"I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, 

like the chestnut bur,

 and my eyes like the sherry in the glass

 that the guest leaves."

-emily dickinson

“Even when real clouds or trees had been the material of the vision, they had been so only by reminding me of another world; and I did not like the return to ours. But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged. Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow. In the depth of my disgraces, in the then invincible ignorance of my intellect, all this was given me without asking. That night my imagination was baptized.”    -C.S. Lewis

"My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent/

and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets./ 

He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals."

CAMINO NOTES (2nd day in over the Pyranees)...

June 18th Roncavauex to Larrasona : 

Amazingly easy! Shade and downhill (most) of the way —-but when it did go uphill, especially in the sun, my body rebelled and I could only go a snail’s pace. Took me 7 hours roundabout. Left at 6, arrived at 1pm. Got to the hostel in Larrasona, and felt the beginning of soreness. But so far my feet have been holding up just fine. Went to the “supermarket” to get beer and the guy gave me a toast with red spanish wine to welcome me, and told me where the swimming hole was. Never found it, but the guy was so lovely! The hostel, simple, but nice and quiet! Where are all the other peregrines? I have a feeling some of them didn’t make it this far and stayed in the town just before. It feels strangely empty in the village.  Only 8 Euro. 

Town I wish I stayed: Zubria had a better river coziness

Arrived! 

Left on June 17th —-Saint Jean to Roncaexaux

Hellishly difficult! Some parts felt weirdly easy, but other parts felt like a nightmare…sun spots and uphill, and when they combined=lethal.  Besides that, the views = unbelievable. Low down fog, like you were in heaven and lots of horses, and cows with old-fashion bells that jangled, and free-range sheep.  Took me 9 hours roundabout. Left at 6:15 —arrived at 3pm. Arrived like a zombie; barely hanging on. But even still, it was doable. Arrived at giant church hostel with 300 beds. 12 euro. Talked to an American man inside from Minneapolis and said I was a “rockstar” because he had to complete that trip in two days—he couldn’t make it in one go. Gave me encouragement for my fitness level.  The American man said he was making the trip because he felt “empty inside”. So many interesting reasons why people do such a thing. Another girl was doing it as she’d just been divorced. 

Town I wish I stayed: Orrion, Orrias? So pretty.

I always wondered why the sky (a sunset) can never look good in pictures. One of my last nights, on my lovely balcony, overlooking the faraway Willamette that merges into the Great Colombia whom Lewis and Clark sailed down, toward the Pacific, well---- I have a sunset. I take a picture.


The picture is dull and emotionless. Why?

I think now, sitting here I understand. It's because when you really appreciate a sunset, you develop a relationship with each feathery cloud, with each heavy pregnancy of the thunderbolt too moody to entertain the gold, red and pink. And you watch them as if they are old friends, just above your head, and it really does seem as if gods reside just beyond their edges. Hiding from us. Pebbled paths, melancholy streaks of mortal pinks, and they all seem to fall toward a certain fragile center and a final  understanding.

But this can only be understood through one's own eyesight. Not a camera.




And that's why I so very much rebel, repel and disagree with our relationships with screens. We cannot see what is actually happening with them. Furthermore, they stunt our emotional understanding of what is going on around us.

Learning how to Leave `again

Leaving Portland, even if for a little while is not easy.

Matt (Liz’ boyfriend) said to me the other day, "what are you runnin' from, girl?"  I feel very bland. Milk toast. I wonder what this resistance is in me?  In any case, it’s making my normal excitement period for travel turn into sheer dread because I feel so utterly uninspired by what I’m about to embark on. Will that change the minute I’m out of my comfort zone? Dear god I hope so.  In part, this trip is a prayer to god to help me remember what it is I love and to remind me to feel something. I feel like my emotions are so dulled. 

 But I make choices and I hope I can stick by them; see them through so I can look back and say, “Yeah, see, my intuition was working fine. I knew what I needed to do.” This is the dream now. To say those words a months time from now.  I need a serious bootcamp out of complacency. So I am doing the only thing I can think to do. Walk. Think. Be a little uncomfortable. Have panic attacks. And then get through them.  Get on the other side of them. 

Matt said I could get everything without leaving here.  But.   I need other things Portland can’t always give me. Portland gives me kindness, and PBR, and naps in the park, and people in Northface jackets signaling for me to go first and good decency and comfort. Lovely trees that strike my imagination. But I don’t want to slip into its pocket forever. I want to leave so I can miss it. I also want to get off wifi and pray. Pray for a country I’m afraid for—and pray for a relationship back to god whom I’ve lost somewhere along the way. I can feel myself going doughy in both mind and body. I can feel my initial anger towards trump and everything he signifies happening in this country, turn old and turn over, ready to forget and numb out. Some little spark in me is so resistant to that happening! It wants me to stay “woke” as they say, and not go into the bunker. It wants me to feel and cry and not go easily from one day to the next. Maybe why I do travel so much. This little fire keeps calling to me. But I too am fascinated by how it confuses people. I wonder if they are right? Am I always running away? Will I ever be okay? Settled? Able to be in one place—sticking it out, and making a life, the way others do?

The questions make me second-guess myself. But then I get a moment of peace and clarity, saying: “don’t second guess it. You know what is right for you, otherwise you wouldn’t do it. You already know. Trust in it, and grow a backbone to stand by it. Stand by it! Even if you are wrong—if you stand by it, it won’t even matter. Because at least you had conviction.” 

Letting go is so painful. But. It can be done. And when something inside you says small and quiet, “now it is time to let this thing (this time) this place go”, well, then I guess you let go without being so precious about it. Without fawning over your sorrow too much, and look anew with positivity and hope and conviction that something better lie ahead. Something with your name on it. A return to god. And a return to feeling inspired. A return to yourself. A new one that you have not met yet. And yet, now it is time to meet her. The wait has been long enough. And the lessons you’ve learned here in this year have been sufficient. Now we look to the new horizon and like they say in the airport walk-way conveyer belts: 

“Face direction of travel.” 

In honor of my mom who told me recently to dream something bigger and to believe in it, I’ll believe these things:

That I will have a good trip.

That I will be inspired again.

That I will meet wonderful people who loves others and remind me what people can be.

That I will have made the right decision to even go in the first place. (despite being afraid). 

That I will find what it is I love, and let it overcome me. 

That I will find peace, and a kind of home. 

That I will have turned the page of a new chapter, without self-doubt.

That I will drink sangria in a courtyard late at night, listening to crickets.

That I'll skinny dip in the Portugal sea feeling more alive than ever (the way I used to in Cornwall).

That I will spend a whole day without going on the computer--free from the news. (God, the  miserable news).

 That I will learn how to see things again, without it interspersed with looking down at a screen.

That a lizard darting across a rock will soothe, interest and hold my attention far more than the headlines of the NY Times.   And I will. I will be thankful I came. Thankful I dealt with the fear and worry, and rather than let it sway me, sticking through it—holding fast. Patience. And smallness. Tenderness toward others. Toward myself.

Shaky tenderness toward even my anger, (maybe...)

I remember when I lived in the French monastery. The only song that truly stuck with me:

Stay with me, remain here with me,
Watch and Pray,
Watch and Pray...

Thus far have bought a light rain jacket and waterproof leggings. 

One more step towards making this trip real. I'm scared. But once you get something into your head, and it's hard to shake out, then it's probably there for a reason.   I'm on the look-out for a few more essentials: sleeping bag liner, earplugs and eye mask, headlamp for walking before sunrise, and blister patches. The good thing about such a trip is the less I take the better. This helps with packing. 

Thursday I go to buy shoes to walk in. The most important part. I'm told to buy one size bigger than normal because that's how much my feet will swell. 

I've been running, not daily, but almost. 

“To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.” 

Time to go!

Somewhere after the inaguration, the Camino seeped into my head. I don't know why, exactly. It just felt time. I hear drones and I don't want to hear drones. I want  to hear happy sounds again... I am feeling weak both by the news and by my addiction to both the news and my screen. I am forgetting how to pray and how to read.  And I do love paths. I love to walk. I love roads that are not roads. Ones made of dirt that meander in front of you at their own will, and you follow. I love drawing them, and following them. My favorite memories of are dirt paths:

The dirt path along the McKenzie River in Oregon when River lit up with bugs and reflections of the sun and purple and yellow flowers dotted the path North.

The path in St Ives that led to Zennor. (Still) my beloved, most precious path of them all.

The path that led me out of the monastery in France, toward something more real. Somewhere else besides the sounds of the people. The path where I felt for the first time real fear of where I might sleep, sore feet in ballerina slippers and the first time feeling real agonizing thirst for water.

The path in my father's land in Jylland, Denmark, and the little forests and farmlands outside of Vildbjerg where I spent many days crying, dreaming, and escaping from the house.

The paths outside of Polmont, Scotland while being in love, rainy and dreary but happy in heart, and the woods so tame compared to America.

The paths outside of Moab, Utah, traveling with my Uncle. Dreaming amongst red rock and feeling the closest thing I've known to absolute immediate bliss.

The path in St Erth, walking home with a friend, watching her long dresses shuffle in the grass in front of me, and her easy laughter even when my thoughts were so somber.

The paths in Baja, Mexico, walking with the one friend I had there, into the desert to roast among the hot desert dust and finally be away from the Orphanage for a day.

Little dusty dirt paths all throughout my life. My brain--my thoughts are like the Interstate. I can't get off them. But on the Interstate I don't see anything. Nothing at all. I only see exits for McDonalds and Gas Stations.  I long so very much to be on the dirt path again...

And now trump is president.  So, in an effort to make him into a positive, I will let him be the catalyst for my bravest year yet...

 33. A year of ascension. A year to lift oneself up from the little, superficial things, and truly understand why you are here...

Story unfolding..

Trump, The Grotesque, and The Lonely Monsters Within

There is something at work in

my soul, which I do not understand.” 

― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

I like fairy tales and mythology and I understand the world best when looking through them in order to make sense of the world around me. It helps, especially, when one feels like things are so overwhelmingly wretched you can’t even bare to think about the news. So lately I’ve struggled to find out a wise way of thinking about the figure (and rise) of Trump. Because I am equally fascinated and disturbed by such a figure, and what it says and reflects about a country that is my home and a place that I love. Rather than turn away in disgust, I feel it’s better to explore the idea of Trump through mythology, the only language that makes sense to me, than pretend it doesn’t exist, or that it is not as important as the stories I love about Zeus and Freya, Demeter, The Minotaur, etc. 

I am suspicious of my anger, my smugness, and/or self-righteousness at both him and his followers. It seems to me to be incredibly unwise to allow such a man who brings out the worst in himself, to extend that indignity by also bringing out the worst in us. 

It is so easy to confuse the symptom with the disease; the truly scary part is that Trump is merely a symptom of a disease (a rot) we have yet to identify and furthermore, unwilling to find within our own self. I certainly know I don’t like to look within myself for rot. And a communal disgust of a man we can all agree to deplore (at least the friends and family I have thus far) is incredibly cathartic and maybe even useful up to a point, but then there comes a time to look past the obvious and turn around the examination to ones self. That is a choice that comes out of growing—leaving a juvenile, communal condemnation of “other” and turning inward to inspect and confront the much more insidious shadows of our own “Ugly”.  Wouldn’t that be far more useful?

I like poems, old books, and I also like pop culture.  As a Millennial, I am surrounded in the communication of an Internet age—trending stories and hashtags and a kind of dumbing down of language. I don’t really like it, and I return to “old things” as a respite. I went to England to study Myth and fairy tale because I revered Carl Jung since I was thirteen years old and my mom kept one of his books on the bookshelf. I wanted to be wise like Carl Jung. I wanted to sit in candle lit rooms, listening to the Blind Willie Johnson song, “Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground,” and Debussy’s “Reverie” while reading a Keats poem and thinking about how Jung might interpret it. Instead I sit by glow of the internet and cannot escape the actual-world-I-live-in, that actually includes figures and incidences I’d much rather not know exist.

But by shaking my head at it all, sighing, I can’t help but feel like I am taking the easy way I out. I was made for these times. This does not have to be a low-brow tabloid story—this can be myth. And like George Carlin said, “When you are born into this world, you get a free ticket to a freak show. And when you are born into America, you get a front row seat. Personally, I’m delighted.” So too, can I be (maybe not delighted) but get something out of it. Bring a new plane of understanding that is not based on mere disgust, but sincere desire to allow our greatest enemies to be our wisest teachers. God forgive them, for they know not what they do. My favorite prayer in the Bible. 

The world as it is now is only a reflection of what it so desperately lacks, and if “the unexamined life is not worth living” then why am I so reticent to examine it? I love scary movies, books and stories.  But I am squeamish with the news. I read about another cop killing an innocent person, and I cry myself to sleep. Mostly because I think about his mother. She is not a part of a debate about police accountability. She is a real person who just lost her real son. I can’t even process my seething anger, so I keep the stories closed. Is this how thin-skinned I’ve become?   I like to look at Titian paintings of the downfalls of men. But my heart sinks every time I read at a Trump supporters comment on the Internet. Why don’t I have the strength to face the hubris and/or cruelty of man, now? Why can I only do it looking backward into the past? 

The America I love is there too, even in its most grotesque form. 

All through our history, America’s had a fascination with the Grotesque, from the turn-of-the-century freak shows with bearded ladies, “dwarfs” and the disabled, in which throngs of Victorians, and then, Edwardians came to communally gasp and gape at like animals in a zoo.  The vaudevillian “black face,” that reduced African-Americans in to caricatures. Freddy Cruger’s distorted features in Nightmare on Elm Street. American Idol try-outs where the nation collectively, yet passively, mock societal outcasts for entertainment.  There is something deliciously appealing at looking at something “other” and being thankful it is not us. It’s a kind of sickness perhaps we’ve yet to grasp fully, and certainly would never admit to, outright. I wonder if there might be a sickness too, in gleefully watching someone like Trump self-destruct. Is it really the best we can do? 

Once the monsters (the freaks) were outside of us. We paid to go into carnivals and freak shows and vaudevilles. But now, perhaps to supplement our i-everything age, we’ve created the Grotesques to be us, so that we do not have to be directly accountable for the consequences of our own ugliness.  No matter where I look I can’t seem to escape the word “Trump” or the word, “Kardashian.”  This is the era of the selfie and normalization of narcissism and self-marketing. It is no different with our veneration of these cultural “gods.”  They are simply a reflection, a cultural “selfie” of the monster in the mirror. Trump does not exist on his own. The Kardashians do not exist on their own. (Indeed, no one can even adequately explain why they’re famous, other than we’ve allowed them to be)!  We’ve created them, like mini Dr. Frankenstein creations, to displace our own immense darkness and confusion onto something out of our control.  But does this displacement of darkness onto another draw out our anxieties, as Stephen King suggests? Or does it perpetuate them?

  “It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another,” writes Mary Shelley.  And with this, the world grows smaller, and we smaller within it, while our idealized monsters stretch up into the sky and out of our control, or beyond or ability to care or even understand anymore. 

And that is the beginning of loneliness.

The sacred and the profane —mixed together, the crassness of celebrity, and the simultaneous saintly adoration and repulsion of a singular thing is a strange phenomenon. Even listening to Trump’s spoken words, he seems to be equally obsessed with women’s superficial attractiveness, as he is his disgust that this value-currency cannot hold up. It seems like the same area of the brain sparks—whether adoring or reviling a thing. This is easily recognizable in one’s self. Both give off a similar pleasure.  Whether it is the creeping normality of bodily nips, cuts, implants and botox to become the “other”  (Kylies’ transformation into a Kim, wherein she no longer physically looks like herself), or,  the creeping normality of racist asides, outright lies, and insidious violence (Trump) coming off as nothing-much-at-all, nothing-much-to-bat-an-eyelash at, because of the very ISOLATING LAB wherein these weird experiments play out (whether it be a Beverly Hills neighborhood, or a town in Alabama wherein entrenched beliefs become normalized and never once questioned.  All of it is distorted, unnatural, comic, tragic and absurd. But we would be amiss not to see these places—this very landscape, within us and our very own thinking about the same exact things. 

There is a vacuum of emotion, and in its place, a kind of void that people seem to want. They seem to want it because it has no end. It is all-consuming. A secret desire for chaos and decay, a kind of Dionysian death-wish, that allows for a giddy stupor where a mind does not have to measure, understand, think critically or reflect on the past, or even consider the future (one that does not belong to us). We don’t have to live an individually lived myth because we are told to wear the mask of celebrity or “other” without having to answer for its Grotesque-ness, the past, or the future. Nothing but now.  It is a plastic representation of the lowest common denominator of our selves. 

Nietzche believed there was something good in having our sense of self shattered and joining the dancing throng. But is this it? Eroticism is transferred into faux-faces, faux-hair, faux-facts, or what Stephen Colbert aptly labeled, “truthiness.” There is something vague about this shiny new way of being a public figure. There is something intentionally, clipped, trimmed and kept to vague ideals—of never having to really be anything at all, or attach yourself to anything at all. Why are the Kardashians famous? They are because they are. Why is Trump allowed to be held unaccountable for the things he says? Because he can. The truth can be genetically modified —the truth can be corn syrup. People consume it like food; because it is called food. Nobody wants to hear that it’s not. Behind the physical, we can usually seek out a spiritual element. But the spiritual has eroded away and in its place we seem to be okay with cheapness and temporality.  Distortion has become some kind of entertainment passed off as truth. And we want our entertainment to be us, more than our desire for truth. 

Where is the hero/heroine here? If this Faux-Us is always there, no matter how hard we try to look away, where do we find the soul of the matter? Do we even have one, any more? Can we find it, even in the Grotesque, if we look hard enough? Is it closer there, perhaps, than anywhere else? Division creates longing for unity. And as much as I’d like to dispossess myself of these uglier aspects of my own psyche, there they are, and very much a part of me. The Trump-ian aspect is part of this “me” I belong to, and it will always be. It will be a matter of keeping it creatively under control.  And the Kardashian aspect is a part of this “me” I belong to as well. I too cannot untangle my sense of identity to what is most superficial about me. Even on my best days, I struggle to be a person who knows better, and does better. And again and again, I fall into my own lowest common denominator, and allow the worst of myself to deflect it onto the most convenient “other” at the moment, displaying my monsters as ones outside of my own self. But… there is something interesting about that. We don’t have to be disgusted. It can be interesting. We can peer into this abyss and by doing so, root out the falsities in ourselves. If this is me, what can I address today, to amend my own blindness, my own failure to see The Grotesque in me, leading to my isolation, loneliness and masks an emptiness that I cannot heal? If Trump were not so awful, if the Kardashians not so (seemingly) shallow, would we ever hear about them?  Maybe not. And in this I feel comfort. Maybe we need these symbols of the basest parts of ourselves to outwardly manifest, and give relief to the deeper parts, struggling to answer the real questions. Frankenstein’s monster in his anguish, said, “If I cannot inspire love, then I will inspire fear.”  We might be crushed by a sense of loneliness (by this I mean a soul-based loneliness) that cannot bear to meet the internal monsters all on our own. But watching the hubris of a man crumble before our feet should not just be a downfall to revel in; it is calling us to a higher way of being human—one in which every mythological character (whether in reality or legend) is actually our own self; a shadow we should recognize from long ago, and an incentive to no longer deny, chastise, mock or exclude, but reaffirm its true value, a new kind of worth, and a very new understanding. We can be better people. And we should do so right now, more than ever.     Again quoting Shelley, “With how many things are we on the brink of becoming disacquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.” 

A little prayer from one still learning to believe: 

Let me not be disacquanited of the monster in my own self by deflecting it onto another. And through a hard-won wisdom, let me touch every other soul that ever has lived.