You know, one of those newsy, how things are going kinda posts absent of angsts and melodramas. And since I’m fresh out of angst this morning (which I am giving thanks for) it seems time I simply recount a bit of my life instead of aiming for lofty philosophy.

It’s been about a month since returning from my last traveling, and five weeks or so since the end of the hearings in Eugene. After a fairly intense spring of work and approaching-court-stress, I was released back into East Van to recapitulate myself in the aftermath of a psychically tumultuous time. Quite seriously, I was not clear on how deeply I have been marked, and am only now coming to self-honesty about so many of the things that have been just under the surface for the past 20 months or so, waiting for the case to be “done” in order to come up into the light and air.

And so, there have been some lifestyle changes and introspective moments and even some tears (though not many, I don’t cry readily). I have sought out friends both old and new to give me perspective and comfort, and one person in particular (Michael) has proven to be a catalyst for bringing out much of what has been pickling inside me as well as a welcoming heart to my sorrows. Firetrap says it is as though I have hit a reset button on my life – and this is the most apt description I have heard – the suddenness of flicking a switch, with the recognition that what I knew all along was right there waiting for replay.

Shutting the door on some parts of my life seems to have opened me up to a whole different set of experiences which are simply a sliver of what is available to me should I give myself permission. Suffice to say, it has been an interesting phase, giving birth to new ideas and obessessions, and one which I thankfully have a summer off traveling to mull over.

And on the more grounded plane, I have started a new job as part of a national project team doing web development for the next 18 months or so; I have been to Victoria and the Sunshine Coast in the last few weeks to visit friends and family; I have almost achieved the discipline to do movement practice every morning (qi gong, stretching, yoga, meditation) and work out 3 or 4 times per week; I am reading voraciously; my diet right now is irreproachable – full of summer’s offerings and the occasional fine beer, and; I have been bringing more discpline to my writing in the last few days. And while my existential crisis of sorts in the middle of June derailed some of these things ever so slightly, I have found myself in the last two weeks able to rediscover my routines without much effort.

As noted yesterday, Darren was moved unexpectedly last Thursday and has been unable to contact me since. A friend of ours who went to visit him on the weekend at Multnomah and was turned away was the first alert I had, and he was able to bum a stamp and an envelope from someone to mail a letter to another friend who emailed me yesterday with his instructions. This of course is jarring for both him and myself, our routine of communication broken; though after so many moments like this I am well aware it will restart in a new pattern as soon as he is settled (and the money I mailed yesterday makes it into his prison account). This moment, like so many, just another reminder of how alien this system is from humanity – a refrain chanted to me so often now that it rarely upsets me anymore even as I acknowledge it. And by that I mean, I can’t let it upset me or these things would have me continually in tears (as they did in the beginning of this mess).

And so the important things I suppose are that I am writing in a more disciplined fashion (and that, my friends, is a struggle for me), I am taking care of myself in the midst of the psychic upheaval, and I am honestly beginning to find peace in the hardships of the past 20 months (a definitive shift is taking place). There are other discoveries as well, to do with faith and truth, which I will not expand upon here (trite it seems to blog about these matters) – which I am coming to accept and integrate slowly, questioningly, hesitantly – but accept nonetheless. An interesting time, yes. And I am grateful for all of you who have fed these interactions since my return. One thing I have learned (despite myself) is that I need other people in my life, and to have this need is not a weakness. So thank-you friends, it is only through you I have found my voice again.

I bought myself a pair of reading glasses today. Of which I am not particularly happy about, having fought with myself about it for awhile now. It’s just getting ridiculous, this swimming of the letters and eye strain. I’m hoping that low-diopter glasses will do the trick until I can take a break from screens and books for awhile. I am fairly certain this is being brought on by eye fatigue more than anything – which I experienced in university and wore glasses for then.

I’m not sure why it irks me so much except that I feel, well, defective. Ridiculous. Yes. But irksome just the same.

The glasses were cheap and aren’t very attractive, but they will do for when I’m working or reading I suppose. Humph.

In anticipation of some serious hiking at the end of the summer, I finally made my way down to MEC yesterday to purchase a new pair of hiking boots. An undertaking I do not take lightly, and so it took me some time to muster up the courage to do so. It’s not just a purchase, you see, but a commitment to something that will be in my life for a long time. And so all needs must be met – aesthetic and physical – Do they support my bad ankle properly? Could I wear them with a pair of jeans in the city and not feel like a dork? Do they feel solid? In them, do I feel sure of foot? What will they feel like when my feet become inflamed by hard hiking? Do they meet my old-school idea of what hiking boots are supposed to look like? And on, and on.

But I do expect them to become a part of my life and stick around for a good long time, so really, it’s important we make friends right in the beginning. The pair I am now retiring became mine eight years ago, and in them I have made many journeys – have tipped a kayak, summitted a mountain, walked a thin mountain ridge dizzy with a steep drop on both sides, gathered firewood for an evening of warding off bears, broken my ankle, gotten lost, and been rescued. Hundreds of kilometres were put into those boots as I learned who I was was in relation to the wilderness, was stopped short by irrational fears that confronted me on one particular trail, and was driven to seek the beauty in solace time and time again. Whether solo or in the company of others, I am in continual reflection when I am am “out there” – a moving meditation broken by the very real survival needs that come with the terrain. Forest or desert. Mountain or valley. Inland or coast. There is not one particular landscape more important to me, though each is so vastly different and provides messages of a different sort. Whether I talk to a cedar tree or a barrel cactus or a bay laurel after a long climb up a hill to watch moon rise – it is all the same to me in the end – communion with the earth, with other species, with myself.

If anything, the forest is my cathedral, the desert a foreign temple, the ocean the loving embrace of the creator-god. And while it may sound trite in this medium, it is nothing less than sacred to me – the epiphanies, the emotional floods that come, the wonder of seen and unseen, the prayers that I have made in times of need or contentment. And part of what makes this pristine magic, what makes it separate from everything else, is the reality of pilgrimage in order to attend. The laborious walking with extra weight at my back, the blisters, the minor accidents, the mountains knocking the wind out of you hour after hour, the ripping of the calves, the occasional navigational misdeed, the humbling of being the slowest one in a pack…. It is a dedication to something higher, this self-effacing willingness to throw oneself into circumstances of challenge time and time again. What that higher thing is, I am not sure, but I feel it out there more than anywhere else. And in return, I allow it inside me in a way I am guarded against within the confines of the city.

It is this way for me. I suspect it is not for everyone. But I suspect there are others who will read this and understand.

And so back to the boots – an essential acquisition for such sojourns into the forest and soul – and so an agonizing purchase on one level, though on another I knew which ones I was going to buy as soon as I looked at the rack (I just needed to torture myself about it for 45 minutes). Without the solidity of this footwear, my journeys would be much more difficult. Without the support under my ankle fraught with metal pins and plates, I would not make it far. Without the deflection of water and elements, my trips would be much more miserable indeed. I am giggling as I write this, I am so pleased by what ones I have bought and are on my feet right now. And I am so grateful to know there are travels coming up in my life that will require that these be broken in and ready to go.

And so it is. Now to break them in. For all my waxing rhapsodic, this is no fun at all.