I appreciate home and train

Life is a whirlwind that incessantly howls, oh so lowly, in my ear. I exist during the quiet hours, sprawled in my bed (yes, I'm sleeping on a bed again). I trace the rolling quiet during cigarette breaks--now coloring breaks complete with crayons and underwater critters. But it's much too cold in Wisconsin to slip outside for a concentration on color. My bed is five hundred miles away, and no bed--or space reserved for sleeping--gives me peace like the one I am accustomed to. I get claustrophobic with too many people (or even just one) focused on me, and I need that rescue of clarity and solitude.

It's been a long time--well, since spring--since I've really blogged, and naturally a lot has happened since then. I wouldn't know where to start, and frankly don't have a mind to.  I've been so homesick since early summer. I fell in love with Leise--we were going to have babies together one day, we said--and the homesickness was dulled. But it did not fully disappear, and, when things ended between us, it snuck back around to nudge me at the most unexpected moments. Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and, though nothing about its foundation makes me thankful, and so thankful to be sitting where I am.

A fire softly flickers to my left. My parents expanded their (new) house with a dining room made of cedar walls and ceiling, skylights bringing in the outdoors during sun-filled hours. The pool room has been finished, with a cement floor that heats the pool. My favorite part is the hot tub, looking out the many windows into the (near)neighborless expanse. That room has cedar walls and ceiling too. It looks like something out of a dream or magazine. And the kitchen with fridge full of food makes me itching to play.

It's not just the place though. The safety of the country--and with parents sleeping nearby--is folded over me like the warmest, lightest blanket. When I go to sleep, I don't worry if someone will try to break in. Not that those worries normally take up all my time, but when Terra isn't home when I climb in to bed--well, I pay attention to the noises outside our door till I remember how to fall asleep. Sometimes, I forget.

It's 11:11. Did you make a wish? I'm making wishes. Home is lovely, but I can't come live in this tiny town. Work beckons me back, and so do my last semseter of classes (for now. more about that later). It's tempting though, to shake it all and stay where the fridge is always bursting with organic fruit and vegetables. Where I am sought out. Where I have a history. A family. Close connections.

I have many random friends--lovely friends with lovely dreams--in Lincoln, but not many core connections. No real best friends. And I thrive with best friends. Or at least I feel like I'll thrive with the ability to meet new ones--new faces, stories, and ways of interacting. Lincoln feels more tiny and hollow as I get to know it, but I don't know understand how that can happen simultaneously. What I'm looking for--the community of people I'm looking for--I think will be found in other places. Or I need to go to other places to find more pieces of myself, really. Then maybe I'll discover those people have been, and always will be, all around me--in the every day life.

 I'm thinking of Madison after my lease ends in October. Or maybe finding a farm over the winter that I can wwoof on that provides a stipend (pesky student loans), then Madison in the spring when more places will be hiring and apartments opening up. I'd certainly like to live with roommates, but don't really know anyone in Madison anymore. Plus, we've all changed so much that even if they still lived there we'd be play the part of strangers. I actually love strangers--like the boy on the bus who studies art in Chicago and is leaving for Indonesia soon to help with a friend’s art school--but right now I'm yearning for the kind of strangers that see the world similarly to how I do. Or at least hold similar desires in how to interact with it. Symphony of Science's We Are All Connected and Matisayhu's One Day pretty much sums it up. And many Rebelution songs.

You know, all the corny "all you need is love" crap. Except it's not crap. It's legit, and seriously missing from society today. What ever happened to community? It's pretty much my new quest--to find, to build, understand, to reclaim.

So I'm starting with stolen moments to get my thoughts in order. It's only in the quiet that I can think, that I fully exist. And I want to learn to make my everyday filled with the peace and clarity of these moments. I want to be Present in my life, and not just get swept in the whirlwind (oh society, and all the evils that we have made you). I want to Live. And really, deep down, who isn't earning for the same?

rocky mountain dreams