Connectedness

The gentle walls are white and white and white, and I want them to stay that way. Clean and crisp as the graceful lakes that populate this land, this third home. Sweet fronds swept up from an orientation centerpiece bend under my fingers, practiced from a dozen Palm Sundays spent folding leafy crosses, until a living shape, the only one, I think, appears. The intersection of two planes, where the human flat line gains depth and stunning significance, the point from which sense and sensation fly along four endless arms to order the mind according to the most real reality. How strange then, that this shape should be rendered by my fingers and by those of so many others.

I wish I could articulate the wildness and wonder that characterize my return to school. No place else stresses and strengthens me the way this one does, but I like what being here does to me. I drink in the perpetual discussion of the things of the mind, relish the attention of my friends, lose myself in new books and the anticipation of brilliant classes with favorite faculty. How can there be only nine months left?

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Spilling Wind

The narrow hulls porpoise, slapping noisily through the chop stirred up by a restless wind. Stray waves wash sloppily over six sqare feet of canvas, curious fingers of heavy blue lake water that slosh, bored, around our legs before trickling away over the rudders. My freezing fingers clutch the tiller bar more tightly as the boat picks up speed and the dagger boards begin to sing, thrumming as they vibrate through the water at fifteen knots, maybe, but the lee hull isn’t submerged yet; we can edge a little more speed out of her. Keeping my eyes fixed on the nose of the pontoon, I pull the catamaran until she’s running at a 45-degree angle to the wind, and the hum increases in volume as the wash spilling over the rudders churns white. The pitching slows and then stops as the sails stiffen and the boat begins to cut through the waves instead of rocking over and under them. The sensation of controlled, powerful motion roils together with the rush of wind and the roar of the wake and the song of the dagger boards, roiling into a heady mixture of sweet, efficient intoxication. I lift my eyes to the dome of swishy cloud and smile, thrilled. Without warning, the hull dips, the surface of the water falls up to meet and swallow me, and suddenly the world hangs on an edge, the thrum stops and the sails swing and I shove the tiller away, panicking at the loss of control, spinning the boat on a dime, into the wind and a sudden halt. I turn to my dad, wide-eyed, and he chuckles, tugging at the mainsheet. “Guess we should spill some wind, hey?”

My first entry from home comes saturated with the sound of rain on a gravel road and the smell of wet pine.

I left the city and a rising contempt somewhere in the Chicago airport, feeling tears prick my eyes when I touched down between cornfields. Twelve hours later I was well on my way to the Upper Peninsula and out of reach, spinning over gently curving highways that led me between cherry orchards and rivers, over the Bridge and along the sandy dunes and inexorably North, until I found a tiny Lake Superior town that seemed to hold everything I could ever want: wild blueberries and apples, which we picked by the gallon, wilder beaches, where 15-foot swells rocked barren dunes and railed against stubborn breakwalls, icy waterfalls whose heavy streams washed away the disbelief I’d learned while away, careful trees under which to sleep away our freshwater exhaustion, and two housefuls of friends and families all mixed up into a tender frenzy of raised voices and comfort food.

It took a day or two to get the feeling of being clean back, to scrub the city grime from my fingernails and to adjust my sight to long, living distances again. I can’t say enough about the beauty of this place, about all the different colors in a plank of a weathered dock, about the impossibly clear water or the sweet yellow sand, about the way fall is coming already and the difference that it makes in different parts of my gorgeous state. Here, oaks and pines curve over me and I feel safe, dashing barefoot between tiny houses that I know and have known; I can sleep at night, covered with the sound of the rain and the steady love of my relations. Here is a sense of place and the possibility of peace.

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Re-post, in honor of my last week in the city

Reposted: “Hasta que puedo pintarme de colores …” (Originally posted 12 March 2010)

There are moments when you realize that you’ve become comfortable. They happen during in-between times – when you’re balancing on the curb, absentmindedly counting the seconds until the light changes. When you realize you’ve memorized your new telephone number. When you’ve woken yourself up without the need for an alarm.  When you’re shoving your apartment windows open. And then you remember that a comfort level in this place was something you never wanted, never expected to have. An airplane slides into view, and you find yourself wondering crazily whether you can catch it if you run.

I’m beginning to realize that it’s true, what my mom explained to me on the phone the other night. I’m never going to be able to do the same thing for too long – I’ll always be after the next big adventure or new challenge, which is probably why I spend so much time idealizing quiet days at home.  “You and dad wrecked me,” I told her, laughing. All the extracurriculars and summer camps and travel and internships that they made possible for me also made it so that I’ll never be able to hold still.

I’ll continue to orbit, though, the way I do now: always roving, but never too far from home – at least, not for too long. My family and friends and forests and rivers and lakes call me back again and again, and it’s the love for these that gives me pause, that makes me shrink from this place which has coated itself in asphalt and political rhetoric,  rejecting the things that make it a place at all. Their memory strengthens my resolve. I won’t bend to the process, won’t fit myself into cubicles and campaigns – I’m here to topple the spiritual challenge I’ve erected for myself. I will walk into this city, the one that scares me and smothers me, and live, carrying silence and smooth stones through my days. They won’t be able to catch me up, to sweep me into their ugly cadence. They won’t find me locked in an office or stumbling out of a bar – I will burn out a place for myself, and it will spill grace into the grid. And when I start to encounter reasons to stay,  I’ll throw my head back  and run until the ground beneath my feet sings of the North and no regrets.

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Houses, Not Homes

Amy’s car hums cheerfully along the expressway, matching the curves of the surrounding traffic until we’re one of a whole, hot, mechanical flock that spools along under the six-thirty sun. Her steady gaze finds my face in the rear-view mirror for an instant before Sam swivels in her seat to capture my attention, her great liquid eyes turned sparkly and snapping from the smile that her mouth just can’t manage by itself. Scott’s vision is keen, and it brushes up against my face every now and again when he turns his head to split a joke with me. The smallness of the speeding space into which we’re all folded is made large and laughing and beautiful around our wonder, branching out of hearts full of blue skies and the things of the Lord.

My bedroom is in better shape than the inside of my head, though only somewhat; in both cases, the order I’d created and left in neat stacks has been severely compromised, though not completely ruined. Two suitcases and the desk chair contain much of the physical clutter, but the book, notebook and laptop left open on the bed remind me of how much mental clean-up remains. I’m pointedly ignoring the box on my cell phone that reminds me that I have new voicemails and text messages to address, but this little light’s battery-powered persistence will burn this resolve away in a matter of hours. My heart, at least, is full and focused, so I dismiss the stress in favor of fresh vegetables and a familiar book. With five days left in the city, these are almost certainly my last precious hours of silence and stillness.

It occurs to me that I’ve never blogged from anywhere outside DC before. I wonder what will change.

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Slow Circles

The pool is tiny, perhaps only half the standard 25-yard length, and rests quietly in a plain room exhausted by the hot glare of neon lights. Its diminutive  proportion is underscored by the excess that characterizes every other aspect of the hotel in which it lives, but these judgments trickle more quickly away with each step. Weighty liquid, a presence in itself, brushes up against its containing edges and over, dominates the space, commands my attention. I slip out of my shoes and go plunging below the surface, beyond the air and into a silken silence. Gravity melts and so does my tension as I drift out of a dive and into a submerged sprawl, letting go for an instant of the need to hold myself together. My vision and volition blur, so I shut my eyes until the stubborn surface pulls me steadily to itself, returning me sternly whence I came, back to the empty air above.

It’s funny, how things keep coming back to you. My father, whose world revolves around the water, raised a persistent water bug not far removed from the child who fancied herself an elegant mermaid and who had to be coaxed back to the dock and dry land at day’s end. Although competition lanes laid over chlorinated yards bear little resemblance to the lines that capture my dad’s next meal, we have in common those ties which secure the sails that sweep us over the vast faces of our own freshwater seas. And now the water follows me where ever I go. I can’t get over the way it glistens and glitters under the sun and over my skin, the tenderness with which it carries me and the raw fury with which it pounds the sands. Rain and the mere proximity to a body of water make me feel better, safer, closer to home.

Thus, needless to say, my week along the Hudson River was fantastic. The quick trip from my current abode on Capitol Hill to last summer’s stomping grounds was sudden and stunning, but I was surprised to find that Manhattan made me happy. The economics seminar for which I’d come left my head reeling with new frames for familiar concepts and my heart musing over the open invitations to visit last year’s friends at their homes in Guatemala and Peru. My teeth are happy, too – surrounded by hispanohablantes, they suddenly recovered my second language and delighted in a deluge of bright and busy Spanish chatter. It felt so good to sink into this wash of rhythms, which I’d had no occasion to engage since leaving school last winter. I liked being able to provide a rest for Adrian, his brilliant mind wearied by the constant necessity for translation. We mused over faith and reason during hours punctuated by Luciano’s charming and incessant teasing. Marys began planning my trip to Guatemala right away, and I laughed out loud when Diego  told me that I have a cute accent, delighted by his appreciation. I love this language and the people it brings like I love the waves and the places they wash.

I wonder what it says about me, that the two things I’m going to remember most about this week are my moments spent walking by the river or swimming in the pool, and speaking Spanish “like a normal person.”

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