Sand dollars

My orientation to my school program was a week in Santa Barbara in March 02. It was my first experience of SoCal, and I sat on the beach, scrawling in my journal that I felt AWAKE for the first time in memory.

At the end of that week, I met up with an online friend who lived in the bay area, and we drove up the coast to Pismo Beach to meet another online friend. We went for a loooooooong walk. The wind on my face and the cool sand under my bare feet seemed to be tapping out a new language for me -- the pacific, and connections, and unuttered possibilities.

I have a picture of me from that walk, somewhere -- probably 3 hard drives ago -- clutching an intact sand dollar I picked up on pismo. I'm wearing a pale blue, very california, Life is Good tshirt with a yoga logo and "stay centred" on it that I'd bought that week in SB. I look... delighted. And I'm holding the sand dollar loosely, unaware of how fragile it is, and how it would crumble by the time I got it home.

That shirt also turned out to have a paradoxical quality to it -- it became iconic for me, mutating into a night shirt when it got tattered, and then a cleaning rag, about six months ago. An admonition that I never quite heeded. The walk on the beach was a thread into a relationship that cracked open what I took for granted about my life, cracking that I needed so much that I got a bit blind to who it bruised. Not so centred, but so critical.

I spent last week in Seattle, exploring possibilities for the next life, mailing off the final version of my dissertation in tandem with J, making it an act of mutuality that nicely encapsulated how this process has unfolded. Mostly me, but with such an assortment of companions who showed up and filled in the colours at so many important junctions.

I can't see the way through to what comes next... there's no set narrative in any way. I want -- I need -- to be by the ocean and the mountains. It's how I need to spend the next part of my life. But it's not moving for a job, or a relationship, or for pure adventure. It's trying to find a way to translate the pull of the pacific that made me feel so awake 6 and a half years ago in a frame for a life. With a lover and work and ideas all threaded in, me at the centre.

F and I went for long walk on an open ocean beach on saturday -- I'm not even sure which one, really -- I was driving, not navigating. It was initially a thin substitute for a mountain hike we'd hoped for but had to scuttle because of a virus he had. But it turned out to be the wind and fog and sand I needed. And this time, I found two perfectly intact sand dollars, and managed to get them home in one piece.