Grand Rapids, Michigan

Grandma Jenks with two new grandchildren (me on the right, cousin Aaron--twice as big--on the left)

Grandma Jenks died yesterday evening, the day of her husband’s funeral. Emmaline and Gordon Jenks were married 66 years and died within three days of each other. Death is never pretty, but it doesn't get much more perfect, or romantic, than that. It’s fun to do the math—how long would I have to live? How much must one love another person to have that strength of will, a will that holds strong against death?

The family has spent the last 24 hours poring over the box of photographs we brought over from her house, a box filled with photos most of us have never seen—some from as early as 1895. We’re sharing stories, whatever we can remember. My main regret is that we didn’t take the time to record her telling us the stories. If you have grandparents, go right now and ask them. I always thought I’d have time, somehow. Even six months ago would have been soon enough.

This morning I broke down when I found two packages of lemon jello in the cupboard. Last year, she asked me to make a lemon cake for my dad. She said, “He really likes it.” I ran out of time during my visit, though, and finally went to my dad.

“Do you really want me to make some cake?” I asked.

“I never liked that kind,” he said.

So the truth came out. “Does Dad like that cake?” I asked her. “Or is it you who wanted it?”

“I had a bit of a hankering,” she said, bashfully. That was Grandma all over. Unwilling to ask for things for herself, whether for good or for ill. If she had told me, maybe I could have made it earlier.

But I never baked the cake. I left, flew back to Chattanooga or Chicago or Maine, wherever I was headed. I ran out of time. The lemon jello’s still in the cupboard.

I’m happy we have a record. The pictures, and each other. Our memories. I grieved yesterday, but today I’m joyful. She’s not in pain. She doesn’t need morphine. She’s gone, but so is her cancer.

Grandma and Grandpa Jenks. Happy.

Aroostook County, Maine, to Grand Rapids, Michigan

Today I flew into Grand Rapids. To get here, from Aroostook County, I started at six o’clock this morning, and caught three successive buses—the first to Bangor, thence Portland, thence Boston. Then a plane to Chicago, and finally, at 10:25 pm, Grand Rapids. I drove straight to the nursing home with my brother to see my grandmother.

She is actively dying. She and my grandfather were married for 64 years, and although I can’t quite accept it, I believe that she held onto her cancer-ridden body just long enough to see her husband through the gate. Now she’s choosing to follow him. She’s always been known for her quiet, forceful strength. If anyone could will herself to life, and now to death, it’s her.

This process has been so long, and we’ve been grieving their passing for so long, but I still wasn't prepared. I can’t stop thinking about two summers ago, August 2009, when my grandmother fed me from her own garden for the last time. I couldn’t believe then, I still can’t believe now, that it really was the last time. I can’t believe that if I pull into her driveway, open the door to her house, that there won’t be chocolate cake waiting for me. I can’t believe that I’ll never again walk through her hallway and smell beef roasting, hear the table being set.

No matter when death comes, we’re not ready. It’s the nature of death. My grandmother, at least, follows her husband. As she did in life, so in death.

She’s a rebel

Picking rhubarb, last summer, at the old homestead

My grandfather died this morning, so on Friday I’m headed back to Grand Rapids to be with my family. Just when the snow is off the ground and the mosquitoes beginning to buzz above the pond. Just when the horse manure is shoveled in the garden. Just when I’m beginning to feel like I’ve come home.

But it’s all right. My grandfather was 92, and I find myself thinking of him more and more, the more deeply I get my hands dug into the earth. He was the one who woke up every morning at four to milk the cows in the Michigan winter, the one who took his award-winning smooth-skinned potatoes to the agricultural fair in Chicago, the one who always had the biggest tomatoes from his garden. He retired young, and spent the last years of his life pouring himself into carpentry, the Bible, and the half-acre of dirt behind his home.

My grandfather and grandmother are lions in my memory, inspirations. We would tell stories about them, shaking our heads in simultaneous awe and disgust. How they didn’t have garbage pickup for forty years, how even meat scraps went in the compost, so my grandpa had to keep away the raccoons with a .22. But every summer we ate up the rhubarb pies, the raspberries on vanilla ice cream.

My dad tells a story of how my grandfather would eat an entire row of lettuce in one sitting. Cut the whole thing, put it in a big bowl, sprinkle it with some vinegar and salt, and wolf it. I find myself thinking of all these questions I wish I could ask him now—what kind of lettuce? How did he start his seeds? Is it okay to plant when it’s wet out? What dirt did he use? What tools?

Why is it that we never think of the important questions to ask until too late? I want my own lettuce, some year when I can spend May digging my hands into my own dirt.

Hallelujah

It finally felt like spring today. I made quiche and listened to the entire Handel's Messiah and watched the resident blue heron wander around snapping up little frogs from the edge of the beaver pond. The garden is tilled, ready for my leeks and lettuce. Today I feel like it's truly Easter, in the old sense of the world--the dead god had arisen from his winter slumber. He is risen indeed.

Me as the eagle

Bean sprouts

On the boat, I had some of the same struggles that I’m having here in Aroostook County. There are some odd similarities between eking out an existence in the frozen north and on a deserted beach. The temperature is different, but in many ways, the landscape is the same. I even had a dream about it when I first arrived, imagining a windswept beach, with sand the color of snow.

One thing is the difficult of eating healthily without fresh things. It’s one of these ironies of our modern existence. All we seem to be able to talk about is health and wellness, and the way we can maintain the strength and youth of our bodies, at the same time as the health of the earth. But what if those things are mutually incompatible? Isn’t Earth Day today? I’m realizing how incompatible our desire for fresh fruit and vegetables is with any kind of connection to the earth’s natural rhythm.

I’m Greek by descent, and the so-called Mediterranean diet is my favorite—there’s little better in the world than sun-warmed tomatoes, fresh basil, and sliced feta drizzled with olive oil. Up here, far from the equatorial sun, you’re lucky if you can get kale to grow by July. So what do you eat in the winter? Potatoes. Moose. More potatoes. All of the things the television tells me are no longer “healthy.”

The produce department gets by only with the help of massive amounts of fossil fuels. When we talk about the developing world wanting the luxuries that we have, what they want are salads, grapes, strawberries. I don’t think it’s a conundrum we can solve. I’m trying to find that balance between what will bring my human body health and what will bring the earth health, and I don’t think it’s to be found in organic sprouted-wheat bread shipped from Australia, nor found in endless quantities of deer jerky.

My lettuce seedlings are nascent in the glass room/greenhouse, and I’m learning to sprout beans and sunflower seeds, to at least get some freshness in my diet. But I can’t resist the romaine lettuce or the mealy hothouse tomatoes at the grocery store, either. Nor can the rest of America, which is the reason for the climate fix we’re in now. Eat more foraged fungi, people. I suppose it’s the best we can do.

You want me, my love

Full moon behind clouds

When I was in college, I was one of those girls that liked “every kind of music but country,” but now it’s pretty much my favorite music. Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, Johnny Cash, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams—they’ve all got to be top ten. That’s six out of the top ten slots, if I were to geek out all High Fidelity-style.

Not to mention Hank Williams, he of the honky tonk blues. Stories about Hank Williams abound. My favorite is the one where he went into a record producer’s office and promising him he could turn in a song by the next day on any topic the producer could name. The producer looked out the window and saw the hills surrounding Nashville. “A big house on a hill,” he said. The next morning, Hank showed up with “Mansion on the Hill,” one of his greatest classics.

He and his drifting cowboys summed up an essential part of what it is to be an American. A country singer is always getting into trouble because of drinking and partying in the woods, but loves his ma and his sweetheart just as much as he loves Jesus. I used to hear legends that Hank's song “I Saw the Light” was included in old Baptist hymnals. I’ve searched pew after pew, though, and haven’t found it.

And his yodel! A friend of mine on the PCT (shout-out to Solid) claimed that humanity’s two greatest artistic triumphs were break-dancing and the yodel, and I’m inclined to agree. Something about the way a human voice can jump from one register to another in a guttural slide echoes our saddest hearts, just like it does for aboriginal Australians or lederhosed Swiss. Those backwoods southern Scotch-Irish knew their way around sadness.

Hank's songs about heartbreak are his best. He’s a master of tragedy. “You only build me up to let me down,” he croons. His greatest song, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” never mentions his lost love at all. It hovers around the things in his landscape, the lonesome whippoorwill and the sad moon all reflecting his own loneliness. The world outside echoes his internal world, and tells the only story he needs to tell.

Hank Williams died at 29, partly of spina bifida that plagued him, but mainly of hard living. There has to be a special level in heaven for great artists that die in the prime of their youth--Hank Williams and John Keats and Elliott Smith and Kurt Cobain. He left a legacy of heartbreak on vinyl, a record in song that’s perhaps America’s greatest.

Question authority?

Mind mapping. Maybe too much information if you zoom in.

A piece below I'm submitting to The Sun, on the topic of Authority. More mind-mapping this weekend... I hope it's all taking me somewhere important... And on the plus side, although my toes are numb right now, it is beginning to feel like spring here.

The first garden plot is finally half-free of snow, and Crockett says we can put peas into the ground April 20! Woo-woo!

**

James Dean is the rebel, his stodgy father is the authority. Lyra is the rebel, and The Authority is dying in a bombed-out popemobile. The dorm girls who listen to The Cure and wear black eyeliner are the rebels, my dorm dad, Uncle Art, is the authority.

I’ve never claimed or respected any authority. I’ve always placed myself on the other side of that line. The introverted girl on the sidelines, or the sneering teenager, leaning against a figurative motorcycle, or the twenty-year-old blowing smoke into a cop’s face. Questioning everything appeals more than having authority.

Like James Dean, I chose to question authority. I attended a boarding school for the children of missionaries in Manila, and my dorm dad took issue with any questioning. Especially of him. It didn’t matter how logical my question, how well-thought-out a position. Questioning authority itself was to be condemned, a punishable offense.

In my dreams, to this day, I’m chased by mysterious “administration officials” out to get me. I’m haunted by the administration as a symbol of the unforgiving God of my childhood, the God that mimics Lyra’s Authority, a heartless, cold, controlling bastard.

Authority isn’t cool. As I wave at thirty zooming by, I realize I’m at the age past which Bob Dylan, the apostle of cool himself, says I can’t be trusted. As I age, I find myself changing my opinion about authority, too. The jaded aura of cool that used to mean so much to me means less as my years pass. Instead, I realize that it’s always easier to stand against something than it is to stand for something.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be an authority on something. “Author” is hidden inside of the word neatly. What I most want is to author my own reality, to shape my future. I want my questions have the same value that Uncle Art’s answers did. I want to possess moral authority, for my opinion to have weight, and substance.

Part of that moral authority, and part of the answers to those questions, is coming to terms with the God of my childhood. I’ve come to understand that I can stand for something, but I can also submit to the will of a higher power. That the true author doesn’t mind questions—welcomes them, in fact. And that as much as I try to create my own reality, I’m not the Creator.

Maybe the essence of authority is knowing when to stand for something, and knowing when to let go. I’m still the rebel. The Creator has the authority.

I walked these streets with you

It may not be spring, but the lichen is growing

We know that day will come

Reading the Sojourners blog the other day, I came across this interview with Rob Bell. In it comes the quote: “I’ve never felt more loved than when I realized I was doing exactly what I was created to do.”

Today I drew a mind-map for one of my characters. I taped a 18”x12” sheet of drawing paper to the cantina, and took two colors of pens, and drew a picture of what I knew. I’m not sure that I came up with anything, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to do.

I woke up late this morning, because I was up playing motorcycle-racing games at the neighbor’s bus until one o’clock in the morning. Then a midnight snack of bean sprouts and rice (K’s first successful attempt to sprout mung beans!) and this morning I woke up to dirty laundry and a blank page. So I spent two hours mind-mapping.

I went for a walk, which I could do without snowshoes, because it was 32 degrees. If it’s under 35 degrees the snow is crunchy enough to walk on top of. I took photographs of the moon.

After coming home, I put cedar in the wood stove and burned my hand. My second serious burn in less than a week. A Vitamin E capsule broken open and rubbed into it works wonders. Then a dinner of chili in the crock pot, an episode of Fringe, some Buena Vista Social Club. It’s 11:47. I’m doing some child’s pose and going to bed.

California-style, I found myself singin'

Little house at the edge of the woods

I wanted to post these Lessons from 10 Days of Self-Help. When I was in Chicago with my sister, we gave each other a yoga retreat, right in the apartment, while the girls were napping. We’d talk about life, where we were, and we came to the conclusions below.

I finally feel like I’m anchored here, like I can remember what happiness feels like. I don’t think you ever really know when you’re happy, but you know afterward. Every day I wake up, and think: was I happy yesterday? And I answer: yes.

It’s mainly because I’ve been following the path my sister and I talked about.

1. If you can't do it from a place of love, don't do it.
2. There are only ever really two options: do the dishes or don't them. (See below.)
3. Let it go.
4. No regrets.
5. Tell people how you really feel. Don't try to small talk if you can't.
6. If you don't have anything to say, just ask how others are doing and really listen.
7. Nobody is bad at yoga. Just like nobody is bad at anything else in life. Someone just may not have practiced a pose enough yet.
8. Practice makes perfect, or however that famous Buddhist guy says it. [“Practice, and all is coming.” Sri Pattabhi Jois]
9. Get rid of useless stuff that just drags you down in life. Each thing you own is one more thing to worry about.
10. Take care of yourself. Treat yourself kindly. Do not harm yourself.
11. Don't be scared to try the next difficult step, in yoga, and in life. You can't fail.
12. Quiet your thoughts. Let them drift by.
13. Don't try to do a million things at once and fit as many activities and achievements into a period of time (be it five minutes or a lifetime) as possible. Meditating, even amid the chaos, is just as important as getting stuff done. Often it is more important, because it allows you to know what must be done.
14. Peel off the band-aid. Admit you have a mouse problem. Or a rat problem. Or a lice problem. Or an alcohol problem.
15. Procrastination is fear.
16. Don't agonize about loading the dishwasher, doing the laundry, sweeping the floor. Do it or don't do it. Then you can do yoga.

Here’s the “do the dishes or don’t do the dishes” story, courtesy of festivus.net. (Click for the original post.)

I read another story that I’ve been trying to keep in mind when I get crazy angry about all the unfair things. The story was about a woman whose husband no longer drank, but was still what they call a “dry drunk” — still exhibiting all the symptoms of alcoholism, just no longer drunk while doing it. And she began to exhibit the symptoms of a dry drunk’s wife, still trying to control him, make him behave the way she wanted, believing it was his behavior that caused their unhappiness, and if she could change it, everything would be better.

She decided that things would be better if he took more responsibility for household chores, so informed him that he would now be doing the dishes from now on (this is called: setting yourself up for disappointment). The first night he was supposed to do the dishes, he just got up and left the house after dinner. She called an Al-Anon friend in a rage, explained the situation. “And so now if I do the dishes, he’ll think he doesn’t have to!” she said. “So don’t do the dishes,” her friend said. “But then the dishes won’t be done!” “So do the dishes,” her friend said. “But then he won’t!” “So don’t do the dishes.” “But they have to get done!” “So do them!”

Eventually she realized that these were truly her only two options. Should they be the only two options? Were they fair options? Those questions don’t really matter, because they don’t change the fact that those are the only two options. The third option, “Fix my husband,” doesn’t actually exist, but putting all your energy into it provides a great distraction from reality, and a great scapegoat for your problems. “If only he would do the dishes,” instead of, “If only I would stop trying to force him to change in order to fix my unhappiness.”

I think about that story a lot, whenever I get into a rage. I try to simplify my options. My co-worker, for example. Goddamn, I hate her. I hate that she asks me questions. I hate that she does her job wrong. I hate that I have to clean up after her… hey, wait a second. I don’t have to clean up after her. But if I don’t, then the work won’t get done! Then clean up after her. But if I do clean up after her, then she just keeps getting away with it. Then don’t clean up after her.

It’s a hard rain

Aroostook County clouds

Today I’m listening to Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon”, one of the albums my sister gave me in Chicago. I have a consistent weakness for 1970s singer-songwriters. In his song “From Hank to Hendrix,” he says: “the same thing that makes you live can kill you in the end.” What are those things that make you live but kill you in the end? Maine could be one of those things. It’s a tough life up here, a tough winter, and I’m beginning to understand why Mainers are so tough.

I saw the outdoor thermometer hit sixty today, for the first time. I still snowshoed across to the beaver pond. The snow is more and more swampy by the day, but clinging on. At least two feet in the front yard. Maybe rain tomorrow, maybe another layer carried away, so I can plant my peas.

I find myself thinking a lot about weather up here. Even though I’m one of those people bored by weather, typically. I have a hard time making choices based on weather. But living in Aroostook County, it’s almost as important as it was on the boat. I have to watch the fronts move through, watch them closely and pay attention.

I’m consciously choosing a life where things aren’t easy. As the snow melts down, up comes the mud. I saw the season’s first flies today, too. I’m doing it because:

“The only way to know the truth [about a character] is to witness her make choices under pressure.” --Robert McKee, by way of Donald Miller (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years)

Adventure makes you live. Beauty makes you live. Challenging relationships force us to define ourselves in opposition to other people. I’m walking a path where I experience greater extremes, both of joy and of pain. I’m choosing to live more courageously. Some days, as Neil Young says:

“Sometimes the beauty of love just comes ringing through. New glass in the window. New leaf on the tree. New distance between us, you and me. Can we get it together, can we still walk side by side?"

And as Ezekiel says: “When I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people, I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live. I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.”

Today’s lectionary. An apt metaphor for spring, as we approach Easter. As we watch for the natural world to wake.

It had to die

Global warming? Not here.

My life here in northern Maine means a number of things, one of which is that I have time to catch up on all the New Yorkers I’ve avoided reading over the last two years. I’m reading the issue of January 4, 2010, right now, which has an article in it about Vincent Van Gogh. You know, he of the Don McLean song. “This world was never made for one as beautiful as you.”

Van Gogh, though is a central type of the modern artist. He doesn’t sell anything while he lives. He goes crazy. He kills himself.

It’s so cliched now as to be almost boring. But the point of the article is that he’s more than that. Gopnik says, “The real community is not that of charmed artists living like monks but the distant dependencies of isolated artists and equally isolated viewers, who together make the one kind of community that modernity allows.”

And then, “On the outer edge of art there is madness to pity, meanness to deplore, and courage to admire, and we can’t ever quite keep them from each other.”

Maybe the article means so much to me because I’ve retreated into my own Yellow House, to spend time in an isolated rural community, to devote myself to a calling. How many Van Goghs were there? “We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life.”

I’m betting my life. I’m going all-in, throwing the dice, and betting it all on one throw.

Never knowing who to cling to

April Fools!

On Wednesday I wrote about faith being a full system of being, a thought that I have continued to mull over these last few snow-haunted days. I’ve written before about the challenge of mutually incompatible systems of belief. Maybe it comes from having parents that are missionaries, parents that are evangelists in the true sense of that word. They make it their life's work to change people’s systems of belief, from one thing to another.

The thing is, in our culture, we don’t believe that any system should impose itself on anyone else. That’s what we mean when we talk about “moral relativism.” I don’t want Aroostook County to impose its system on me, or vice versa. But certain systems of being cannot exist in the same world, mine and Osama bin Laden’s, as an example.

He can’t live in a world where women like me are allowed to live legitimate, solo, lives with purpose. According to him, my life should come only from my family, either from my father or my husband. It’s hard for me to believe that any religious text could completely support the suppression of half of the human race, but many Muslims interpret their religious scripture as saying exactly that. There are also Islamic feminists who have an avant-garde, progressive, feminist interpretations of the Koran, who interpret Islam in a cultural context, who support the equivalent of liberation theology.

That’s neither here nor there. My point is that I do attempt to convince other people that my system of being is the right one. That it’s correct for me to be out here in the woods, separate from the world, devoting my days and nights to the written word. I want other people to find the joy that I find in art, in the outdoors, in a life of withdrawal from our consumer addictions. I am an evangelist in my own right.

But if everyone were to live the way I do, our economy would fall apart.

Thoughts on a snowy April evening, alone, with the wood stove burning. A foot of snow falls tonight, as I write, on the first of April. Heavy, dense, wet snow, forecast to bring down power lines, according to the weatherman. I’m trying not to get discouraged. I’m trying to muster the courage to plant my little radish seedlings, to look through seed catalogs, to build a cold frame, to believe that spring is really, really right around the corner. It is, right? April is the cruelest month, indeed. It won’t be breeding any lilacs out of the dead ground up here.

It makes me remember my old masthead, the sailing vessel of the coast of New England, and all of the hope and freedom it conveyed to me, the blues and the purples. Things are different up here. Photographs, even. They're all black and white.

Islamic scientists predicted the computer chips

My hosts

When every Sunday rolls around, I ask myself why I'm not making it to church. I ask myself that question almost every single Sunday, and have for years. Since college, actually. I read John Updike's lauded article about faith, and he mentions slipping into a pew each week, almost despite himself, and I wished I could get that far.

What's hard for me about church is the same thing that's hard for me about living in a rural area—community. It's difficult to break into any community, especially to find a place where I belong among people of faith. What I loved most about living in a major urban center was the complete anonymity. No one knew who I was. No one knew what I was buying at the grocery store.

Here, people do. I feel judged for my choices—the tomatoes in the dead of winter, the bedraggled package of blue cheese shipped from who-knows-where, the day-old bakery wheat bread, unsliced. It's not so much judged as observed. As someone accustomed to anonymity, observation feels like judgment. I worry the same thing about church here, that my choices--of clothes, boots, peripatetic lifestyle—will be judged.

As Immortal Technique says so eloquently, it makes me want to "dead 'em all then escape in green Chevy." If only I had a green Chevy.

I wish I could just accept myself enough to make the choice to belong, no matter my differences. I keep thinking about this xerox-copied anti-Muslim treatise someone distributed at the YMCA before I left Chattanooga. It said that Islam wasn't a religion, but a full, 100-percent, total system of being, in its truest sense. I keep thinking about it, because that's the way I want to live my life.

A total system of being--that's what being a person of faith means. Faith is the most fundamental part of my existence. No matter what I have faith in, that's how I determine how I live my life. Some people believe in capitalism. Some people believe in status, prestige. Some people believe in mere matter in motion, in science, in hedonism, in just having a good time.

The first thing is what we believe. Everything else comes afterward. We're not all that different after all, the gentle citizens of Aroostook County and I. "Y'all are my sons like Ibrahim and Ishak," says Immortal Technique. Maybe so.

The creatures of Prometheus

People ask me why I blog sometimes, and besides blogging being a calling card for me as a writer, I do think of it as a literal web log, similar to the logbook I kept on my boat. Then I tracked the variance of the weather, my location, my mood, and Secret’s mood. When I go back and read posts from the past, they carry me right back to that moment in time, and I’m glad that I kept that record, if only for myself.

Some posts become touchstones, as this one did. I wrote it on the train, when we were home for the holidays from the boat. One of the great things about being back in Maine is that I have access to my old library, including that book, The Spell of the Sensuous, which has continued to be influential in my thought, even as I’ve been away from it for the last several years. My quotes from my last posts were epigraphs from it, and I’ve been rereading excerpts, especially thinking about it in the context of land.

I consistently think about the way he explains the way aboriginal Australians view the earth, as profoundly differently than we do, not as mere matter, but as the literal bones and blood of their ancestors. Their spiritual life takes place in something called “Dreamtime” when, “The earth itself was still in a malleable, half-awake state, and as Kangaroo Dreaming Man and innumerable other Ancestors wandered, singing, across its surface, they shaped that surface by their actions, forming plains where they lay down, creeks or waterholes where they urinated, forests where they kicked up dust, and so on. Eventually, having found an appropriate location, or simply exhausted from the work of world-shaping, each of the Ancestors went ‘back in,’ transforming himself (or herself) into some physical aspect of the land.

“Each Ancestor thus leaves in his wake a meandering trail of geographic sites, perceivable features in the land that are the result of particular events and encounters in that ancestor’s journey, culminating in that place where the Ancestor went ‘back in,’ metamorphosing entirely into some aspect of the world we now experience.”

I find myself wondering as I traverse this landscape, walk across the spine of this land, about the native people who lived here. Who were they? I don’t even know what tribe lived here, how they survived. I can’t imagine living outside during the winter here, yet people must have found ways to cope. That knowledge is completely lost. They must have told each other stories about this landscape, known what people are buried here.

My floundering for a place to belong becomes a larger cultural struggle. My blood is mixed. My grandfather Zodhiates came from a Greek island off the coast of Cyprus, Zodhia. Zodhiates means “of Zodhia.” My great-grandfather Douglas was of the Douglas clan of Scotland, so much so that my great-uncle was named Douglas. My name, Jenks, is Welsh. But I belong to none of those places. They no longer own me. I don’t know their stories, I don’t know the bones hidden in their land.

I’m realizing that being homeless is a larger American symptom, and maybe even a larger global symptom. Here’s the question David Abram asks:

“How did Western civilization become so estranged from nonhuman nature, so oblivious to the presence of other animals and the earth, that our current lifestyles and activities contribute daily to the destruction of whole ecosystems—whole forests, river valleys, oceans—and to the extinction of countless species? …How did civilization break out of the participatory mode of experience known to all native, place-based cultures?”

Place-based cultures. The alternative that we’ve chosen is homelessness. We are a homeless people, who have stolen our land. Maybe my hunt for a place to belong echoes a larger one, our larger hunt as a culture for a place that we belong. Because only when we can find that, when we can begin to look at the land as a living, breathing entity, can we begin to find our way across it as a civilization.

Bridgewater, Maine

Branches in winter

I’ve been following the curve of the road back to the end of the land every day, except Sunday. Some days, when it’s above 40, the snow is damp and soft and I sink through up to my thigh in some places. Some days, when it’s closer to 30, like today, I can walk across the icy crust of the snow and head to places unknown.

I’ve been visiting this piece of land for seven years now, and I know it pretty well—where it arcs and curves north above the gravel pit to the beaver pond, where it opens up into the big wide field they call Strawberry Field, where the hill rises behind the washout, and how it looks on the other side. I feel like I know it.

“We must stand apart from the conventions of history, even while using the record of the past, for the idea of history is itself a western invention whose central theme is the rejection of habitat.” --Paul Shepard

“I wonder if the Ground has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said?” –Young Chief of the Cayuses tribe, upon signing over their lands in 1855

I know I don’t truly know this land, or have any possession of it. But if I continue to follow its lines, every day, don’t I love it better than anyone else? It’s almost like the only dignity is to be found in treating the land itself with compassion and love, to listen to it, to be mindful of it.

Aroostook County, Maine

On the bus yesterday, I rode eight hours up from Boston, watching the snow accumulate along the sides of the road. Piles and piles of it, growing along the highway. Here, in Aroostook County, the biggest county east of the Mississippi and the northernmost county of the continental United States, spring is a long way away. I went for a walk today, trying to balance my body on the crust of ice atop the four feet of snow. When I postholed, breaking through the crust to the soft stuff underneath, the snow came above my knee.

It’s beautiful up here. Today, as I walked the sky turned lavender as the wind changed. Even a quarter of a mile into the woods, I could be hundreds of thousands of miles away from the nearest civilization. It feels like I am. I’m writing in a little office, a view out the window of the snow and the pines, but with no idea how I’m going to connect this to the internet. I’m hoping to set up a dial-up internet connection. (If I’m posting it, it’s because I have.) Doing it old school. Cause that’s just how I roll.

This was the point of coming up here. Among the points. Solitude and silence are a writer’s lifeblood. I’m hopeful, given enough time and silence, that I’ll be able to accomplish something extraordinary.

One of things I’ve been reading, or was reading before I came up to the frozen north, was the biographies of Nobel Prize winners on the internet. It’s an odd thing to do, I know. I’ve always been a compulsive prize follower. I back-check Original Screenplay Academy Awards every year the Oscars roll around. When he found me poring over my encylopedia’s list of the Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, my dad said I should rethink my degree in chemical engineering.

There have been only four women writing fiction in English to win the award: Pearl Buck, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, and Doris Lessing. Shockingly, all of them were products of two cultures, the marriage creating a third culture, its own. Pearl Buck was the child of missionaries in China, thrown out by the Boxer Rebellion, and she spent her life writing novels about China and the intersection of Asian culture with the west. Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing were both raised in countries that were not their own—Gordimer in South Africa and Lessing in Iran. They both spent their adult lives wandering, hunting for a home, and interpreting their experiences through their fiction.

Morrison inhabited her own space as an African-American writer, finding that space on either end of the hyphen in the divided word. It’s bold of me to claim that she inherits the assignation of a third culture, but more and more as I read my favorite African-American writers they find that same space where Morrison lives, balancing the demands of their home culture and the alien culture in which they live. That’s the tension that occupies her as a writer. “I don’t belong here,” she says. “I don’t belong anywhere else, so I have to stay here. You can’t tell me this home is mine.”

It’s encouraging for me to look at these writers, and have a moment of recognition. They were successful as writers and as women precisely because they didn’t belong. Precisely because they occupied that place of homelessness. They found that tension and they lived inside of it and they used it to create art. Instead of fighting against the feelings of loneliness, of loss at leaving a place I loved, I can use those feelings to inform my work. The point is to transform the woundedness, to come through it, and to end up on the other side in great joy.

As Toni Morrison herself so eloquently said, "My project rises from delight, not disappointment."

Ann Arbor, Michigan

When I arrived in Ann Arbor yesterday, I thought that the rejection letter I had received from the University of Michigan graduate school was already behind me. After all, I knew from the definitive MFA blog that people who were accepted received their letters on February 22. I knew that only 22 out of 1000 applicants were accepted last year, and only half of those in fiction. Generally, 70 percent of applications are for fiction rather than poetry. Those are long odds—11 out of 700. “Don't take it personally,” my professor from Tennessee said. It seemed good advice. I thought I had made my peace.

Tonight, though, as my friend Sonia and I wandered the streets and coffee shops of downtown Ann Arbor, it began to irk me. We sipped lattes and Thai iced tea, and I eyed the bespectacled and bescarfed students that surrounded me. Which of them were already MFA students? Which were professors? Had any seen my work? Had they roughed up my precious manuscript? Read three lines and scoffed?

Sonia and I also went to our first Bikram yoga class today, the original hot yoga. First impression: a carpeted room, heated to 105 degrees, filled with close-packed bodies sweating for 90-minute classes, six times a day, is extremely stinky. The first goal of a Bikram practice is just to acclimatize, to condition oneself to actually spend 90 minutes without leaving the room. It’s one of those limitations that can end up bringing freedom—I had to let go and just experience the heat, experience the feeling of being present in those conditions. Let it go, I kept telling myself. Let it go. Let your expectations for your body (and olfactory organs) go.

Which is what I need to do for graduate school, too. Let it go. I’ve put off applying for so long because I was afraid of this exact scenario. If they said no, what would that mean to me? Would it mean I’m not good enough? Would it mean I should give up? Of course now I know it doesn’t. It just means that it’s not the path for me now, at this time. It means I’m not ready yet, or that there’s a different opportunity around the corner. I need to let this program at this time go, to throw it like a stone into the river and let the water to flow by. “We step and do not step into the same river,” Heraclitus said. “We are and are not."

Everything flows, he also said. Nothing remains still. Let it go. Practice, as Patthabi Jois said, and all is coming.

Grand Rapids, Michigan

Grandma in her garden (my sister's photograph)

My grandmother sleeps this evening a floor above me, in my aunt’s day room, hooked up to oxygen and a catheter. She’s on three kinds of morphine, but still sometimes grimaces with pain in her sleep, when she feels the tumor pressing against the tender tissue of her lung. Last night, I made her boneless skinless chicken breast and potatoes for dinner. She looked up at me, smiled, and asked, “Is this one of your gourmet meals?” She ate every bite. Food has always been her favorite thing, and she’s keeping that joy till the end.

Tonight my grandfather sleeps five miles away, in the special care unit of a nursing home. He’s hale as a horse at 92, but his mind is slipping. Today, as I joined him for his lunch, he repeated the story of the flight he’s scheduled to make to California tomorrow, to speak to first the entire country, and then the entire world. He shook his head at the difficulty of it. “I just don’t think I’m qualified,” he said. “I don’t want to embarrass the president. I don’t want to make a fool of myself.”

The irony did not escape me. He was so concerend with not embarassing himself, as he was revealing his most vulnerable side to me, his granddaughter. I drew him back around to topics I knew he could manage—his garden of forty years, the farmstead where he grew up, stories from the boat. He asked me why I wasn’t married yet. “I’m an independent woman, Grandpa,” I said.

They’re both fading. I’m mentally preparing for this trip to be the last time I see both of them. I could be wrong—I hope so—but in some ways I know they’re preparing for their departure. My grandma asks her pastor why it’s taking so long, and I understand that, too. I don’t want her to end her life of faithfulness with excruciating suffering.

I’m glad to be communing with them at the end of their lives, but I prefer to remember them the last time I saw them at their own house. Grandma cooked a vast feast for a group of us, me, cousins, and assorted children—wilted chard, zucchini bread, sliced raw tomatoes, and blanched green beans with butter. Along with, of course, a ham and scalloped potatoes. An everyday meal in her house. Four ingredients from her own garden, and this was only two years ago. The cancer was already growing in her body.

Grandpa has a picture of that garden, from that year, on the wall in his nursing home. He stands, with a straw hat, between the cabbage and tomatoes. Maybe someday, when I’m eighty, someone will take a photograph of me, standing between my rows of cabbage and tomatoes. And I hope that at the moment that photograph is taken, I remember both of my grandparents, and this day.

The rain drops

En route from Chicago, Illinois, to Grand Rapids, Michigan
186 statute miles

Traveling today on the Amtrak, I was able to review some of my old emails, including one that forwarded to me this review of an essay I wrote for the House Studio. Bizarre, to see my deeply felt and carefully constructed article disposed of like so much garbage. And oddly encouraging, in that I don't feel the criticism as deeply as I would have even a year ago. It doesn’t bother me as much as various other rejections, like the one I also received yesterday from the graduate school at the University of Michigan.

One of the books that I read while “adventuring” on Secret was Silence, by Japanese author Shusako Endo. In the novel, a Portugese priest named Father Rodrigues travels halfway across the world in order to evangelize the Japanese. Instead of being nourished by the rich food of faith upon arrival, he finds discouragement, disappointment, and filth. He reviles the Japanese he is supposed to be serving. He flirts with, dancing ever closer to, the seductive poison of apostasy.

Eventually he is imprisoned by the Japanese authorities, to whom any kind of proselytism is illegal. As he sits in prison, images of the face of Jesus and the face of Judas Iscariot flash before his eyes, and he tries to decide whether or not he will walk on the face of Christ when it is presented to him. Thematically, the novel explores the silence of God in the face of his believers’ persecution. Does God accompany followers experiencing adversity, or does he abandon them? And do we abandon him in turn?

That’s apostasy. While I am sympathetic to the priest’s struggle, I refuse to admit that questioning the literal inerrancy of Scripture equates me with him. I am willing to admit that my last post was borne more of that kind of doubt and fear than out of a true spirit of faith. In college, I was taught the concept of the hermeneutical circle, a circle of faith inside which a person is completely alone, forced to make the decisions of life by herself. An atheist, inside of the circle, decides that all of life is purely matter in motion. A Jungian decides that the endless layers of synchronicity he encounters mean something deeply significant about archetypes and the subconscious. A Christian stakes her life on the death and resurrection of the person of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, simply and solely that.

The biblical prayer is: “Lord, I believe. Help Thou my unbelief.” I struggle to find my own faith inside of my doubt. I have no other choice. All of us step out in faith, insulated inside the bubble of our own hermeneutical circle. All of us who sit in condemnation are solely responsible for our own choices, our own belief system.

I continue to doubt, walking away from my life as it was. Walking into the unknown, as Father Rodrigues did, forces me to doubt, forces me to throw myself on the goodness and grace of God. The choices I’m making also mean that I’m again walking away from people I care about and love, and walking a path that my family and many of my friends don’t always approve of. That’s difficult. A cognitive tension that I don’t think will ease with the passage of time. I’m trying to walk that line.

Don’t you want to feel your skin on my skin?

I feel alone right now, and broken. I walked away from my Chattanooga life a week ago and already I feel like I have made a bad choice. I walked away from my life there, and for what? For faith and a vague promise of redemption?

God said: all things work together for good for them that love Him and are called according to his purpose. He said: worship in Spirit and in truth. But I feel lost. I’m letting go of things, and it’s almost as if I’m letting go of too many things and now I’m left alone, driftless. I have cast off, and now I am being cast off myself.

How can I go through life alone? I see my sister’s life, her challenges and the things she has given up, the compromises she has been forced to make, but at least she has a life partner that she can count on, children who receive her love willingly. What do I have? Only the language and not the kiss.

“The fear I've known, that I might reap the praise of strangers, and end up on my own.”

It’s this constant fear that somehow there’s something wrong with me, that I came out wrong. I have to be in some way twisted, if I’m forced to drive away everyone who ever loved me, to pursue some high-minded ideal that isn’t real the way people are real. I feel abandoned, even though I’m the one changing, shifting my life, my boundaries, my space. Conflict about my life choices, from people in my life whom I love, makes me question Christ’s plan for my life. How can I believe that God loves me if the people He brings into my life don’t treat me with love?

I guess it’s a matter of letting go of the people who don’t treat me with love and drawing close to my heart those who do. God brings people into my life who care about me, but sometimes it’s difficult to pay attention to those people, to let go of those whose approval I desperately crave, whose approval I will never get. I have to have faith in Christ, that He is bringing change into my life for a reason, even if I have to journey alone. I also have to have faith that the things that happened in the past happened for a reason.

Clearly, I had an intense experience of surrender at my sister’s church this morning. I’m trying desperately to hold my life with an open hand, to hold it open to God’s will, but I keep wanting to close my fists.

It just hurts so bad. Change is brutal. Painful. Like I’m shedding another layer of skin.

Oak Park to Warrenville, Illinois and back

Yesterday was the seventh anniversary of my start date on the Appalachian Trail. I can hardly believe it. My life has changed profoundly since then, and I’m proud of myself for the journey that I’ve been on, the progress I’ve made. I’ve compromised since then, but not on fundamentals. Not on the kind of life I want to lead the most.

I’m still pushing forward, chasing the dream—despite obstacles thrown in my way. This week with my sister and my friends has been nourishing, constructive. I wrote in my journal that spending time with my sister feels like water in dry ground. We draw energy and connection from each other. We’ve had our challenges over the years but we’ve come to a place where both of us have grown as people and are able to accept each other as we are and not as we wish we’d be.

Also, we’ve been doing a lot of yoga. We’re making jokes that we’ve turned her 900-square-foot apartment into a yoga retreat, where we just mess around on our mats for as long as we can convince the girls to sleep. Then we talk, we regroup, we assess, we debrief. It’s intense watching her living the life she’s living, raising three girls in a tiny space. Evangeline, her third is six weeks old today.

It’s almost as if she has to do yoga to survive. The only way to deal with two of your three children screaming bloody murder is to stay focused in the present, in the immediate moment—deal with the child at hand and believe that the other ones aren’t going to kill each other in the meantime. To let it go. I’m realizing how many things mothers have to let go. That all women have to let go. That everyone has to let go.

I’m realizing what extraordinary sacrifices these women make, among them my friends. As I’ve grown older and become less competitive, less defensive about my own life choices, I’ve realized that becoming a mother is just a different choice. I realize more and more why so many women don’t become artists. It requires such a tremendous sacrifice of one’s core self to be a mother. Not that it’s not a legitimate choice, but it is a real choice. As much as I love my nieces, I’m still not sure it’s a choice I’d make.

This old guitar

Maybe it’s gauche to admit it, but I’m still a huge Indigo Girls fan. They’re maybe the first band I fell in love with, even back in the Philippines, and I don’t think they’ve received the critical acclaim they deserved. Not because of homophobia and sexism in the media and the recording industry or anything like that. Not because of anything like that.

So this Indigo Girls song came to me today, driving up from Chattanooga to Chicago, my old stomping grounds.

I don't know if it was real or in a dream
lately waking up i'm not sure where i've been
there was a table set for six and five were there
i stood outside and kept my eyes upon that empty chair

and there was steam on the windows from the kitchen
laughter like a language i once spoke with ease
but i'm made mute by the virtue of decision
i choose most of your life goes on without me

oh the fear i've known
that i might reap the praise of strangers
and end up on my own
all i've sown was a song but maybe i was wrong

i said to you the one gift which i'd adore
unwrap a package of the next 10 years unfolding
but you told me if i had my way i'd be bored
right then i knew i loved you best born of your scolding

when we last talked we were lying on our backs
looking up at the sky through the ceiling
i used to lie like that alone out on the driveway
trying to read the greek upon the stars the alphabet of feeling

oh i knew back then
it was a calling that said if joy then pain
the sound of the voice these years later
is still the same

i am alone in a hotel room tonight
i squeeze the sky out but there's not a star appears
begin my studies with this paper and this pencil
and i'm working through the grammar of my fears

mercy, what i won't give to have the things that mean the most
not to mean the things i miss unforgiving
the choice still is the language or the kiss

Maybe the only reason I’m brave enough to post that is because it’s 12:43 eastern time and I spent all day driving trying to convince my father that I’m a Christian even though he believes I’m not. Trying to convince him that the work I’m doing is important. Trying to convince him, and through him all of my family, all of my friends, all of the people who have ever doubted, who have ever said no, all of those who think that walking away from a paycheck, from a sure thing even if it’s not the thing I believe in: I am doing the right thing.

It’s always reassuring, watching the Oscars, watching all of those dorky people get up on stage in their fancy outfits and think about all of the people who must have beat them down in their lives. “You’ll never make it as a set designer. Who in their right mind would pay you to do that? What kind of job is that anyway? Why don’t you go ahead and go to accounting school, like Cousin Jeb.” But they said no, and tonight’s moment is their vindication.

I’m writing tonight because maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I am doing absolutely the wrong thing, risking everything on a bad hand. But I’ll never know if I don’t try.

Finally he just stopped

Dylan’s words keep rolling around in my head, as I prepare to become a rolling stone again. It’s a feeling that both of us know, because both of us are artists. So many of his songs end up being about the journey of the artist, forever disassociated from any kind of community, any kind of culture. The only way to critique a culture is from the outside. The artist, of necessity, must disassociate herself from a community in order to have the distance to create.

In college my favorite professor gave a lecture about Alfred, Lord Tennyson, that most maligned of Victorian poets. Maligned by me, perhaps only because Anne of Green Gables was such a big fan. But Tennyson did coin the phrase “nature, red in tooth and claw,” a much more accurate response to the world than the gooey romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The lecture centered around “The Lady of Shalott,” the cursed weaver, doomed forever to create an imitation of the world without ever participating in it. She watches the river and road that pass by her window, only able to observe through the screen of a mirror, weaving her web.

Eventually, seduced by a knight's beauty, she looks out her window, directly engaging with the world. Immediately:
“Out flew the web and floated wide--
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
'The curse is come upon me,' cried
The Lady of Shalott.”

Her art, and her life, destroyed.

The first time I heard the argument, I warred against it. No, I said. An artist’s job is to experience life fully, and then channel that life into her work.

As I’ve aged, my doubt has grown. The more I directly engage with the world, the less time I have to devote to craft. Writers from the past, even those acclaimed as great adventurers, spent far more time hiding away from the world, hermits alone with their desks. As I step away from my life here, I think to myself that perhaps that’s what I'm doing now. Retreating to my snow tower and observing the world through a mirror. As life without internet access can only be understood in this day and age.

Like a rolling stone

A not-so-sheltered childhood

My iTunes on shuffle played me that song today. I was a latecomer to American popular music, and each wave of the musical revolution swept me away as I encountered it throughout my adolescence. Elvis, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan—each hit me with that same shock of discovery that the country felt during the twentieth century. One of the joys of a sheltered childhood overseas.

No less so than with “Like a Rolling Stone.” I didn’t grow up hearing it, so when I encountered it for the first time, on a best-of CD, it struck with the same intensity as it must have in the sixties. The organ, the hate-filled raspy voice, “how does it feee-eee-eeel…” Each element seemed profoundly true, profoundly sacred. It’s no wonder that Rolling Stone magazine (natch) named it greatest song of all time.

I knew exactly what he was singing about. I knew exactly how it felt to be without a home, like a rolling stone. I knew that Dylan did, too. I knew what he was singing about.

Over the years, as I listened to the lyrics more closely, I found them more and more disturbing. He’s not singing about himself. He’s singing about some rich chick who’s lost everything by being phony. He’s gloating at someone else’s downfall, about human ugliness and nothing else. The song becomes a diatribe against a person who created a fake, idealized version of reality, a person who loses everything.

The song stopped seeming universal to me and started feeling artificial. I stopped understanding why it was so celebrated, such a big deal. It seemed a cynical song about unhappiness, with nothing redemptive inside of it. Nothing holy.

But I couldn't get away from that feeling. When Dylan croons, “how does it feel?” I knew that he knew how it felt. I knew he was singing about himself, and about me, no matter what the lyrics said. He knew how it felt to stare into the the mystery tramp’s eyes, to be forced to compromise against his own will. I did, too. We all do. We all know how it feels to stare into the heart of darkness.

Biographers and documentarians (including Martin Scorsese) consistently named their books and films “No Direction Home” tacitly stating that Dylan was talking about himself. As did Dylan. After his motorcycle accident in 1966, he realized that "when I used words like 'he' and 'it' and 'they,' and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me."

So many of Dylan’s song perform this same balancing act—an attempt to point the finger out that ends up circling back around to himself. His songs seem to have an inner self-referential circle, a rotation around a repeated truth. My favorite example is “Shelter from the Storm.” The narrator loses the archetypal woman filled with grace who provides him shelter, but despite that loss, he returns to the hope of renewal, again and again, in the chorus. He’s lost her, at the same moment that she continues to accept him unconditionally.

It’s a paradox, an assertion and yet a belief in its contradiction, anekantavada.

So many of Dylan’s songs end up being contemporary zen koans, in the truest sense. “How many roads must a man walk down?” is a question that has no answer. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” “How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home?” Questions that can’t be answered by rational thinking but only by intuition.

I also circle back around. The song ends up again being about me and about him. What Dylan sings about is loss. The anger and fear and darkness and loneliness we get from losing something, from losing everything, from becoming detached from community and from culture, from becoming wanderers. I am the rolling stone. I am the one without a home.

And how does it feel? Not always so good.

Go and follow your heart

On December 2, I wrote about an endless quest among cultures. I wrote: “I look at people who manage to be stationary, attached to one place, with envy.” I wrote: “traveling is when my heart beats fastest.” I finished hiking more than a month ago, and I’ve been silent ever since. Processing my experience, maybe. Digesting. Or more likely, just busy. I immediately stepped back into my full-fledged life here—two jobs, writing group, teaching yoga, taking yoga, land hunting. Enjoying the joys of a stationary life, of having a fully equipped kitchen and an office and heat and friends.

I’m only finding my voice now, as I prepare for another journey. In two weeks, I’m heading back up to Maine, maybe forever. Probably not for ever, ever, but you never know. I’ve found a beautiful piece of land here in Georgia, one that I first looked at more than a year ago. It’s land that has continued to wiggle around in my consciousness, reminding myself of its presence every so often. It has significant challenges, namely: an impassable road. I’ve only ever walked to the home-site, as I don’t have a vehicle that can make it up the mountain. Having a house I must walk to may be a romantic ideal, but I’m sure the eighth time I bring groceries home the charm will wear off.

Still, I’m keeping the piece as an option in my back pocket. It has gorgeous views of Lookout Mountain, feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere, but is close enough to Chattanooga to commute. If I can make it down the road. The questions is: are the challenges what make me hesitate, or is it the reality of digging down roots into one particular stretch of dirt? I’m having dreams about dirt, dark dirt roads stretching out in front of me, mud dissolving beneath me. As the reality of buying that piece began to settle in, I began to search farther afield—investigating areas close to Carolina’s outer banks, or along the outer edges of Asheville, the southeast’s hipster Brooklyn.

Am I afraid of being attached to a single place? Have I not found the right land yet? Or am I just not ready? I don’t know. In my ideal life, I’d be as close as possible to the ocean (hence the boat). North Georgia is utterly landlocked. I could buy a piece twenty minutes from Pamlico Sound for the same price. Does that mean it’s the wrong place for me, or am I merely procrastinating?

New England still draws me northward. As impossible as I find winter there, it has a hold as few places do—why else would I be writing a book about it? Waterfront land in coastal Maine goes for bargain-basement prices. Is it worth looking there, or am I motivated solely out of bullet-biting fear?

In any case, I’ve made a choice to keep my options open, at least for the next two months, with the Georgia land as my back-up plan. In the meantime, I’m traveling up to Chicago to meet my new niece, to Michigan to see my grandmother for the last time, and thence to Maine. I’m thinking of it as a mini-sabbatical, a chance to be still and make a final choice about the things I really want.

The last few weeks have been brutal, as I’ve shared my decision with my friends here. I never realize how thoroughly entrenched I am inside of a community until I decide to leave, and it’s been that way since I was a little girl. I have a pattern where I reluctantly build a connection with a community, slowly over time, and then, as soon as I’m thoroughly tied to it and happy, I tear myself away. It’s perverse masochism, like wiggling a sore tooth. I distance myself from my friends as I get ready to leave, preparing myself for departure, slowly cutting those clinging ties, in order to keep myself from feeling that excruciating pain of losing friends.

Sometimes I believe it’s an addiction. I’m addicted to the art of losing friends. It’s the thing I was taught best to do as a missionary kid. Growing up, every year I had a new set of friends. Every year I was torn away from people I loved. Now it’s just a habit.

It’s a whole set of issues that we crazy gypsies have to deal with. A lack of consistency in our past means that we crave inconsistency in our present. I can’t actually believe that it’s dysfunctional, though. That would be like denying a part of myself. Journeying is an art in its own right. Moving through space and time calls to me, again. Though I’m giving up some things, I’m gaining some things, too. The life I’ve chosen for myself comes at a high price. It’s a price I choose to pay.

Chattanooga, Tennessee

So my hike is over. We drove back to Chattanooga in the freezing rain last night, out of the wilderness of backwoods Alabama, and made it here just in time for seven inches of snow. It was planned, actually--I pushed the miles the last three days so we could make it out in time for this last front. Shadow is confused and at loose ends. Even though he's a snow dog from Maine, snow in this context is confusing, as is the sudden conflation of people and the lack of backpacks.

They say one of the biggest challenges of hiking with dogs is their adjustment after the hike is finished. He keeps whining and staring out the window in bewilderment and needs a lot of affection. They say many dogs, especially after a longer hike, become depressed. The famous seeing-eye dog, Orient, who accompanied Bill Irwin, the first blind man to hike the Appalachian Trail, became so depressed that he never recovered. He was older anyway, but he passed on soon after completing the trail, going to that great trail in the sky.

No more so than I. Not that I'm going to the great trail in the sky anytime soon, but the adjustment post-hike is just as difficult for humans as for dogs. Today was a snow day in Chattanooga, everything closed, and I used it mainly to cook and eat, favorite post-hike activities. Shadow even has a huge store of Christmas and New Year's bones in the freezer that he can gnaw on, after his meager trail rations.

Hiking changes people and dogs alike, and the recovery process is difficult. I could just step full-force back into my life here, and it's a little overwhelming. I've made some decisions, though, about goals and priorities. Mainly, I've confirmed what I already knew--I want my next major project to be land. That's my main goal for the next however many months, until I find my next anchoring point. I want a homestead of my own.

I love Donne's poem "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," where he compares his wife to the rooted part of the compass, and himself to the other moving leg, and though he circles and moves away, he always comes back. They always meet back in the center. I need a home that can function that way, the rooted anchor that I always return to. I'm not ready to stop adventuring, and I may never be, but having something that ties me to the ground will give me the stability I need for the next stage in my life.

I'll be posting entries from the last two weeks of my hike over the next few days, and I'll try to get photographs up as soon as possible. Looking forward to rejoining civilization, at least for a little while, and hearing from and seeing all of you. Happy New Year, everyone.

Rebecca Mountain to Chattanooga, Tennessee

Campfire and moon memories of the trail

When we walked out of the woods today, into the hallowed hiker heaven of a Mexican buffet (a rarity in the all-you-can-eat universe), I had that same sense of vertigo, of the world shifting around me immediately. Like in a science-fiction movie, when the green screen drops, and our hero realizes he’s been at home the whole time. After the trail, everything changes. The calories I was trying to pump my body full of just this morning now reek of nebulous evil.

Water comes from a tap, not from the earth. Human bodies smell like perfume, and not like themselves. I spend most of the day sitting (even this evening, in the car), instead of moving from place to place on my feet, with my belongings on my back. It’ll be an adjustment.

But the trail, for now, is done. Complete. A tied-off knot.

Sherman Cliffs to Rebecca Mountain

Shadow, at my sleeping bag's foot, in the morning

18.5 miles

Wondering if tonight may be my last night in the woods, I’m sitting in front of the dying embers of a smoky fire. Partly because of Shadow’s food situation (he’s still on strict rations), we’ve been pushing our mileage, which means I’ve done in three days what would have taken us four in December. So we’re ahead of schedule, and the hunters tell us there are eight inches of snow forecast for tomorrow. A good reason to push for the deuce, the big 20-mile day tomorrow.

It still makes me sad, thinking that this campfire may be the last. I don’t know if I’ve done an adequate job of capturing the beauty of this trail, how it’s been a small but lovely part of the American landscape, wilderness but not rugged, with creeks wandering through, low wetlands or ridges with pastureland falling away on either side. We walked a ridge all day today, with a brisk north wind heralding bad weather and keeping my fleece on. But it was a lovely last day of hiking—kicking through leaves, poking at head-sized chunks of snow-white quartz, looking for caves in the boulders that jut out of the tops of mountains.

I love that the Pinhoti Trail is the tip of such a long chain of ancient, ancient mountains. Here, at the end of the chain, you can feel their weight settling into the ground. Just the angle of the rock tells its age—horizontal lines of marbled quartz, now nearly vertical, sunk by the ages. I love that at this point we have now truly finished the Appalachian Mountains, that after these miles they dwindle down into nothing in the swamps and flatland of the Florida panhandle. It makes the Appalachian Trail feel truly complete.

It does not, however, in any way sate my desire for a hiker’s life. I keep thinking of other trails that hover on the horizon—the 1000-mile Florida Trail, the 300-mile Benton MacKaye Trail, the 900-mile Bibbulman Track in Australia, the American Discovery Trail, the continent’s longest trail, that stretches from coast to coast, more than 5000 miles. No matter how much pain I feel, how much my shoulders tingle, I want more. I don’t want it to be over.

I want to have adventures and write about them. I want to do that forever.

Clairmont Spring to Sherman Cliffs

Shadow and his Puppy Chow from heaven

16.0 miles

A shaman met us on the road today. Well, a crazy Californian living in a van with “LOVE” painted on the side who claimed to commune with the spirit of Sacajawea and to have knowledge of his past lives. And to be a shaman flautist. He claimed that my nose indicated I came from the Cheyenne tribe. He called me a “wise woman.” I’ll take that compliment, no matter who it comes from.

It’s the second odd experience in as many days. I’ve been really worrying about Shadow’s food. The campground store at the state park had nothing but ramen noodles and Snickers bars for our resupply, and even less supplies for him. We packed out seven cans of Vienna sausages to supplement his dog food, but they’re not really doing the trick. His high-protein dog food is running really low. He seems to understand our conundrum. He whines less for his food, accepting what he’s given, and putting his head on his paws while we eat. It’s still awful. It’s one thing for me to go hungry when I know there are Chinese buffets waiting at the next road crossing. It’s something else when you’re a dog and you don’t understand why there’s no food.

But yesterday, walking along the trail, we found a full bag of puppy chow, two pounds of it, exactly what he needs to get through the next five days. Dog food, untouched, still in its original packaging, just lying by the side of the trail. Exactly what I needed, when I needed it.

How bizarre is that? My first thought was: it’s not possible. My second thought was that it was one of those inexplicable unasked-for miracles, a sign that someone in the universe has a sense of humor. And is kind. Call it synchronicity or Christ Jesus, call it what you will. I just have a hard time believing that anything so coincidental is actually coincidence.

Heaven Camp to Clairmont Spring

Tired trail dog

13.4 miles

Before I left on this trip, I showed some friends at my job a map of the trail, told them my plan. “Better you than me,” was their attitude. Today was one of those days I know what they mean. Half the day was spent walking through a “rock garden,” with each step unsure beneath my feet, jagged stones throwing me off balance, wrenching my ankles, my knees, my shoulders.

The concept of adventure has been something that’s haunted my thoughts this entire trail. What makes this an adventure, and not just a walk in the woods? I’ve risked frostbite and hypothermia and coyote attacks, but does danger alone make for an adventure? Is adventure merely a conscious choice to expose oneself to physical discomfort, to pain?

What’s an adventure to one is not to all. One of the things I love to do is built small adventures into my everyday life. Visiting a restaurant I’ve never been to before. Going to the park all by myself. Driving home from work on roads I’ve never explored. So are those adventures? Solely the thrill of the new?

I’d like to call myself an adventurer, but it’s a title--like poet, like yogi, like prophet—that’s difficult to bestow on myself. Whatever the discomfort, though, the life of an adventurer is the one I want. Adventure makes me see the world through new eyes. I feel like new scales are dropping from mine with every step I take outside the status quo. Even when I’m gasping in pain, I can breathe fully here. Van Gogh said: “Our only job is to breathe as hard as ever we can breath.” Keats said: “I want to clamber among the clouds and exist.” Eliot said: “In the mountains, there, you feel free.”

I don’t know what it is that makes an adventurer adventurous. But whatever it is that makes me feel this feeling at the end of the day—beaten, broken-down, exhausted, and happy—it’s what I want.

Cheaha State Park to Heaven Camp

Cheaha State Park placard

8.2 miles

I’m sitting cross-legged, in front of a birthday bonfire. Shadow is a curly dog next to me. K is cracking dead oak into logs for the fire. We built an oven to cook my birthday dinner, a packed-out frozen burrito from the campground store.

The burrito was absolutely delicious—crispy and brown on the outside, gooey and dumpling-like inside, with oozing cheese and bean sauce. It’s amazing how being outside makes gas-station food fantastic.

It’s always funny to me how much of a contrast there is between time in town and out here. This morning I woke up in a climate-controlled room, in clean sheets, with plumbing and running water and a television. The minute I stepped out into the woods, I’m alone, just me, with the food and clothing I carry on my back. The change is instantaneous.

Blue Mountain Shelter to Cheaha State Park

Another Pinhoti Trail stream

1.9 miles

When I woke up this morning, I thought I may end up here—in yet another motel room. That’s four for a 350-mile trail, and I hope it’s the last. As much as I love the anonymous hotel room, and this one’s especially nice, at a state park with a gorgeous view of Alabama’s highest point and stacked rock everywhere, I feel like I’m splurging a little bit, too much for a short trail. Then again, I always felt that way on the Appalachian Trail, too.

I must admit, too, that a day in a flooded-out tarp does make one want a hot shower, a cheeseburger, and some clean sheets. So we had an easy two-mile hike to the state park, where we got a room.

Friendship Camp to Blue Mountain Shelter

Stone floor to a tarp (that's the green tarp wall to the right)

9.6 miles

Sleeping on a bed of rocks last night hurt my hip a bit, I think. But it was far better than sleeping in an inch of standing water, which was the alternative. Yesterday, after my pen ran out of ink, we were huddled in the shelter of the tarp, I was reading, Shadow keeping my feet warm. The rain was pounding down.

Then Shadow stands up, absolutely dripping in water. K, my hiking companion, says: “You better check your tortillas.” I do, and we pull back the sleeping pads, and there’s about an inch of groundwater, just below the ground cloth.

My choice at that point was: hike on with everything I own wet, or devise a solution. We ended up pushing the flat rocks from around the campsite under the walls of the tarp, sweeping away the water, and devising an impromptu stone foundation. It wasn’t that uncomfortable. A lot more comfortable than sleeping downhill, for instance. Or in an inch of water. I felt like Jacob, sleeping on a stone pillow, although I did not dream of angels.

We even built a fire with wet wood, and today almost everything I carried was dry. At least, until I decided to ford a stream with my shoes on. Impatience always makes stupid decisions. Today’s hike was a lot less eventful. Pleasant miles, interesting flute-like fungi, and vibrant green moss. Moss may be my favorite plant. It’s always so green, and it’s involved in very interesting reproduction right now. Every bed of it is topped by miniscule and mysterious growths.

Tonight I sleep in a shelter, with no rain to concern me. Nothing to worry about except ghosts and mice. Oh, and a worry about a return to my home-bound life.

New Year’s Day

First picture of the New Year

0 miles

We’re trapped in the tarp again, on New Year’s this time. We’re bored. Ender’s Game is the book that succeeded Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—some easy reading science fiction to take the place of hardcore natural realism—but I don’t know if we should finish it today, because then we’ll be all done and that will make me sad and we won’t have a book left to read. I’m thinking over my resolutions and wondering if I should have shared them because then they won’t come true.

I’m also wondering if anyone is reading or commenting on my blog, on the things that I’m writing and the ideas I’m exploring. I’ve been writing them differently than I did on the Appalachian Trail, exploring my larger goals and larger concepts, rather than focusing on the day-to-day minutia of how many miles I’ve hiked or how much pain I’m in. It makes my hiking journal less interesting to some, I’m sure, especially those looking for specific details about the Pinhoti Trail so they can hike it in the future. But more interesting to others, I hope, more interesting to those unconcerned with mileage but interested in the feeling of long-distance hiking.

My right shoulder is in pain, and I do find myself thinking about little details like how we carried too much food out of town or when we’re going to finish if we don’t stop doing more than a zero day at a time. I feel like it’s more valuable to find something interesting to focus on and write about it than it is to obsess on the little details. Especially by the end of the AT all I could think and write about was how many miles I was doing a day. Today I’m frustrated by not hiking, by being a day further behind, but I want to think about other things, like books and music and art.

There was an eighty-percent chance of thunderstorms today. I should have known. Maybe it’ll still clear and enable us to hike, but I doubt it. It feels like an all-day rain.