Pumpkin Pilgrimage

As your eyes pass over the line of Pinterest-perfect pumpkins - toothy smiles and hipster owls and even the Golden Gate Bridge carved into squash - you might notice a cluster of pumpkins at the end, pumpkins that aren't like the others. Slightly dim but full of personality. The sort of pumpkins that would pull the station wagon to a screeching, smoky halt by the side of the road because a freshly-killed squirrel was spotted, a squirrel that would do well in a bowl of chili or maybe cured into jerky. Obviously a family. Not the brightest, maybe a little physically impaired, but happy, secure in their tribe.

After an afternoon of mulled wine, lizard staring contests, and scooping pumpkin guts, we loaded our pumpkin family into the back of my car. They rode around for a few days, windows rolled down to disperse the pumpkin smell, until we finally had to decide what to do with them. When I proposed taking one or two home and leaving him with the rest for his apartment building, he looked at me in shock. "We can't split them up! They need each other!"

I collected myself, horrified by my insensitivity. Of course they need to stick together. They would be lonely. No one else would understand them. The round little mother would be devastated without her crooked-grinned husband. The adopted sibling, a bug-eyed genius who needs to carve carrots into perfect replicas of Bic pens before eating them, wouldn't mesh well with normal society. The cyclops would smash into walls and knock over tables without her buck-toothed brother to lead her around random bits of furniture. (Her peripheral vision isn't all that great.) 

So we scoured the streets until we found a good spot under a tree near Dolores Park. As we tucked our pumpkin family into their new home, a herd of schoolchildren passed, yelling out Happy Halloween!s and complimenting our jack-o-lanterns.

They had found their place, and they were happy.

What Dreams May Come

I've been thinking about dreams lately. Where they come from, how we interact with them, how we can allow or block them, depending on what we need at the time. Even the grandest of dreams are simple at their core, stemming from a desire for connection, creation, love, healing, impact. Most dreams, when you tunnel down to their essence, land on this Venn diagram.

Dreams can get blocked. For a long time, I thought I could wrench myself into productivity. But I'm learning that when things aren't flowing or my energy is low - that's a message. I can try to blast through the message, placate my brain's need to make things happen with new systems or schedules. But that never works for long - a few days, or a few weeks at the most. In the end, if I want to get where I'm going, I have to listen to what's coming to me.

My body gives me information. It's a brilliant tuning fork for my emotional and spiritual state. If there's some feeling I'm trying to repress, my body won't let me go anywhere until I figure it out and process it. If there's a lesson I need, everything will conspire to take me down until I learn it. It's a marvelous and deeply annoying system. It's marvelous how profound it is, when you peer into it. Marvelous that doing what my body and spirit needs has been prioritized over impressive achievements or success or any of the other things my ego finds desperately important.

But when I look at it from a larger perspective - one that doesn't pay any mind to my own admittedly arbitrary goals or schedules - it's a beautiful, shifting network guiding me where I ultimately want to go, passing up things I thought I needed or wanted so it can take me toward what will truly fill me up. The world is a brilliant system of information and if you trust the random influx of messages that come to you, they can lead you like fireflies in the dark toward what you most want. But you have to trust what comes and, most of all, you have to trust yourself.

voice of a wild thing

Last week, a woman on Twitter wanted a book. I read her tweet and thought, "I can afford that. Should I do it? I should." So I did. I got this in the mail from the author of the book a few days later. Twitter is its own brand of magic.

Dreams will reshuffle and reform. My dreams center most around love and creation. If I try to force those dreams, they skitter away.  But if I sink into the messages that my body and my soul and the world around me send, I am pulled onto a path I didn't expect but feels bigger and lighter than any path I could have dreamed on my own.

Making Myself a Wizard Hat Out of Felt and Rhetorical Questions

Crushing, soul-grinding doubt seems to be the legacy of humanity. We doubt our worth, our contribution, our ability to meet the standards that society or we ourselves have set. I spend a reasonable chunk of every day convinced that I’m not doing enough, feeling enough, living enough, earning enough, being enough. Why on earth would I do that? Why on earth would I pour so much of my finite energy into a sticky black pit of doubt?

Why isn’t it enough to be breathing every day? Why isn’t it enough to wake up, put your feet on the ground and think, “How can I help today?” Or wake up, put your feet on the ground and think, “How can I have fun today?” Why do most of our early morning thoughts begin with, “How can I survive today?”

My tiny-fist-shaken-at-the-sky rhetorical questions crop up whenever I find myself in the unconscious loop of work and budgets and doing all the things I don't particularly want to do in hopes of one day being able to do what I really want to do. I have a bad habit of feeling like a victim of my own life rather than its creator. But work and budgets and doing things you don't particularly want to do right this very minute aren't bad. Sometimes work and budgets and things you don't want to do right this very minute really are a good idea. It's not so important what you do, as long as you're being conscious

I don't believe we're here to eke out whatever small life we can manage. I prefer to think of us as wizards of our environment, whisking what we most want out of the ether the way Dumbledore presents hundreds of thirsty adolescents with jugs of pumpkin juice. We're here to make what we want to make and do what brings us joy and spend as much time as we can in the midst of things that light us up - whether that's music or writing or knitting or running through dewy grass or eating that expensive granola that you feel bad for buying. (STOP FEELING BAD FOR BUYING THE GRANOLA YOU ACTUALLY ENJOY.)

Creation beats sacrifice. Joy beats doubt. Picking up a stick on your morning walk to wave like a found magic wand while pretending to be Dumbledore and yelling, "I shall conjure up time for more writing and plane trips to visit friends and also better breakfast cereal!" beats just about everything.

Fairies Welcome

If your life needs some magic, may I recommend a five-year-old? You don't necessarily need to birth and raise this five-year-old. You can simply invite one over for an afternoon. Cheaper, faster, and far less mess.

Wombat and his father.

Take a five-year-old to a redwood grove near your house and he will discover a gate in a chain link fence, a gate you never saw, despite multiple trips to this exact spot. Walk through the gate and you'll find a path under ancient trees. Follow the path and you'll find a hobbit door.

Walk through the hobbit door and you'll find a place you thought only existed in Victorian children's literature. A secret garden. A Narnia, once summer beats back the ice. A babbling brook winds under the redwoods, with bridges leading to giant mushrooms and dinosaur ferns and wooden benches surrounded by riots of violets. Sun filters through the leaves to hit the flowers and warm the water. It's perfect.

Knowing it exists in the world means you can walk there almost every day - and I do.

Once you return home from your adventure to feast on potato chips, you realize how small your house is, when filled with a family of four. One room, with a bed under the eaves, a tiny kitchen at the back and enough seating for three people, if you pull the chair off the deck. So the children will occupy themselves by jumping merrily on the bed, tiny faces smashing themselves into your pillows as they hurtle themselves through a profound experimentation in the rules of gravity.

Soon the eldest will notice a small pink and green bowl on a stack of books. In the bowl are two tiny pink silk pillows, one labeled "create" and the other "joy." He'll arrange the pillows, find a cloth your mother used to wear around her hair in the '70s, and tuck it in with the pillows. He'll add a sparkly multifaceted ring from the cup of jewelry in the bathroom and, as the crowning touch, a potato chip. This, he tells you, is a fairy bed. The sparkles to attract and the potato chip to entice closer.

The next morning, after they're gone, when you're prosaically clearing away the potato chip because ants, you'll look up. Etched into the window, above this tiny bed, is a fairy wing.

Magic.

My Hobbit Hole

I've become the Goldilocks of trashcans. Two weeks ago, I moved into my new home. It's a little cottage in Mill Valley, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. After years of being in and out of cities and in and out of storage units, finally settling down means everything must be perfect, including the garbage cans. It's strangely hard to find just the right trash receptacle - you want it to do its job and fit in its corner. But I don't want to buy something just to fill the space. I'm willing to wait for the right one. The right garbage can is important, you know.

When I first signed the lease and posted a picture on Facebook, Zach said, "I didn't know they were still selling real estate in heaven." Tracking down your own spot of heaven is a bit of a holy calling for most of us. My heaven apparently comes with skunks plotting on the deck and squirrels tap-dancing on the roof. The floor tilts a bit to the left. Spiders fall from the ceiling. Sun lights the deck in the afternoon. When I open the sliding glass doors, I can hear water rushing past rocks in the creek bed. My storage space rests under a treehouse. It's like camping, but with my own mattress and internet access. It doesn't have everything I was looking for - there's no laundry or bath tub - but I'm learning to accept gifts as they come, without being too persnickety about checking off every box I concocted while dreaming of what I want next. So far, I've learned that I own too many books and that it is possible to coexist peacefully with many-legged insects. I see animals loving my home as much as I do as a good sign, even as I lose any and all remorse over killing ants.*

* All god's creatures, my ass. Get out of my sink, ants.

I've always treated my apartments like way stations between me and whatever was next. For the first time, I want to build a home. A home with a trashcan that suits me perfectly, yellow rugs and mugs, a home with the few pieces of furniture I've collected and the books I love. I don't know what my future looks like. Any wisdom I've gained over the years falls smack into the "give up on knowing what's coming because life will surprise the hell out of you" category. I don't know if I'll be here for five months or five years. I do want to get married and have kids and, since I'm turning 36 in a few months, it would be nice if that was sooner rather than later. But I want to build my home as though I'll be here for years - choosing things carefully, creating a space for myself, the kind of space that nurtures who I am and who I want to be, and looks pretty doing it. If I do up and move again soon, it will still be time well spent. Because this is a way of taking care of myself, of reminding myself that I'm worth the effort, even if it is just me. Especially if it's just me.

Maybe this will be the last time I can create a home that's all my own. If you have a family, apparently you sometimes have to let them choose things and, I don't know, take their needs into account on occasion. So maybe this is the last time I get to enjoy being psycho perfectionist about trashcans and having everything precisely the way I want it. Maybe this is practice for building a beautiful, useful space for me and my family. Maybe this is creating the space that will nurture and support me for years to come. I just don't know. So I will build it and trust that things will work out exactly as they should.

For now, home is a hobbit hole surrounded by redwoods and tucked into the curve of a babbling creek. Maybe it will be mine for mere months, maybe for years. But now is all we ever know for sure. So I will love it and care for it until it's time to love and care for something else.