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.