Spring time in Davis

Davis, April 20, 2014

Spencer comes to town

March 22, 11pm. Spencer lands on Sacramento airport. A moment long anticipated, with mixed feelings. I was excited to have him back, my best friend and lover, someone who is always available to talk to, to give and receive the warmest love, and brings out the best in me. But I knew that his arrival would mean the end of the life as I’d known it here. The fluid, fanatical, undivided attention I had for my life in the co-ops would now have to be partly diverted to him. The easy, carefree life I’d been leading in a world in which I’d grown only young, shallow roots, would be penetrated by a representative of the old life: someone who, be it lovingly and happily on my part, bound me in so many ways. It had been so wonderful to myopically follow all my whims, flutter erratically to every scene and object that caught my eye, have no-one to rely on but myself. Now it was time to come back to earth, expand my consideration to include the wants and needs of another person once again, and re-open up to someone to share my full vulnerability. I was scared of it. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to merge two of such big worlds of mine. How I was going to divide my attention, when really I wanted to give my full attention to both. How I was going to hold on to the strong, independent self that had come to such fruition here in a world on its own. It was good that Spencer came on the first day of Spring Break. With that, I had a chance to give my private life, just me and the co-ops, closure as a completed and very successful Part I. I could be proud of myself. I had succeeded, with flying colors, in what I had wanted to come here for on my own: proving that I had the autonomy, the sure and firm self-awareness, and the positive disposition necessary to craft a whole new life, beautiful and worthwhile, with my own bare hands.

$pRiNg BrEaK!!!

Spring Break was spent catching up and recalibrating, while exploring the uncharted lands of central California. In our rented car, we drove up to Clearlake, a quiet water with rickety jetties reaching into the mists, on through an hour long windy rollercoaster road through Jackson State Park’s redwoods and spruces, until we reached the final frontier in Fort Bragg, and I got my first up-close glimpse of the Great Pacific! From Fort Bragg, we spent two days driving all the way down along the famous Highway 1, all along the coast, down to San Francisco. The scenery was breathtaking, wild untamed and rugged. It reminded me of Scotland. The truest rolling hills I’ve ever seen, so round they couldn’t be real, small wooden ocean towns, and rough cliffs and giant rocks protruding from the surf, guarding the coast of the Golden State. I love California. We rolled into the Bay City across the Golden Gate bridge, spent the day in Golden Gate Park, and met up for dinner with my dearest friends Lili and Ashley, our separate spring break wanderings crossing for the evening in a café in Berkeley Spencer used to frequent in his time. That night, once again, we hadn’t arranged for a place to sleep, so we found our way to Lothlorien, one of our sister co-ops in Berkeley, to see if we could crash there. What a trip that turned out to be! We got there in the dark, with rain pouring down so hard rivers were flowing down the steep streets. We climbed the hidden stairs to a giant mansion, little windows lit five stories tall, and met two figures on the porch. We shared their smoke until we’d befriended them enough so they would let us in, and opened the doors to a madhouse of murals,  extravagant characters, a red velvet dress and some dilated pupils, countless corridors and enormous living rooms. We were led up to one of their spare rooms, a narrow lair underneath a slanted roof, with nothing but a mattress and some cozy twinkly lights, scribbles and quotes from past guests covering the walls, and a bulging fish-eye window that gave us a watery view of the thousands of lights that lit up the nightly Bay Area. The end of the corridor that our room led on to took a sharp turn and continued across a small bridge a dizzying seventy feet above the ground out of the attic and into a circular tree house hugging a giant redwood that neighbored the house. I couldn’t believe where we’d ended up. I stared my eyes out, this was awesome! Back in Berkeley, home to the largest student cooperative in the country, 12 houses like these altogether, and no doubt of the craziest ones at that.

 Rolling hills in California's Central Valley

Our lair in Lothlorien

The next day we continued our journey down through Stanford until we reached our final destination, Santa Cruz, where we spent the last four days hanging out with my friends from Davis. We stayed at my good friend Miles’ double house, atop two small twin hills in the forests outside Santa Cruz, a welcoming home cluttered with dozens of unfinished home jobs and fix ups, telling the story of the family life lived here over the past decades. His brothers were home too, and the three of them were the sweetest, closest band of brothers I’ve ever met. Their mom cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for us, complete with turkey and appreciations. The head of the family, their big bearded father, fell in love with Spencer’s sharp mind. Miles took us and three other friends into the woods. That’s where I met my first old growth red wood, an ancient woody giant towering high over our little heads, charred up inside but still going strong, his rough spiraling bark an exhibit to the force with which he’d shot up out of the earth over the centuries. The rest of our Santa Cruz time was spent strolling through downtown, tidepooling and hanging out on the beach, going to an awesome awesome show (the Polish Ambassador & Saqi), climbing trees (my rediscovered passion, one of my favorite things to do now, together with biking and dancing), and driving, because that’s how you get around here. I’m so glad we got to get out of Davis for a week, got to see more of my gorgeous second homeland, and got to spend time together and with some of my best friends who have come to mean a lot to me over the course of my stay here. Perhaps it is the Californian zest, or perhaps the co-op community in Davis is a really biased sample, but the people that have become my friends here are so wonderful, so stoked about life, so open and loving. And Spencer only adds to that, and makes life here a little more real.

That's what I mean 

The gang in Santa Cruz

Painting is a process

Back in Davis, Part II started with my first official week in Pierce, the co-op next door. I had moved out of DSC two weeks before Spring Break already, because of issues with my lease, and since then my stuff had been all over the place, spread out across two houses. I never knew where anything was, and was constantly repacking and moving my toothbrush around. I loved it, that chaos fit my fluid self well, but after three weeks of that I was really ready to settle down again. But it wasn’t time for that yet, since I’d taken up the big project of painting my entire room.  Over the first weekend of spring quarter, I hid out in my room and painted and cleaned and taped and scrubbed for hours and hours for four days straight. Everything I did outside of my room, eating, peeing, partying, sleeping, felt like a painting break. I felt like I hardly saw anyone, and mostly I felt extremely liminal, the fourth week of chaos, of no homebase, and this time in a new house. I hadn’t expected to feel so homeless those first days in Pierce. I was moving in, after all, because I was friends with most of the guys there, and was super stoked to get to know all of the Piercians (14 in all) better. Yet having them as housemates was different. And then I remembered the other reason why I had moved into Pierce: because I’d caught myself settling down, and getting too comfortable in DSC. I had wanted to pull myself out of my comfort zone, put myself on the edge again, so I could keep exploring, and growing, and branching out. But I had just forgot about it, and not expected that moving in with the Piercians would place me that far out of my comfort zone at first. But that’s good. Not only was that move in line with my philosophy of what this life here is to me: one of fluidity, diversity, and novelty. It also meant answering to a call deep within me that’s been there for as long as I can remember. One Friday morning, outside on the grass over breakfast, a friend here asked me: “Are you a drifter? You seem friends with everybody, not really stuck in any cliques…” I thought about that for a while after. Yes, I guess I am a drifter. As long as I can remember, I have spent my social life drifting from friend group to friend group, never sticking around for longer than a year and a half at best. I feel like I’m always searching for ‘my people’ – I wrote about that earlier, and I remember talking about this with my therapist at the tender age of 11. Yet each time, after a while, I’ll find that the new group of friends I’ve landed in isn’t my social kin after all. Each time, I’ll retain one or two really good friends from that time and take off again. It’s taken me a long time to realize that this is not a bad thing, not just a movement out of lacking. Many times I’m happy as a drifter. I’m so happy I put so much effort into establishing myself here in the co-ops and in the larger community, that I kept exploring and found friends in many different places, instead of putting all my eggs in one basket. I’m happiest, as I wrote before, rolling from social scene into the next, doing my rounds, journeying from room to room, or party to party, over the span of an evening. I love that people know my name, and that I can get on my bike and think of five different places to go to see people I want to see. I love putting myself out there in the world, and it’s not just because I’m looking for family, it’s also because I simply love being out there.

My new room

“You’re a Piercian now”

That said, I also really value having a home, and the first week in Pierce, the last week in liminality, was lived in delicious and restless anticipation, getting ready for the next big torrent. I’m so, so happy I moved into Pierce. Three weeks into the quarter I can feel how I’m slowly, in between those smallest of moments and interactions, in the kitchen, on the stairs, in the bathroom, carving out this new home space for myself. Pierce is a glorious home. It is a happy place. It is one filled with laughter and loudness. It’s dirty, it’s cluttered, and every other weekend we have to move all the stuff out of the living room, all our couches out on to the lawn, because we’re hosting another party. The boys are big and introverted, teaching me how to be affectionate friends without all the words, while the girls are loud and jubilant, keeping track of their periods on a fertility chart over the stairs and busting into the bathroom with comments like, “Who’s in there? Cole, is that you?!” “…” “Are you taking a shit Cole?” “…” “Okay, rock on dude!” Sure things are a little uncomfortable in the beginning, but what a wonderful group of people, welcoming me into their midst with an initiation ritual in my first house meeting, and comments like “You live here now! It’s so awesome!”, “Stef, you’re a Piercian now”, “Stephanie, we’re glad you moved in”, and “Welcome to the family”. My wonderful roommate, Tucker, waited patiently with all his possessions in piles of chaos on the landing for a week, complimenting me all the while on all my hard painting work, with comments like “This is my favorite color!” Oh man. And he mentioned me during Appreciations at the end of house meeting, saying “I appreciate Stephanie, because her punishment when she saw how I had turned our room into Bed Land (he barely managed to squeeze his queen-sized bedframe in there) was that she’s going to paint a mural in our room.”

Yes, moving into Pierce was an absolute master move. The dominant emotion now is hunger. Really only moving in a week after the quarter started, and having to divide my attention between Spencer and the co-ops now, I’m so hungry to bite into this life. A single second flash of lightning that has only just started to light up, is all this moment here in Pierce, and in the co-ops, and in Davis, will ever be. One second to live this experience and a lifetime to remember it. I’ll have to live it in slow motion, soak it up, gulp it down greedily, be here, with it.

Birthweek

The first week of the quarter was also half of my birthweek. A birthday was not enough to fit all my excitement into, and a single party not enough for all the celebration that needed to be done here. On my birthday itself I purposefully didn’t plan anything. That way every moment was a great surprise. And it was beautiful to see how, surrendering my birthday to friendship, Spencer, Lili, and Ashley filled it in for me. They kept finding me, throughout the day, for another little celebration. Lili and Ashley waking me up, a birthday breakfast on bed from Spencer, a picnic with Lili’s homemade ‘boterkoek’, singing for me over house dinner, and gathering some my favorite boys (my only +21 friends here) for a birthday shot and a drink in town. That Saturday a birthday party in Pierce, where my party buddy Gordon played a DJ set with “all of his Dutch songs” for me and Spencer, the last ones standing. Throughout the week I wore my green paper necklace so that every time I’d look down I’d be reminded that I was celebrating, and the people in the co-ops and Spencer knew that I was celebrating for a week, so every morning there’d be someone to recongratulate me. Good times.

Surrendering my birthday to friendship 

Spencer's BACK!

The rest of these first spring days were: running around campus bursting with excitement with a new friend looking for the best rooftop to watch a full lunar eclipse at midnight; new awesome courses (from hapkido to a Mexican muraling workshop and from learning about organic crop production on the Student Farm to Sociology of Social Movements); field trips to see murals in the Mission in San Francisco and to the juvenile detention center where we’ll be painting ours (intense, mindblowing experience, a whole story in itself); staring at my beautiful new painted room; wonderful moments of reconnection and rediscovery with Spencer; two to five person sleepovers in the tall wet grass under a hazy full moon in the field behind the Domes, another ‘intentional living community’ in our larger community of awesome radicals and a Hobbitland on the edge of campus that looks like you stepped straight into a fairytale; and, as always, the gazillion little moments and interactions that make this life here so full and vibrant, so dizzyingly acutely here, and make you fall in love with life so hard. 

Last few weeks of winter quarter

Remember when I said I had fallen out of my fairytale when drama struck? I was wrong. The dark side of the moon only made it more three-dimensional, more dense, more real, and sucked me deeper into its trance. Ever seen the movie Waking Life? That’s how I feel. I’m tripping out in a big dream, wading through thick air that clouds my consciousness, and I can’t wake up because I’m in, and all of this my whole life here.

Picnic party on the quad

The moments that make up this fairy land

How will I ever make people back in my other lives understand? I can’t. It will always stay a wondrous dream of some lost time spent in a distant fairy land. Studying in Pierce’s Space Station (one of the bedrooms) until midnight and then going for a walk with my study buddy, ending up climbing rooftops and collecting pine cones and clambering on piles of red sand like little kids before heading home again together. Going for yoga at the Domes, the little hobbit-house community on the edge of campus, getting dinner in a yurt filled with good people and good food, ending up borrowing a violin and bringing it home for my first lesson from my fiddler friend and housemate. Stretching out on the lawn in front of our houses in the California winter sun to write a little, being joined by steady stream of friends who bring chai tea and smiles and stories. Climbing a big red wood tree in the middle of the campus quad, all the way to the crow’s nest and meditation bell in the top, in a spiraling dance around the furry bark on bare feet that fit so perfectly around the curves of the branches you suddenly remember why they’re shaped the way they are. Coming home to my housemate and her turtle weeding together in the cabbage bed. Walking out of my last class of the quarter onto the sun-drenched  campus quad to take a nap on a friend’s belly, and wake up to be joined by the next friend, and the next, and the next, until you find yourself in the middle of an impromptu picnic party. Going on house trip and on a hike the next morning in a veritable Sound of Music landscape, and running down the hill together, through the wind and through the brakes, throwing ourselves at life. Going on Trico-op trip and spending the afternoon in an enchanted forest in steaming azure blue hot springs with naked forest elves, the hooting of a distant owl and a green frog concert. Jumping up from the bed after making music together and biking through the dusk, feeling the breeze stream through the fingers on our outstretched hands, to our housemates’ concert, where we’ll know about half of the audience because we live with them or because they’re our friends’ friends in this tiny little town that houses the collection of all our dreams for these years. I could go on for hours recounting hundreds upon hundreds of such little moments that I walk in and out of day to day. Put together, they cumulate into something so huge and magical that it’s swallowed me whole, purely by virtue of the combination of so many amazing individuals and their all their eccentric skills and inside worlds and ideas.

Hot Springs, Sierraville

Many big things have happened in the past two weeks. We went on Trico-op trip to the hot springs in the Sierras. My first encounter with California’s big nature. We had reserved an entire hotel for ourselves in a deserted old Gold Rush town, set in the middle of the expansive plains of the Sierra foothills. Getting drunk and silly, making dinner and music, and playing games and acroyoga together, until we stumbled upstairs exhausted and recreated home with our housemates in these unfamiliar rooms for the night.

Berkeley co-ops

A week later we went on house trip, just us DSC. We visited the co-ops in Berkeley. My God. I had no idea. I’ve never lived in co-operative living before, and so the Trico-ops and affiliated communities around Davis (three more co-ops and the Domes), altogether about a hundred people, is the only frame of reference I had. The Berkeley Student Co-operative is something else entirely. In between their 12 co-ops, Berkeley counts about a thousand co-opers. We visited three co-ops that night, counting 50, 150, and 120 inhabitants respectively. Especially their flagship co-op, Cloyne, left a deep impression on me. It was so similar and yet so different to us. They were just like us, the same kind of people, drinking out of mason jars, painting murals on the walls, having chores and communal dinners. But they had our creativity and eccentricity tenfold. What erupts when you put all of that together is a huge old hotel that over the course of a century has become infused with the personality of the community it houses to the very last inch. There’s not a wall in the vast building that doesn’t bear the most incredible murals. We visited late on a quiet night, and not many people were home. But I liked it that way. Just like when I first got to Davis, deserted as it was on the tail of winter break, I got the chance to become acquainted with the space first, before its quiet voice would be drowned out by all the people. And still, I felt welcomed by scores of people, and learnt so much about the place. These walls told me the stories of those who lived and had lived there, throughout the years. This place was an extension of its people, they’d poured their inside worlds out onto these walls. I remembered that this was one of the big reasons why I wanted to live in the co-ops in Davis: Being able to mold your living space, give it shape so that it becomes your natural habitat, so that it comes to express who you are, so that it can become your home. It’s what I’d always missed in UCUs sterile campus grounds where we weren’t allowed to leave any physical trace of our culture. You couldn’t tell by looking at our campus what people lived here. In Cloyne, very much so. These were the most articulate walls I’d ever met. The air inside breathed history and character, the voices of all the generations still echoed throughout the hallways and common rooms. Crazy too, was how a moment that lasts a second can throw your whole journey on a different course. I walked into the Cloyne dining area (huge space), slightly buzzed, and saw a face. Something in my brain clicked, and I waited for a moment to have it confirmed. When I heard the Dutch accent, I shouted, “Utrecht!!” and there she was, a girl from UCU that had gone on exchange to Berkeley, and lived in Cloyne now! Out of all those 150 people, she was there, at that time, in that place! Being on the other side of the ocean, this world and the ones back at home seem so separate, how could they ever blend? Yet here she was, teleported from another dimension into my journey in California! For the rest of the night, she took me all over Cloyne, and then CZ, another co-op, and showed and told me everything. Wauw universe, you’re crazy!

Being in an urban setting again, and on a hill, made such a difference too. Sitting on the roof of Kingman, another co-op, we had a view of the Bay, thousands of light sparkling in the night sky. Sather tower, UC Berkeley’s landmark, in our left eye’s corner, and the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance in our right eye’s corner, being elevated above so much life brought things back into perspective. Davis is flat like Holland, no hill from which to look down upon your life and see how it loses its urgent significance amidst countless other lives. The lives in Davis aren’t countless either, it’s a small town set in the middle of  agricultural land stretching for miles and miles in all directions. Only 60,000 lives in a vast sea of space. Too easy to lose yourself in living, on ground level like that, surrounded by people who are all part of your tiny life. But seeing Berkeley’s scale also made me realize that part of why I love Davis so much is precisely its small little cuteness. It’s an easy place to love, so personal and intimate and homely. And I imagine that 44 people more readily feels like a close-knit family than a 150 people. Either way, our visit to Berkeley jerked my fairytale dream-like life back into perspective. Made me realize how tiny it is, and how much I have come to love the people in it. Housemates are a special kind of friends. You share an allegiance, a kinship, a familiarity, a frame of reference that forges a deep and dear bond. I returned home with a renewed appreciation and gratitude for this place.

The Bay

Dark Sparkle

The next night, last Saturday, was a big one. It was Dark Sparkle, a huge dance party a half hour drive outside Davis. Everyone had been living up to this night for weeks. As the evening progressed, our drive filled up with cars, all old Trico-opers and friends who used our houses as a homebase to get ready for the party. I won’t go in-depth, but suffice it to say, it was crazy. A Burning Man camp in the middle of dark sodden fields (that we sprinted into barefoot at one point), with campfires and fire dancers, and a drag show and glittering lights, and tents and barns with sick beats and an oven for pizza making and 500 souls burning through all their saved-up excitement, living it up. Man, what a great night. A pearl amongst my memories, this one gets a special drawer.

Pierce

Lastly, the big change is that I’ve been accepted into Pierce, the house next door. I said before why I felt I was ready to pick up my bags and get moving again. I have to keep flowing, because that is the nature of this journey, and how I feel best and grow most. Winter quarter only ends next week, but I’ve already half moved out because of some minor issue with my lease. So now I’m treating these last two weeks as a transition phase in between DSC and Pierce. I was planning to just do some roaming, sleep somewhere else every night, which reminds me a little of my nomad life last semester in between Utrecht, Amsterdam, and The Hague. But having almost completed one week of roaming, I feel pretty liminal. Last night, I started missing DSC so much I picked up my bedding and moved back to my old bed for the night. Waking up to the familiar view, with my roommates Lili and Karen in our cluttered room, was glorious. Walking downstairs and preparing breakfast in the familiar kitchen, where most of the dishes are done, it doesn’t smell like dank old food leftovers, and we get the Eastern morning sun that Pierce doesn’t, made me so happy. Listening to the morning thoughts of my familiar morning people made me feel so at place. I’m realizing now that what I said about DSC last time, about becoming almost too comfortable in it, like stagnant water, is also really valuable to me. DSC has seamlessly taken over the role of a home in my life, and I love it and I’ll miss it dearly. Nevertheless, I’ll gladly trade it for Pierce. I applied because the people in Pierce draw me very much and because I was ready for something new. Now, I’m starting to see what a master move it’s been. The first house meeting I attended, a day after Dark Sparkle, blew my mind. The meeting was very efficient and fast-paced, but when we got to appreciations, at the end, we slowed down and sunk into a different stream. Everyone was so heartfelt, so warm and so loving in their genuine appreciation for each other and their experiences in the past week. All the big and small things received a shower of gratitude, and the atmosphere was so palpably positive it caught my breath. Now, all the time spent hanging out in friends’ rooms, studying, making music, hanging out, talking, is filled future and an excitement about all the great moments still to come. My friends keep reminding me, during some of the many great moments, “you’ll be living with us next quarter.” Yep, I will, and it’s gonna be great.

Woei I feel better now. My dearest friend Lili showed me a quote: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect”. Yes I think that’s a big reason of why I write. But I also write to take a step back sometimes, distance myself from the moment, from this all-consuming dream-life, and not lose myself in it too much. It steadies me, keeps me sane, and makes me understand myself better. Glad to be sharing that with you.

Dancing with water

                                                                                                                       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.

Getting streaked by the Domies at our blanket fort party

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.

* David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech at Kenyon

Report from the River

Dominant emotions: happiness, excitement, wonder, contentment, gratitude

Report from the river

So much can happen in five weeks. You can build a whole life. And not just any life, but a huge, diverse, ever-evolving life more fulfilling and enriching than any other I’ve ever been a part of. Of course, part of that is just the novelty, the same way I felt UCU was paradise on earth when I first got there. And part of it is my awareness of my temporality here, which makes every day seem so much fuller, vivid, and unique. Another part is just me reencountering myself. Just like the times before where I broke away from a life I’d been living and started anew, being here all on my own makes me rediscover how much I like myself, which is great. I feel that in any new place I’d go to I could feel this happy, simply by being reminded of my own brightness when it’s held against a new and different light.  But by now it has been a while since I last felt that free breeze of unbounded, empty existence I held so dear in the first few weeks. And that’s okay. I am so happy to have traded it for a feeling of deep embeddedness in this wonderful place, surrounded by such amazing people. Because yes, a fourth part of why I’m having the time of my life here is because this simply is an incredible place.

The people here are all such unique characters, and, generally speaking, so kind and welcoming. Many have a fascinating set of talents and skills that I can learn a lot from. Like right now I’m writing all this in one of the bedrooms in Pierce, sitting next to someone who grows algae in a lab and plays waterpolo, and who I’m rapidly growing into a beautiful friendship with, and another guy who, I just discovered, plays the Irish whistle, taught me a tune, and in return has some questions for me, as he is learning to play the guitar because he wants to be a bard. I am still super involved in loads of different things, simply by being surrounded by so many active people and not having to muster the discipline all by myself every time I go rock climbing, running, going to the gym, gardening, planting seeds in the greenhouse, jamming, singing, partying, playing videogames, going to the weekly Farmer’s Market, reading, studying, cooking, hanging out, meditating, yoga, concerts, … it goes on and on and on. Every night again, I find myself rolling from one social scene into the next, and it takes at least three, all with different people in different places, before I finally roll into bed. Apart from leaving me feeling so socially saturated and satisfied, my learning curve of life has also started up a steep incline. I talk and think about my experiences here at a meta level a lot. A friend of mine put it beautifully, saying that with being around so many people all the time, your head is constantly filled with other people’s thoughts. And so apart from going through your own learning process, you are in effect a participant in other people’s learning processes too. Maybe that’s why life is so fast and deep and full here. At the same time, I have never felt so fully present for such a long consecutive period of time. In fact, I feel I have never left the center of life, where it’s all going down, in all this time here. And not just that, I have also never been so consciously grateful for all that I have, I feel like I’m living gratitude. So here I am, experiencing and thanking every second of it all.

Spontaneous 1,5 hour long jam coming to our kitchen. 

One of the most wonderful surprises of my life

My life here is like a river that just keeps flowing, taking me in unexpected new directions even now. I float into new people’s lives, deeper into familiar ones, away from some others, laying anchor for a while in places that feel right. And I trust this river. I feel comfortable just drifting along, because I know that it will take me to places I want to be, very much like how Spencer and I started out together. I am so glad I waded into this river on day 1, without any reservations, because I have been reaping the benefits of my deep involvement from the start. I am so excited to be developing myself here as my own life project, but other people are an absolutely essential part of that. Here, all my needs for real connection, a real hug, a real conversation, can be satisfied by a whole bunch of bighearted people that all live within a 20 meter radius from my bed. Five weeks in, and already I have become firmly convinced that this type of living environment is IT for me. This is how I want to live my life, sharing it with kindred spirits.

Let me share some of the specific insights I’ve had, to maybe make these very generic statements above come to life a little more.

Four day visit to the cave of rumination

One friend that I’ve made here in particular has boosted my learning curve of life. He is what I consider a ‘real scientist’, just like my dear friend Mark from home. But more so than anyone else I’ve ever met, he looks at the world so differently, that I have trouble relating to what he has to say about it. Everything he says is never something I could have predicted. He reminds me that while I’m spending my time trying to make sense of the world on my own terms, those terms are so relative, and there are such different ways of looking at the world. Recently I have been thinking a lot again about the one-person universes we all inhabit, or our ‘inescapable separateness from the other’ as a friend called it. It was confronting to see how I can connect with someone, feel some elusive deeper understanding that draws us together as friends, and yet know that our universes are so alien to each other that all we could ever accomplish is stare in through sporadic little windows in wonder. You can never understand the other person on their own terms, see the world through their eyes. ‘Really understanding’ thus becomes at best a close approximation of the other person’s experience. In fact, it was a little disturbing, and it made me call into question the coherence of my own perspective on the world. I got drawn too deeply into thinking about this, and spiraled down into a deep rut of rumination. For four days, I was upset and confused, and felt my mind clouding over the world around me.

But the way I came out of this throwback was beautiful. I know the way out very well in theory, and have experienced many times in my life, but every time I get lost in my mind I have to wait for the next moment where I feel the way out. This time, it was through meditation and yoga. Centering on my inner strength, stripping off all thoughts, made me snap out of it. I had never before so consciously experienced how those two practices can lift you out of a bad state of mind in a single session. The key – for me – is opening up to world. Peeling off all films of fear that settle in between you and your infinite, omnipotent source of love. Every time I am amazed how easy it is to relieve your love of some of those layers of fear, once you realize, or rather remember, that you can. Life is all about sharing your love. It was so beautiful to see how it transforms your interactions with other people. They are drawn to your light, happiness, to warm and open and generous love, and it’s so contagious. It makes for instant and real connections. Why don’t we always share our love? And it’s not more complicated, on the contrary, it is the simplest form of being. Why, if it’s not our natural or simplest state, do we get caught up in these strenuous, exhausting modes of being most of our time, weighed down by this fear of sharing our love? It’s crazy, it’s all everyone wants! Luckily, I have this place now as a perpetual mirror, instantly reflecting the effects of my state of mind in my interactions with the people around me. Can you imagine how this place accelerates my growth?

Fractal webs of affiliation

Last week Friday I went to my first party off campus. After a month of sinking into life at the Tricoops, all of a sudden I found myself back on an edge, surrounded by people I had never seen before. Yet I felt the same benign vibe: open and welcoming. And as the night progressed, I stumbled upon some of those invisible threads of spider silk, connecting new people I met back to friends at the Tricoops, at the Domes, from the Student Farm, rock climbing, Project Compost, the Whole Earth Festival Crew, and so on. It was here that I realized that the Tricoops are anything but an isolated community of 44 free radicals. They are deeply embedded in a much larger community at UCDavis of – how to describe them? – ‘moon language’ people (it’s a Hafiz poem, check it out, beautiful). An eccentric, friendly bunch, generally so so kind, open, ready for connection because they have all felt its potency. I am so lucky that I can count myself a member of one of the hubs of this huge moon language community. The Tricoops are really where it’s at, and every time I come home from a party with some amazing people that are my housemates, my heart jumps at the joy of that realization.

Finding my place

Last weekend was significant in many ways. One of them is that after a month of being here, I felt ready to step forward and into a real role in the community. I facilitated two meetings where a bunch of buried tensions and unspoken hurt feelings and misunderstandings needed to come to the table. All it really needed was the request to open up to each other as a group, and what happened after that was just magical. I just can’t understand how we as the vast majority of humanity ever got ourselves into that predicament of swallowing our concerns and closing off to others. Open, honest, respectful communication is the answer to everything. It’s what I’ve experienced time and again I have taken part in it. It shakes loose worries and obstructions that you never even knew were there, and harbors such a beautiful, transformative power. Being the one to break the silence made me feel like a real member of the community, contributing in a way I know taps into some of my greatest competencies and passions. In truth, I know that this is where my path lies. Some of my greatest strengths and focal frontiers of personal growth – intuition, social awareness, empathy, and diligence – all come together in this role as facilitator. That role embodies and synthesizes all my greatest lessons in life, because it’s the lessons I’ve always been drawn to most. And here is a place that calls on me to take on this role. Here, right now, in this precious life of mine, I feel that I’ve begun to bloom.

Second Tricoop meeting

A life that gets your hands dirty

The dust has finally begun to settle, in my third week here in Davis. Ever since my first party here, a week and a half ago, I am no longer to be found on the edge of this wild universe. They took my hand and led me right in. So perhaps it’s time to turn to some descriptions of what has turned out to be, even within such a short time, the setting of a profound personal journey, the meaning of which I have elaborated on a little last week. Maybe if I tell you about this place in a little more detail, you will understand why Davis, and the Tricooperatives specifically, are having such an impact on me.

The Tricooperatives are an ecological community, set up as an alternative living experiment in the 70s. The three houses, Davis Student Coop (DSC, where I live, housing 16 people), Pierce (with 16 people), and Agrarian Effort (Ag, with 12 people), share a big garden, chickens, and pretty much all the rest of their lives, situated by the Northern edge of campus. They’re not the only quirky community type thing around here. In town there’s some 2 or 3 other cooperatives (mostly UC Davis students) that I haven’t visited yet. And just a ten minute walk from here, in a far corner on campus, there’s ‘Baggins End’, a dozen white domes shared by two people each. While the Domes are taking the alternative living environment thing to a whole new level, people tend to be more involved with each other here in the Tricoops, where we live together in such close quarters. And this is where the parties are at, which is great. In the weekends, people wake up from the workday slumber and there are parties to be found all around. The weekend mornings are great for sitting downstairs and watching the one night stands squeamishly trying to leave the house unnoticed.

 Party at the Domes - full moon, stars, Xmas lights, couches, a Yurt, 

and trees and Domes in the background. Man, what a crazy setting for a party.

Fluidity

I had deliberately (tried very hard to) kept my expectations of the Tricoops blank, just opening myself up to whatever would come my way. So when I arrived here, was shown to my room, and I saw the cobwebs, crazy murals, and dirt on the floor, I thought, ‘Alright, so this is how it is here, I can live with this.’ In all my open mindedness I didn’t even think to clean the room, which hadn’t been inhabited in the winter break, in the first few days. By now, however, I have come to see that one of the main characteristics of the place is its fluidity. The whole house gets mixed up every quarter, so you’ll only spend about 12 weeks in any of your rooms. You can paint everything over, and if you need drawers, a mattress, or any other furniture, you just go ahead and find an idle piece somewhere in the three houses. It’s all that I have longed for for a long time: a living space that those who live there give shape; leaving their mark, creating their own most natural habitat.

While there are house dinners 5 out of 7 days a week, it doesn’t matter all that much in which of the three houses you have your bed. People just walk in and out of all three houses, sitting down without a word on the couch to study, visiting friends in their rooms, joining for dinners, hanging out on the porch, pretty much like it’s their own home. When I stored my dinner leftover in the Pierce fridge for the night, it really almost felt like a second home. Some of my favorite moments so far were when we would merge house dinners and all 44 of us (plus guests, which are always around) would eat in one of the living rooms, or when one of the other houses forgot their cook night and when the clock strikes 7, a dozen Piercians or Agrarians magically materialize in our kitchen, right in time to be served. All our meals are vegan, mostly gluten free, and complemented with fresh produce from the Davis Student Farm where some of us (me included!) volunteer, and later on in the year probably also from our own garden. These dinners are my favorite time of the day, and the time that comes after, when I’m done for the day and just roam around, walking into rooms at random and getting to know all the amazing people here better by the day. That said, it’s funny how fate determines your allegiance. I live in DSC, so I like DSC best of all three houses, and am closest to the people here. Nonetheless, I’m taking advantage of my newness while it lasts. I do not yet have a feel for the subtle relational dynamics of this place. I am ignorant as yet about the intricate webs of who hangs out with whom, and everyone’s respective personalities. I’m still in the privileged position where I’m (mostly) not yet inhibited by such sensitivities, and boldly hang out with as many different people as I can. I’ve been reaping the benefits: I already feel deeply embedded here, have gotten to know some pretty great people, who have become allies, safe havens from which to keep exploring.

Dinner just doubled in size

We have house meetings every week, and a big Tricoop meeting every month. The house meetings are one of the moments I look forward to most every week (together with the parties in the weekend, weekly garden parties, and shopping for the house). These meetings – in my opinion – keep the house unified and connected. We start with emotional check-ins, which are great. It is really wonderful to know what is going on with the people you share your home space with. We end with thank yous, just going criss-cross around the room thanking anyone who did something nice for you that week that you hadn’t thanked them for yet. At the first meeting we divided the chores. You’d think cleaning the bathrooms and the like wouldn’t be things people would be stoked about, but everyone avidly vied for their favorite chores. I got great ones for this quarter: feeding the chickens (so I regularly get my own freshly collected egg for breakfast), garden coordinator (thinking about the ‘vision’ for our garden and coordinating the weekly garden parties), volunteering at the Davis Student Farm (bringing home fresh produce that you pulled out of the ground for your little Tricoop family feels really really great), and shopping. Doing groceries has never been this much fun. We only buy at the biggest fanciest organic supermarket in town, because we get a discount in return for some Tricoopers volunteering there. We bring all the empty jars and bottles and refill them with almonds, spices, rice, beans, self-ground peanut butter, sugar, soy, oats, agave syrup and anything else that comes in grainy or liquid format. Next we go to the other side of the store, which is overflowing with the most incredible vegetables I have ever seen. And all of it is organic, save for one tiny little section labeled ‘nonorganic’. Some people get cook nights, others are assigned as ‘staplers’. This means that almost every day as you get out of class, there will be people baking cookies, bread, cakes, granola, sauces, you name it, for you, to snack on! Can you imagine?! This place is simply heaven.

Harvesting our own honey

While there’s something sad about the massive flux of residents (for 13 out of the 16 people in DSC this is their first year here), it also keeps this community vibrant. People come in with fresh excitement to further enhance the living environment here. I talked to one guy who’s been living here for almost 5 years who told me that, understandably, he had come to feel very detached from the Tricoop life, desensitized to the perpetual change. Luckily, most of the people here have not yet grown tired of forging new friendships, losing them, and starting over. They have welcomed me here with open arms, quite literally, willing to invest in me as a real friend.

Sharing

Next to fluidity, sharing is another big theme here, as you might have guessed. Just about everything is shared. We share our food (what you label is yours and yours alone, all the rest is ‘house’, and will be gone within a matter of hours) and our clothes (there is a massive ‘freebox’ in Pierce that recently provided me with an entire outfit for the Californian winter I had underestimated). We drink out of recycled glass jars, because all the cups always go missing. We share catchphrases (everything here is ‘gnarly’), heartbreaks, colds and sicknesses, lice outbreaks (glad I wasn’t there for that last quarter), our bored and animated moments, sleep, study sessions, our lives, generally. And I love it.

About those heartbreaks, though. While everyone will shout ‘hippies!’ as soon as you’ll start talking about this place, it’s not a place of free love. People love to cuddle here, but often there will still be a hidden sexual agenda, and when you fall into that trap, more often than not, emotional consequences will ensue. Hearts do get broken here. People are forced to live alongside those they are trying so hard to forget. Life here is intense, but then it’s exactly that which makes me feel so alive here. I was made for this full, dynamic, communal lifestyle. I’m sharing my room for the first time in my life, and that with two people, but already it feels boring and empty when both of them are gone for the night.

Learning

The Tricoop population is really very diverse. It ranges from introverted solitary figures who easily get overwhelmed and make you wonder how they cope here, to flamboyant types who stomp around yelling and laughing and hanging one boob out of their shirt. You get  spectacled science nerds and zealous gender studies majors. People who hate gardening, people who love it. People who are young to take drugs, and those who are young to study. People who write on the walls, and people who tell you to do your f*cking dishes. People who collect dead birds in jars, or gauze fairy wings, or keep fruit flies in test tubes. Name and identity fluidity are big here. Some people have changed names or the spelling of their names, and some are in the process of gender and sexual identity transitions. You have to be careful with the way you talk here, political correctness is very big in a place that where many political minorities find a refuge.

What I’ve been finding is that this diversity is very activating. Every day, there will be people that go out running, to the gym, rock climbing, or to open mic and improv nights, concerts, or jamming on the roof, or juggling, hula hooping, gardening. It motivates me to join them, and here I am finding myself more active than ever before. I run several times a week, twice already with a couple of housemates on a spontaneous 4 mile run. I have done all of the above (except the gym and jamming on the roof, though I do pull ups on the pull up bar in the Pierce kitchen and play guitar every day) and much more. This place is helping me actualize all of those things I know make me a better person: I am fitter, more creative, studious (as ever), more socially embedded, more in touch, more outdoors, more intellectually challenged outside a school setting, and more productive than ever before, and all of it at the same time. This place is challenging me to grow on every imaginable level, and I have felt myself slipping into a rapid in this personal journey that is life.

Stephanie

Gravitating into communal living at the Tricoops

Time for an update. I am not going to tell you what I have been up to, but believe me it’s been a lot (alright then, in bird’s eye view: sitting in on 15 classes in my first week of school, cooking and shopping for a family of 16+, exploring as much as I could of the 7300 acre (30 km²) campus on my flashy new road bike, wandering into rooms and kitchens to get to know dozens of new people, sharing my room with two other new girls and bonding over our rookie-ness, visiting a dozen new cafes and restaurants, learning to juggle, watching squirrels, and many first-times: the first garden party, the first egg from our own chickens, my first party at the Tricoops, my first house- and Tricoops meeting, etc etc). But I wasn’t going to tell you about this. Instead, let me tell you what it means to me.

The UC Davis quad, the center of campus

Our kitchen

Learning to juggle

Before I left, when I talked to people who had gone on exchange, many of them spoke of it as the best time of their life. It intimidated me, and I could only hope that my time here would be half as good as what those people made theirs out to be. But now I’m here, and I can honestly say that I, too, am having the time of my life, and I think I know why.

It’s got to do with that blank slate feeling, the freedom that comes with it, and the temporality of this life here.

Novelty

This novelty of everything here is the sensation that stands out most of everything. I’ve felt it many times now, in different forms. I felt it when I saw land come into sight below me on my way here, when I emerged from underground with the train in San Francisco, on New Year’s Eve when I stood there with empty hands, blissfully, when I walked onto campus a week and a half ago, into an uncharted world that I knew was going to steal my heart, and I see it every day, in everyone’s eyes here.  My empty gaze sees so much more than I would see on familiar terrain. I feel like a baby, and it’s such a delight to drink in the new sunlight, all the colors, new words and gestures, and all those beautiful faces (did you take a proper look at the humans around you today, they are so beautiful!).

And apart from their novelty, these people are so incredible because of they are. Every day I’m coming home to a community of over 40 people that live here, with always a few extra bumming around, that hang out on the porch, hula hoop in the sun to blaring hip hop beats, study around the dining table, congregate in the kitchen, working in the garden… And they just open up to me, welcome me in, love me as I come, without even knowing me. Can you believe that I am just falling head over heels in love with this new world? I am mad in love with over 15 people already, and all I want is dive into all this, no reservations. I have nothing to lose, because I came in clean and empty, a blank slate, empty hands, open eyes.

Our house, the Davis Student Coop

Freedom

But this time, I am conscious of the life emerging around me, unlike the life I grew into at home. And I am so ready for it this time. I feel such freedom. I feel strong, independent and fully capable of taking this life of mine in my own hands and start steering it. And I can do so unbound by the relations and commitments and claims on my time and energy of those at home, however much I love them and want them all to be there when I get back, I am now free to take this life wherever, and feels so GOOD. All the credits for that go to Spencer, for his trust in me and our strong relationship, to my mom, who has the deepest understanding one could ever ask for of the necessity and bliss of freedom for this venture, my dad, who has come to believe in my autonomy, and all their big hearts.

My roommates, also both new, talk of being overwhelmed by it all. I think I’m in a better position: to me, not only this crazy-ass living environment is new, but this whole continent, everything here is entirely new to me. I had expected nothing less than being completely overwhelmed, and so I was ready for the wave to hit me. What’s more, I can make myself fully available to it. I have no other friendships here that demand maintenance, so I have the freedom to be a full part of all this whenever I want to, and I can also fully withdraw if I need some alone time. But apart from being ready and available for it, I actively seek it out. I am here, eagerly taking in all the new impressions and people and experiences that wash over me, and I just want more more more of it, relishing every second of it.

Our bedroom. My bed in the left bottom corner

Temporality

The fact that I can’t get enough of it, and that it doesn’t seem to tire or overwhelm me too much, is thanks to that other special lining to this big adventure. The horizon that was always going to be perpetually in sight. I am at any point so aware of the transience of my time here. And while it could make me sad and unwilling to commit, instead it makes all this novelty so vivid, that I cannot think of a time where I felt more alive. You see I am a thinker, and as such a regular victim to being yanked right out of life, and looking at it from the sidelines. Not here. Never have I felt such an integral, vibrant part of life. And that in such a sunny, powerful, colorful existence. I am here, strong and free, to absolutely maximize my time here, dive into it deeper than I ever have before, because I have nothing to lose, everything to gain, and the time is now.

And beside all this, I was born for communal living. I have never been in a better place and a better fit. I’m very very happy here.

Stephanie

My first garden party

Eating together

The Ingress

Early Beginnings of a Whole New Life

3 January 2014, Davis, CA

Fifth day in the U.S. completed. What a ride it’s been so far. The predominant feeling, even now, is that I just really don’t know what’s going on. I am completely in control of all the little things I have to take care of, and I’m having a great time, but it just won’t dawn on me where I am. So far away, on the eve of such a massive adventure that will no doubt impact me profoundly, it is all so much to take in, and still much too unreal.

Starting with the mere idea of being inside America. Hirtherto a place victim to so many preconceptions and stereotypes, but none of them mine. On my subjective mental map of the world, the United States are a pristine blank spot. And here I am, coloring it in for the first time, inch by inch, image by image, encounter by encounter.

Before reaching my final destination Davis, YOLO County (can you believe this one?! this is too good), CA, I had one day for each of the best two cities here: New York and San Francisco. I could go on for a while about just those few hours, but I’ll keep it short.

New York – 30 December 2013

My New York day mainly comprised a virtually nonstop six hour walk through Manhattan, covering Chelsea Market, the High Line Park, Empire State Building, Broadway, Times Square, Central Park, the lobby of Guggenheim, the Chrysler tower, and all the streets in between. I was so surprised by the familiarity of it all. Sure, the buildings were a lot taller than anything I’ve ever seen with my own eyes, but I discovered there that TV and internet plant much more life-like images in your brain than you’d think. I wasn’t blown away by it or anything. And apart from the height of the buildings, New York was like any other world city really, like London or Paris. Actually, it shouldn’t be surprising of course, New York’s familiarity, it being the Capital of the Western World. This is where we all got it from, in a sense. The Original City. Still, somewhere I expect to find a completely different world, because all we ever do is emphasizing how different we are from those stoopid Americans. Here I was struck mainly by our similarities. Which was beautiful in a way. It’s what I’m always looking for in other, more exotic places: the peopleness in all those different people. At the end of my hike up north, by the big lake in Central Park, I was musing on these insights, and my numbness to reality – I still didn’t miss anyone, and New York didn’t affect me as much as I had expected – when a bespectacled young Dubaian engineer came up to me and asked me if I was “from around here”. Out of nowhere, I had a metropolis-exploration buddy for the next two hours. It was so nice to talk to someone, anyone, about anything. Share your experiences fresh as they are imprinted on your retina. It grounded me, made everything a little more real. Thank God for other people!

 

The crossing                                                                Elmo and Cookie monster on Times Square, NYC

San Francisco, 31 December 2013

Then I had one day in San Francisco. I came in exhausted, still jetlagged from my first flight, having had to get up at 2:00AM again this night, and knowing I’d have to stay awake for another while because it was New Year’s Eve, but I really wanted to make the most of my one day in San Francisco. Only problem being was that I had made no plans at all for finding people to stay with, who would also be willing to tag me along to their NYE parties. Some friends and family back home had asked around for me but all those contacts had fallen through. It was only on the day before that Eda, my awesome friend from Peru (who had given me her bed to sleep in, fed me pizza on the night of my arrival, and drawn a map of all the places I needed to visit in Manhattan that day) that I was staying with in New York, came to the rescue. Within a couple of hours, she had put me up with a girl, Morgan, she knew had just moved back from Barcelona. And what a rescue it was! I was happy enough that I would have a roof over my head that I need so floor, couch, I was fine with anything. But it turned out that she and her brother lived in a beautiful apartment completely redone by her parents to be rented out on Airbnb, and as we got in, she pointed “this is where you can stay” to a gorgeous, romantic, sun-drenched room with a king size bed. Then, she took me out driving all over San Francisco for four hours, I saw everything! And then she also took me along to the NYE party she was going to. And all of this in such good spirits and completely happy to tag me along. Such hospitality is just so heartwarming, what an amazing welcome to America I received from both Morgan and Eda. I had never done anything this outlandishly random and unplanned when travelling, and all I could think of it how well it worked out was this: You can’t imagine what you could end up with if you don’t risk to ask. Reach out, ask the question, ‘I need help’, have a little faith in that it will work out, and be amazed by the wealth of kindness and hospitality and warmth waiting for your call.

The New Year’s party was also an invaluable experience, not because it was such a great party, but in fact because it wasn’t, objectively speaking, and the insight I gained from that. We had come to the house party of friends of Morgan’s friend, ran ashore in some tension going on between different parties, and so we went to a bar with the three of us to celebrate midnight there. Morgan’s friend had trouble letting go of whatever had happened between those people and was clearly preoccupied. The magical thing for me to realize was this: I had nothing here in this continent, so anything was something. I was perfectly happy with any sort of New Year’s party, however modest, and the fact that I had no social relationships here at all that could get tangled up and give me worries made me feel so light. I remember this clearly from my travels to Peru, four years ago: being lifted out of an entire existence you’ve spent years and years building up, is such a liberating experience and provides such perspective on it, even if what you are leaving behind is very dear to you, like my life in NL is to me now. Soon enough, I would get engaged in plenty of social relationships, but in that moment, at the turn of the new year, it was bliss, this burdenless existence, this blank slate beginning of a new life.

My first night in the Tricoops

Davis, 1-3 January 2013

Man, I really don’t know how to capture these first couple of days here in Davis. I am in the middle of a deep-reaching process. I’m witnessing a full-fledged genesis from the inside: a whole world unfolding itself in front of me, with a unique, Stephanie-shaped place opening up in it for me to occupy. When my train thundered off leaving me on the platform of a deserted little adobe-brick station lined with some crooked old palm trees, I had the words of the woman in the train ringing in my head, “Oh Davis, yeah it’s really small-town America.” This was it, this was where it was all gonna have to happen. As I walked into the 60,000 man strong town of Davis, the loudest sound was my rolling case on the cement sidewalks. Over the past three days that I’ve been here, more people have begun to trickle in, but it’s still very quiet on the streets of the village and the university campus. I actually like it that way. It gives me the opportunity to ease in, to first get acquainted with the space and only then the people. The quiet town, the beautiful and unfamiliar trees and birds and squirrels, the sweet-scented air and bright sunlight, the deserted campus, with empty streets, roundabouts, parking lots, grassfields, and buildings, all those things and I got our little private moments now, before all the people swarm in.

When I arrived at the Tricoops, the three student cooperatives in the middle of campus where I’ll be living these coming months, there were only 3 people. Over the past 3 three days, more people have started arriving, but all 40+ of us will only be here probably on Sunday, the day before classes start. I got the chance to familiarize myself with my room at my leisure, which I’ll be sharing with two other girls for the rest of my time here, and the rest of the house, which I’ll be sharing with sixteen other people in total. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have this place to come home to in these vulnerable, early beginnings. Especially at the international student orientation day today I realized how much more I’m already embedded in the world that is UCDavis than the other students. I’m so glad I didn’t have to be welcomed by nothing more than four blank white walls like the others. The Coops are really a fully alive and thriving organism that is taking me up within its middle with open arms. Last night they came and took me along to a concert in the city of Sacramento, half an hour drive from here. They really went out of my way to make me feel welcome: “We loved your video, we all really wanted you to come and live with us, you were a hot commodity”, and “I just said that we could drive past the IKEA so you’d come.” He had needed to convince me with IKEA because I still needed to get bedding somewhere. And so as I got out of the concert, they said “Alright let’s go!” and took a whole detour at 11PM especially for me to get my bedding. And in such good spirit, messing around in the store and making jokes all along the way. And during the show, one of them reached across the others to me and asked me “Stephanie, are you okay?” It’s those little things, so attentive and so warm… Man, I couldn’t have been blessed with a better home away from home. I can tell that now already, on the third day. An incredible time awaits me here.

The international student orientation today was also surprisingly helpful. You’d a expect a boring, tedious event with all this information you already knew. Instead, it really set something big in motion here for me. The past two days, despite the warm welcome I had had from the few Coop people that were already back from their holidays, had been zombie days a little bit. I didn’t what was going on, where I was, what was coming. All the new students at the international student orientation day provided a new social framework that placed me outside the Coop minicosmos for the first time here, which gave a better sense of the bigger picture of the UCDavis experience that lies ahead. The campus tour was a really magical experience. I could consciously notice my brain working hard to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together into the mental map of a new world. It’s incredible how fast you pick stuff up. In my three days in Davis, and my five days in the U.S., I have already accumulated so many puzzle pieces that I start reencountering them in the world around me here. Like I was surprised by how much that we were told and shown on the campus tour I already knew, after only two days of being here. A unique new life is gradually starting to take shape around me, and I’m being drawn into the universe that I am now still circling on the perimeter of. Soon, I will be so far in, I won’t even be able to tell all the pieces of the puzzle apart, and I won’t be able to look at this place with the open, empty, unknowing gaze I have now. I’m excited for it, but it’s also a little sad. This ignorance is bliss, and these early days, alive with expectancy but so light and unburdened by the weight of existence are precious to me now. I will cherish it a little longer, while I still can. Starting Monday, there’ll be no going back.        

Stéphanie