Thursday, July 14, 2011

An unexpected twist

Forward:
As far as I can tell, most of my readers are fellow
knitters/crocheters/crafters, and they read my blog because it is a
knitting blog. If you only are interested in reading a knitting blog,
then I must apologize, because there will probably be far fewer posts
about knitting and crafty topics. My life has taken a bit of a
drastic change, as you will read about below. If you do happen to be
interested in reading about an insane new adventure as it unfolds,
then please, I hope you'll continue to read my story.

So begins a new chapter in my blog, and my life.

If you've never read the diary of a homeless person, you're about to.
Bruce and I were living with his parents, and this past Friday things
got a little crazy. Without splashing his private family drama all
over, let it be said that we could not stay under that roof without
more misery than it was worth. I could, in theory, go running back to
my parents' house but that would mean following their rules, and I
really don't think I can go back to their idea of a 'proper' and
'productive' life. And I'm not sure the open door letting me go back
home is open to Bruce, and I couldn't go home without him; we're a
team, we say we're as good as married, even if we aren't legally
hitched.

We've spent three nights in a friend's room. He works nights so we
can sleep in his room all night, and relinquish it back to him in the
morning. We've spent two nights in a tent as well with two other
residentially challenged friends. I'm very glad that none of us snore
loudly; some of the birds are actually much louder, but at least they
sing sweetly. I gotta say, this is my first 'real' camping
experience; I had camp-outs in my back-yard as a kid, and I once slept
in a very primitive lean-to on Santa Rosa island during a tall-ship
sailing expedition (which was three weeks of extraordinary experiences
in itself), but I have never actually gone camping in the traditional
sense. I guess being homeless in a tent still isn't camping in the
'traditional' sense, but it is a tent and it's not the backyard of my
parents house anymore.

Sleeping outdoors completely away from society is . . . amazing. You
start to realize just how much energy pulses around you in the daily
life of society. There is the energy of all the people around and the
cars whizzing by, then we go home to buildings that literally buzz
with appliances and electricity, and that's not getting into all the
emotional and spiritual energy, the good and bad juju of everything.
The other morning I woke up on the ground in the tent, and as I lay
staring up through the mesh roof (we haven't installed the rain tarp
yet) to the branches of the tree above me, I suddenly felt my body
emptying of excess energy in the same way that water drains out of a
bathtub. I've been in deep trances and deep trips of a variety, but
nothing cleanses in quite the way that simply returning to nature
does, and I think especially sleeping in nature. At night Bruce and I
have to hike to where the tent is set up, and once there we are almost
100% cut off from from modern society. We do have our cell phones on
us, but the only other things in the tent are our blankets, a few
clothes, a little food, and a few basic necessities like a flashlight.
We go to sleep to the sounds of nature, we wake up to the sounds of
nature, and we have to hike to get back to modern society. I've never
felt anything refreshing in quite the same way that this experience
has been so far, even though it's only been two nights in the tent.

It's not all fun and games. The first morning I woke up in the tent,
while everyone else was asleep, I looked around at the walls made of
canvas, the roof made of mesh, the mattress made of hard earth, and
then I pulled the blanket over my head and cried. While I do have a
habit of deliberately abandoning traditional habits and rituals of our
modern society - refusing to get a degree, refusing to get a 'normal'
job, refusing to let fear rule my life and instead let only love
dictate my choices; now I find myself somewhat out of my element.
They say that home is where the heart is, and I truly believe that,
but it's one thing to center your heart in a house, or even a bedroom,
or even a bed, and then have that taken away from you. Yes home is
where the heart is, but it's one thing to be rooted somewhere, to have
you own personal 'headquarters', and it's entirely another thing to
pack up that idea and carry it in your heart, every day, unable to put
it down.

I have a friend that is certified in CPR. He was explaining to me the
other day about how when you start administering CPR, you must keep
going, you cannot stop, and you must keep performing to your highest
ability until more help arrives. Because when you giving CPR, someone
is now relying on you for their life, you cannot get up and walk away
when you are bored and tired, you must keep going. I adopted this as
my new philosophy for how to live. Life may throw you all sorts of
curve balls, but you cannot just stop living, you have to keep keeping
going, one day at a time, one foot in front of the other. To give up
would be suicide, but I don't believe in death. I believe that I was
put on earth to serve a mission, and that my 'death' will be when
whatever the heck it is that I am goes on to whatever the heck comes
next. If I were kill this body, I'd as much be saying that I quit my
mission, that I don't want to do it. But I don't fully understand
this mission yet, I am still learning, still creating, still figuring
out how I can make the world a better place. As if another were
relying on me for their life, I must keep living day to day to the
best of my abilities.

Ganesha, my patron deity, challenged me; he said that if I truly wish
to eliminate all fear from my heart, that he wasn't going to let me
off easily. Step by step, I am in a slow motion run towards a
existence that knows no fear, only love, and the obstacles are huge
and terrifying. Ganesha is the elephant headed Hindu god of obstacles
in life; he not only places impediments in life as a challenge, he
also removes them when we pass his tests. He is a gentle patron, but
persistent; my life has been thrown into new upheaval, but Ganesha has
promised that if I submit to his challenges, if I purge myself of all
hate, fear, and anger and open my heart to love, beauty, creation, he
promised that everything will turn out as it should. No, he did not
promise a happy ending, only that everything will turn out as it
should. It's the bargain that was made, and my duty is to keep at my
mission, one day at a time, to the best of my ability.

Today the challenge is adapting to carrying my home in my heart
everyday. Tomorrow it might be something else.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

I swear I wasn't sleeping on the job!

Whew. Here I am. Alive. Sort of. I'm still so sore from dancing on Friday night that for the past two days I had difficulty standing and walking. It was as bad as when I used to take ballet - probably because I found myself using a lot of rusty ballet technique on Friday. Something about having wings and everyone calling you Fairy Girl makes you want to jump and flutter like a fairy.

My legs are also covered in mosquito bites thanks to a long hike yesterday. On my left leg alone I have 14 bites. It really blows. I have an almost empty tube of Cortisone, a bottle of Calamine, and lots of allergy medicine (which I'm trying not to take, but I needed some last night just to be able to sleep).

But I know what everyone is waiting for - wing picutres! These aren't the greatest in quality and detail, but it's what I have. So without futhur ado:

This is me chilling in the lobby with a good friend.



Me, Bruce, and our dear friend Spiffy!



And an actions shot of me being a butterfly!



I'm going to try to persuade one of my other camera talented friends to take some good detail shots that I can put on my Ravelry page.

I'm terribly behind in reading all the rest of your blogs, and in commenting. I tried to keep up, but it was just one hell of a week. At one point my blog reader did a major goof and gave me a bunch of random news feeds in French and I thought I'd lost all my regular feeds. Everything seems to be perfectly normal today, so I'll be jumping back into the blog community with both feet.

And now that my wings are finally done (although I might have to fiddle with the straps, as you can see, they're very long) I need a new project. I still have sock poi to finish, but I think it's time to raid the stash and start thinking new patterns.