My current photo is from my trip over Memorial Day to Sea Ranch, California.  I think it has a bit more bearing on my current situation than the previous.  In many ways I am looking seaward, wondering what’s in store for me on a distant coast. At first I was really sad to leave my friends and situation in Denver.  It was scary on so many levels – Denver felt so welcoming when I came here and I fell easily into a group of friends.  At first, D would regularly get angry with me for inviting him out with my friends because he’d been in Boulder longer and felt he should have more friends in the area than me.  Haha.  It’s just Denver.  It’s such a friendly and easy to assimilate into kind of city.  Everyone loves the outdoors, everyone wants to carpool to the mountains to ski, everyone is game to join your kickball or soccer league, everyone wants to meet for happy hour, or to see a good show.   It was such an easy place to fall right into a comfortable routine – which has it’s goods and bads.  On my old blog, I used to lament the lack of challenge and the fact that I was getting too comfortable, too quickly.  But, alas it is hard to argue with comfort.

It’s funny that R and I announced our move to our friends and expected that a lot of people would be sad to see us go, but before we knew it everyone around us seemed to have plans to move on and leave Denver as well.  I have at least three friends planning to move to Portland in the next month or so, others who are eyeing moves to the mountains, or back to where their family lives.  Denver’s friendliness comes with the caveat that people are friendly because almost everyone is new to the place to a certain degree.  And people are constantly new to Denver because Denver is a transient kind of place.

I hear Brisbane may be similar to Denver in certain ways.  It’s the fastest growing city in Australia, and the third largest.  I take that to mean there will be a lot of people in similar situations to mine – having just moved and not really knowing the ropes.  I hope this will be a good thing and that I’ll be able to find people to explore the farmer’s markets and coasts with me and warn me of the dangerous animals and bugs that might kill me.   (I have had about 10 emails from friends relating to me the various ways I could die down under – thank you.)  I really hope it’s a friendly and welcoming place.  If not, it may get a bit lonely.

More than anything, the thought of moving to Brisbane has made me cognizant of the myriad changes that have taken place in the three years I have been in Denver.  I came here at 26, got a Master’s, got some real world experience in the working world, got back together with D, broke up with D, met R and here I am taking some huge steps that I was never really willing to take for previous boys – like moving halfway across the world.  Sometimes I look at myself and marvel at my own growth – and also at the way I haven’t changed at my core.  It’s amazing the difference a couple years can make – and what a couple years in Australia might mean.

I have to admit that it’s a scary move for me and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it all works out well.  I am also currently distracting myself from over-thinking it by trying to to find the right luggage rack to set up my bike for our bike tour from Missoula to Seattle – which starts in a week!   We’re also going to ride Mount Evans again before we leave, for kicks.  Should be fun, if not distracting.  By the way, if you know of a good rack system that goes through the hub – please tell me about it.  I am not really thrilled about the idea of drilling holes in my carbon frame as some people have suggested.

I don’t really want to go into her death, but it suffices to say she passed peacefully after a long fight with cancer.  She had been failing slowly for many months, but she took a turn over the past weekend, and the first I heard of it was last night when my mom called and told me that if I had anything I wanted to share with her, now was the time to do it. She put the phone by my grandmother’s ear and I shared with her how much I loved and appreciated the role she had played in my life and how proud I was to be her granddaughter, and then I spent a restless night mulling over the ends of things.  When I woke this morning, I learned she’d passed in the night – as we all expected.

I spent the morning moody and sad for her loss, but also for the fact that ends like this make us reflect on the means, so to speak.  How does one pass the time he or she is given on earth?  How am I passing it?  Would I be happy with my life were I to pass away tomorrow?

I had a minor existential dilemma.

I came across an article that helped me tie together some of the loose ends that have been dangling in my subconscious preventing me from forming a coherent thought worthy of sharing with the blogosphere for the last month.   The article was called, “Why Lying Broken in a Pile on Your Floor Is a Good Idea” and I think the craziness of the title alone drew me to it.  The reason for this is that it contradicts all the work I have been doing over the last year or so!   I have been making efforts to be a more outwardly positive (inwardly I’m pretty positive), uncomplicated, and generally “nice” person.  The reasons for this are many, but most directly I had quite a few discussions with D where he told me I was too critical, sarcastic, or mean.  While I know he is particularly sensitive to that stuff, it also made me think.  After reflecting on these conversations I resolved to work on this because I know that I can be all of the above, at times.  I wanted to express myself in a more sincere, uncomplicated way that was not threatening to people. More than that,  I wanted to BE more sincere, uncomplicated, and non-threatening.

So, I have been working on these things for a few months now and it’s going well.  The only problem is that something about making an effort to be uncontroversial, uncomplicated, and nice, grates against my being.  I am not sure why, because I am not naturally mean or threatening (and most people would laugh if I told them I sometimes think of myself that way).  But something about the effort to hide my authentic person behind a facade of pleasantness – to lose all the sass and sarcasm and emotional tides that go with it – seems wrong.  I feel I’m not entirely being true to who I am.

I read an article a few weeks ago that echoed this sentiment, and I emailed myself a quote from it.  It was about this Asian guy and his struggles fitting, or not fitting as the case may be, the typical stereotype of someone who is Asian.  His quote was this:

“In lieu of loving the world twice as hard, I care, in the end, about expressing my obdurate singularity at any cost. I love this hard and unyielding part of myself more than any other reward the world has to offer a newly brightened and ingratiating demeanor, and I will bear any costs associated with it.”

And I love this quote.  Why?  Because it is so blatantly asinine and so uncompromisingly authentic.   I can relate 100% – because what I read from that is not that he doesn’t love the world, it’s just that he’s not going to live his life compromising his authenticity for the sake of getting ahead. I love that.  It makes me feel like I’m not alone in bristling against the cult of positivity and niceness; I’m not alone in lamenting the process of growing “mature,” whereby people lose the spunk and uniqueness that once defined them, and slowly morph into corporate robots.

So, fast forward to today and the Goddess of Never Not Broken as featured in the first linked article.  Yes, that’s right.  Never. Not. Broken (or always broken if you’re not a fan of the double negative).  This goddess LOVES chaos, uncertainty, and transition.  This Goddess rides a crocodile.  This Goddess and I would have a lot of fun together.   This is a Goddess to whom I can relate, because we both relish that which is undefined, gray, and makes other people squeamish.  We both see opportunity in uncertainty and latch on to that sense of possibility.  In change we find constancy.  In change we find peace. She and I could ride our crocodiles around the world stirring up good-natured trouble and we would have a hell of a time.

Yes, Never Not Broken validated my sense of self today.  She validated the days when I relish my angst. (Side note: Once upon a time it was cool to be angsty and I miss those days terribly)  She validated my comfort with change and my discomfort with constancy.  She made me feel like perhaps there is something beautiful in raw emotion, as much as there is uncomplicated niceness. 

So, I googled the goddess of Never Not Broken, and I found this amusing blog:  Namaste, Bitches.   And, though I may not be a yoga instructor,  I am a pretty good student, so a lot of her descriptions resonate with me! Especially about being authentic.  And who says,  Namaste, bitches?  How awesome is that? It definitely reinvigorated my desire to complete a yoga teacher training  – once I know where my life will take me in the next few months.

***  The below got posted only partially due to some unknown glitch in my “save” function.  I am now correcting***

Anyway, perhaps since I left Macalester and found myself immersed in a “real world” where not everyone is questioning the hegemony inherent in our culture or acting our against heteronormativity or cultural insensitivity,  I have become a little self-conscious of my propensity to have strong opinions, to want to debate with people, and to be always questioning what’s around me.  I now realize that some people find this type of discourse to be mind-numbing and would rather talk about less controversial subject matter like, hmm, baseball.  It’s been a rough road for me.   But,  I now, feel somewhat validated as I lean into diversity and challenge and feel that I don’t need to hide my true never-not-broken self.

I can’t even begin to explain how excited I am about this trip–mostly because I SO miss the feel, smells, sights, and sounds of water.  Growing up on the lakes of Wisconsin, it’s so hard for me to live in a place where the only sizable bodies of water are reservoirs that are often ice cold, windblown, and uninviting.  I miss the feel of dipping a paddle into a lake at sunrise as the mists lift of the water’s surface and seeing the still water with its surface covered in dust and settled pollen swirl into chaos as my paddle’s movement disrupts it.  I miss putting on my suit and heading to Lake Harriet on a hot summer day for a dip in the murky water full of screaming kids and scantily clad teenagers.  These are things that one simply cannot do easily in Colorado, and as much as I love it here, I miss those sensations tremendously.  So, a few weeks from now I will get to revisit some of those feelings as we paddle for a few days on the Yampa.   I can’t wait!

The real highlight of the weekend, (aside from my new yellow saddle on my fixie bike) was doing some backcountry skiing on Saturday afternoon with R, followed by a huge dinner we cooked up at my mountain house near Breckenridge.

 It was the way we decided to spend our anniversary and I think that in doing so we made a statement about what it is that makes us work.   We both love pushing ourselves, being outdoors, experiencing new things, and enjoying all that life throws at us.  We both work hard and play hard.  We run or ride bikes for 3 hours, and then have beers with our friends to pass the afternoon.  We both hate the idea of sacrificing our lives to work, working out, or being social–we want a balance of all three even if that means some sleep is lost in the process!

I respect him, the things that make him different from me, and the things that tie us together.  He is different enough from me that I defer to his judgment on a lot of things and he does the same for me–leaving both of us a degree of autonomy that I think is mutually appreciated.  We don’t need to be with each other, but life if a hell of a lot more fun when we’re together.  As we grow closer, I am constantly amazed at how different this relationship has been from my previous relationships in terms of the level of respect we share, the tenderness, and the profound security I feel with him.  I have only been with one other person for a year of my life, and I spent many more years with that person.

This one year mark seems like a pretty big deal for me in that sense and I’m happy that we shared it together, hiking up a solitary mountain and skiing some untracked snow.  I hope that, like the untracked snow, this relationships breaks some new ground for me in terms of opening up and sharing myself–something that is easily talked about but hard to really do.

If you have read my previous post about my 19 miler up in Fort Collins, you may have gathered that my world- at least so far as running is concerned- is in a minor state of panic.  My longest run, thus far in my training, has been my shittiest run—possibly ever.  And, as you can imagine, this has left me feeling pretty nervous about the upcoming race (next Sunday, May 1st!).

I have good reason for my nervousness.  My training has been lazy and/or inconsistent.  On the one hand, it has been good because my IT band still feels decent, but on the other hand, while I know I can finish this race, it might not be pretty.  It might be straight up ugly.

I haven’t felt all that motivated lately to run and it’s been kind of a bummer.  First, I was running on treadmills early in my training.  In my opinion, running on treadmills sucks all the life out of running and is almost worse than not running at all.  So, yeah.  You can imagine how well that went.  And then it got warm and I had a few really good weeks of running, but my mileage wasn’t super high.  I did a lot of pacing and speed work per D’s instructions which was a nice change of pace.  But eventually, as the race date started getting closer I was feeling antsy about my lack of long runs and starting to question the use of the ex as a coach–was he setting me up for failure?!  So, I began doing some long runs on my own, but with all the speed work I had under my belt it felt like I was having a hard time pacing myself and was getting frustrated and sick of running.

So, to remedy this I have stopped working on speed and have recently just been going out and cruising at whatever speed feels good in the hopes that I’d re-connect with my inner runner and start remembering why I like running. Tonight I did just that.   It was rainy and overcast–my favorite running weather–so when I got home from work, I put on my shoes, a fleece, and my alpaca hat and hit the road.  As I ran I made a conscious effort not to skip any songs on my ipod, a practice that I find takes me out of the zone and makes me feel unhappy with my running unless I can find the “perfect” song.  I just sank into the music and my rhythm.

Before long, I was in total zen running mode.  I was enjoying the grey evening light and the mists and the thoughts just tumbled through my head without my conscious mind being aware of their progression.  It brought me back to some of my really great runs as I was training for my first marathon the summer after I graduated from college.  I was remembering tonight, how much I loved running in the Twin Cities  along the river and through the tree-lined parkways and boulevards in St. Paul.  That was one of the happiest times in my life–whether because I was running and active, or because I liked the research I was doing on the Cape Wind Project, or because D and I were in a really good place– that summer is seared in my memory.  I would work my shifts at Patagonia, do research for Roopali’s Cape Wind project, and then come home and go for a long run, usually between 6 and 9 miles, and then show up at D’s place, eat a bagel and we’d make dinner and throw a frisbee around.  It was a simple, nice routine, and it all felt really easy back then to fit the various parts of my life together.

These days, it sometimes feels much more complicated.  But, tonight’s run reminded me that when it’s going right, running is like dreaming.  It lets the controlling part of my brain take a break and things begin to float into their proper spots—it’s like defragmenting a computer.  It makes more room for me to think clearly and store things.  Without running, my brain becomes a cluttered mess.

I left my house tonight feeling antsy and as though I had too many things on my plate, but came home feeling clear-headed and optimistic.  I remembered what I love about running.

Now the next step is to remember why I love running for 26.2 miles next Sunday…

I sit a lot.  Like 10 hours a day in a desk, interrupted for 50 minutes or so at lunch time to go running, and thereafter broken up only by intermittent trips to the printer, bathroom, or kitchen for tea.  It’s not an ideal situation. That kind of sitting bugs me.

My life, however, could use a bit more sitting in the sense of finding time for conscious reflection without the distractions of work, facebook perusing, texting, checking my horoscope and then the horoscopes of anyone who matters to me, and compulsively reading the New York Times.  I could use a lot more time to sit, to let words and thoughts roll around in my head until they’re fully formed, and to put those thoughts into writing.

As I have been reading The Quiet World it has struck me how observant and well-spoken people exploring the wilds of Alaska were at the turn of the century.  I guess they needed to be in order to convey the beauty around them to anyone else in a passable way.  I can’t help but think it’s a shame that people today have, in many ways, lost their ability to artfully and effectively communicate.  More than that, however, I am fearful that my generation has not just lost its ability to communicate, but more crucially its ability to observe.

We have eight thousand things at our fingertips to distract us.  It seems that in order to take the time to sit quietly and take in what’s around us we must consciously eschew those distractions–something that isn’t that easily done.

I think it is becoming a new priority of mine to shift away from distraction and towards conscious attention to the simpler, natural beauty that surrounds me.

I’m absolutely enthralled– and I’m not one for biographies.  I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised though.  Douglas Brinkley was granted the rights and privileges to write the biography of Hunter S. Thompson so one would hope he’s legit.   I mean, I can actually speak to his legitimacy having seen him speak at the Tattered Cover a few months ago.  He really inspired me to re-evaluate some things in my life (namely my job) and in many ways it was a turning point in motivating me to make some moves to get into the track I WANT to be on, rather than the track I happened to have fallen into by virtue of being a good interviewer while slightly hungover.

Anyway, I bought the Quiet World before hearing him speak because I was sure it would be a book that would interests R and its 500 pages would occupy him and his voracious reading habits for at least a little while.  He tore through it and it was back on my shelf before long, but it’s an intimidating book to pick up so I put it off for a little bit.  Now that I’ve found a little time I’m excited to have the pleasure of delving in and it’s remarkably researched and presented.  I’m really excited about it.

And, you all may need to get excited about it too, because I plan to be writing a lot more in the month of April and this book ain’t going away quickly.   I decided to make daily journaling a priority through this month- as well as eating better (as in gluten free, mostly).  The spring sort of gets me into a funk in some ways and I am hoping to preempt that.

I have read Leopold throughout my life in short essays, but never before had I sat down to read his magnum opus, A Sand County Almanac.  Thankfully, this year for my birthday, R got me a huge, beautiful version of the book, illustrated with photographs from throughout the area of his cabin in central Wisconsin.  I may be a bit biased, but I have to say it is by far one of the prettiest places on earth.

The beauty of the book, however, is the fact that it illustrates how the tiniest and most mundane details of life are imbued with a beauty that often goes unnoticed.  He talks about geese, making astute observations about what the timing of their migration, or the chatter of their flocks, might mean.  He discusses the way that chickadees survive the winds by choosing the proper leeward parts of a branch.  He discusses how trout elude him in a small brook or how his dog interprets each part of the world through his sense of smell.

His detailed writings make you think about just how much you don’t see.  They make you long to be still in a forest and let the life around you become accustomed to your presence such that no being feels then need to hide or censor it’s goings about.    His musings make you wonder why you spend your time trail running, or mountain biking, or jabbering along as you hike, when so much more could be communicated by and through a conscious silence and observation.  His writings make you painfully aware of the overall tackiness of being human.

I read about something called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement which essentially is a movement that espouses voluntarily forgoing breeding.  It’s a hopeless, yet intriguing cause.  People will never get over their instinctual need to breed and their narcissistic love of seeing themselves reproduced in new generations.  It’s in our nature and it’s not going to change.  I can’t fault anyone for this, because my whole life I have fantasized about having a big, loving family.  But, that being said, it’s not really a bad idea to voluntarily limit our growth either. As you watch the crisis magnify in Japan, it’s hard not to acknowledge that we (humans) made this worse than it needed to be.  Nuclear reactor on an active fault?   Whoops.  Development along a coastline susceptible to tsunamis due to it’s proximity to active fault lines?  Yet again, we shot ourselves in the collective foot.  Will we ever learn? Probably not.    We humans are short on memory and long on the ability to rationalize bad decision-making.

But bringing it back to my original point, reading a Sand County Almanac is enlightening because it manages redirect our focus from the need for exploration and growth to the recognition of the mysteries and complexities that sit right under our noses.  It makes it sound like an adventure in and of itself to walk to the edge of a marsh and absorb the birds, plants, and other creatures just living their lives.  It makes it a challenge to know when the first migratory birds will appear on the horizon.  It reminds you that not long ago, these observations could mean the difference between going to bed hungry and being well-fed.  Not all that long ago these were the observations that helped us to distinguish the changing seasons and keep time with the rhythm of the natural world.

Reading A Sand County Almanac gives me something to strive for that is reflective of a simpler time.  It’s a goal to see what is right before my eyes with a more critical eye–to be less of an actor in the world around me and more of an observer.  To make time for silence and reflection, in the face of ongoing pressures to act and engage.  To find a balance that many do not even strive for; to be but a cog in the larger machine of the natural world, rather than a cog in an economic machine programed for ever-increasing growth.

Keeping in mind the above description, I hereafter will set out to write about my life and it’s goings on, with an eye to the spirit of independence, generosity, and respect for all things wild and beautiful that is embodied by Willa Cather’s writings.

I can’t say, specifically where this blog will go in terms of it’s subject matter, but I can say that I have missed writing and I am happy to again be sharing my observations with the wider world.