Holy Spurs On My Moments

Hooray!! I am in Portland, on the first spur-of-the-moment vacation of my life, visiting my friend Lacey. Wonderful Quena arrives tomorrow night, too! A girls’ week, and a favorite-people week, and a travel for fun week. Being around incredible, loving and happy people is a very good thing, I think I might do well to get used to it and do it more often.
The morning started out as a reprisal of last weeks theme – oversleeping, this time both me AND my dad. I nearly missed my flight by being late and then getting thoroughly unpacked in a double-security screening, but made it onto the plan just as they were swinging the door shut – only to then sit in the runway and taxi back to have a malfunctioning radio system repaired (from the pilot: “No need to worry folks, it wasn’t like it was something that would have prevented us from landing safely or flying into another plane, nothing like that, just a routine problem”…!!). As soon as I called Lacey to tell her I’d be late, I fell promptly asleep (I’d stayed up till 3:30 unpacking from house-sitting and moving and repacking for the trip), and stayed that way till we landed. Yay for unexpected maintenance and impromptu nap opportunities!
I found Lacey at PDX after a bit of wandering around in the wrong directions, and we took the MAX into downtown and walked through lovely tree-lined Park Avenue which I remembered more vividly than expected from childhood visits up here. Lacey’s charming flat is in a student housing complex, and just the perfect size; I’m reminded again how much space I’d really need to feel at home, and how much I’m looking forward to student housing of my own in the hopefully not-too-distant future! I noticed by noonish that time had slowed waaaaay down, that I was more relaxed and happy than I’d been in a long time, and just basked in that – what an incredible thing!
It was Lacey’s friend Paul’s birthday, and we decided to make a Vegan Birthday Dinner-Feast (intentional caps), complete with spice cake from a recipe that I’ve had swimming around in my head but hadn’t fleshed out all the way. In other words, experimentation, my very favorite thing to do with a kitchen! So we headed out to shop, and I got a ground-level taste of how incredibly low-key and well-laid-out Portland is. We made a brief detour into Powells (DANGER WILL ROBINSON), a stocking-up at Whole Foods, and then back to drop off groceries and walk to Lacey’s community garden plot, which is flourishing beautifully.
The feast was prepared and savored and enjoyed, and at some point i'll have to post the menu... I am just so full, not of food but of peace, love, kinship, and feeling immersed in people and surroundings I both understand and am recognized as my true self by. A new, and curious, and blessed feeling. I am looking forward to all that this week holds for us.

Where You Are

I have more or less successfully kept to a "news fast" since the fourth week of Janurary 2003. No papers, no magazines, no NPR, no CNN, no networks, no Yahoo!Ticker, nada. Yes, I do see the occasional headline, and will occasionally seek out news from basic info-based sources like the BBC, AlterNet, or Working for Change -- but the chronic news, the endless stream of overproduced, dramatized, background-noise "information" was what I wanted to turn off and leave off. And despite all the things that have happened in the world since then, nothing has convinced me to retreat. Now, with the state of things in Louisiana, and several of my EMT classmates going to join the relief effort, the fact that I'm still not plugging into the media frenzy has been called into question by some. I have (mostly) learned to keep my mouth shut when this sort of thing happens (pior instances ranging from the London bombings to the Tsunami to the death of the Pope), because if I say what I really think about how the media takes advantage of world crises to soak up ratings and how for every person affected by tragedy in the developed world there are thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of people starving to death or suffering from treatable diseases in the third world because they're not glamorous enough to be the popular "cause of the moment", I tend to piss people off and apparently paint myself as uncaring about current events.
I wonder what would happen if news were something we made, and not something done to us? If people felt generally compelled to do something more than write a check? Like, what would happen if instead of waiting for things to go wrong so we can have a bake sale, we chose to live in smaller houses, build sustainable infrastructures, do without the luxuries we take for granted like giant supermarkets and being able to drive everywhere, build communties based on interdependance so that when bad things happen there's no question of how everyone will be taken care of, take a humble slice of the world pie so that there's enough of everything for everybody? Or am I nuts?
I really like this, it showed up in my inbox back in September of '01 and then again last week; I plan on using it as a bookmark in my Paediatrics textbooks if I can ever figure out how to fight my way into school.
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Where you are right now is a very good place to be. For you are alive, aware, and able to make a difference.
Certainly things are not perfect. You may face uncomfortable situations, painful choices and difficult challenges.
Even so, where you are right now is a good place to be. For you have the opportunity to take whatever you have and make it into a life of value, meaning and fulfillment.
You have the extreme good fortune to be right here, right now. The more you see your life as the immense opportunity that it is, the more true richness you will uncover.
There is a path that leads to the best in life that you can possibly imagine. And the starting point of that path is where you are right now.
Pause for a moment and consider your many blessings. Then move forward and fulfill all the rich promise of where you are right now.
-- Ralph Marston

Dear Sophie, Adieu

I am (sniff) selling my beloved Subaru Outback Sophie as I prepare to leave for my adventure, since I've so far been unable to find any way to shrink and bring her with me, or swim-tow her across the Atlantic (the swim is my worst tri leg, remember). She's been an awesome travel companion, and I'm a Subaru convert -- they drive like sports cars, take on any permutation of nasty weather with ease, hold up forever (my friend's is at 327,466 and still ticking!), are top rated in all 5 crash tests, and get great gas mileage -- what more could you ask for? So if you want to hop on the Subaru bandwagon or know someone who does, let me know.

Here's the craigslist posting:

http://www.craigslist.org/pen/car/95289349.html