Wanderings: April 2010

Well, it's been two and a half weeks since I've been home now, and almost two weeks of doing "The Artist's Way." My first order of business upon arriving was to clean out our old "chalet" in the backyard, which had turned, as most things in our household do, to storage space, and revamp it into the breezy, rustic, creative sort of nook it so deserves to be.

On Saturday, the spring equinox, I did a little ceremony to usher in both the space and the season. At Wellesley my dear friend Ji Hyang introduced me to the Ayni Despacho ceremony, and so this was my first attempt to carry it on on my own. Obviously, I did not have a llama fetus. But there were sparkly hearts.

I've been writing, and painting, and basically just whole-heartedly enjoying these expansive amounts of time by myself; my parents are house-sitting 45 minutes away to be closer to my mother's job, so I am alone throughout the week. Sometimes I feel like I should be worried about the extent to which I really crave just sinking into the depths of myself; my unending stream of thoughts, fantasies, frustrations, fears, melancholy... joy, inspiration, bouncing energy... I'm trying to learn to ride out the ebbs and flows and not take any moment, any thought too seriously. The biggest thing that this bout of traveling taught me was that most of what we "are" is experience... and so how and where do we locate ourselves when our experience is always changing?

At times I felt so anonymous, so caught up in everything around me, so cognizant of the fact that there are billions, BILLIONS, of people, places, moments, experiences, ideas, emotions, creations taking place EVERYWHERE, that really, REALLY though, why should I take myself seriously? It's absurd! And it's extremely difficult for me to find ANY one thing that really truly justifies my being here, except for the fact that my parents, you know... and therefore I am, and so I have to at least pretend to be enthusiastic about all of this until it's time for me to NOT.

Phew! Can you imagine? This is the sort of thing that goes through my head ALL THE TIME. I suppose I could get myself a nice distraction, like a boyfriend. But I'm already set in my ways of distracting myself through obsessing over food and exercise, or watching movies and tv shows on the intellectual level of Cougar Town. And fantasizing over the boyfriend I'll someday have when I miraculously change.

And writing, writing, writing, and drawing silly pictures of a girl who wets herself.

This is my life post-Europe! Pictures and more to come, check out my new website for an attempted classy synthesis of all I've been doing thus far.