Notes from the Other Side #2

Is this a series? Another journal entry as I learn to root in

This piece is part 2 of (what might become) a series of journal entries around moving. You can read part 1 here. This particular entry was written a week and a half ago, two weeks into moving in.

I am in a depressive slump. Everything feels sloggy and heavy and I feel far away from people I love; many back in California, many in Canada by way of birth or immigration due to this current administration. I feel a pressure to understand where I am as if I’m looking at an an arial view of the region on a map. My office desk faces South, whereas it used to face North, and when I sit with clients and energetically reach in their direction, something I didn’t consciously realize I did until moving here, I’m left totally disoriented. I don’t know left from right or up from down. There’s a poetry in that my view used to face the direction we migrated in and now faces the direction we left. But I can’t find beauty or meaning in that right now. I’m too bogged in the slog.

Amidst my disorientation and desire to understand where I am directionally, I notice myself wanting to drive to more wild places than the suburban neighborhood I’m in. We have a fenced in yard. A boon with a young shepherd. But the landlord cut the trees “back” before we moved in. He proudly showed me as he gave me a house tour upon arrival. He thinks he’s caring for the cleanliness of the lawn. I think he’s maimed a friend. It brings up the memory of my grapevine, holly and mulberry trees, and rosebushes my former landlord in California, before the mountain, ripped out or cut back to an unrecognizable degree after we moved out. This memory lives in the back of my heart. The ache of it is too much to bear when I go into the backyard. So I avoid it. I want to know where I live, but I also want to drive away from it to be in the wild.

This ping-ponging of longing and disorientation is making it incredibly difficult to settle in, but today I took my first day away from any work. No professional work, no unpacking work, no homemaking work. As someone with a chronic illness I need days like this regularly. I am typically good at giving this to myself (after years of fighting this need). But amidst final paper writing, packing, moving, unpacking, work, and assignments for next quarter, this need has been a hard one to honor. Anyway today I had coffee in bed and sat on the couch in the “blue room” -named for how I’ve furnished the front room with a robin’s egg blue velvet couch, my library on custom painted bookshelves in a shade called agave frond, and a whimsical kingfisher blue rug with azure beetles, green leaves, brown and yellow speckled snails, and butterflies dotted with spots of lavender and lilac (I am so trying to bring the outside in). I sit here reading and snuggling with Bear, my afore mentioned shepherd, who lifts his head to watch neighbors as they walk by and drowsily rests it again in my lap after they pass. As I watch the walkers I’m struck by the realization that I haven’t taken a neighborhood walk yet. I’ve been so latched on to my desire to get to know the wild here that I haven’t gotten to know my immediate surroundings.

A large part of me rejects the suburbanality of this neighborhood. But it’s where I am. Here I am wanting to get to know the place I live, but avoiding it. So I decide to take a walk around the block.

Living on the mountain, the air is thin at 6,300 ft above sea-level. My illness affects my lungs, and when hiking on the mountain I had to carefully monitor my lung capacity. If I lost my breath, I couldn’t catch it again. This was another layer of the hardness of that land, one I thought I’d adjust to; and though I did a lot of physical healing in that place, this was something my body never quite adapted to. New symptoms have arisen recently, and I wondered how this move would affect my system. Cautiously, we walked a beautiful scenic trail our second day here and I was stunned to notice how rich the air is with oxygen here. I could lose my breath and catch it again! I didn’t have to monitor my lungs with such diligence, which meant I could focus on the pleasure of feeling my muscles! But those of us which chronic inflammatory illnesses know we have to be careful not to push ourselves too hard or we will “flare”. A flare, if you aren’t familiar, is when your symptoms ignite in the body and you’re knocked out for a bit while you recover. This usually happens after a period of too much strenuous activity, stress, an allergy, or environmental triggers. Flares can last anywhere from a few hours to a few months. Mine usually peter out after three days, sometimes sooner. In any case, the elation of oxygen is tempered by my need to pace.

Living in various neighborhoods in Los Angeles I would purposefully let myself get lost. I would walk for miles getting to know the streets, the shops, the landscape, and the people. It was a spectacular way to get to know a place. I smoked back then and would often stop every few blocks to share a cigarette with a bartender on a break or a shop owner just about to close up. I was invited into people’s houses for tea, or to meet their cat, or to see the garden beds in their backyard. Darker invitations offered and accepted as well, of course. I had a fearlessness in me that wanted to be catapulted all the way into my experiences. And if I flailed or got lost or got hurt I felt exhilarated at the challenge of setting things right again. I liked feeling my resourcefulness, my competency, my instinct. I liked living intensely and enjoyed the very particular feeling of losing my footing, being in some degree of danger (often a reckless degree of danger if I’m honest), and relying on the sense of something bigger, older, wiser, more animal reaching up to inform me of what to do next. I believe those of us who were un-mothered share this urge. It was, of course, an unsustainable way to live. But boy was it an effective way to thread myself into a place.

These days I move through that process differently. Experience, age (which I say as a badge, not as a deficit), working through various traumas, chronic illness, and really simply becoming who I am, have changed the way I am in relationship to the world. It’s less verbal now. Growing from my sense of my roots and ensoilment myself rather than grasping up and out for a charge to prove to myself I’m alive.

Anyway all of this makes the prospect of a neighborhood walk very different.

Mindful of my capacity and that I want to walk in the Procession of the Species on Saturday as a salmon, and will need energy and stamina to do so, I set out to walk a few blocks. Parts of this place remind me of Pasadena/Altadena with bungalows, flourishing gardens, “Free Palestine” graffitied on electrical boxes. I feel a loving ache here. The familiarity of something you’ve once known but know you’ll never really know again because it’s fundamentally changed. Lots of flags. Too many American flags, but also a flag that just has planet Earth on it. One that has the image of a Siamese cat, only to find three Siamese cats lazing on the porch underneath their flag. That is their house. They have enchanted their humans. So many beautiful trees: cherry blossoms in bloom, alder, maple, some cottonwood. Others I don’t recognize but sense are a kind of cedar. Everything is green and fresh and new, not in a tender fragile way, but with the exuberance and curiosity of youth. Flowering rhododendron which grows in front of my house, and is the state flower of Washington, grows abundantly absolutely everywhere and sprays of tulips are deliberately planted around trees in front yards. The Pacific Northwest feels a little bit like England in this season. I turn a block and enjoy seeing houses deliberately built around gulches (is this what they’re called?) that flood when it rains. Another block suddenly has less trees and smells like plastic and asphalt and the houses are all the same shape, all have their own mailboxes, and are either grey, grey-blue, or grey-green. An old unseen dog sees me and lets out a baleful bow-wow. I’m glad this isn’t the street I live on but feel uneasy that it’s just a few blocks away; housing tracts like this feel infectious to me. And then I reach a forest entrance with a “no trespassing” sign. I ignore the sign, on principle, but only enter this little forest a few feet since I can already feel my energy reserves are nearly spent. I can feel the beckoning of getting lost.

I snake around to another block to find more flowering trees, a colorfully painted lending library, and neighbors tending to their vegetable plots in their front yards. That familiar ache again.

This little tale doesn’t end with something magical or revelatory. I made my way back to my yellow house- more flags, more flowers, some kids on bikes (surprising for noon on a Wednesday in a place like this). Maybe my explorations can spiral outward slowly. Slowly getting to know these homes and the beings around and in them. I’m trying to trust that slow and uneventful little excursions like this will aid me in feeling like I’m home.

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If you’ve read this far, thank you for meandering with me. I’m hesitant to give myself an assignment, but may turn this into some kind of series. Documenting this is soothing something in me and making me feel less alone. Can’t promise anything! But appreciate your willingness to accompany me here.