Just like a faucet that leaks

Sunset in Wisconsin

It’s another one of those days when I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. Why am I crafting my day into words, explaining to strangers how I occupied my time? I’m grateful for this place, the space that I’ve carve out for myself to create, but I don’t feel like I deserve it. I still feel like a vampire, living off other people’s good graces, their gifts, their leavings.

I am truly grateful for the thing that have been given to me, and I try to accept them in the spirit in which they’re offered, but the nagging voice at the back of my head says: when are you going to start pulling your own weight? Earning your own living? When are you going to give up on these juvenile dreams? When are you going to get a real job? When are you going to come of age?

The whole time I was in California, I drove around in other people’s cars, rather than bothering to rent one myself. I spent more on hotel rooms than anything, but even then I spent most of the time being the guest of others, availing myself of hospitality rather than paying my own way. I drove cross-country with my brother partly as a fun adventure, but mainly as a cost-saving tool—that way I could add wear and tear to his vehicle, not mine, and piggy-back on the fossil fuels he was already burning. Even the hiking trip was just a way to avoid paying for another week of lodging.

Maybe it’s being back here, my adventure for the summer mainly over, and realizing that I still don’t have a place of my own. The land decision hangs over my head. As the stock market dwindles, so does the cash I have to plunk down on acreage. I want a home, but at this point it just feels like another abstract goal to mark down on a list.

The real business of researching, contacting realtors, calling about listings, driving around country roads to find another disappointing piece of dirt, and then starting from scratch again is exhausting and heart-breaking. Worse yet, it takes time away from the writing work that I have put at the top of my list. But can I write with a good conscience until I have a carved out my own space in the world? And how can I carve out my own space until I stop doubting myself, and forge ahead, doing what I believe in?

My California host has a son, a 24-year-old jazz drummer living in New York City, an excellent career choice which I endorse heartily. His story did make me take a step back and wonder to myself which career path is harder: aspiring writer, or aspiring Brooklyn musician? Maybe I should put fashion model, movie star, and astronaut on that list, too. I’d never question the dreams of anyone else. I want my nieces to be able to pursue any ambition they have. But when it’s me, by myself, bashing my head again and again against these same doubts, these same obstacles, it’s tough to not throw it all to the wind.

Here's a link to his band's music: Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds. Go help an artist out and spend some cash.

But I won’t be sticking around

Buds

The worst part about the poison oak debacle has been how it’s kept me from the bare skin of summer. Actually, that’s not the worst part at all, but it has been one bad part. I’ve been wearing long pants and long-sleeved shirts everywhere, even to yoga class, in 95-degree weather. At least I’m now healed enough to show my arms in public.

I’m one of those people who can’t manage to convince herself that there’s anything wrong with the sun. I know that everyone says it’s bad, it’ll give me cancer, but I don’t believe them. Or I don’t care. I love every inch of it I can get. I want to be in the sun all day, every day. July is my favorite time of year. Every minute of July is a heartbeat of joy. I wish it was July all year.

One of the things I inherited when I came to Chattanooga was a beat-up 1993 convertible in place of my sturdy Maine Subaru. It doesn’t have air conditioning, which is fine by me. Who needs air conditioning when you can take off your roof? So I’m driving back from downtown today, caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the black interior of my little car, the top down, semis roaring on either side, the sun beating down, the humidity oozing, the water in my bottle the temperature of tea… All of the people around me probably pitied me, thinking about how much of a bug under a magnifying glass I am.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking: I am so happy. This is perfect.

All I need is sun, I guess. Vast quantities of it. So I hope my skin heals soon so I can expose vast quantities of it to the sun again. I have December to spend worrying about cancer.

Don’t be sad when it’s time to say good night

Arms

As you may know, if anyone has been following along since I left California, I have encountered a fair share of bad luck, thus assembling a backlog of posts and photographs and energy. I may be back to almost normal now, after a week of prednisone. I did fork over the forty bucks for my pictures, thanks to the financial assistance of some kind familial members. I just couldn’t lose them, and it is nice to know that my family believes in me a bit. At $40 for 200 pictures, that’s twenty cents a piece. Would I have taken fewer pictures or more if I had known?

My steroids have been giving me lots of energy, hence my mass quantities of posts and photograph uploads in the last however many days. I also stayed up until four o’clock in the morning yesterday, finally compiling the first draft of the first five chapters of my novel, a goal I’ve had since January. It may not seem that important, but it was a huge thing for me. I’m considering making it a real goal to finish an entire first draft by the end of summer.

The clinic was an interesting experience, a brush with what works and what doesn’t work with health care in our country. I may have mentioned before how my sister’s public health class studied TennCare (Medicaid in Tennessee) as a case study of everything that’s wrong with our medical system. As someone living well below the poverty level, I applied earlier this year for TennCare and was turned down. The reason being? I’m not pregnant. So if I go down to the corner bar and get knocked up, I get health insurance, but if I make responsible birth-control choices, I don't? How does that make any kind of sense?

I spent about five hours over the course of two days in the waiting room, being shuffled from one nurse to the other. My fellow patients were mainly Chicano families and single, teenaged moms—there for pre- and post-natal visits and breastfeeding classes and check-ups and vitamins. I brought the book that I’ve been reading: David Dark’s The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, and I felt vague guilt about whipping it out. I was the only person reading anything in the waiting room, and it made me feel this odd cognitive disconnect. How is it right for me to have spent all of these financial resources on an expensive Christian education, only to avail myself of services destined for the less privileged? Is it wrong for me to feel guilt about using them? How legitimate are my goals, if they leave me floating at the lowest of income levels?

That being said, the County Department of Health did a great job. They couldn’t get me a visit with a doctor, but found a way for me to sneak in under their female wellness program, which gave the nurse practitioner an opportunity to prescribe generic drugs. And now I’m almost better! So the system worked, and worked well, and I am able to pay the fair price asked. It ended up being exactly what I needed when I needed it: access to an educated caregiver and to drugs, at a cost that made sense.

If I had a full-time job and benefits, access to the same level of care would have cost hundreds of dollars. How is that rational? All I needed was a simple consultation and prescription, not countless tests and follow-up visits and reams of staff paid $30 an hour with millions of dollars of malpractice insurance. There has to be a way to figure out how to pay for what we actually get, and not to keep paying into this nebulous system that perpetuates itself without creating anything of real value, not even true health.

And when I go, don’t you follow

Lake by the ocean

My poison oak itchiness is becoming unbearable. I’m using every pharmaceutical product I can get my hands on: benadryl and caladryl and Ivy-dry and Tecnu and a steroid cream from a previous prescription and hydrocortisone and showers as hot as I can make them switching to as cold as I can make them. Tomorrow morning my goal is to wake up before seven in the morning so I can call and make an appointment with the local county clinic as early as possible. I'm trying not to anticipate the questions, like: what, exactly, were you doing when you spread poison all over your belly and inner thighs and sensitive areas?

The thing is: I was doing nothing. According to the internet, I must have a Class Four Hyperallergy, because that’s my only logical explanation. Unless I peed on the stuff, it must have brushed my clothes and shoes and socks, and spread that way all over everything. I can’t imagine what I would look like if I had actually done anything illicit in a patch of the stuff. I’d be dead now, almost certainly.

I’m back in Chattanooga now, at least, after suffering through the plane flight with massive amounts of Tylenol PM, wearing a long-sleeved shirt and pants in the 95-degree weather to shield my helpless limbs from the eyes of onlookers. It’s almost impossible to focus on anything when I’m fending off scratching myself bloody. One part of my brain is always focused on not scratching. Actually, about three parts of my brain.

At least being back here where I’m a formal resident means that I have access to things like the County Department of Health, even if it does put me in the province of the illegal immigrant, which is basically where I rank in the hierarchy of health insurance. I’m praying to God that they’ll give me prednisone, the only thing I know that will give me relief. Yet another brush with the darker side of health care in this country, or more specifically, my choices that always seem to put me into the nether-regions of our system. I’m too distracted to develop any kind of argument, but it does seem wrong to me that this is how we condemn those attempting to live as artists.

No, I’m going down

The boys in Boston

Trying to hold the buildings up

Climbing up the Balance Climb sculpture at the Children's Museum

Afraid to go too close to the edge?

A smile, finally!

Shine on you crazy diamond

California horse trough

My choices have come back to haunt me. What was it that Jean-Paul Sartre said about the hardest part of life not being that we have too few choices, but that we have too many? It’s crazy. At my job, one of the things I do is make people new id cards. I always ask them one simple question—if they want a lanyard or not.

Nine times out of ten, people can’t even make that simple choice, and I never let them off the hook. I make them choose. It just seems so clear to me, as they hem and haw, that most of the time people don’t have any idea what they want. They don’t know how to make a decision even when they’re forced to.

The existentialists believe that our choices are literally infinite. That we can do anything we want to, anything in the universe, at any moment. What makes our lives so brutish is that we’re consistently the ones who limit ourselves. We constrain our lives with structure and routine so that we’re not forced to see that we could re-carpet our entire house on a whim, or drive down to a bar tonight and drink liquor until we fall over, or change our locks and kick our roommate to the curb.

We can do anything we want, whenever we want. It’s just too hard to deal with.

So my choices. This summer has been about doing the things that I want, but these decisions have consequences. For instance: my body now festering with poison oak blisters. I chose to hike, I chose to wander around parts of the National Seashore that were overgrown and wild, and now I’m dealing with the results of that choice.

For instance: my choice to live in Chattanooga instead of Marion. It’s hard now that I’m back up here, and I realize all of the time that has passed, the children that have grown up without me in their lives, the relationships that have been left drifting, like threads in the wind.

The thing is that our choices are all we have. At the end of my life, all I’ll have is the choices that I made. I have a really hard time believing in change, that change is possible for me, for anyone in my life, for anyone at all, really. But change is just small choices, adding up over time—small, daily choices to do something different. Something big, or something small.

“I can change, I swear,” Dylan said. His saddest line, in my opinion. How often do we believe our lovers can change? How often do we believe we can change?

Overblown ramblings of someone itching within an inch of her life. I don’t regret my choice to hike, or to wander. But it was a choice. And now I have to spend the rest of the month dealing with it.

Independence Day

Holy mother of God, is that poison oak right there? How could I not have seen it? What the hell was I thinking? Beautiful picture, though. Was it worth it? No.

At the dining room table today, after spending all night last night on the red-eye from California back to Marion, Massachusetts. Someone’s snoring loudly in the next room, and behind that is the noise of the television, back on after I’ve had a wee break from it, some talk show making fun of a size-twenty woman who smothers people for a living. I hate it. Back into the world of female objectification and life by proxy.

Anthony Bourdain was my choice earlier in the day, and maybe I just succumbed to the lure of cable because of the three hours of sleep I had last night. Even those Travel Channel shows with their excellent writing drive me crazy, though. The shots of the Caribbean? I want to be there, on Secret. Jamaica? I want to be the one buying jerk chicken from a guy on the street corner. I don’t like living vicariously through other people. It’s such a contrast from the actual living I’ve spent the last week doing.

I also need to get my hands on some antihistamine, and stat. I have poison oak pus oozing through my jeans. Awesome, right? When I was dodging all of the poky plants in California, I neglected to remember the other ways that coastal plants have of attacking. Actually, I didn’t forget about the noxious poison oak at all. I remembered very, very clearly from the debacle of the bicycle trip along the coast in 2005. I kept my eyes wide open for it at all times. I even did extensive research before I left, to remind myself of what it looked like. But still, somehow, I must have forgotten, because I am vastly in need of prednisone.

On the plus side, I had a great Fourth, despite my exhaustion, sleeplessness, and uncontrollable itch. My ticket back here was extremely cheap—if you’re looking to fly to California, try the red-eye on a national holiday—and I was able to spend the day in the sun and at a friend’s vast barbecue, complete with mini-sliders, crab puffs, and a giant pallet bonfire. I haven’t been back up to Marion for more than a year, and it’s great to see everyone here, to remember the things that are amazing about New England, things like lobster bisque and authentic chowder made from real quahogs and swimming in the Atlantic in July. Not to mention the land-purchase options.

I have an option up here, potentially, for a free house in Calais, Maine. It’s an old house, from the 1800s, in need of repair, but along the coast. It belongs to a friend of a friend that doesn’t want to pay taxes anymore, and houses in similar condition go for only $10,000 anyway, but on this one I’d only need to pay the closing costs. My main point of doubt is: winter. Can I deal with it again? Is all the seafood and the ocean worth it? I can’t decide.

Better run, run, run, run, run to me

Unnamed field to Sky Camp, California
7.2 miles

Bark of eucalyptus

All I wanted to do all along as I hiked on the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails was sit down in the middle of the woods and write, and on this trip I am able to, because I’m hiking less than eight miles a day. It feels so astonishingly easy, like I have all the time in the world to dawdle, to take off my shoes and lounge around streams. Part of me wants to hike twenty miles a day, to keep pushing through, just because of the endorphins, because pushing myself harder makes me feel like what I’m doing is real and will go on forever.

I’m sick and tired of having my emotions tied to things that don’t matter. Things like my photographs. I did get picked up by my dad on Wednesday and spent the day with my family, even going horseback riding with Sophia and then back to the house my parents rented for showers and an amazing lunch of barbecued pork chops and baked potatoes. Definitely helping with my calorie deficit. I also tried to upload my posts and photographs there, and discovered that they had all, every last one, been deleted. I’ve been taking a ton of pictures over the last week, including ones of the wedding, and it felt like a devastating emotional blow.

I know that they’re just pictures, and it shouldn’t matter, but it does. My family was compassionate, but I don’t think they could understand how I felt. The only solution is just to be happier, but it feels like any creative impulse I manage to cherish gets destroyed. I eventually found a piece of software that can recover them, but it costs $40. Are my pictures worth that? Is my creativity?

I’m scraping the bottom of my bank account as it is for this little adventure, taking two months away from my paycheck for the sake of some freedom this summer. It’s hard for me to trust myself when I have such a hard time spending money on the things that are important to me, when I can’t even value financially the things that I know are vital to my survival as an artist. “She’s an artist,” Bob Dylan said. “She don’t look back.” But I can’t help looking over my shoulder.

My emotions, my work, my life are my own and belong to no one else. Only I can take control of them. That’s what makes it so crucial, so dangerous, so frightening. If I fail at what I most want, I have only myself to blame. And maybe defective technology. But even that I can blame on myself—my camera’s been acting up for more than a year now. But how can I take that money and spend it on myself, on these little things that don’t even seem important?

I want to be focusing on nature right now, not on my own confusion. The thing is: nature is a lot less sexy close up. Disgusting yellow slugs, oozing goo, fist-sized, were clustered around my watering hole this morning. Bugs and ticks and spiders and grass that looks beautiful but when I flop down on it fills my clothes and shoes and socks with spikes that dig into me for the rest of the day. Even the sun and the wind. The sun is hot, and the wind is relentless along the coast in the afternoons.

I don’t regret anything. I can’t. The reason I want to continue hiking, continue even thru-hiking, continue adventuring, is because of these challenges. It's like one of those stock-market charts. Ordinary life, the life when I’m wrestling with inanity, is static. The line on my chart hovers near zero. I’d rather have these excruciating, wrenching doubts, these turbulent emotions, these fears, this discomfort, because the highs are so very high. It’s so easy to forget that about the trail. I remember the times when I am able to float up near the stratosphere, and forget about the moments when my body is filled with so much pain that I can't take another step.

My heart says follow through

Muddy Hollow Road to unnamed field, California
8.4 miles

Favorite moss picture ever

You come over with all of your friends

Limantour Beach to Muddy Hollow Road, California

1.5 miles

View from the beach, early in the morning

My dad is coming to pick me up right now, as I sit on the grass early in the morning. After three days in the wilderness, this feels vaguely like a failure, like everything else does in my life. I don’t even know why I bothered to call my family, but they’ve rented a house within thirty minutes of here, and I came across a pay phone at a beach this morning, and it felt like fate. At least it’ll give me a chance to spend more time with my glorious nieces.

Now that I called, though, now that I’ve reconnected with civilization, it feels like Pandora’s box being opened. Turns out I sort of exaggerated the amount of food I can do without when I’m hiking ten miles a day, and $45 for groceries wasn’t quite enough. I kind of wanted to just risk it, and keep going, and walk out with nary a granola bar in my backpack, but I decided not to. Now I sit here, in the sun, shielded from the wind, and wait for another human being.

The California Coastal Trail is beautiful, and how happy I am to be out here again. The weather is almost always perfect—the breeze coming off the ocean cool enough, the sun hot enough. It’s pretty level, too, following the ridges that circle the Pacific, with spectacular vistas, rocks coming down to meet the water. Yesterday I stopped at a total of three beaches: one for a lunch, one for a late-afternoon sun break, one for sleeping. I’m clambering among rocks and existing.

I’ve been camping, mostly illegally, following Leave No Trace ethics as much as possible, but having a hard time when it comes to the mainly hostile plants around here. California hosts some amazingly prickly plants. Not just the exquisite thistles, which gorgeous to look at, but less gorgeous when they jab me in a central vein. The worst are these innocuous-looking ones that have prickers even on the bottoms of their perfectly shaped leaves. There are bushes upon bushes of overgrown blackberry and raspberry brambles, which are fantastic when you’re walking along, looking for a sun-warmed snack, but less so when trying to camp among groves of them.

Not that I mind. It makes it feel more real, more hard-won, more hard-fought. As I’ve veered away from the well-used, three-lane trails that lead from the main visitor centers to the beaches, the trails have become overgrown, nearly impassable, and I’ve found myself wishing more than once for a machete. But that’s where the herds of tule elk hang out, where the California quail spring away into the underbrush, where the red-tailed hawks trace currents in the air.

Can’t you just leave it at that?

Wildcat to Coast Camps, California
9.3 miles

Free gift for anyone who can guess what this is

Hazy coast heading up to the actual point of Point Reyes

Evening star at dusk (extended exposure)

As the fire smolders

Pablo Point to Wildcat Camp, California
9.8 miles

California flower in front of rocks

Brook opening into the ocean

Two riders at sunset

It’s not that it’s death

Pablo Point, California
2.0 miles

At the edge of the manzanita

I’m in the woods again, burning an illegal fire. It’s awesome. I attended the last wedding event this morning, a brunch, checked out of the amazing, cheap-for-San-Francisco-but-still-too-expensive-for-me Bay Landing Hotel, loaded my backpack, and drove out to Point Reyes National Seashore, where I am going to wander around for a week.

I’m theoretically drifting up the California Coast Trail, following the coast around the point, because it’s the best part of the coastal trail that I have good maps for. I’m stealth camping, which according to the CCT website is allowed. So I was dropped off on the side of the road by my dad and mom, dropped off to be picked up again in a week, dropped off with nothing but my wits and my backpack, what I have been longing for since April.

Tonight dinner was a tuna steak and lemongrass-kaffir lime leaf pilaf, bought from Trader Joe. The tuna steak was deep-frozen and just melted enough by the time I made it to my campsite to be perfect over my little, mini, Indian fire, made in the hole of an old stump, far from the manzanita. A fantastic treat for the first night on the trail. I spent $45 for trail food for a week, half the price of one night in my fancy hotel.

I do love people, and my family, and I’m happy that I invested the energy and the time and money to be out here to support my brother, but endless social events and the small talk they bring forth make me miserable. I feel so unable to communicate honestly, to really connect with people. It’s making me glad to be out here in the woods instead, even though I wasn’t really psychologically prepared for it, after the shock of the big city.

Also I have this feeling of doing San Francisco, a new city to me, incorrectly. I’ve read travel books compulsively since I was a small child. There’s an excruciatingly cute cassette tape of me at the age of six, reading Walt Disney promotional materials aloud to my siblings, forcing them to comment on each elaborate description in turn. When I accompanied my family to Greece, as a child, I was the one trying to force my parents to visit each available set of ruins. In order. As much as I could figure. I was the one who planned our Metro trips through Paris at ten, so we could cram the most possible activities into each blessed day.

So, in an ideal world, I’d be staying in the cheapest available hostel listed in Lonely Planet’s USA on a Shoestring. I’d be visiting each attraction, each restaurant, each museum, preferably in order listed. I’d be shopping at Dave Eggers’s pirate shop at 826 Valencia, eating at all of the best ramen joints in the city, ordering a handmade $10 ball jar of sangria at a “speakeasy,” and heading towards a different show of a new unheard-of band each night.

As much as I wanted to do a Lonely Planet version of San Francisco, I more wanted to be among these amazing trees, this stunning landscape. Vistas scraped with yellow, mammoth white pines looming, pulling themselves up out of the green moss with the strength of eons. They’re not quite redwoods, but everything here feels bigger, grander. Even though I know it’s younger. The more mammoth something feels, the younger I know it is, the closer to its evolutionary forebears. Maybe as we human beings get older, we’ll get smaller, too, or maybe the ants will just take over after we decimate ourselves.

I’m older now, too. Still able to climb two miles straight up and stealth camp after dark. I’m excited about my new little notebook, about carrying it with me the next week, about pretending that this one week is an actual thru-hike instead of just a meager imitation. Looking at the looming trees, thinking about how many years older than I am they are, I want to move inside of them, love them every single day.

Could it be edible?

The night aimed shadows through the crossbar windows

Flowergirl

Bridegroom and sister, both serious

Groomspeople

Bride

After the fete

You’ll still hear me singing

Angel Island

I’m sitting in a guest room, looking out on the San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge gleaming under a full moon. One of the things I was worried about, abandoning my trip in the Sierra, was that it left me without a place to stay in San Francisco this week. I was flailing about, discovering that rental cars in California cost $60 a day and campsites $25, hostels $20 a head, etc., only to have a good friend’s sister call and invite me to stay in her guest room. It’s yet another strand of the web of synchronicity that’s been woven around me by the writers’ group I joined in Chattanooga last fall.

I was just telling my dinner companions this evening about it: I met Ellen, my first Chattanooga friend, at an event at an organic grocery and café on the North Shore, and she connected me to this larger community of artists in the area, a community that has continued to spread outward, now connecting me all the way to the Left Coast. So today I spent the day wandering around the bluffs of Point Reyes Seashore, watching elk graze on the yellow hills, walking along the barren, wind-swept beaches, eating sandwiches among purple thistles and lupin.

My brother marries tomorrow, at a vineyard looking out onto the mountains, the bay, and the city. This is, after all, the reason for my vast trip cross-country, my adventure from Tennessee to Virginia to Michigan and thence to California. To give my brother away, in spirit if not literally. It’s a difficult thing to watch my baby brother separate himself from my family and create one of his own.

I’m afraid of losing him, for real. I’m afraid of losing the closeness we have now. I’m afraid that in a way he won’t fully be my brother anymore, even though I know that's not true. But now he’ll belong to someone else, for better or for worse. There are always tears at a wedding, because it’s a rupture of sorts. A loss of one family, being traded for another. Tomorrow I have to let go of my brother. If I love him, I have to let him fly free.

Tell all the people

Backyard in Waxahachie

“What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the bottle.” --Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosopher o’ the day), last line from his second book, Philosophical Investigations

Maybe all it means is that Wittgenstein didn’t keep a very clean kitchen. Who knows? I’ve been thinking a lot about being honest lately. The older I become, the more important it has seemed to tell the truth, rather than keeping secrets. Maybe this concept is obvious to the world at large, but not always to me. In Thailand, we had a concept of naa tak, literally “face break.” The larger good was to keep one’s face from breaking. So the phrase “save face” had a literal interpretation.

I internalized this concept, to the point where I didn’t see little white lies as wrong at all, and in fact saw them as something that served the larger good. I’m changing my mind about that. In trying to protect other people’s feelings, I often end up manipulating them. Instead of being clear and up front, from the beginning, about what I want and what I need.

The counterpoint to honesty, the argument made against it, is that telling the truth causes pain. Apostle Paul says: “tell the truth in love,” and that seems the wisest course, but there are times when even telling the truth in love can hurt. For instance, here in this forum. I don’t know how many times I have shielded the truth, fearing to cause my friends and family pain. Even if I was doing my very best to do the opposite, to speak and write in love.

So I’ve decided to tell the truth about why I’m here, in Dallas. True, part of my motivation was that the Pacific Crest Trail was snowed under (despite being told that the snow was not clear in my last photograph. That grainy black stuff, across the river, behind me, fifteen-feet deep—all snow). But a friend found an alternate, lower-elevation trail for me—the Lake Tahoe Trail, a 200-mile trail circling the lake in the mountains. It was perfect. Just enough snow for an adventure, not so much that I feared dying.

Instead, I chose to come to Texas at the behest of my cousin, who has been struggling with a complicated pregnancy and the onset of undiagnosable and unspecified inflammatory bowel disease. She was in the hospital for three weeks, unable to eat, her digestive system revolting against her fetus, and without any doctors able to figure out what’s wrong. She’s much better now, thank God, on better drugs, but is without family here and needed someone to come take care of her. Her suffering is real, true suffering, and in its face I don’t know much what to do except shake my fist.

If I said it has been easy, I would be lying. It’s almost unbearable watching someone you love ill, in pain, nauseated, depressed, crying, unable to find comfort. She has good days and bad days, and I think I’ve done some good during my stay. She has gained ten pounds since I arrived, not quite up to my stated goal of fifteen, although I do have three days left. It’s amazing what adding butter and cream to everything will do. Her color is better, and she has more and more good days, fewer bad days.

The hardest part has been dealing with the emotional pain. I’m good at managing prescriptions, driving to doctor’s appointments and asking difficult questions, cooking fat-filled meals, reasonably good at keeping a clean kitchen and toilet. But for all my big talk about love, I don’t feel very good at sympathy. How hard it must be for her, healthy only last year, and now feeling so powerless, unable to work in or out of the home.

I feel selfish even talking about any difficulty I’ve had. It hasn’t been easy giving up three weeks of hiking, knowing I may be giving up my chance for a solo adventure this summer, knowing I may not be able to get more vacation time. But I couldn’t put myself first. My family needed me, and I was able to meet that need.

I’ve learned a lot about myself, too. My last post was heartfelt. Doing dishes, you may remember from the boat, has never been my favorite task. But if that’s how I can help someone in pain, then that’s what God asks of me.

It brings me back to questions about love. How do I balance the need to love others with my need for self-preservation, my need to do what I’ve been called to do? While I do dirty dishes, my writing is on the back burner. I am so much better at giving other people what they need than I am at asking for what I myself need, another part of honesty.

How can I balance the love for others, Christ’s central commandment, with carving out time for myself and my dreams and hopes and goals? A question I’m not going to be able to answer today. A question as difficult as getting that darned fly out of its bottle.

Tuesday I head back to California for my brother’s wedding. I was able to extend my return to Chattanooga by a couple of days, so I may get some hiking done on the California coast next week. I hope I’ll be able to get a couple of hiking posts in after all.

Come on, give me the keys

Today, philosopher o’ the day is Aristotle. His first book was called “Physics,” or the study of all that is. His second was titled “After Physics,” or “Physics II: The Sequel,” which has come down to us as “Metaphysics.” Funny that all of our talk of metaphysical nonsense comes from a sequel that should have ended up with a better name.

Why, you may ask, is your favorite and much-esteemed blogger so obsessed with philosophers these days? It’s not so much obsessed with philosophers as their philosophy, she may answer, cheekily. In these last two particular cases I’m particularly concerned with the idea of the real versus what is beyond the real. Because these ideas end up being very important in day-to-day life.

For instance: there are the dirty dishes to do. And there is the idea behind doing the dishes. But what is more important? Doing the dishes, or the idea of doing the dishes? Physics, or metaphysics?

Thich Nat Hanh, the Buddhist thinker I’ve referenced before, has as his central concept mindfulness. One of his favorite metaphors is the necessity of mindfulness as one does the dishes. Mindful of one’s hands moving in and out of the water, mindful of each act, of each movement. Mindful while cleaning the toilet. Mindful while folding the laundry. And why? Because that’s what we spend most of our time doing. Most of our time is spent on these boring, mundane aspects of existence, and what we are called to do is move through them mindfully.

As now: Breathe. I am typing in a Word document. I am listening to Bob Dylan. I am sitting in bed with a blanket around my knees.

As much as I spend the life of the mind consumed by the thought of love, by what it means to be a good Christian, by metaphysical concepts, often these ideas boil down to doing the dishes. Plunging my hands into soapy water. Washing them because I love the people who ate off of them. Chopping vegetables to feed mouths I care about. Listening to the stories and feelings and hopes of the people carried into my life.

My mind’s not right

Me and the snow

My belief in the noumenal realm of Kant has been renewed, thanks to my recent visit with Mike the statistician. I can speak freely of Mike the statistican, since the odds of him ever happening across this website are nil to none, the main reason I feel so much more freedom talking about people distant from me than from those close. It was a pleasure to have that vocabulary renewed for me, the vocabulary of Kant. His language for describing the universe is among my favorites, but I always feel vague embarassment when using it, as it seems pretentious and forced.

But they are beautiful, and necessary, words. We have the phenomenal, the realm of the actual, matter in motion. Things we can see and feel and touch and measure. And we have the noumenal, the realm of everything else, just as real. All of us know that second realm is there, all of us except scientists, maybe, and statisticians.

I’ve never found better words for those two parts of reality. Acknowledging their existence begs a whole series of additional questions. What do I have faith in? What do I believe? Do I only believe in things that can be measured and quantified and counted? Or do I believe in the noumenal realm, too? And if so, how? How do I make decisions in that other realm beyond the reach of science?

The specific context of that conversation was the difference between quantitative psychology, hypotheses about human behavior that can actually be measured and tested, and psychologists like Jung, my personal favorite. His exact words were: “Jung is bull.” At which point I disagree. I believe there is a profound use for the world of matter in motion. If we measure things, and test them, we can learn a lot about the world. But there is also a place for those who observe reality and that make observations about it, based on this other realm, the realm of the noumenal.

I’ve been discussing my faith a lot lately, and I find the division between those two realms useful in discussing it. Because faith is just that—faith. I can have no proof for the things I believe, no scientific evidence, because faith exists in a completely separate place, the place of the noumenal. The key is to keep one’s rationality just as alert in both realms. Just because there’s no scientific evidence of the things I believe, doesn’t mean that there’s no evidence. It’s just evidence of another sort.

I suppose my posts for these weeks are a lot different from what a lot of people were expecting, including myself. I expected to be writing about snow and blisters and ramen noodles. Instead, I’m writing about esoteric philosophers. Maybe I’m dealing with my disappointment by dissolving myself in the world of ideas. One of my many bad habits.

Abel

In this life, it can be as hard to find validation as a single woman choosing not to have children, then it can be to find validation as a married woman choosing to be a homemaker. I know that fact, of course, but I don’t always realize it consciously. My cousin and I have been having long conversations about the role of women in our culture, and she has expressed the belief that our society’s prevailing attitude is “feministic,” where I am usually of the opinion, as all of you well know, that it is “misogynistic.”

About validation: it’s one of these things that I know isn’t necessary, but it doesn’t make it any easier to live without. I want affirmation and celebration of the choices I’m making, even if my conscious mind knows that expectation is entirely unrealistic. As time passes, as people question my choices, I realize that validation is something that’s never going to happen. Trying to redefine marriage, for instance. Or femininity. Or success.

I’m feeling melancholy today. Maybe it’s the BP oil spill, which makes me want to spew profanity at a rate equal to the spewing well. Maybe it’s my email, which refuses to work, even after hours of effort, and I know I should just give up and switch addresses or programs or something, but at this point I’ve wasted so much time on it I don’t want all of it to be in vain. Maybe it’s just feeling so completely out of step with all of the women in my life, almost all of whom, every last one, are pregnant. And I am not. And don’t want to be.

I’m realizing, though, that this being out of step isn’t going to get better. It’s just going to get worse. Every year that passes, my life and theirs will diverge farther and farther from each other. The center cannot hold.

I found you, flightless bird

Imagine, if you will, a plane flight to Texas, banking above the desert after three weeks in ten square feet of my brother’s Acura. I’m recrossing the land driven by us on hours and hours in the car, hours and hours of listening to Iron & Wine, The Avett Brothers, Townes Van Zandt, Johnny Cash, and Highway 61 Revisited. At seven in the morning, driving through the corner of Minnesota, we tried to genuflect at the crossing of Bob Dylan’s favorite old highway. At a coal mine in West Virginia, we were told, “no f***ing pictures, you f***ing f***ot.” At the crossing of the Pacific Crest Trail, we trekked across sixteen feet of snow pack. We peed in pit toilets in the Nevada desert, learned colloquial Serbo-Croat in the long stretches of Nebraska, and drifted among water lilies in Wisconsin. It was an epic trip. It will go down in record books. Trust me on this one.

I’m being creative right now, even though I have two well-heeled and made-up Arizona women sitting beside me, talking about their Tiffany bangles and five-carat diamonds and the outfits they wear to their neighborhood Wine & Dine parties. It makes me uncomfortable. I asked my brother on our trip, whether or not he really believed the principle of no competition in yoga, a principle that I’ve begun to adapt to the rest of my life.

My brother made the point that competition, and desire, is probably what drove most successful people in the world. By the standards of the world, Buddha was not very successful. He was a penniless wanderer. As was Christ. And Saint Francis. By the standards of the world, none of them was successful, and it becomes a question of how we define success.

I am also a penniless wanderer, without success in the eyes of the world. I must be doing something right. I only aspire to follow in those footsteps, but I find it interesting that not only has almost every prophet in history chosen poverty, but each has also condemned wealth. Especially unexamined wealth.

It’s not that we’re wealthy, it’s that we have no idea how wealthy we are. We think this kind of wealth is normal. We think that it’s okay, that it’s sustainable. And it’s not. I imagine our grandchildren will be shocked that we jumped on planes at a whim, that we hopped in our cars and drove cross-country. We probably shouldn’t be doing these things that we’re doing. We probably shouldn’t be jumping in our cars or planes or trucks.

But what do we do? Turn down medical care and air conditioning and Coca-Cola? We probably should, but it’s not easy.