Les Pays Bas/ Hiatus.

This may not come as a surprise to some, given my waywardness and wandering mind, but sometimes I feel lost.

Sometimes I feel like I am floating outside of everything.  I could have used a better word there, a more poetic one, but I like the practicality and all-encompassing-ness of 'everything.'  I feel simultaneously cloistered and adrift.  Anchored, but not anchored to anything.

And yes, I recognize that this is only my fault.  I make the decision, have made the decisions, that lead me from Point A to Point B.  I am far too willful for it to not be my fault. 

But anyway, here's where I am today: stuck inside of my head, outside of everything else; disappointed, fretted, and ever-mindful of the future and my place in it.  I am acutely aware that my writing has been sub-par.  I suspect it is because of the mountain of chemistry and geology that I've climbing over the past six months, but some things are cyclical and sometimes I lose it, them.  Sometimes I lose my beloved words and have to wait it out.  

For me, forcing language is like arguing with a zealot.  It just doesn't turn out well for anyone.  

So I am going to stop for a little while.  Until it comes back, I am going on hiatus.  From this blog; from the empty, accusatory journals; from the pen and the (s)word.   I won't write until I'm ready to and I won't allow myself to feel bad for not writing.  I won't weep over words that I am losing because tears won't accomplish anything.  

And until next time.  

Stay tuned... 

The Long Game.

I've reached that point in the term- Oregon State runs on a 10-11 week schedule rather than a semester system- during which I lose myself in a blind scramble to figure out how to either save the world, or extricate myself from it.

Seriously.

I feel a little bad for my husband because he's been though this before, and he's going to go through it again.  This is the same point during which I become morose, taciturn, and angry.  Angry like you would not believe.  It's the kind of anger that has me tucking my nails into my palms until I break the skin to keep from punching every idiot I meet.  It's the kind of anger that leads me to believe that most people I meet fall into the aforementioned idiotic category.

It is the kind of anger that I turn back on myself.  Because I'm smart.  But I'm not brilliant.  So I can't save the world... not the way I want to anyway.

And here's where I run into trouble- I get angry and I lose patience.  I lose patience for everyone and everything around me because I feel so alone.  I wonder why no one else cares the way I do (note: on an intellectual level I know this is not true.  I know that I am not completely alone and, in fact, there are many many many people who care and are equally as angry and frustrated as I am.  But recall I'm currently seething and emotional destruction seems so much more satisfying than intellectual qualifications).  I wonder how long it's going to take everyone else to figure out how incredibly irresponsible we humankind are.

And then I have to sit back and let despondency wash over me like so many waves in a vast sea of anxiety.  Yes, I am prone to thinking dark thoughts and feeling my way through hard times and tough situations.  So I'll get over this, too.

But not before yet another crack wrenches at my heart and wrecks my brain.

And it's not even finals yet.

Time Flies.

Weirdly enough, it is Facebook that sometimes reminds me how quickly time passes.

This morning, for example, it told me (because like Google, it is creepy and all-knowing) that six years ago today I set off for New Zealand.  For 42 days.

In those 42 days, my weight plummeted from dangerous to deadly; my mind fractured, knit itself back together, fractured again; I got my first tattoo; I cried until I felt dry on the inside; I was given a name that is not my own, that still feels foreign to me despite a great man's conviction that he was right (and by default, I was wrong); I met some of the most intensely alive, vibrant, and giving people I have ever met.  Ever.

I learned yoga.  I learned to teach yoga.  I learned to let go.

Still, sometimes those many days don't seem real to me.  Sometimes they feel like a dream I had that sustains me even while it shames me.  It feels like something I didn't do, but some other version of me did.

Some version of me that I still want to be- with thin arms and ragged ferocity.  With terror and honesty and lies; with creativity that exploded because of desperation.  I miss that version of me.  Beyond the disease that is my oldest, most unrelenting companion, I miss that version of me for her flagrant, bold insanity.  Never was my writing so raw, never were my feelings so scattered or simultaneously so underwhelming and so overwhelming.

Never was I so wild.  My journals from that time, this blog from that time, are uncomfortable but they are real because they are hers.  And because she is me and they are mine, too.

Sometimes those many days don't seem real and then sometimes it seems like they are too far removed from me.  That she is.

Time.

Just.

Flies.

Mizpah.

Here are some things you may or may not know about me.

I often become obsessed with words and I get lines of poetry stuck in my head the way others get songs stuck in theirs.

I am frequently far away.  In thought or in my actual physical being, I am often separated from the people and the places that I love.

I have tattoos.  I have tattoos of birds, runes, witches.  I have tattoos that depict ancient Celtic folklore and everyday nursery rhymes.  I have a tattoo on my foot that failed to take it's intended shape but that I'll likely never cover over or fix because I sort of like failed, burnt look of it.


No one... I mean no one... would accuse me of being a Christian.

I am (I think) an okay person.  I have morals and understand right, wrong, and the vast gap of space between the two extremes.  But I do not believe in the god that Christians believe in.  I do not have the same faith.  Nor would I propose to.

Which is why I am likely as confused as you are at this point when it comes to my utter obsession with the word, the concept, 'Mizpah.'

It is a Hebrew word which means 'watchtower' (which is cool enough on it's own to be totally honest) and yet historically it has taken on a meaning so much more than that.  Mizpah is a sort of emotional bond- a word that signifies care and keeping and ongoing love even when separated from it all.  And from everyone.  It is a way of saying goodbye with the hope and intent of seeing each other again, in good health and happy.  And right.  It is important.

But hang on, it gets better.

The Genesis quote in which it appears (yes.  Genesis.  The first book of the Bible.... I am, in fact, waiting for the lightning bolt to strike at any moment):

'And Mizpah; for he said, the Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another.'

There is something eerily beautiful and mesmerizing in that phrase.  Something that makes me want to jump in feet first and have it put on my body.  'watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another.'

I have always been hesitant to have words tattooed.  Runes don't really count.  At least not to my thinking; they are an ancient, unused language.  One for the gods and old time.  And the 'everyday nursery rhyme' I mentioned earlier?  I translated it into Runic before I had it tattooed.  So that was a thing.

But this- this would be something different.  This would override all of my ideal and young notions of TS Eliot lines as tattoos.  This would be a permanent reminder of all the people from whom I am parted; of all the time during which I am parted from them.  This would hearken back to a world that I willingly left behind.  This would be something different indeed.

And until next time,

Mizpah.

The Doldrums.

There is an area of the ocean called the Intertropical Convergence Zone.  It sounds complicated and terribly exotic but isn't really.  It is the region roughly between 5N and 5S where the trade winds meet, causing squalls and all manner of foul weather, but also where the hot equatorial air rises and keeps the world still for days, weeks at a time.

That stillness is the doldrums.

Sailors know it as such, poets know it as such.

Stillness, to me, is it's own sort of madness.  It's a quiet, low-scale, gnawing madness that strangles you slowly.  Stillness is my apparent nemesis.  It's why I'm so antsy all the time; why I can't do just one thing at a time but rather must do many things all at once; it's why I fidget and why I am a terrible patient.  It's why my knee bounces when I sit for too long and why long-haul flights feel like torture even as they feel like freedom.

It's why I like sharpness, speed, motion.  I like things to be vibrant and lively.

Stillness is madness.

This January is proving to be a test of my ability to withstand my own madness.  It seems like everything right now is standing impossibly still.  Like my whole life closed in on me and the walls of my cell are shrinking with it.  The wind has died, and my ship is failing.

And all I have to keep me company is the great grey sky.