6/2/2006 - This Crazy Time in Our Lives

Peggy: "You know, this is a really crazy time in our lives."

Me: "Oh my god! it's the craziest time in our lives! I'm only recently realizing how amazingly free we are... we can go anywhere... we can do anything... and we can take care of ourselves. What an amazing thing to realize."

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I am thinking, what is this, some sort of 'coming of age' story? Of course it is.

Will I look back at all of this that I've written, and what will it mean to me, then? I've noticed I write in questions a lot recently. Suddenly, I am okay with that.

Yesterday I sat looking into the shining moonpie face of my neuroscience advisor, watching the joy ooze from his pores as he recounted the day that his daughter called him, to tell him, "Daddy, I just realized something amazing- I just realized that I can go anywhere, and do anything, and that I will be okay, and that I will be able to take care of myself. I can wait tables, I can type letters. I can serve drinks, or rule the country. I can do all of it."

His eyes were shining as he told me, "Her mother and I of course had known this all along, we'd known all along that she was capable of taking care of herself. We'd never worried about that. But to hear it come from her mouth..." The pride radiated from every cell of his being. If I were not so proper, I would have dropped to my knees in awe.


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I am experiencing something I feel compelled to document... not so much as a personal history but simply because it refuses to be contained. I discussed love and spiritual awakening over boba tea with Karina the other day, recounting with wistful melancholy the circumstances of my recent heartbreak (because everyone always asks why Nick and I no longer talk).

She brought up something that should have been obvious to me, just like my conversation with Nikola had, and my many conversations with Bjorn, and with Kate, and Peggy, and Mike, and Karen and the many other luminescent reasons why I had to come back to L.A.

"If you were still with Nick," she said, "Would you be on this adventure, this crazy journey of yours? Would you be going to Maui? Would you be so free?"

I concluded that I would not. Pondering this later that day, I was looking in the mirror at my face, not so much out of vanity but more to confirm whether or not I was the same person. I pulled on my hemp necklace, the one I had woven at the sime time I'd woven Nick's necklace, and also knitted his guitar strap for his birthday two years ago. It has not come off since.

I turned it around on my neck to look for the knot, where it had been tied and couldn't find it. It was an endless knot of woven strings, all the loose ends had been worn off long ago.

I tugged it closer to the mirror, to get a better look at it... my resilient token of the past... and with a slight pressure on the back of my neck I heard it snap.. and I held it in my hand, this necklace that had been a part of me for two years.

I am a sucker for symbolism.

I smiled to myself, and removed the other two necklaces that I wore around my neck, looking at my naked collarbones, one of them crooked and broken from being hit by a car when I was thirteen.

All of this change. My eyes are wide open and suddenly, all of this change is so beautiful, and so infinite in its possibility. Suddenly I felt all of this love for the sweat on my skin from the too-hot sun, and for the tears on my face. I felt all of this love for the wrinkle on the right corner of my mouth from all the smirking I'd done in my life, and for the thin-ness of the skin under my left eye, where you could see a tiny vein, because I cry too much.

I type this to acknowledge today that this was not the manic ecstacy of a hormonal surge, or an unusually good day, but a turning point- if only symbolic... of emerging from the other side of the jungle.... even if only to immerse myself in yet another.



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What are mantras?

To me, they are simple little things that we say to ourselves, and to each other- to remind each other about things we already know. A while ago I asked Karen, who is even greater a nomad than myself, what she did when she ran out of money, and options.

"You always have your friends. Your friends are always there for you. Chances are, they have been in the same position as you, and they know that you will help them, when they need it- and when you have the means to help them."

I remember when Alexia said to me with a laugh, that "Life is a problem. That's all it is! I have faith that you will solve it."

And talking to Amanda about Maui, and about going there, with no prospect for a job, or a place to live, or a goal, or purpose- other than adventure:

"Just listen to what your heart tells you to do. If you heart tells you to come to Maui, just come, and come without fear of uncertainty."

Bjorn has reminded me, always, of what true responsibility is. I worry so much about being responsible, and doing the right thing. The night I quit my job, and bought my plane ticket to L.A., she had told me:

"Your first and foremost priority, your biggest responsibility is your responsibility to yourself. You have to take care of yourself, because this world is cruel and will not take care of you. Responsibility is taking care of yourself."

Carl has given me too many -isms to document all of them. But I will always remember recieving a text message from him, while looking at birds at the zoo, the day after I quit:

"I am so proud of you, and your strength and resilience".

If not for my writing this now, with glistening eyes, he may never have known how much that statement will always mean to me.

The capacity of a human being to love another, to feel pride for and to care for them- the capacity we have to become a family, or to connect- if only briefly- is a phenomenon to be reckoned with. There is a godliness to that wisdom shared, and that connection. There is a universality that is illuminated when all of the light in the cosmos shines from our eyes during these moments of realization.

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"To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful un-knowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.

The bright hours when the young rebelled against the descending sun had to give away to twenty-four-hour periods called 'days' that were named as well as numbered.

The Black female assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance."

- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings