Time, music, and memory

I thought I had posted my last update on my trip back to California, but my mind doesn’t stay within the neat boundaries of defined time. I’m back home now, after a month in California and Paris, sitting at my kitchen table, when suddenly this song picks me up and brings me back.

Sometimes memories are more alive inside you than the updated reality. Back from California, here I am in Amsterdam once again, empty hands, with a song that takes me back not to the Co-op Thanksgiving I just visited, but the other Co-op Thanksgiving, a long year ago. So much sweeter, and so much closer now.

“I’m curious to see how you’ll handle it all, because everything will be much different when you return,” my dad had said on the airport on the morning of my departure. Those words rung true, though I didn’t know yet in what way. They kept following me the entire journey, and trailed back home to the Netherlands with me to this moment alone at my kitchen table, where they finally ripen into their full meaning.

A life is so much more than the people or the places that feature in it. It is the place you have in the mesh, the role you fulfill in the perfectly balanced web. I still have a place in the people’s hearts, and I can take up space in old familiar places, but with my role gone, I can’t return to that life.

How strange the way time wraps itself in whichever way it pleases around your existence. I went back to California out of love for those sweet memories, and now once back it’s still those same memories I travel back to, rather than new ones.

How all-knowing is music, showing you your own true heart like that. Those people then, that land then, me in that moment. That’s where the waves of song take me now. And also to the lonely months that followed, stranger in a new city back home, where it was just me and this music to tide me over, onto a new life. The music-and-memory duo seem to have their own agenda, picking out moments you thought were of no consequence at all.

Periods in my life keep rearranging themselves to each other. My trip back to California bleeds over into the year I spent there, erasing the intermediate 11 months in the Netherlands from my mind. Before being separated again starkly by the music that takes me back to my year there, but blots out my recent trip. And the most recent time, spent outside Paris in deep ceremony with indigenous elders from all corners of the world during the climate summit, is a whole story on its own. Time, again, behaved so very differently there. Like a smaller but much denser planet than either my California trip or the preceding 11 Dutch months, it bends the space-time fabric into almost impossible folds. And then periods from years ago poke up their heads from my subconscious, heralded by old characters that featured in them and suddenly reappear in my life.

Like a vast sea, with each wave crest a different period, they keep dancing that peculiar dance with each other, impossible for me to keep track of. Time has shown me so many faces recently that I don’t know what to make of it any more.  

Time, music, memory… such mesmerizing enigmas of existence. I wonder at you, but I’m wise enough not to try to figure out your devious depths. I’ll go along with it all, appreciating your occult nature, giving my life such delicious saturation. I’m curious to see where next you’ll take me.

Going Back 2

The trees

“What do you think about all this, this coming and going of people, their arguments and fights?” I ask the big tree. I sit in her lap far above the ground and up here such calmness comes over me. Momma Fig, heart of the Trico-ops, consecrated again and again throughout the years by co-opers who felt the special power in the dappled shade of her canopy. The cool afternoon light and the scent of figs. She whispers her answers into the rustling leaves. This constant flux of people, that divide themselves up into ‘generations’, or ‘houses’, and then again ‘individuals’, and then they’re a ‘community’... They redraw the lines at their convenience, to back a point, to take a stance. The Fig Tree doesn’t see those lines, doesn’t recognize the individuals who return to take refuge in her arms. She just is there. Unwaveringly, unendingly, she receives the life that seeks her out, and gives of her shelter, shade, and fruit. Such a blessing trees are, to remind us little humans with our petty whirlwind lives of stillness.

“What is time like for you? Up here I hardly feel it at all,” I ask the soft hairy branches of the big redwood. Dozens of feet above the ground, this is an incredible spot. A well-kept secret, because it’s quite a journey to get up here. It’s one of my favorite places in Davis, and I had been looking forward for weeks to visit the redwood again. When you trace the lines and crinkles in its furry reddish bark, you can tell the tremendous force with which it’s shooting up out of the ground, towering higher and higher, spiraling upward. And yet trees seem suspended, unchanging, because they don’t share our sense of time. Up here it works differently, and I can almost pretend I never left this place. What a blessing these trees are, calm and steady, to come to and forget all this frantic time travelling for a while.

Finding my new role

I originally thought, naively, that I was coming back to reaffirm all my relationships here. Instead, as it turns out, my return breathed them back to life, and they continue to evolve within the current circumstances. The web of relations has rearranged itself around my absence. Everyone welcomes me with the old love, but my old life here is gone, and the role I played in people’s lives in a few rare cases just doesn’t fit anymore. A very humbling experience. This dance is tricky and unending, a perpetual positioning and repositioning of ourselves to each other.

Back and forth, back and forth, between feeling so uprooted, holding the shattered pieces of my precious old life in my hands, to doing my thing like I could be doing it anywhere in the world. It took me a good week to finally figure out my new temporary role here. I found it on the Pierce Haus trip to Lake Tahoe, in the snowy hills and Jared’s cabin, amid the Douglas firs and Ponderosa pines. For three days straight I felt so in place. Pierce is a fine home, and I am very grateful to the current Piercians – known and new – for welcoming me so fondly in their midst. Since then, I been chillin. Simple enjoyment, lighthearted and happy to see so many friends and familiar places. Drinking IPAs, eating kale salads, still not understanding the traffic rules around here, inserting ‘hella’ in my sentences, Seventh Generation dish soap and food sampling in stores and farmers market stands, potlucks, sleepovers, long boarding, stargazing, camp fires, road trips, scampering up back country hills*, peeing with the door open, ahh I know it here!

* (I actually got lost for an hour in a redwood forest, it was really scary, it would start getting dark soon, no one could hear me and I could hear nothing, and I had absolutely no clue which way was left or right. Cole and Gordon rescued me, a chance for them to repay me after me saving their asses last year on the Lost Coast.)

The magic

But even as I’m chillin, I still don’t want to belittle the momentousness of being here. Moments in the tree branches remind me of what I returned for. I’m here for the magic. I know it’s there, profoundly influencing me subconsciously, even when I don’t readily notice it all the time (thankfully). That’s the reason I’m so aware, so intentional, about my being back here. Some places hold undeniably powerful magic, like the Fig Tree, and the Pierce porch: Palm gliding up the banisters, worn down by so many hands full of love for it, the smell of old wood,  the feel of the cold metal doorknob, the sound of its creaky turn and the door opening to a true home, hallowed by many many souls. “Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color”, some anonymous hand wrote by the door. How supported and surrounded those two lines made me feel in the last weeks before leaving last year. And how they still echo in me now.

I planned this whole trip around Co-op Thanksgiving, the annual reunion, which is an event of some awesomely powerful magic. It is the night when the hallowed walls hum with life upon the gathering of generations who poured their souls into them. Last year the event was the absolute pinnacle of my Davis year. This year was different, the Thanksgiving celebration the focal point of some radical and polarizing political criticism from within the community. The night itself was fine of course, but as a result of the intense Facebook discussions the turnout was rather low. A pity, I had hoped to see more people and feel that co-op magic come to life. But a traveler must stay flexible. I am at the mercy of people’s availability and hospitality this whole time here, and nothing ever works out as planned anyway. If anything, this year’s reunion was a good test of character: those ready to take charge of their own experience showed up to have a good time regardless of the circumstances.

Home

Unexpectedly, during this trip I’ve also realized that after being back in the Netherlands for some time, my dominant life is back there now. I’ve even caught myself missing my chilly northern country and its people. Who would have thought… Not me, I thought I would never fit back in. But humans are so adaptive. Though I have relished the chance to reconnect to the Californian pieces of me and the cherished friends and places here, I’m looking forward to going home in the other direction, too.

Going Back

Traveling really trips you up, and questions the foundations of the place back at ‘home’ you’ve rooted yourself in so deeply that you see everything in its light. Shake it off! Shake it off! I’m glad I threw myself onto this trip, terribly mentally underprepared I must say. The realization wouldn’t – as I knew it wouldn’t, and how could it? – sink in until I felt my insides sink into the pit of my stomach, in that sweet feeling of lifting off from your native soil.

I’m back. This is not a visit, this is not a holiday. This is stepping back into another life of mine. A whole world that I built up from scratch with my own bare hands over a year’s time on the other side of the planet.  Another reality, and a place I invested so much of myself in that it feels like reconnecting to a severed piece of myself. A piece that finally found a home in sunny, life-loving California and told me it would be happier to stay back there, while my other pieces came back with me to my home in chilly, level-headed Holland.

I knew it would be a trip, but I could not have prepared myself for the shock of crossing over to that other world. Stepping from the plane teleportation machine, and off onto the platform of the Amtrak vortex train station, and through the portal, my senses swelled to familiar sounds, scents, and sights. The distinctive hue of the sunlight here, the scaly eucalyptus trees, the nightly cricket choir, the cork oaks and olive trees, the heavy towering stone pines, the blue jays, the spastic rabid squirrels: my heartland’s nature greeting me. And, unexpectedly, my mind flooded with vivid memories helped along by the man-made environment. The wide concrete sidewalks with the painted curbs, the traffic signs, the street names and all the familiar shops and stores. The very first street I walked down, G St, brought back evenings spent with different friends in the various cafes and restaurants: The Beer Shoppe, Woodstocks’, DeVere’s, Wunderbar, Ket Mo Ree, ACE hardware store, I remember I remember I remember it all.

And then it found its way back to me: the surge, that big surge in my chest, that brimming over with ecstasy. It was the occasional spilling over of that baseline happiness and gratitude I felt in my time here. It came over me mostly when I was racing my orange road bike, bless it, or when dancing, or clambering up the soft hairy arms of sequoia trees. Where to go? Where to go with so much happiness? Oh man, how I loved my life here, how I loved who I was here.

I’m walking through a dreamscape. My mind and body still filled with my (make no mistake, equally sweet) life in Holland, and yet here I am, walking through the scenery of a life that a year ago seemed much realer than my Dutch life. The two sides of Inception, and I’m not sure which side I’ll wake up on. It’s a big confrontation, frankly. I've been turned inside out. For a year Davis and its people and places were a virtual reality that existed somewhere inside me. Now, it turns out it's kept on existing as concretely as ever without me, and I stand eye to eye with it, and I am in it, instead of it in me. 

And yet, it’s all changed; the space-time fabric has filled up the hole I left upon departing. Ahh Time, you get me everytime. All the components of my California life are still here, but only remnants of the life itself remain. They’re stored in the hearts and minds of people, as I’m finding out. They greet me with all the old love. They’ve carried my memory in them, in all the stories that we’ve shared. People are the key. The key to time. The constants while the waves of time ceaselessly keep rolling over, rolling over. People bridge the spatial and temporal divide. People, weavers of fabric out all the different times, gingerly sewing meaning into its threads, they’re such magic.

I am one of them, and as crazy and wild as this navigating of different worlds feels at times, I’m doing it. Quantum dancer on the rolling waves, threading them together. Gathering up all the pieces of who I am in their different shrines, and proving they can all exist simultaneously, finding synthesis in one of those magic human specimens, me.

I’m really glad I came back to check up on things here.

 

Bye NL, Hi CA