base

I am strange. I am one of the most spontaneous, random people you will perhaps ever meet. The other day, I fell in a fountain.  But I am a creature of habit, of needing a lot of pomp and circumstance before beginnings. Of needing to feel some sort of ceremony. I love my tiny rituals. 

The way I eat bananas. Split into thirds from top to bottom. Three tender curving triangles. as delicately chewed as possible to preserve their perfect graininess.

I like to find favorite spots, favorite stores, favorite feelings. I revisit these with unwavering affection, they are my anchored bouy in the evermoving, ebbing, flowing, sea of myself.  They are bastions against panic.
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My small superstitious tokens against the instability of never having permanent homes and entirely reliable families.


These tiny corners of fortitude are what allow me to be who I am. They are that which make moving whenever, wherever possible. They give me the assurity to jump in the fountain, feetfirst, and therefore fall on my butt, and soak myself entirely.

And when I am taking on a great thing (because returning to school with 19 credits is no small thing) I seek these bases for my context, so that I may safely venture out and play tag with my ambitions, and always have a place to sprint towards when breath is needed.

And so, this morning, I am here. Between the math and geosciences building. In the sun. Near coffee. Near people. In the midst of campus, so that my very presence here may act as a revolt against that which I fear.

"it's the middle of the night there chief, what are you doing--?"

"learning how to be a human, and part of a family"

"yeah, i think you speak for a lot of us there"

image courtesy of rottentomatoes.com

from the movie Martian Child 

i could stand to lose a little.

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

--e.e. cummings

Loss is not generic. It is the single most paralytic happening known to man. And still, all the loss in this swirling miraculous universe is the same. It is the shadow lurking at the edges of our days, which makes us hold tighter, fight harder.


It is a fingerprint unique to each of us, woven into the grain of us; with every scintilla of growth, it changes and is as capable of evolution as any species of animal. The loss of a child, of pride, of an ideal, of a nation, of and earring, of a home. Each an entity unto itself.

But ever the same. For loss, in itself, cannot be lost. We bring it with us to the grocery store and to fetch the dry cleaning. We dance with it balanced on our heads so that even our most joyous labors are restricted by the need to remember our loads. As though we were the foreign villagers of a tired third world nation, keeping our burdens close to our center, letting it press down from atop our heads, disc compressing disc in order to continue moving forward beneath it.


Such is the scar of loss. The residue is as everyday and as everywhere as the dust., as sleep in my eyes in the morning. The left behind lost particles are as much a part of wear as the freckling of skin.


But losing scares the hell out of me. The cutting away, the very process of it. Not because I am unsure of how it will feel. I know, and know, and know again. I am by nature a collector. Of people. Of minutes. Because of that the subtext of my loss is a second heartbeat to me. Ba-bumping deeper, and more malevolent. It makes me laugh harder, until the whole of me aches with joy. My throat burns with singing into it's yawning mouth songs of joyous banishment. The very idea of that tearing feeling makes my boisterous tongue shy, and simultaneously, a feverish scrambler for its antithesis.

But that second heartbeat was born at the very dawn of joy, in the moment of my first laugh. So that I could more rightly see the beauty in things kept, so that we might know the precious thirst of holding on.

and even though we can barely stand it, even though the possibility of it is enough sometimes to keep from listening to the the little birds, it will come. It will be the shadow, dancing along behind us, and when the tearing feeling leaves, the weight of what is left becomes our gravity, centering us around that which matters most.

and these things

make uncertainty seem

so, so, small.

this week

I put notes on strangers cars with the most beautiful things I could think of on them.

I am making a wish tree in downtown boise. (keep an eye out for elaboration)

I laughed until I cried.

I remembered that no matter how wonderful my adopted families are, blood is a beautiful tie.

I stayed up too late.

I planned eight thousand things I wanted to do in a four day period.

I did them all.

I got a concussion.

I challenged myself.

I made my life an art project.

I ate whatever I wanted.

I accepted every drop of love that game my way, and sucked it up more joyously than the exuberant, exhausted August ground.


My tummy is full. My heart is full. My life is full.

And getting fuller.

a new woman

 my cousin is in town. Today we went to the Discovery Center of Idaho. It is the closest thing to wonderland that I can think of on a rainy Wednesday afternoon with ready-to-laugh company by your side. We wound through the rooms, and as two independent, curious, explorers of the world will do, Mikki and I lost each other to the intrigue of the whistling, singing, whirling innards of the world around us. I happened to come across something called  The looking glass. For visual learners and comic relief here is a picture of some total strangers who probably didn't want to be on my blog sitting at the looking glass.

Are you done laughing? If not, continue anyway, my philosophical waxing is, at times, taken better with a dose of humor.

I walked up to the contraption and sat down. From my chair it looked like a regular vanity with a very flimsy mirror. Still, I analyzed myself and waited for my company to come help me test it out. I mentally noted everything wrong with my appearance and cringed at the stitches on my forehead. And then I smelled soft after-bath powder, and the tails of a sigh I looked up and saw a woman leaning steadily toward seventy looking over my shoulder in bemusement. I asked her if she'd sit on the other side and try it with me. The light on both sides of the two way vanity was set on high and I dimmed mine first, and as I did, my face melted away. I saw powdered cheeks, papery, as though the pages of every calendar day had been thrown in with the wash and lain to dry along the curves of her high cheek bones.  I faded and the next fifty years filtered through tinted glass and shone in that dark room. The peace of having lived; having decided and done all I can to make a full life and left to look through the glass at the wonder of it all.

I turned the dimmer back up on my side just as she began to turn hers down, and when she did, she all but disappeared, she became a faint ghost of reassurance on the other side. And then I heard her suprised laughter. On rising note expressed all I needed to hear about the return of the lithe pulsating kinetic life she'd suddenly been turned round and allowed to face again, in the same direction she'd come the first time. I previewed the joy at looking in a mirror and somehow losing the last forty years. Her daughter had found her and was looking over her shoulder. The ghosts in the looking glass spoke.

"Look at that," she said. "A new woman."

There is so much coming.

images courtesy of scidaho.org

tell me i'm right

I should be sleeping. I definitely should.

I'm so, so, so sleepy. Something about a concussion yesterday or something. Who knows. But I can't sleep. Because too much has peeled my eyes today, and my eyelids seem afraid to close again. Afraid of the inching dark of turning a blind eye to all the wrong things.

So I'm listening to a lightning storm, and learning about destruction as a means of creation from this little gem.

Each page comes with instructions. Ideas for how to tear it apart, break it into pieces, spit on it, tear it into strips, color the entire page, paint a picture with your coffee. It screams at me to do anything, to drop it off the roof in the rain, and by the low lights of my own gumption it is beautiful. While I gather my breath and listen to the lightning outside and I survey the ravaged plain of all I can't manage, throwing a perfectly good book out the window to make a collection of my damages seems like a screaming beacon calling my scrambling hope home.  It seems like a strange thing to cling to, but hear me out

The family I was born with is damaged. The battle between innocence and angry fragmented humanity has come to my door step yet again and I am charged with a bleak attempt at tipping the scales in favor of the only side which allows for healing. I cannot stand aside any longer. And so I will break the thing I cannot break, and fall headlong into the wispy hope that the piece that must be saved will survive the collateral damage and blossom into something more than the sum of countless generations of convoluted survival; that the piece will thrive.

So, in the face of these things, in the breath between decision and acting upon that which I know I must do to live with myself, I am grateful for a small black journal which promises that sometimes creation is only bourne forth through the rubble by destruction.


P.s.  i need blog beautification lessons. any volunteers?

there are certain things you need directions for..

This is the story of the girl who did not ask the right questions, who did not think the right thoughts, and now, has a beautiful crescent schaped scar on her eyebrow to remind her.

It started out innocently. My boss and his daugther (a very good friend of mine) asked me to go shooting with them. (I live in Idaho, this is par for the course) She does rifle competitions and he has been shooting for fifty years and they promised to teach me the basics.

I shot about twenty shots out of a .22 caliber pistol (which means something, or something) and since I was shooting at a big piece of wood a long ways away, and nothing was getting hurt, and I'm hypercompetitive, it was a little exciting, you know?

So Bob (my boss) says, "Hey Rach, want to try the big gun?" (insert devlish grin)

THE BIG GUN.....

So, I followed all his instructions to a T, but my crappy vision kept me from seeing properly through the scope (big ugly telescope thing on top). So, having recieved no instructions to the contrary, I got closer. Sighted the ancient laptop that they had been shooting the big gun with (because in Idaho we blow up old electronics, it's pretty standard). Pulled the trigger and......

Pain. Confusion. Bob, staring agape at me and shouting "Pack it up"  T-shirt on face. Water bottle dumped on wound.


I got scoped. In the face. The good news is, I hit the target.

The bad news is, that the lovely doctor with a bachelors in Russian who works in the ER at West Valley Med Center had to give me five stitches. In my face.....

I think I'm over guns.

not today.

some days I'm afraid to let anyone come near. I'm scared out of my mind that they can smell the bitterness rolling off my skin. I don't want them to see the dullness in my eyes.

I am not myself.

I am the difference between popcorns; burned or buttered. I find myself putting on extra perfume the acrid smolder of my weariness.

I am not myself.


The distance on these days between where I want to be and where I am is long enough to ferment my hopes, and the alcoholic drizzle runs through me. Sedates me. There is too much to be done, and too much I continue to trip over. I'm the prodigal child, the mess maker, picture drawer, sing at the top of my lungs-er. I am the jump off bridge-er, the never stop trying-er. I believe in a beautiful song, and not making promises. I believe in letting the chain on the door hang loose, and letting life's vagrants come in, look in the fridge, eat my chips.

But, I am not myself.


And some of the things I've had to do, that I'll have to keep doing are ugly, they are not clear cut. Their ambiguity brings me to a startled breathlessness.

I am not myself because I've been sitting on these half-broken things, this snooze-buttoning of my choices has found me, more than once, in bed with fast food.

So, in an effort to sober up my dreams, to degrease my bed, I have to do the ugly thing. I have to once again say the thing that starts dominoes I can't stop.

And I might puke.

let it go, this too shall pass.

I promise you some actual real-live writing for tomorrow, but in the meantime, I might be mildly in love with the video and head over heels for the sentiment.