I have arrived.

I pulled in right before 12:30am on Sunday morning, with Brando there to welcome me with a hug. It was just the two of us for awhile, which I think was the best possible arrival; we talked for almost an hour and a half about life, what I’m hoping to find here, how I’m okay with absolutely any schedule the guys might hold as long as I can stay here while finances are figuring themselves out. We talked about his marriage, about his heartbreak, and I’m happy I’m here so that we can adventure together and find our respective paths to happiness.

I’m going to go make a copy of the key today, and walk down to Pebble Beach since it’s so lovely and not yet raining and take stock on where I’ve transplanted myself.

I’m excited.

I’m ready.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

I'm sorry I haven't posted in awhile; it's been a very busy time.

I got the job in Crescent City, making significantly more than I'm making now. So, without hesitation, I accepted the offer and knew that in the three weeks before my start date I would need to resign from my current position, pack up everything I couldn't live without into my tiny Mini Cooper, and start somewhere new.

That's a big concept you know. Starting somewhere new. For someone like me who was born sixty miles from where I currently live and has only lived within that 60 miles their entire life, up and moving 800 miles on a whim and some hopeful grace has a lot of apprehension associated with it.

I am surprisingly calm. Mainly because I have this loving, bright, inexorable force of support from my friends and family. No one has whined about me moving. Everyone is smiling, and glowing, and squeezing my shoulders and saying "Good LUCK." Be the one that gets out of San Bernardino. Be the one that lights the way so we can leave too.

My friend Star gave me a lovely note that did, in fact, reaffirm everything I needed to hear, which was exactly her intention. She put one of my favorite poems with it, which is Our Greatest Fear by Marianne Williamson.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other

people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

And the last part punched me in the gut as I read, tears welling from my eyes. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. My loved ones see that and push me forward so that I can be that example, and I am beyond grateful.

It is because I am loved that I am able to dream so big. It is because I am loved that I have been able to accomplish what I have in this life and hope for more. As I have said before, everything I am and everything great I try to do is nothing but one huge living testament to the people who give so much to me.

Today I'm packing. I've done so little traveling that I only have three small duffel bags, so I'm running over to Goodwill to see if they have any cheap luggage. Of all the things I'm feeling though, fear isn't one of them. Neither is anxiety, really.

I am open and loving and joyous and grateful. I have enough gas money to get there and that's all that matters.

Ready. Set. GO.

The pre-beginning.

I have my first job interview in Crescent City on the 26th.

I plan on doing a bunch of other applications that you can only do in person while I'm up there too.

This thing is going to happen, and it's going to happen soon.

It's called being proactive.

I figure it's about time I'm proactive about something in my life that has nothing to do with responsibility and everything to do with happiness.

<3

Labor Day Escape.

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. Not the act of dying, or the inevitable realization of death, but rather the slow grinding away of your soul that makes you wish for something to end it. And really, that’s all death is: an ending. So, I want my current life to die. Croak. Kick the bucket. Be dead meat. DIE.

Because I want this chapter to end. This painful post-college graduation that is so stereotypically depressing…mundane, mediocre, bottom-feeding job that pays nothing and drives you to drink and want to trash your life just because you loathe what you’ve done with it.

My hair is falling out. Thinning by the handful. Every morning, I wash my hair and have 20-30 strands staring back at me, tangled in my fingers and my towel and I can feel them in the fibers when I dry my skin and I feel like I’m killing myself. That the stress I willingly inflict is assuredly killing my soul, and how could my body not react to that?

My conclusion to all of this madness is: escape.

Two of my best friends, Milla and Matt, my M&M, and I went to Humbolt this last weekend. It was Labor Day, my last three-day weekend of the year, and Milla is moving to Colorado soon and Matt is soon going to join us working stiffs and it felt like the last glorious chance to adventure for awhile. I’ve never been that far north on the coast; when I drive to Oregon, I go through central California, so driving up the 101 past San Francisco was a new experience. We arrive in Arcata, the small town our friend Kelly lives in, and we’re immediately laughing and catching up and talking about all of the fun things going on that weekend. His band, Silent Giants, was playing a show at a local brewery…there was a blues fest by the bay, street carnivals, farmers market, art walk, et cetera. Too much cool stuff for such a small place.

I felt my blood pressure dropping. I felt the urge to sit under a tree and writewritewrite, anything and everything. I felt like the physical manifestation of a Walt Whitman poem, leaving the hustle bustle of the city life that I value so highly for the rural town that I need so desperately.

I’m going to move. I need to be a wild rural American for awhile. I need to feel like Whitman.

The next day, Saturday, we go to a Creperie and have the most delicious shit I’ve ever eaten (rosemary garlic mashed potato with artichoke heart crepes…be still my heart). We walked around for hours, enjoying the small city center and going to amazing little stores that had the actual owners behind the counters. We bought books and beads and banana fiber yarn and smiled small smiles at the hand-written receipts and calculator-figured sales tax, always rounded a few cents down to be an even number. Brandon had come down from Crescent City to spend time with us, and it felt like we 5 were just another happy bunch in a city seemingly full of laughing parents of so many (SO MANY!) children, dogs, hula hoopers, dreadlocked hippies, musicians, street artists. Chalk drawings are everywhere. Weeds spurt from every sidewalk crack because the soil is so fertile, no one can keep it at bay. No one seems to want to, and the absolute absence of that frantic, stressed, high strung feeling is leaving me loose and flowing, like a lava lamp.

I can’t stop hugging them. I feel like my hand is constantly reaching out to wrap around Matt’s arm and pull him close so I can bury my face into his shoulder or hugging MIlla to me and pressing my lips to her hair. I grip on to Brando and Kelly when I walk barefoot in the freezing sand at the shore the following day, sliding down the dunes and laughing so fully I feel like I’ll lose my voice from it.

We climb rocks and wander to the mouth of caves and drive through redwoods and look at an elk herd, all because it’s there and free for our eyes and souls to take. The redwoods are commonplace for most of the people in my car except for me, and the idea is starting to be planted that I belong in a place that makes me marvel at God’s greatness everyday. I need to go. To get lost. Get gone.

We lay in our beds Saturday night, Brando and Matt in one and MIlla and I in the other, and laughter starts erupting and rolling around the room in waves and I can’t imagine being with anyone else at this place at this time. It’s a living breathing heaven. A vibrant soul burst of joy. Everything that makes this world beautiful and worth working for.

I’ve realized that death is staring me in the face every day. It’s the crazy trucker, the guy who casually talks about my impending rape, the tweakers who threaten to kill me in my office…the meek way I have to dismiss them makes me feel like death and I are in a staring contest and I’m averting my eyes because I’m not really living. I’ve never averted my eyes from a challenge in my life. Something needs to change, or I’d be the one changing, and I fear that if I stayed with my job and the stress it burdens me with I would be irreparably broken.

I like that Crescent City is still equidistant from San Francisco as my current location, so I can still make weekend trips to see my loves and enjoy the city and revel in the fun of it. And I would be only 5 hours from Jacque, so I could be closer to see her in good times and bad. So thrilling. So hopeful.

For one of the first times since I’ve graduated, I feel excited and eager again.
Let the adventures begin.

Coffee Beans and Gratitude.

I saw my sisters last weekend and as I was driving home, I felt a transcendent joy settle around my shoulders like the mink mantle my aunt just granted me that was my great grandmother’s. I was grateful to realize that it hadn’t been long since I’d felt such happiness, screaming songs and dancing rambunctiously with Milla in my car only two weeks ago on my birthday.

Then I realized, shoot! I never wrote about the awesome day that was my birthday.

So, Milla and I have been trying to see as much of each other as possible in this, her summer of freedom, before she moves to Colorado. I’m stoked every time we get to hang out because we have a really intense and unique connection that throughout the course of our friendship has been maintained at a distance, which makes getting to see her often a beautiful and intense and appreciated thing. Like a chocolate covered coffee bean. Yeah. Biting into one of those and feeling that shock of flavor and deep appreciation afterwards is as good an analogy as I can think of to describe my time with her.

Anyway, back to my birthday. She came down in the morning after telling me while we were in San Diego the week before that she put aside the entire Saturday for ME, no one else, and that she we were going to do whatever I wanted. So, we shenaniganed. Had an awesome lunch at Martha Green’s, a place I’ve been wanting her to try for awhile…got baby stuff for my cousin’s baby shower later that day…went to said baby shower…then boned out to get me a new tattoo. My artist, Aaron Funk at Tattoo Revolution in Redlands, is normally booked up about three months in advance and yet found the time to fit me in so I could get “so it goes.”, one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes, on my shoulder. We drive down the freeway, and suddenly “Home” by Edward Sharpe is on the stereo and Milla turns to me, massive smile lighting up her face, and says “It’s our song!”

We start singing, rocking our shoulders and leaning toward each other and loudly shouting that home is wherever I’m in love with you.

Florence and the Machine, “Dog Days are Over” comes on next, and immediately the sweet singing of the last song becomes a wild dancing ride, arms flailing and hands clapping and screaming at the top of our lungs that you’d better run for you mother, father, sisters and brothers…to leave all your loving behind because you can’t carry it with you if you want to survive. And there was a joy that I can’t fully describe. Something that hits when you have these moments with your best friends and sisters and foster mothers or are making jam with you ma, where you feel one with everything around you. Your soul expands and you know as surely as you know breath that this is what people work entire lives to feel, ache through trying relationships to know, tithe to churches to understand: you and the universe, you and love are not separate and divisible things. You’re one and the same, have always and will always be one and the same, and the only dividers that make you feel separate are the ones you put there yourself.

I don’t think I’d be able to feel such things if I were surrounded by anything less than the outstanding caliber of people that choose to love me, and damn, aren’t I lucky for it?

Gratitude. Yes, I’ll have a second helping. Thank you.

Fields.

Sometimes I want to drive into the middle of nowhere, sit in the middle of a field, and scream my brains out. Then cry my heart out. Then figure out where I'm going from there.

I wonder if the reason I feel so solitary is because my soul is almost done with this journey, and if I had a kid or a lover I'd be leaving them too early, and the damage done would make me come back again to learn my lesson.

I fake my happiness so much that I don't know when I truly feel it thrumming anymore. I never fake gratitude though. That's a perk.

I want to lie on the grass and look at the sky, all day if I wanted to. I want to go to the beach and put my feet in the ocean and remember why I'm here in the life I've chosen.

I feel a profound sense of guilt about Jim. He seems so sad about us, and I just wanted to go slow. When I saw him rushing and I had to be the one to constantly put on the brakes, a wall started to develop. Absolutes are a scary thing. I can't deal with "always" from the get-go. Unyielding devotion needs to be tempered, like steel, over time. You try to form it too quick and it'll snap in its development.

I think I'll spend the weekend lying in the grass somewhere.

Maybe it'll serve as a reminder on what the journey is about before you end up in the ground.

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." –Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love.

I am full of profound feelings and thoughts right now. I’m in my training to be a Court Appointed Special Advocate, or CASA, and am sitting on a bench next to tee-pees used for camp outs at a mansion in Redlands that is owned by a philanthropic oil entrepreneur dedicated to enriching the lives of underprivileged children.

In training this morning, a social worker who’s been on the job for 26 years, the span of my life (which, trust me, the insinuation was not lost on me) was explaining the sense of loss and mistrust the foster kids we’ll be advocating for are bound to feel, and why. How so few of them succeed in life, or continue in the same cyclical poverty and abuse they were raised in, passing the abuse to the next generation. How we, as CASAs, have the capability to be the factor that changes the course of that child’s life, by simply staying true to our word, by BEING THERE because we care to volunteer our time, not because we’re paid to be there.

As soon as we had a break, I went outside and called Jacque. I wandered up a grassy knoll to a shady spot under an orchid tree and asked her how her leg was doing, found out she went back into the hospital for an infection and deliberately didn’t tell me because she didn’t want to worry me, et cetera. Eventually, I couldn’t hold the fact that I was crying from her anymore, and she fretted. “What’s wrong baby? Why are you crying? You never cry.”

I thanked her. I told her how much I loved her, how people can only achieve as much as they are willing to risk, and I have always been so driven because I knew I always had people who have my back. Jacque, my foster mom, who was there on the nightly basis that the cops told me I had to find a place to sleep or they’d have to remove me from the home, and I knew I could always go there. My aunt, when it was time to take me out of my home for the sake of my own safety and well-being. She took care of me to the best of her abilities, handling a teenage girl, which she’d never raised firsthand, in all of my angst.

My mother was pivotal in loving me from the beginning and establishing the trust I needed to be able to trust the right people later and survive, but ultimately, it has been people who were not obligated to loving or raising me that have helped me be who I am today. Two bachelor degrees, with honors. On my way to grad school. Ambitions of becoming a published writer and a business owner and getting a doctorate.

I feel that becoming a CASA is one of the truest things I have ever done. When I took guardianship of Becca when I was 18 and she became my sister, my family didn’t know what to make of it. Who is this girl that calls herself your sister? Hm? But they grew to understand that my unorthodox upbringing freed me from the standard definition of family, and that I am blessed with the ability to love people like Becca, and Jay, and my Cataldo and Thompson and Foster families as if they’ve been with me since birth. This is one of my purest strengths, and being able to try and give the support that’s been given to me to a teenager that needs it is a calling to my innermost.

I feel a new drive. New goals developing. Becoming a foster parent isn’t an ambiguous goal that lives somewhere in my future. I will be a CASA until my life is together enough to foster a teen, but my goal is within the next five years.

I had a waiter tell me last night that I’m enigmatic. One of those perpetually unattainable women, that look lovely and engaging but always separate, unapproachable, because I am too far away. I smiled at him, laughing and asking if this was him trying to be slick and “attain” me. But he blushed and said, no, I just wanted to tell you. And I felt that a divine power had spoken afterward when I recounted it to Milla. Sometimes, driven people just need to be solo forces. I can’t imagine how a partner would enrich my life at this point. All of my relationships lately have been juvenile, wrought with miscommunication and ultimately wastes of my time and energy. I don’t have a lot of time in this life, and I have a lot I need to do, so staying focused on the goals ahead are quickly diminishing the societal standard of husband and marriage that have consumed so much of my last 2 years.

I feel pretty done with that chapter. I’m on to the new, the paying forward of what was so freely given to me my whole life, to living a life worth having, and fighting for, and being deeply satisfied with.

Needless to say, this whole week since my birthday has been a growing revelation. I feel very connected to my soul, which in turn makes me feel acutely connected to the ones I love, including God. I imagine heaven will be a swirling love-energy mass where what I feel for them is tangible and visible in the matter that makes up the universe.

My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love. But that’s okay. In my heart of hearts, they’re swirling with me all the time.