Davis,
March 3 2014
The bliss of that empty, light, new life has long gone by now.
I was right to notice in those early beginnings that that degree of novelty couldn’t last. It’s a most precious,
delicate, ephemeral feeling that will inevitably slip through your fingers. All
you can do is gratefully relish the few moments in your life that you’ll feel
it. By now, life is full once again, and pretty weighty at times. But I wouldn’t
want it any other way. I am so grateful for what this empty new life has been
filled with. Two main things fill my life here: my inside and my people.
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My people…
I am so invested in the friendships I’m forging with all
these incredible new people around me. They amaze me every day. Relationships
develop so fast in a place where you get to know people in their home
environment. Many people here are just as reflexive as I am, and I often go on
long walks with them over campus, releasing and exchanging mind matter,
inviting each other into our universes. I have come to love the insides of many
people here. Since we share so much, it feels almost as important to tend to
their minds as to my own. Our collective unconscious infuses the whole Tricoops
area, you feel the air thickening, closing in around you as you bike in. And so
making our collective mind a beautiful place will directly benefit each
individual, because the boundary we draw between individual minds and their
surroundings is a porous one, if one at all.
…my inside…
Sharing so much fills my mind not only with my own thoughts,
but with others’ too. My head and heart are so full all the time, it’s
sometimes hard to breathe. It’s only so short ago that I had no-one but myself
to rely on for a while, so I still feel very strong and centered. But sometimes
there are a lot of forces tugging at me, threatening to bring me off balance. I
don’t think I’ve ever been this self-reflexive in my life. Every new
experience, person, place that I encounter, my mind eyes them, picks them up
and very consciously adds them to this great mash of impressions that’s growing
wilder and wilder by the day and that my mind is trying so hard to make sense
of. There is so much going on in my life that it’s been a month since I’ve had
enough mental space to sit down and write about the experience in its entirety
like this. I journal a lot, but those are just details, moments, conversations,
insights, not the meta level bird’s eye view that I’m working from now.
…and where they meet
The porous boundary goes for my inside and my people too.
They give me as much as I give them. It is in connection with two of them that
I have come to my biggest self-insight here so far. For the first time, pieces
of the puzzle fell together whose connection I hadn’t seen before. I now know why community and friendship are such a big deal to me. Why I am on this
life long quest for ‘my kind’, for durable connection. I am looking for family.
I am looking to fill the big emptiness that an erratic, fragmented, incomplete
family has left me with. Coming to understand something so big about yourself
is so powerful. The whole world started making a little more sense to me at
that moment.
The Sierras
Fairytale meets
reality
The other side of reality has finally tracked me down here
on the other side of the world, and infiltrated my thus far unspoiled
fairytale. The past two weeks have been filled with drama, confusion and
sadness in the coops, fortunately followed by a remarkably fast recovery.
Nothing terrible, just life. It’s good. My conception of the coops is more
nuanced, more grounded now. More real. The events in the past two weeks have also
drawn me in even deeper, and I feel I have permanently lost that ledge I jumped
from all this time ago out of sight. Yep, the ledge is gone, and I’m in,
definitely, permanently in.
That’s good too. I’ve made the inevitable tradeoff between
oversight and involvement when I left the edge of this new world to jump into
its vortex, and I wouldn’t want to be any less involved. Since I jumped in, I
have been treading water, getting sucked in deeper and deeper, sinking in, until
the waves went right over my head, crawled under my skin, submerged me entirely.
There’s no fighting it, all I can and want to do is let it all wash over me,
hands raised, eyes open. This is an open sea, a great river that I want to wade
into, because it’s giving me so much. I’ll have to see where I resurface at the
end of all this, but I have complete faith in this water.
Dancing with water
As I surrender, and let the waves close in all around me, I
do know this: this great fluidity, this grand harmonious celestial dance with
water is exactly right. It speaks to the eternal in me, centers and strengthens
me like nothing else, is bringing me level to existence, and existence and I
look each other in the eye as equals, friends, lovers. It whispers secrets into
my ear about how to live my life: in connection, in dialectics, no boundaries,
as mirrors, as two-in-one. And in mutual respect, understanding, and excitement,
we join forces to make this life of mine, that is also just another of
universe’s lives, the best it could be: real, full, beautiful, and in perpetual
open generous connection with its surroundings. An optimized give-and-take. I’m
dancing with the waves, playing with the current, my moves are guided by forces
so much larger than me, but they are still my moves. This dance is what my
whole journey has come to be all about: novelty, fluidity, and the vividness
that transience brings. And so I have to keep moving. The one thing I feel I
should watch out for here is settling in stagnant waters. Which is why I have
applied to live in Pierce, the house next door, next quarter. I have become so
comfortable in DSC, it’s time to expose myself to some unchartered waters
again. Pierce has a magic about it that draws me, a different kind of very
salient humanness that I feel could teach me a lot of new things that DSC
couldn’t. DSC has given me so much, they were the first ones to see me, they took me into their midst
and initiated me into this amazing world. For that, I am so grateful to them,
and I will love and be alleged to them forever. But the water calls me on. This
wild water washing over me is waking me up to a whole new way of living. This
is not just a period. This is really huge. I know that wherever I’ll resurface
I will never be the same again, and I will understand so much more about life,
myself, and how we jam together. Like the great David Foster Wallace reminded
us*, this life here keeps reminding me: This is water, this is water. And I
don’t know what water means, but man, this is it. This is being alive.
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