Drunkenly

I recently visited my brother at University of Portland, where we sipped French press coffee and chatted in his dorm room. He said, "Yeah...I'm pretty much in a constant state of anxiety and stress." Me too. It unfortunately runs in our family. I am pretty much constantly in a state of some sort of anxiety, bouncing and wobbling and crawling along as I ride daily undulating waves of moodiness. Some days it feels like I can barely keep my head above the waves.

I look for little things to help. I recently found a blog that I really love. It reminds me of something my mom said over Christmas break - that things "aren't good or bad, they just are." One entry had a list of daily, simple things that the blogger likes. Here is my own, just from today:



1. The smell of woodsmoke.
2. Looking at the drunk, low-lidded way my dad's cat's eyes look when someone pets him.
3. Talking about Taoism and drinking black coffee with Hunter.
4. Seagulls.
5. The really really tall pine trees around our neighborhood.
6. Reading for fun.
7. My dad's action figures.
8. Making faces at Hunter in church.
9. Listening to Bec's Regina Spektor CD in the car.
10. That one new song about the sky by Animal Collective.
11. The thought of Ryan watching Twilight.
12. Flushing toilets.
13. Planetariums.

Drink More Coffee

'Tis the squeezin' for letters and quiet, snowy gray! This January I want to become a cupcake expert. Not funfetti, white icing cupcakes, but thick, rich fudge cupcakes with raspberry chocolate frosting, or lemon meringue cupcakes with nutty, buttery frosting. Oh God.



I want to go to Coffee Cottage in Newberg more often. I want to reread The Hound of the Baskervilles. Under the covers listening to Oregon rain on the moss-covered roof of my falling-apart, miniscule-bathroomed but lovable house. Journal and take up the writing I started in France. Get away to snow. Delight in it like a child first eating a cupcake with the frosting smeared all over her lips. Think more often about things that made me very happy when I was little, like airplanes and planetariums. Visit a planetarium. Listen to Bon Iver, Windmill, Animal Collective, Devendra. Meditate more regularly. As usual, worry less.

The clouds above us join and separate,
The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns.
Life is like that, so why not relax?
Who can stop us from celebrating?

- Taoist poet Lu Yu

"You can't settle down, until the Icarus in your blood drowns."

Limbs and Branches

Currently addicted to: coffee shops - To the Lighthouse - the feeling of driving my car - watching how other people live joyfully and learning new techniques from them - Frightened Rabbit - getting over my issues speaking the English language.

Seattle/Grants Pass

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern...

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from...

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

"Little Gidding," The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot