the next step

June 30, 2009
The end of another month arrives. Tomorrow we begin a new month by heading for a new destination. We’ve been going back and forth about where to go next. We thought maybe Pullman, but then we discovered that it’s a 6 hour drive and we really didn’t care to do that. I thought we’d looked up the mileage before and found it to be only 250 miles or so, but it turns out that it’s really about 100 miles farther than that. I am either hallucinating or just getting very confused! Anyway, we realized that there is really no need to go great distances in one day--at least at this point--and to tell you the truth, six hours in the truck on a hot day doesn’t seem appealing. So I looked on a map and found Yakima was closer. The search for a campground began. There didn’t seem to be anything much coming up as a result of the Google search, so I said we might as well go on up to Ellensburg, which is about 40 miles up the road. They have a campground there and we were able to get reservations. We’ll stay for a couple of days and then move on to Spokane. We managed to reserve the last tent site at the campground there. I felt that with the holiday weekend coming up, it was a good time for reservations. I really do not want to be driving around searching for a camping spot that has a tent site available. So this will work out. We will be in Spokane until July 7, so will attend meeting there on Sunday.
We will have to try and time things right so that we don’t end up in whatever rush hour traffic there is in these places. We’ve spent a couple of days now dealing with Portland traffic and it’s not at all fun! It was not this bad when we lived here. Then again, we never traveled around during rush hour. We’ve picked Heather up at the transit center for the last couple of days at 4 o’clock. Yesterday wasn’t too bad, although it was bad enough for Bill to get really stressed out at having to drive in it. Today was a different story. There was an accident on the Washington side of the northbound freeway bridge, so what should have been a 15-minute ride back to my friend’s house turned out to be a 45-minute ride in stop-and-go traffic. Bill kept repeating that he would never live in a place where he had to do this every day. I was just hoping it would be over soon. Bill had the radio on and some guy was rambling on about basketball and repeating the fact that Yao Ming was a science experiment. Whatever, dude. I can see how people can easily fall into anger and road rage. I wasn’t even driving and I was highly annoyed. I was quite relieved when he turned the radio off. After awhile we passed the accident scene and it didn’t look too bad, although there was an ambulance. It didn’t seem as though there was any urgency about things, though. Just in case, I sent some good thoughts into the universe for a good outcome.
It’s been really fun visiting with Ellen and Brigg. I have enjoyed our conversations and appreciated their hospitality. It’s also been an experience revisiting some old stomping grounds and realizing that I’ve moved on. You can’t step in the same river twice as the saying goes. And before this trip, I would have put Portland down as the best place I ever lived. I suppose compared to the other places, it would still be the best, but it doesn’t hold the appeal for me that it once did. Life goes on; people change; and nothing remains the same. This is a good lesson for me to learn right about now. In many ways, we are starting over in our life together. Our first big move was from New Hampshire to Portland. Now we’re going back the other way. As I do that, it is good for me to see with my own eyes that this part of my life really is over. It was fun while I was living it. But I’m not the same person I was when I lived here. I will never be that person again. So it’s time to turn around and move in a different direction. And so I go from Ellen’s to Ellensburg for the next step in the journey!

Freedom Friends

June 28
Started off the day with some great coffee, homemade blueberry pancakes, a cloudy sky, and conversation. At about 9, we hopped into the truck and headed south. We headed over the bridge and into Oregon, dropping our daughter off at the transit mall so she could spend the day in Portland. Then we went on to Salem. We found the church and rushed through the door rather breathlessly, because it was just about 10:30 and we didn’t want to walk in late. It was a small group, but there was a really good vibe there. It was different than what we are used to, but still good. I enjoyed the way they focused on gratitude in the prayer time. I think that’s so important and often overlooked or considered as a kind of an afterthought. I think that somehow we tend to obsess about what’s going wrong as we see it and we forget to pay attention to what’s going well. But if we can shift our thinking to the things we are grateful for, we can find joy and peace, even in the middle of a hard experience. There was time to talk about the things that aren’t so great, too, but they started with gratitude and I thought that was a powerful thing.
After the meeting for worship, we were able to spend a couple of hours with the pastor of the meeting and the presiding clerk. We had a great conversation and we were grateful that they took the time to talk to us. We learned something about how they started the church and why and how it has been progressing. They can tell it better than I can, so I recommend that you check out their website at www.freedomfriends.org They are a very welcoming and inclusive church and if anyone is looking for a church on a Sunday morning in Salem, Oregon, I can happily suggest that one. They are in a funky little building right near 13th St. And they even have a neon OPEN sign in the window.
As I was riding down the freeway, I was struck by how familiar everything seemed. We lived in Portland from 1987-1995 and I have driven down that road countless times. Now, yesterday when we drove off the freeway and through our old neighborhood, there was much that seemed totally foreign, but still other stuff that made it seem as though I’d only been gone a week. But what struck me the most yesterday was how agitated I felt almost immediately upon entering the city. There were too many cars, too many buildings, too many people, too many things going on. I marveled that I used to actually live in that environment and thought nothing of it. Now that I have been away from it for 14 years, it all seems different. Today, though, we were on the freeway and there wasn’t much of that. There was what seemed like a great deal of traffic for a Sunday morning, but other than that, it all just seemed like something I had done one time too many. The funny thing is, I enjoyed living in Portland. If someone had asked me the best place I’d lived, I would have named that as the place. And now it was just someplace that I was done with. That’s the thing. I was flooded with the knowledge that it is simply time to move on. I know that I am in the process of doing just that, so all I have to do is proceed. Still, there was a twinge of sadness as there is when you realize that something you valued is over.
And so we move on, with a big thank you to Freedom Friends for a great Sunday morning experience and for being so welcoming.

the next place

June 27
Left The Dalles this morning. Before we did we had a nice visit with our hosts, a friend’s brother and sister-in-law, Larry and Paula, over coffee. They were so nice to us and very welcoming--wonderful people. We enjoyed meeting them and seeing the town, which we had only driven by in the past. And we so appreciated their warmth and hospitality. Both of us are still trying to get used to this new life. It is a weird thing--it seemed like all we did was talk about doing this project for a month and a half. It was as though that was all we were going to get to do--talk. Then came a flurry of activity that picked up as we got closer to a departure date, but somehow it still seemed like actually leaving was some sort of distant thing. Even on Thursday, I woke up and reminded myself that I would not go to sleep in the same bed I woke up in. The day had arrived. It still didn’t seem real. Then we were on the road. In some ways it was like it was never going to happen and in others, it all happened in an instant. And now we’re in the midst of it and it is unfolding with each passing moment. The thing is, even with all of that planning, we are still kind of feeling our way along and figuring it out. That is how it should be. Even if we had planned even more, there’s no way to plan for every possible thing, so it’s best to plan for uncertainty and flexibility.
So now we’re in Vancouver, Washington at the home of an old friend of mine from grad school, Ellen, and her husband, Brigg. We had a chance to visit and ate a delicious meal. Everyone is kind of tired, so we all decided to just veg out after dinner. I am looking forward to being able to talk more with them over the next few days. We are also enjoying getting to bond with their two cats, Ollie and Cocoa. They are quite friendly and we’re told they may decide to keep us company as we sleep. I think all of us are kind of hoping that this will be the case.
Tomorrow we head for Salem and the Freedom Friends church, but not until we‘ve eaten a breakfast of homemade blueberry pancakes.

Resting

June 26
I woke up this morning and realized that I have no house or apartment keys to carry around with me. We have no home in the traditional sense of the word. Home now consists of the three of us, our truck and tents. There is an amazing sense of freedom in that. I am starting to see that with a little rest and a few days, I could really embrace this whole thing. Not that I haven’t been excited about it in the time leading up to our departure, but it was easy to get wrapped up in the details of planning and preparation and to forget about what we were preparing for! I suppose that’s good--then it was time to prepare and now that is done and it’s time to experience what we have been preparing for.
We had some ideas about what kinds of things we could do on our day here in The Dalles. But the other day a friend suggested to us that the first order of business should be to rest. The old me would have never been able to do such a thing. She would have pushed herself to get something accomplished and then eventually been too tired to function or gotten a migraine or something. But this is not the old me. I realized today that this friend was absolutely right--we do need to rest. So after breakfast, we took a walk into town and just looked at what was there. It seems like a nice little place. It was about a five mile walk--downhill on the way in and uphill on the way back. It was nice to walk. We’d been taking the truck so much to do what we had to do and not had much time to walk the way we used to. Now it’s afternoon and I am sitting on a lovely deck with a breeze from the Columbia River blowing through the garden. I might make some coffee. I can do that because we unloaded half the truck this morning to rearrange things. Yesterday we put in the big stuff, realized what big stuff we couldn’t take, and then started putting other stuff on top of what was there. Then Bill decided to stick in some of the smaller stuff we thought we didn’t have room for. I did not know this. So when he handed me a pillow last night as we were removing our backpacks, I almost dropped it because it was heavier than a pillow! Turns out he’d grabbed a pillow and wrapped a lamp that used to be his late aunt’s inside the case. Good thing he mentioned it, because it almost hit the ground! Anyway, things are much more accessible now. I am avoiding the thought of where I will put the books I removed from the box before we shoved that further back into the truck. That will be an issue for tomorrow morning. For now I am just going to savor the afternoon, knowing that I don’t have to be anywhere and I don’t have to do anything. It doesn’t really matter what time it is. I can get some of that rest I need so much right now and gather my thoughts for the coming days. And maybe I’ll even read on of those books I took from the box this morning!

and they're off...

June 25
Finally, we’re off! It feels like eons ago that we decided we would do this project and even longer than that since we knew we wanted to leave Klamath Falls and now it seems that suddenly, the day is upon us. It was a busy one and by the time we left, I felt kind of numb. It has been a very long process and it’s actually hard to believe that we are gone.
We brought our cat to her foster home where she will be until another person can be found for her. So it was another sad good-bye. It feels like all I have been doing for a week is saying good-bye to important people in my life and crying.
Then came the fun part--loading the truck. We had to leave some stuff behind, of course, since there was more stuff and less room than we figured on. But we got what was important loaded into the truck, leaving enough space for the people to squeeze themselves in, and we headed out at about 2. We drove through some familiar territory and then into parts of Oregon where I had never been, arriving at The Dalles at about 7:30. We got out what we needed from the back of the truck and sort of vegged out for a few hours before going to bed. It just doesn’t seem real. I kept thinking about the fact that it feels so weird to be not exactly on vacation, because there’s no place I am going back to at the end of it all. I have nowhere I need to be and no timetable beyond the next couple of days. As I looked at landscapes and places I had never seen before I felt a sense of wonder that for most of the next 3 months, that is exactly what I will be doing. And as I walked around what was my house for the last time, thinking about how much loss I had suffered there and how unhappy I’d been, I felt a heavy sadness inside. But at the same time, I could feel the little kernel of hope that has been growing for the past few months and I felt excited because this is the beginning of a new direction, or maybe it’s just a continuation of the old direction that is leading us further into who we are. I don’t know. But in any case, it’s a fresh start and it’s happening somewhere else. Or in many somewhere elses. I wonder how long it will take before it seems real.

Goodbye Miki

June 24
We woke up today dogless for the first time in 21 years. Yesterday we brought our dog to be euthanized. It was not something we wanted to do, but we knew it was best for her. She would get crazy in the truck and hating being out of her routine. Even while she was still with us, she knew something was going on as we ran around getting ready to leave and the boxes piled up. She did not do well with other people when we were not there, so we couldn’t try to find her a new home. She was 12 ½ and was slowing down. When the vet felt her leg just before she gave Miki the injection, she said she had a small tumor. She had a good life and a peaceful death, even though she was agitated in the 15 minutes before she went to sleep. We’ve spent a lot of time crying. Last night my sinuses were killing me as I lay in bed until after 2 a.m. not sleeping. It was something we dreaded, but knew we had to do. It is hard to believe she’s not here anymore--we keep thinking we see her or hear her tags jangling. Both of us are glad that we are leaving tomorrow so that we don’t have to be constantly reminded that she’s not here. Bill woke up at 4 a.m.--the time he would usually get up to let her outside. We came home from having dinner with a friend and she wasn’t shoving the drapes aside with her nose to look out the window. Both of us got into bed and lay at an angle, leaving a space at the bottom in the center where she would normally be sleeping. I realized today that it has been a decade of loss--animals that we had for some years began to die and though we had other animals, the pain is still there. I found myself thinking that since we will not have any four-legged-furry people of our own for awhile, I will not have to feel this again, at least for some time. There was a sense of relief in that.
We took some of her fur and that of the dog we lost a year and a half ago and scattered it in the peace garden at church.

Camping

June 21
We have been noticing camping gear for the past month or so as we have been gathering what we will need for the trip. We had a tent that was a couple of decades old. It got used when we lived in Portland , but not so much when we lived in Fairbanks. We used it a couple of times here and the last time we discovered it leaked when it rained really hard. Fortunately, it was set up in the backyard for us to sleep in during the hot summer nights, so instead of getting wet we could just go into the house! But we figured we would need a new one before heading out, so a couple of weeks ago, after looking at sale ads, we went and got one. It was a bit smaller than the old one--very basic and simple. But as always seems to be the case, once we started looking for tents, we saw them everywhere. Today they were all over the weekly ads. And we continue to be amazed at the kinds of tents they have! We had noticed before a shower/changing room tent. Also, a cottage tent. It had rooms and everything. Today there was a lodge tent, which is apparently somewhat bigger than the cottage. And they had a tent with closets! This seems like quite a concept. Closets in a tent! I can see that have a space to put your stuff that is out of the way might be a good thing, but it seems kind of amusing to think of it as a closet! Anyway, I have chuckled at the idea that you could go out for a camping trip and spend quite a bit of time setting up something like a whole little village. You could have your cottage and your lodge, which may or may not come with closets--the ad didn’t really say. You could set up your shower/changing room tent. Then there are the portable toilets and I suppose you would need to have some kind of tent like structure for that, unless you wanted to use one of the existing “rooms” in your lodge or cottage. Maybe one of the closets could serve as a bathroom. And you’d want one of the portable kitchens they have as well, though probably that would have to be outside. I am exhausted just thinking about it. I can see the utility of this stuff if you are going someplace and staying there for a fairly long period of time. But for a night or two, or even a few, it seems like a lot to go through. I knew that RVs were getting larger and fancier, but I honestly had no idea that the same thing was happening with tents. It’s a far cry from what it used to be. I wonder how it will all evolve.

People

June 20
More good-byes. Yesterday we went to see some friends and former coworkers and said farewell to them. In a little while we will be going across town to see another friend. This is really reminding me of how many wonderful people we have come to know here. It is sometimes easy to take people for granted, but saying so many good-byes in such a concentrated period of time really makes me aware that I am leaving something valuable behind. I never thought I would feel sad at all when I was preparing to leave here. I used to think about how wonderful it would be to know that I was leaving and to be actually getting ready to go. Sadness never entered my mind as a potential part of that process. But here I am and here it is. It is, however, gratifying to know that some good things came out of my time here. All too often I have felt as if I were wasting my time and doing nothing of any value. At other times I felt that I was being wasted because I was doing so little and not even close to what I was capable of doing. But in this last week, I can see that I was building relationships and that is important. And that makes me happy. So it hasn’t been a total loss.
I’m kind of tired, so I am hoping to take tomorrow off. We’ll see how that goes. It would be nice to just hang out for a day after church and to give myself permission to lounge lazily around for a whole afternoon and evening! If I can just ignore the boxes and totes that are all over the place, I might be able to pull it off!
We got rid of more stuff today--we put all the kitchen stuff that we can’t take on Freecycle as a batch and off it went. That is good. We will be passing stuff along at an accelerated clip for the next several days.
We have our first two stops confirmed. We’ll be in The Dalles, Oregon first, and then we will go to the home of an old friend from grad school for a few days. That will be fun. I am looking forward to catching up with her. I last saw her a few years ago when she and her husband drove over the hill from Ashland, where they making their annual visit to see the Oregon Shakespeare Festival offerings. We went to lunch and spent the afternoon together. After leaving all of the people we will miss so much here, it will be nice to see a friend from the past. It’s a good reminder that sometimes people never leave our lives completely!

Important People

June 18
Today we spent the day with some of the important people in our lives. And while it wasn’t our good-bye, we all knew that day was coming. For me, it was a rather emotional day as everything has started to seem more real and less like something that might happen someday. I know that in many ways this will be a tough week. We have to say good-bye to people we deeply care about, we have to give our cat to someone else, and we will have to put our dog to sleep. She does not travel well--even with sedatives. She is 12 years old and showing her age. Even so, we would have considered giving her to someone else, except that she gets very distressed when we are not with her. So we have determined that the kindest thing for her, even if not for us, is to celebrate the good life she has had and let her rest in peace. It is not easy to anticipate this, and it brings up memories of other 4-legged furry people we have lost over the years. We are both glad that we will be leaving and not having to spend a long time in this house when she isn’t here.
I still find it amazing that there are so many people that I will miss when I leave here. It’s hard to imagine not seeing them on a regular basis. And it has been truly amazing to be on the receiving end of such generosity and open-heartedness. Everyone wants to make sure we have everything we need; they ask us what they can give us; and they offer us things they have that we might not have thought of. Today we received a power inverter. I didn’t even know what that was when someone offered it to us, and at first we declined, but then we thought about it more and asked a couple of questions. Turns out it is something you connect to your car battery either via the cigarette lighter or the terminals and it turns it into a regular household current. So we will be able to charge our computers as we drive! There’s something I didn’t even really know existed and now I have one! I wouldn’t even have been able to ask for it, but someone cared enough to think about what we might need and to offer it to us. I am grateful for such caring and generosity and I feel lucky to have such people in my life. As excited as I am about what we are doing, saying good-bye will be hard. Endings and beginnings all at the same time. It’s hard. I feel drained tonight. But I will rest, maybe do some reading and crocheting. Tomorrow I will get up and go say good-bye to a couple more people and be happy that I got a chance to share a part of my journey with them. They have all enriched my life.

One Last Time

We have set a date! If all goes according to this part of the plan, we will be leaving Klamath Falls on Thursday, June 25th! I am afraid to get too excited about the whole thing, and there is a bunch of stuff to be done between now and then. Nevertheless, it feels good to have that date to plan for.
Yesterday we gave away a bunch of stuff and then ran around doing errands. We drove. Both of us have noticed that we really miss walking like we used to, but we had limited time and the things we had to do took us in opposite directions, so using the truck was the wiser choice. This morning, though, we were able to do what we needed to do in town and walk. It was nice to be able to do that even though it was a little hot. The sun here is just relentless. The quality of heat and light just seem completely different than anything I have ever experienced before. Still, I had an unexpected gift of a couple of weeks of clouds and rain, so I can’t complain.
One of the things I did this morning was to stop in at the yarn shop and say good-bye to the owner. I have worked there on an occasional basis for 4 ½ years, teaching and taking care of customers when she needed an extra pair of hands. The shop opened up just a couple of months after we moved here and I was so excited. I remember how I used to wish there was a yarn shop within walking distance when I lived in Fairbanks. So I got it here instead. It was a whole new area of my life that just blossomed. It’s a good place. So is the library.
I stopped in there yesterday to talk to the people I used to work with in the Circulation Department and to give them some cards with this blog address, our website and email. Before I left, I told them that the library had helped to keep me sane--not because I worked there, but because for the whole 5 years I have been here, that library has been a beacon of light for me. It is an excellent library for a town this size. I was surprised at this when I got here and to some extent, I am still surprised. But they have great people working there; they order great books; the circ people get them out on the shelves so I can find them; and what I don’t find, I can interlibrary loan and they will do their best to get what I want. It has been wonderful to have access to words, ideas, thoughts, and knowledge. I have missed having a university library to use, but this one has been almost as good!
So it has been interesting these past couple of days to stop in one last time at these places that have been a part of my life here. It seems unreal that after 5 years of popping in on a regular basis, I have now done that for the last time. But I will always remember the people and the places here that enriched my life in various ways when I really needed them!

Getting Back to Work

Back into the preparations after a day off yesterday. I didn’t really plan to take yesterday off, but when we got home from church it was already 2 o’clock. I read email and talked with Bill over coffee. Then I went into the bedroom and stretched out to watch Knit and Crochet Today. It was an old one with a host that I really don’t care for. But I just felt like vegging out and watching people manipulate yarn is a good thing to stare at while doing that. The episode was about felting. Some interesting projects were shown. After the show, I didn’t really feel like moving, so other than pressing the power button on the remote to “off,” I decided not to move right then. I felt so peaceful and it was so nice to just lay there with the dog. After awhile I got up. Eventually I boiled some ravioli for dinner. I made some tea and headed back into the bedroom. Watched some news, read, then I just lay there listening to an Anonymous 4 CD (English Ladymass) in the dark. I thought I might get so relaxed that I would melt! Then I listened to a couple of dharma talks from AudioDharma.org while crocheting. Went to bed at midnight. I sort of half woke up for awhile in the middle of the night because it was pouring outside. I always like to hear that--especially in June!! So it turned out to be a very nice day. I had a momentary thought that perhaps I ought to be doing something more constructive, but it didn’t last long before I told myself I might as well take a day off and rest.
I’m glad I did. I got busy enough again today. After breakfast and email we went and picked up my friend, Karen, and some boxes so she could donate some of her things to Goodwill. Then we had to stop and pick up toothpaste, toothbrushes and some other stuff like that for the trip. Then we stopped at another place to get a few groceries. Then home. Lunch was next. Then it was time to start planning. I had my road atlas, the Directory for Traveling Friends, the Directory of Friends Organizations, and my little netbook with its Google search bar fired up and ready to go. For about 3 hours, I flipped pages and did searches. I see signs of progress!! We have our first few stops ideally planned out. I say ideally because to do it this way will require us to send some emails and hope for replies, something that hasn’t worked out well so far. But we will see what happens! I think we are both prepared to adjust as necessary. Not that we have a choice about that! Anyway, I have a plan with one place leading to another, but my mind is swimming at this point, so I have decided to not work on dates at this particular moment. I will do that later this evening or tomorrow morning. Once I do that, I will send out those emails. And then, we wait!

Celebration

Today was our going away celebration at church. We had an opportunity to share our story and update people on our progress and to accept people’s good wishes and blessings. In fact, my friend, Karen, whose website is listed in our links list on the side of this blog, wrote us a beautiful blessing that we will carry with us as we travel. And we had a potluck with excellent food and a chance for good conversation with (F)friends. It was a bittersweet experience because although we will be there for one more Sunday next week, some people will not be there. So today was the last day for some things. Though we will see some of these people again, the context will be different. For me, it was a reminder that this is really happening. We really are leaving. It hardly seems possible that after everything we have been through in the past five years, it really is coming to an end. It reminds me of the lines from the T.S.Eliot poem that go something like, “to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” That is what this is--both an end and a beginning. I am excited for the beginning, since I have waited so long for it. But I am also--surprisingly--sad about the end because I will miss many people here. I will be in touch via email, of course, but I will miss seeing them on Sundays, spending time over a leisurely lunch or cup of tea and having interesting conversations, and just spending time together. It won’t be the same. But I am glad to have had this time with these people and knowing them will enrich my life whether I am here or not.

Letting Stuff Go

More packing and sorting today! I went through my 3 boxes of Christmas stuff and got it down to one box. I will give away the rest. I got a closet cleaned out. Got more totes packed. And we brought the computer to its new home and got to enjoy a couple of hours of tea and conversation with friends as a bonus! It is surprisingly easy for me to just put stuff in the “give it away” pile. I had been putting off doing the Christmas stuff because I am a Christmas junkie and have always enjoyed putting up and looking at all of my decorations. But maybe because it is June or maybe because I am excited about what we are doing, it was pretty easy to just let go of stuff. When we left Fairbanks I did the same thing. I was thinking that it used to take me all day to decorate the house for Christmas, but we keep on downsizing, so it will be quick as a flash this year. The ease with which I was able to get rid of stuff may also have something to do with last Christmas. I had the decorations all up on the day after Thanksgiving as usual. Shortly thereafter, we had weeks of air stagnation and heavy pollution, which caused me to have runny nose, watery eyes, sore throat and a bad cough. A cough that kept us awake at night. Then the week of Christmas, Bill got some kind of weird digestive ailment or something. He spent Christmas in bed. So the decorations in and of themselves weren’t that important in the end. I would’ve rather had both of us feeling good in a house devoid of decorations than to be sitting there coughing and having Bill sick in my decorated house. Anyway, progress has been made! And tonight I should be able to finish the sock I am working on. It is the second of a pair--I finished the first months ago and figured I should make the mate before we leave so I can tuck my double points into a tote. Slowly but surely we are getting there!

Surprisingly Productive

Turned out to be a pretty productive day, though I had my doubts when I woke up too early this morning, very congested and freezing! I yawned my way through breakfast and then we headed out to go to the bank and to pick up a Tracfone for the trip along with a few other things ( canned fruit, salad dressing, etc.). We got home and I felt worse. Then the headache started with a bit of discomfort that soon progressed into pounding pain. Eating lunch didn’t help--at least right away. But then I made some coffee and took a migraine pill and things settled. I was still tired, but no longer yawning and freezing and the congestion eased somewhat. So I sat and ripped out a vest I’d made for myself in Tunisian crochet a few years ago which fit at the time, but was too big now. I wanted to salvage what yarn I could to reuse. I’d done the front sides earlier in the week, along with another vest, so getting the back done today meant that I was done with that task. And now I have some more yarn--never a bad thing! While I did that I listened to a couple of spoken word Cds I’d gotten a couple of years ago--one about women in US history and one about US poets. Neither was very long, but it was another thing I was glad to have done. I plan to put them on freecycle now that I’ve listened to them. Then I got some more stuff packed, sorted for giving away, and recycled. Got another tote packed. And since Bill finished scanning our old photos yesterday, we were able to put the scanner on freecycle and it is now in its new home. Some people also came and picked up our houseplants and a ladder. Bill wiped the hard drive of our desktop computer and we will be bring that to its new people tomorrow. Things are moving--even though it sometimes doesn’t feel like it! Someone suggested to Bill that Route 2 in Michigan is a really nice way to go, so we looked at a map and decided that this would fit very nicely into the trip. We are disappointed because we sent out a couple of emails to people to were recommended to us and they have not responded. Since they would be people we’d be seeing at the beginning of the trip, we are getting to the point where we may have to just decide when to leave and plan to not stop in those places. We have to make a firm decision on when we are leaving so we can get the utilities shut off and call the person who has already said we’d be welcome at her house and give her a date! I don’t know if they are on vacation or just not interested, but it’s been a week already. I guess this is a good reminder that stuff happens and we will have to be prepared to adapt as we go. And to end the day on a pleasant note, it is raining outside. It’s been below average in terms of temperatures with grey skies and rain on a fairly regular basis. I love it! It’s not what I have come to expect from June in the Basin, but I will take it and consider it a gift!

Lessons Learned

I was thinking about yesterday’s post. In the process, I was reminded of all the things I learned in spite of the pain. And I thought about my firm conviction that growth usually happens as a result of suffering--maybe that’s why every life has some. When things are going well, we have little incentive to think about them or to try and change them in any way. In fact, we are probably more likely to cling to and grasp at whatever it is that we think is the cause of our good fortune. As I said yesterday, though, all is impermanent--the good times and the bad times, the boring times and the exciting times, the joy and the pain--it is all here for awhile and then gone. So it is important to remember the gifts that come with each thing and to be grateful for the lessons that we get to learn along the way.
I have learned plenty of lessons in my five years here. Many of them I am sure I will come to appreciate even more when there is some time and distance between me and the experience. Some I am sure that I am not even aware of yet. One of my biggest realizations has been that without my five years here, I would probably not be able to do this project. The person I am now is not the person I was when I rode into town. That person would not have so readily jumped at the chance to do something like this. Oh, I would sometimes think about doing it. But then I would rationalize about why it wasn’t time, or how I didn’t have the resources, or how no one would want to talk to me anyway--and on and on. So there’s one lesson learned. I am far more comfortable now going with the flow. I am comfortable with uncertainty. And I no longer have any delusions about being able to control anything other than my own thoughts, feelings, reactions, etc. Maybe people won’t want to talk to me. Ok, then, I will figure out some other way to make something meaningful out of the process. And really, what are the odds that no one at all will want to speak to me? Pretty slim, I’d say. So I have learned to observe the thoughts and stories that spiral out from my brain in a given circumstance and to let them go--maybe even laugh at them.
Letting go--there’s another big one. I sometimes feel that I have done nothing but let go for years. I have let go of attachment to outcomes, I have let go of other people’s issues that I somehow felt compelled to fix for them, I have let go of my ideas about what kind of community involvement I would have here. I have learned to accept help from people in a generous way, even though sometimes it is painful to do so. I have learned that sometimes people really do want to help. Before, I simply tried to do everything myself so I would not be a burden on others. Somewhere along the line I realized that instead of feeling like I was a burden, people genuinely wanted to help and that it was OK for me to let them do that. This is also something that I had to understand before we could do a project like this, since we will be relying on people giving us their time and stories at the very least.
I have learned that things come flying at me out of nowhere. When I think I have nothing left, something comes from somewhere--a kind word, a check, a bit of work, a bag of garden produce. Whatever I need shows up and it is my job to be open to that and to accept it. This also means that I cannot plan far in advance and try to control every outcome. I think this is a human tendency because we are looking for security. But I have seen too many people throughout my life sacrifice their own lives for some hope of a kind of security that simply does not exist in this human existence. Someone recently told us that we are living on the edge, but that things always seem to work out. I think everyone is living on the edge. The only difference between me and them is that I know this and they seem to be trying not to know this. After all, cars run red lights, planes fall out of the sky, people we love leave us through death or abandonment, cancer, heart attacks, strokes happen, or the CEO runs off with the retirement money you socked away for decades and you’re left with nothing. How do we protect ourselves from those things? The truth is, we can’t prevent bad things from happening. All we can do is learn to tap into our inner strength and wisdom so that when they do happen, we have the resources to deal with them in productive ways. That is probably the biggest lesson I have learned here and I think that it will serve me well throughout this project and beyond.

Courageous?

We just got back from a visit with a friend, during which we shared coffee and conversation. She wanted to give us a good luck charm that was small enough to take with us and that would remind us of the people who are supporting and caring for us. She chose a small blue glass panda bear that has watched over her while she writes. We have been thrilled by the support and love being shown by her and many other people as we move toward our departure date. It is impossible to overstate how much it means to us.
At one point she mentioned that she thought that this is a courageous thing to do. This seems to be a common sentiment. But for me, it simply feels like what I must do--it doesn’t feel courageous at all. The thing is, after five years of torment here, the thought of what is coming seems exciting rather than daunting. Will there be moments of distress and discomfort? Sure. But I have had five years of that and more just existing here. I know that there will be moments when I am uncomfortable or when I have a series of interviews scheduled and I just don’t feel like going anywhere. There may be days when the most attractive thing would be to lounge around in or near my tent, reading and stitching, and I will have to drag myself somewhere else anyway to do some work. But that happens anywhere. And, the truth is, all I have to do is remember any one of a number of days that I spent dragging myself down Main Street yet again to go somewhere I did not want to go, and I will feel better. It is hard to express how very difficult these five years have been to people who have not experienced anything similar or who live here and like it, or who even live here and find it tolerable. For me, it has been excruciatingly intolerable and most days have been some kind of struggle. At least on the road, the scenery will be different. The challenges will be different. And it will all be wrapped up in the hope that things are looking up and that I can build a life, rather than hoping for continued existence.
Today is the fifth anniversary of our arrival in Klamath Falls. It has been the most difficult five years of my life. The only way I have been able to get this far is by constantly reminding myself that all is impermanent. Even when I didn’t believe it, I kept repeating it to myself. And so, while I recognize that there are challenges ahead, I also know that now, after this time of just hanging on and making it through one miserable day at a time, I am a very strong person. I will meet the challenges ahead. And when they come, I will acknowledge them, say a silent prayer of gratitude that I am somewhere else, dealing with something else and no longer in Klamath Falls, and then I will hunker down and proceed to solve the problem.

Bargains for the Road

Only 2 or 3 weeks now until we leave. We’re still waiting for answers to a couple of emails we sent out. We’ve started getting provisions for the trip. We are trying to get stuff that is nonperishable and can just be eaten without much preparation. We will fire up the camp stove for awhile in the mornings, most likely, so we can heat water for coffee or tea and to fill our thermos. We have a grill that we can use once in awhile to cook some chicken or something, but we plan to cook enough during those times to last for a few days. There will be so much to do on this trip and we will never know what will happen, so we need to be prepared. I have issues with my blood sugar--there are times when I get hungry and just feel hungry. But at other times, I feel queasy, get a headache, and have trouble focusing. I need to be able to eat something right away during those times and Clif bars seem to do the trick. Bill also has issues sometimes, though his symptoms are different. The Clif bars work for him, too. So we knew that one thing we wanted to have was a good supply of those. Happily, the weekly ad for my local Fred Meyer store had those and Luna bars on sale for 89 cents this week. We each got a box of Clif bars and a few Luna bars. They also had bulk walnuts--$2.99 per pound, which is a $2 a pound savings over the regular price. Walnuts were on our list too and I was hoping they’d go on sale. We mix them with raisins and eat this with breakfast, lunch, or for a snack. They can be tossed into what I call soaked oats. I put some raw oats into a container and cover with vanilla soy milk. Let it sit in the fridge overnight. For breakfast, I put some of this in a bowl, top with berries, peaches, or raisins, add a handful of walnuts and then add a bit more soy milk if needed. Yum!
We had also hit pay dirt a bit earlier in the day when we went to our local Grocery Outlet store. We’d gotten our cold brew tea bags already, since in the summer we drink a great deal of water and iced tea. But we still needed some kind of coffee. We had decided on instant coffee. I am not sure how this will go--I don’t think I’ve actually had instant coffee in a couple of decades. But practically speaking, we won’t have time or equipment to keep on making coffee on a camp stove with a percolator. So instant it shall be. We knew it would be cheaper at Grocery Outlet and indeed it was--$2-3 cheaper per jar. I would have preferred to get some kind of organic/fair trade coffee, but we couldn’t find any. Anyway, we picked up some other stuff for the trip there--canned fruit, peanuts, and a few other things. But the big bargain was the crackers. We both love Stoned Wheat Thins, but they are so expensive--$3 per box in one local store. I’d gotten some at Grocery Outlet before when I found them for 99 cents a box and was happy with that deal. Yesterday, I turned the corner into the cracker aisle and figured they’d be out, but it didn’t hurt to check. They were not out and the price had dropped to 2 for $1! That’s because the date on the end was a couple of weeks ago. For some things that would make a difference, but not for crackers. Since we’d already put a dent into the boxes I’d bought before, we decided to buy the two full boxes they had on the shelf. Each larger box contained 12 boxes of crackers. We left four loose boxes of crackers on the shelf for someone else. So it was a day for bargains on stuff we really needed. The crackers cost us $12. Had we bought them in another store, they would have cost $72. I probably would not have bought 24 boxes at that price, but now we have them. Buying the Clif/Luna bars on sale saved us about $20. And buying the walnuts saved us about $18. Best of all, we will have healthy food that we can grab and eat on the run if we need to and enjoy in a relaxed way when we can. We plan to stop at farmer’s markets when they are available to buy fresh local produce that will supplement the staples we are stocking up on here. It’s important to us to maintain the healthy food lifestyle we usually have. It makes such a huge difference. It would be really easy to end up eating lots of stuff that has too much fat, sugar and salt or that is just empty calories. But if I do that, I will end up getting sick with my migraines and blood sugar issues and I don’t want that! Plus, we just feel better when we eat better. We’ve gotten used to a diet rich in fruits and veggies, with some lean protein (chicken or fish), nuts, and whole grains. Whenever I deviate from this way of eating, I can feel it. I get more headaches, I feel lethargic, and just out-of-sorts. Since I do not want to be dealing with those things on this trip (or anytime, really!), I will make it a point to eat well. And it will be easier to do that if I provide myself with the staples to do that. Then we’ll see what we can find at the farmer’s markets to round things out!

Control

It’s funny all the little things you start thinking about when you’re trying to plan an extended camping trip. Yesterday I dragged some mp3 music files--Bach, Beethoven, Haydn--to my jump drive so I could put it on my little computer and then onto my mp3 player if and when I wanted it. Suddenly I had a vision of myself relaxing in the tent, hearing a breeze dance through the surrounding trees and needing a Bach fix. It’s kind of like my thoughts yesterday about always wanting to be organized and prepared--for any eventuality. But of course, stuff happens and the one thing that wasn’t thought about is the thing that will happen. I have some of my classical music available, but it is perfectly possible that I will want none of that when the time comes and decide that what I really want to listen to is something I didn’t make easily accessible. Oh well, I will survive! It’s the same with the books I have packed in my milk crate, which will go on top so I can reach it whenever I need it. I have no doubt that at some point on this trip, I will look at what is there and say, “I don’t want to read any of this. Why didn’t I bring that other book?” And of course, that other book will be packed away and inaccessible. That’s life. No matter how much we try to plan in advance, we can’t plan for everything. No matter how much control we think we gain by doing this, we really have very little, at least over the particular circumstance that will magically appear to throw us for a loop. And even if something has worked well in the past, that does not mean it will continue to work well.
We had our plan in place, and it was one that had worked before. We’d live in our house until it was time to move on, then we’d sell it and use the proceeds to get settled in a new place. We had done this three times in the past 20 years and it had worked fine. This time was different. And frankly, I had little control over the circumstances that led to the situation being what it is for us.
And yet, I did have some control, not over the circumstances themselves, but over how I would respond to them. I could choose to wring my hands and get upset. And at first, I will admit, I was feeling some pain. My experience here has been so horrible that the idea that even this dream had been taken from me was hard. I cried. I gave myself permission to take most of a day to grieve what I had lost. But I knew that this wouldn’t be useful in the long run. So I stopped that and realized that I could still do all of the things I was planning to do--I just couldn’t do them right now. It wasn’t time. But it was time for this great other thing that I would do instead. Now I would get to do that and go to Ireland later--I could have both experiences. And that’s the key--all I could control was my own response to the crisis. I chose to do something positive instead of spending a great deal of time agonizing over what was not happening. It was a choice. That is one of the biggest lessons I will take from this place. I am stronger than I thought and I can never plan for every possible eventuality. All I can do is develop my own sense of mindfulness, awareness, and inner strength, which will allow me to take things as they come and make a joyful and peaceful life in the midst of whatever happens to show up. That’s where I have control. But it’s up to me to develop that and act on it.

Flexibility

We are moving toward our departure date. We actually have the first few stops planned. Through the whole process, we would like to maintain a balance between planning and flexibility. So we are trying to keep ideas in mind, make contacts, and do what we need to do to make things go smoothly, while at the same time not doing things too far in advance. This is a good exercise for me. I am prone to making lists and being heavily organized. There will be some room for that in the short term, but I know I can’t start planning for where we will go in the Midwest, for example, since I have no firm dates to confirm and it is far too early to predict how things will unfold. We want to keep that flexibility in place, since it is part of the beauty of this trip. We can go where we feel led to go and take as much time as feels right in the places we stop. If I were to schedule everything for the entire 3 months, we would lose that spontaneity. So we’ll see how it goes planning a couple of weeks in advance and watching things happen as we go along. As I told a friend, the only thing I am expecting is the unexpected. It’ll be fun to see what happens!

Making Space

June 3, 2009

We continue to prepare for our journey. The truck has gotten 4 new tires, an oil change, a tune-up, and a check up. We find ourselves giving things away at a very fast clip. Oddly enough, even though we will be living out of our truck, we have a little more leeway in terms of taking things than we thought we would. When we thought we’d be heading for Ireland, we were planning on taking no more than 120 pounds of stuff, because we’d have to mail it and that’s expensive! For me, the toughest things to weed through are my books. Books are heavy! So I now get to bring more books than I thought I would. I have some tucked away among other things in the totes we will be bringing. I have a milk crate stuffed with books to read along the way. It’s always this way when I travel. First I decide which books and stitching projects to bring and then I pack clothes in the room I have left. It’s bad enough when I am going away for a few days or even a few weeks. I have never tried to work this out when I will be gone for a few months! I keep reminding myself that there will be places to get more reading material if it looks like I’m going to run out. And since I have long ago made peace with the fact that I will never get to read all of the things that interest me, I can be pretty certain of finding something in a reading emergency!
With the books and everything else, it has been fun to think about who might like the particular object I am giving away or what group could best use it. We brought a bunch of clothes to the Gospel Mission the other day so they could give them out to people who could use them. We have given away books to various individuals and to the local library. Some will become a part of the library collection and others will go to the Bookie Joint, a twice weekly used book sale with proceeds going to Friends of the Library. Freecycle is a great place to find new homes for things that we can’t take with us, but could be useful for someone else.
There is something completely freeing about this exercise. I am getting rid of most of what I have in order to move around freely. I find that I really do not have an attachment to most of this stuff anyway. The stuff that means something to me can come, but it is a valuable thing to discover how easily I can let go. I also am doing this in an environmentally friendly way as much as possible. We are not throwing things away, we are giving them to people who will have a use for them. As we proceed, I come to a deeper realization that this trip will lead to some fundamental growth and lead us into deeper insights into who we are and what we believe in.