One day at a time. One. Without worry or an unrestful eye on all the rest of the days that are likely to follow today.

This is not the first time I have been taught this lesson. This is, however, the first time I have felt the least bit successful in learning. I know what it is like to suffer because I am holding all of my days like hot water in hands that were never made for such a thing. I have often recognized this scalding even as I persist because I did not know what it was to let go.

Success feels different than I would think. There is no victory celebration, but there is also no feeling of exhaustion from having arrived too late. It may sound simplistic but all I have felt is ease. To be sure, the ease is largely due to the previous struggles, the wrestling of my will, the learning of foreign movements. And yet, I am surprised. There is a lightness to living…and I cannot help but greet it with just a little confusion.

I do not trust things that do not test me. At least, not usually. But this? This is breathing. How could I stop or protest without punishing myself? There is something stronger than relief here. It is rest or peace or something else. I wonder if this is just a season or if that is my distrust talking. I often make life so much harder than it has to be just by trying too hard. It’s kind of funny. I am sure that I will find myself back in that place, but I think I will spend most of the rest of my life trying to figure out how to make this ease flow into the working, planning, and sweating parts of life.

It has been a long journey and I am only just now beginning to feel like I have come home to myself. 

In between boredom and busydom

These days it is harder than ever to get out of bed. My apartment is a great first apartment. It holds myself and my materials just perfectly. It allows me to breathe and I almost always look forward to coming home. But it is not without its quirks anymore than I am. Some of them are endearing, like its will to grow a forest of tomatoes. With the change in the season, I have discovered that my apartment is a bit drafty--though not the draftiest I have known. Moreover, the pilot light in the heater has no desire to stay light. Inside my house is just as warm as outside. And while I am glad that this is true of my apartment in Portland rather than in Montana, I still find it difficult to want to leave my bed. Compounding this feeling is my lack of job, school, or really anything that could motivate me past the initial discomfort.

I am in grave danger of becoming bored. and yet, my body automatically wakes up at 7:30 am with nothing to do. This is a strange time of life. I want to leave and stay at the same time. I am both resting and wearying. My body is restless. It is hard to do manual labor everyday and then just stop for a month. Balance is such an elusive thing. My mind and my body are forever leaving each other behind. Are they supposed to be in step? Sometimes. In the very quiet in between places, I feel as though I have snuck up on myself to be wholly present. It is always a gift when I recognize it. 

It is hard, though, to remember that it is healthy not to be busy but just as healthy not to be bored. In this space before the panic of a new job, I am relearning how to take one day at a time--not because I can't handle planning the future or looking ahead. Rather, because the future is not here yet, is not mine yet. It is hard not to look for change so I can adapt myself around it and plan accordingly. It is hard for me to be truly present. I am so much more gifted with the future. Yet, I am coming to see that the maturity of such gifts comes in being able to stand in the moment. And know when to plan and adapt. For now, I am in the long in between. But soon, I will leave. My task is not to mentally leave before the rest of me is allowed to.

In Search

I love the drive from Portland to Montana and back. The topography changes every 100 miles or so. The gorge. The endless plains and farms. The forest. The mountains. The valley in the hills.


I took too many of these photos while driving.


It is good thinking space though. The way the land stretches before you as if there are no more limits. I wonder at the ease of my vehicle and think back to the days when crossing 600 miles would have taken more than a month rather than a portion of my day. The last two times I have driven to Montana, I have been outrunning the rain. The first time, the lightning and thunder came in a few hours after I did. This last time, the rain took a few extra days on the trip. But it was the same rain. I am sure of it.

When I drive to Montana, I often leave the windows up. That is, until I reach the state line and cross from Idaho to Montana. When the window rolls down, there is an intense blast of pine and cedar. You are in the mountain pass. It is full of spruce and ponderosa. As you descend to the valley and meet the river, cottonwood trees greet you on the wind. I smell them always before I see them. Nothing smells more like home than river and cottonwood. Add the whistle of a train and the rush of water, and I am either profoundly homesick or already home.

Montana feels like home in a way that Portland never will. To start, all of Montana is home, even the places that I have never been to. Yet, Portland is an island inside of Oregon. Moreover, the topography of Montana calls out in the secret language of familiarity. In Portland, there are only places where I have lived and worked and spent my free time. Storefronts, book stores, parks, hiking trails, even grocery stores, but never the ground or sky by themselves. As I leave the Interstate for lesser roads headed to my house, I greet meadows and marshes that have always been empty, cliffs that have lost only a little weight, and lakes and rivers that tell me how much snowfall there was last winter by their wax and wane.

On this trip, I also smell the familiar smell of fire smoke. It reminds me of the summer that so much of the state burned that my uncle came from Arizona with his team of firefighters to help quench the blaze. The weekend that he came to visit our house, he looked so tired. He had aged 20 years in the course of a few weeks. He had hardly slept. It was the first time that I was aware that my uncles were mortal. I was so surprised to see him a few years later and see that he had reclaimed much of the youth that had left him while fighting those fires. That was the summer that the sun turned red from the thick layer of fire smoke--red all day long.

Where I stopped to take these pictures has no name. Only a mile marker on a highway between two small towns. It exists in what you call deafening silence. An orchestra of crickets pulses with such intensity as to cover the sound of approaching cars until they are upon you.

This post is far from finished but I am releasing it. I have fallen behind and it may take many more weeks before I have organized all of the thoughts that are attached to these photos. So, here you go. An abrupt end to my road tripping. One of several sagas in my chosen unemployment.

P.S. This is where my sister first learned to walk.

This woman. This woman is power. I have spent the morning listening to all of her poetry. It only gets better. There is part of me that wants to be her. To have something to say and the fire to get up and say it. But I am quiet and adaptable. I change myself to the situation before I even ask myself if that is what I wanted to do. I often guess what is expected of me wrong but that only makes me change faster the next time. Forming a solid identity is a slow thing. A clumsy thing. A graceless thing. It is so hard to keep trying.

Beet Soup.

Today is beet soup with red pepper and pear. Maybe I will like it. Maybe I won't. We will see. Also, Gregory Porter. 

The week has been a good exercise in the balance of desire and duty. Someday I will get the hang of living in the desert with a mysterious God. A God who desires good so deeply and is just as deeply committed to keeping alive my own ability to desire, even as he trains me to want honest but good things. How to be both unselfish and true to myself? Clumsily at first, that's how. 

Esta como Elena.

Well.

I quit my job.

I went home to Montana.

If you asked me why, I am not sure that I could put all of it into words. If 15 different people asked me why, I would likely give them all very different reasons--and I think they would all be true. My last day was bittersweet. I had hated night shift. It made me crazy and lonely. I was always switching from nights to mornings and back again. But I loved the community that was morning shift, even though I was the only white woman and I usually had very little idea what was going on. I had chosen to love the people there even though I knew I would leave quite soon. I invested a lot. Actually, I invested a lot more than I realized. I cannot think of a word to describe how I feel in thinking about the way they took care of me other than "blessed".

Elaine is a difficult name to pronounce in Spanish. It has too many vowels. But when I told my Hispanic co-workers that it is "como Elena", it stuck. After 4+ years of Spanish class, if you call me by my Spanish equivalent, there is 90% chance that I will answer in Spanish. My confused 3 year old efforts in their language pleased them and I learned a new kind of humility. I lived on heavy servings of their grace and patience.

Sharing that vulnerability only made me feel that much closer to people with whom I could only talk with about my family, food, t-shirts and boxes, and (if my vocabulary held out) maybe a sentence or two about what I did on the weekends. On the days that were very Spanish heavy and I was overly tired, I would come home unable to sort the languages because, in the warehouse, I did not have to. We made our own language based around what they knew in English and what I knew in Spanish and how available one of the bilingual people would be. I did not always transition out of that so easily. But I am not Elena anymore. 6:00am does not bring me Spanish love ballads and it has been a full week since I have been greeted in Spanish. Leaving was quite possibly the hardest decision that I have ever made. Not the hardest thing I have ever endured or survived, but the most difficult act I have ever committed independent of provocation.

I hope it was the right thing. I hope it was, at least, a good or healthful thing.

I realize now, that I have left behind my main community and support. As frustrating as it was to be unable to communicate so much of what was important to me, these were the people who gave me their time. They taught me Spanish and spoke with their hands and their eyes. And they kept talking slower and slower the more exhausted I was until I finally got whatever obvious thing I was overlooking. And if I had asked for anything, they would have given it. With joy.

I would like to think that that is true of all of my spheres of community past and present, but I am not convinced. So often, people are busy and distracted and they act like you are going to break through their thick wall of self-sufficiency and scheduling in order to tell them that you are vulnerable and needy. As if you have that kind of energy by the time you are damaged and drained. They act like you are going to chase them down to ask them to take care of you. Because that feels healthy and not at all codependent...right. And dignified. Turns out, human beings cling to a sense of human dignity long after the size of their need tells them it is not the most efficient way of filling needs. At the core of being human is a profound lack of efficiency that makes me wonder a little.

Anyway, I am going to miss that community. It would have been soooo much easier to let go if I knew at all what was coming next. If I had somewhere to go after I left. But I do not. I mean, I am here in Montana, but that is to stave off the loneliness...not to actually choose a direction. Unless I come back here permanently. That is an option I guess. Everything is an option and I am as of yet committed to no thing and no place.

All I know is that Elena is no more and that carries a heavy sense of loss. I will miss that community, but I have no words to tell them why or how much. Just as I had no words to answer the constant porque Elena? Porque?

I come back to my Israelite metaphor that I began living in after I got fired from HAI. I am still in the desert. At different times in the last couple of months, I have thought that I had left the desert. Every time I was surprised to learn that I was truly in the desert with a God that I am well aware could, and possibly should, abandon me here forever. He already got me out of Egypt and I have been so ungrateful. Besides, the Angel of Death leaves a particular impression on a person. And the desert. It just keeps going. The topography is always vaguely familiar and vaguely foreign.

Just a preview. And a warning.
Warning: musings about home and community ahead. Not guaranteed to make sense or to have tact. Product may contain unprocessed honesty and raw confusion.