Peregrinations

I'm perched at this upstairs lounge at a an odd little café in Monterey. There's free wifi here, and some quiet jazz, and the smell of movie popcorn because it's attached to a very non-chain little cinema, and the rooftops and sunshine are at my eye level. There's a pair of young white people teaching each other arabic at the table in one corner, a very california type oddball with perplexing dreadlocked facial hair and a burnt stare slurping an apparently endless tub of yogurt and grunting behind me, another guy waking from a snooze on the sofa to speak loudly and an unfathomable language on his cellphone -- russian?

The surf at the Asilomar state beach is roiling, and so many nodes of life twining together. Here, with F, our first shared taste of the ocean we both love so much and yearn to live within a touch of. Echoes of my lost prof and friend John, a Steinbeck scholar, my memory of Steinbeck's depictions of tidal pools my first real understanding of fractals, life in miniature and large at the same time. Walking this street with L two weeks ago, eating well and expanding mind into the next space as a thinker, scholar, what my work is. Learning to be peaceful with the echoes of F's history, knowing that this is a well-trodden space for him, that he'd shared it with so many other people, learning to put those stories into a place that shows me how he became who he is, here with me. Writing a paper that synthesizes my scholarly "journey," how I came to situate myself right here, this moment of self and mind and worldview.

So many strands that point to the question -- how do we come to live the lives we're living right now, be the people we are right now? I'm in this poised, privileged place, high vista vantage point on my history, choices I made, life I made from the bifurcation points, assimilating all of that into how I want to be next. Sometimes it's so transcendental -- how is it I am lucky enough to have found, at this moment, space and resources in my life to flit about from landscape to landscape, be with a man who challenges and affirms me in the most profound ways, have work in front of me that sharpens and pushes me... it's a perch of a completely different level of awareness, movement, choices... and it's overwhelmingly powerful... and sometimes so BIG that I just pause, unable to figure out how to keep moving my feet without stumbling or tripping. Steady huge waves, thrumming and unceasing, carrying forward, making me so tiny and so strong at the same time.

Feet on cork, heart in hand, facing forward

My friend J really loves to crawl into a tightly tucked bed and kick her feet gleefully free of the covers. She's generally a serious kind of person, that J, so mindful, so I love that image of her fluttering madly under the sheets, unfettered and delighted.

I get that. My version is the sound that my bare feet make when they slap the cork floors in my loft gently. There's an infinitesimal stickiness, a little suctiony noise, a little tiny thwack, a momentary caress between flesh and warm surface that is oddly grounding, distractingly meditative. It's this aural focal point, a pointer to a profound, quiet, listening-to-your-belly space.

I find this space in my loft, alone, especially when I've come home from somewhere. I haven't been home much lately -- Windsor, then Montreal, then California, then several days in ROC. Leaving again on Thursday. But when I'm suddenly, quietly, alone here, I can find a sort of suspended time, a chamber of heightened senses. Like in the quiet padding around, slap slap slapping in a whisper on my floors, I can hear things through the palimpsest of history, stories, stuck patterns, for the underneath, the elemental desire or need.

The most powerful sense memory of this was the night I arrived home from my time in Portland last spring. I got home, late, quietly alone after a long traveling day, the calm space of this flat open on a saturday night, humid hectic early summer toronto pulsing outside. I put some Josh Ritter on my itunes -- the quieter thoughtful stuff -- and walked around, barefoot, eating raspberry gelato out of the freezer, bite by bite off a big spoon. I felt simultaneously calmer, more poised, more awake,more full of possibilities, more infused with a kind of emotional chlorophyll than I'd ever remembered feeling -- simultaneously deeply satisfied and deeply yearning for something more. I was alive with having been in a west coast city that deeply suited me, able to write some important things, unfolding into a rich correspondence with F that had led to a decision to meet a week later, a connection I never could fully open myself up to until I was fully alone in Portland. All of these folded together, my feet in tactile contact with my floor.

I've lived here almost a year now. It's a rich space, open and forgiving. Warm, silent, space for the slap of my feet, listening to everything that I know how to hear. It doesn't feel like a permanent space -- just one to grow in, quiet grounding, knowing who I am at my most elemental, disheveled and joyful and *awake*. My most loving and strong.

I was reading a series of emails from three years ago, and I find it hard to find myself in those words, sometimes. Articulate, held together, so certain. Now I find myself rarely certain... but confident, knowing, feeling sure through my body right to the palpable contact of foot on floor.

Fieldnotes.

LAX, noon.

Allowed myself to be rerouted (thus courting rebooking pitfalls) to gain a voucher for free travel on United anywhere in US in next year. All good until I went to check in at Air Canada for LAX -- YYZ flight and discovered that United agent in Santa Barbara had given me a TICKET but had not booked me on flight. Much Clucking and Blaming from an oddly eyebrowed agent later, I'm at the gate.

And puzzling. So now you can bring liquids and gels in your carryon if they are "less than 3 oz each" and all packed together in a quart-size ziplock see through bag.

I had a ziplock freezer bag that had in it an almost empty thing of toothpaste (normal size) and one TINY tube of prescription cold sore ointment. Nothing else.

The guy at the SB security said my ziplock bag was too big -- it needed to be QUART size and mine was GALLON size.

I'm canadian. I don't know from quarts and gallons. And I pointed out that the idea was that I could have that MUCh, right, not what size the BAG actually was, and said bag was actually ALMOST EMPTY, and wasn't the whole point of the bags so everything was in one place, which mine was?

No. My choices: dump toothpaste and $90 tube of zovirax; put shoes on, retrieve computer and go to back to gift shop and BUY A SANDWICH BAG.

Luckily, I had in my purse a small sandwich bag I had ibuprofen, dramamine and advil cold in.

So I shoved my toothpaste in that and he allowed me through.

Charmed life

Another week in CA, another collage of talk talk talk sun ocean ideas writing deep collaboration in my tribe. The inauguration of the week was a wonderful grounding -- Linda and I established a "first annual" ritual with a drive down the Big Sur coast that featured a lot of hiking, gabbing, dinner at the cliff edge watching the sun set over the pacific while we sipped our beverages of choice (mine a pinot, hers pretty much straight gin), peeking through the fence of the henry miller library, falling asleep amid the debris of a bottle of malbec, a gorgeous fire, wasabi peas, gummy bears and a bit of west coast bud and talk talk talk.

This is where I belong, this is where I'm alive, and so I'm coming back in two weeks with F. My life is about as good as it gets.

And in other mysteries...

Remember these?


The hosts my sister bought me in a depanneur in Quebec, alongside the ju jubes and sesame snacks?

My cleaner has been surreptitiously eating them.

Out of beta? Out of blog? Out of fog?

There's a header now on this blog infrastructure about being "out of beta" on the new techy platform. In parallel, I feel like I'm out of blog steam. Have been so RUSHED in so many ways, that I just puffed out of energy in a lot of ways.

I'm still wracked with the residue of some respiratory virus my otherwise adorable babyniece inflicted on me when she coughed in my MOUF over the holidays in Windsor, a virus that I toted hither and yon around the province, across the wee ferry to take Porter Air to Montreal for New Year's with F, scattered widely across that city and then left lodged in F's lungs for his trip back to western NY. Now I'll take it on a plane to CA tonight, where it will trail with me from SF along a drive down the coast, through Big Sur overnight and onto Santa Barbara.

Where school awaits, and more recalibrating about my plans, my work, what AcademicCate really is and can become. Another committee meeting where I'm not ready to have my proposal approved, though they're a lot happier with me since I sent a note about my status and my thinking two weeks ago. It will be rich -- it always is -- and I'll ground in my tribe, and anchor myself a little.

So many suspended stories as 07 begins...where will it take me and F? will I be able to cobble together meaningful and lucrative enough paid work that lets me live my other two lives? how can I throw myself full force into school this year? Two days ago, the work path looked evident, but ow it seems this huge grant we were working on may be buggered up, and I'll have a lot more flexi time in the first quarter than I thought. The intrepid life of a consultant, as usual -- one moment it looks as though I might be able to earn enough for my whole year in the first 3 - 4 months, the next moments it's pffffted back into Ministry coffers and vanishes. Back to basic income, eking it out a bit, trolling for work, trying to focus the time productively to write.

This moment right before Winter Session for school is always a little fraught for me -- last year I was poised to buy my condo, to sever the going-nowhere, energy-sucking relationship with T, to try to refocus my academic work after a year where I just milled about, really. I'm in such a different place now -- life stories being tentatively co-written again with someone complex who... feeds me.. in so many ways, so much more clarity about the field I want to play in, less angst about income even when opportunities surge and vanish, a loft that feels home-ish, even if not HOME yet. A really-makes-me-alive project with the orphans. A strong web of people scaffolding and stretching and buoying me. A body reasonably fit, though not at its peak. Places touched and felt over the year -- Portland, New Mexico, Oregon coast, Houston, Montreal, Santa Barbara, Vermont, DC, Vancouver, ROC, Ottawa -- and some across an ocean to be savoured in the coming year.

Still a bit edgy in all of this -- the sproinnnnng of a suspension bridge across a gorge, where you're really not *positive* that your backpack isn't going to tip you over -- but trying to just give over to the bounce, the spring.

And by the way?

My sister's comments on my peeping tom santa post? Hilarious.


-Any depictions created by religious factions who, having accepted the inextricability of Santa from Christmas, attempt to gain-by-working-WITH the secular fence-sitters, and show Santa happily working hand-in-hand with Jesus. No matter how they try, it just always winds up really really creepy. These Santas never seem wholesome, they seem like Santa got some favour from the mob years ago, took his time paying up until he found a reindeer's head in his bed, and is now shilling for Jesus only because of the unseen machete digging into his back, a look of terror always visible behind the forced smile in his eyes.