social un-norm.

A well read friend recommended "Walden" to me a few months back. She said Thoreau and I were kindred spirits. I measured the weight of that statement through the many glasses of wine we had all consumed by the time she uttered it, but also made a mental note to seek out this piece of literature. My roommate found it for me at Goodwill. I tore into it, and devoured the contents as if my life's worth was measured by the number of pages turned each day.

Shorty before opening the book, I'd stumbled upon some important life truths dealing with creativity and purpose. Mostly, that we should spend our time doing the things we love, even if they are things that don't fit nicely into societies packaging. I have been dancing with that philosophy for a while now, shedding layers of expectation here and there without ever really letting its music fully move me.


I've held hands with simplicity for quite a while, in the physical sense. Have less stuff, mostly. Dear Thorough and life epiphanies have pushed me from mere hand holding to a full on embrace. This simplicity stretches much further than the contents of my modest closet. It's meant to reach into the crevices of life, and the wells of what we spend our time on, too. This simplicity doesn't always translate easily into cultural success, but the tenets of its truth propel me into tasks that truly fill my soul. Working with my hands is a must. Writing is a necessary creative outlet that I should always be attempting, refining, pursuing. My relationships and the people in my life are paramount to fulfillment, and I must invest in them with intention.


I've been fully diving into those things as of late, which left me pretty exhausted last Saturday evening. One of the few things that could drag me from rest was ethnic food. I crashed married couple date night to have My Thai Kitchen for dinner, which happened to be exactly what all of my insides needed. The food was everything I was hoping for, the inside of the space was painted vibrant colors of red and yellow and orange like a baby's nursery, and the owner was the embodiment of hospitality and graciousness; His presence the equivalent of ease, which balanced nicely with married couple banter. Though I devoured my meal as I'd devoured "Walden", there were left overs to be had, and so I didn't leave the restaurant solo.


I met the following Monday morning early, and drove to my work, a place where I make coffee and work my hands raw with espresso and bleach. I was hungry for breakfast, Thai left-overs in hand. And that's what I wanted to eat. It was seven-thirty in the morning, and I was craving rice, vegetables, and the curry both of those things were resting in. Something inside deterred me. "That's not breakfast food," this expectant voice whispered in my ear. "Eat your granola", it said, "and save your left-overs for lunch, where they belong."


I recognized the tone. It's the same voice that's been pushing me for years to figure out what I want to be, as if what I am isn't enough already. "You can do this for a while, but eventually you're going to have to start acting like a grown-up, Meredith."


And this is the response I am attempting to cultivate: Have granola for lunch! Do the things you LOVE to spend your time doing. Breathe, and damn-it, eat left-over Thai food for breakfast. 

look at the water.

Sitting on a bench that beckoned, I heard clatter from clusters of sail boats that created the faintest hint of wind chimes, and a subtlety that can only happen accidentally, white beach birds whose scientific name I do not know sang their evening songs as the echoing train whistle teased in the space behind me.

I walked down the street to the section of Lake Michigan that borders Milwaukee, with down town to my left and endless seemingly sea before me and to my right. The daytime was inching closer to it's end, and the sun that usually warms the bay had taken a bow. As my boots clanked the sidewalk and rolled up jeans clanked the sides of my boots, Walden and journal in hand, I had a moment of regret. I left my I-Pod in my bag inside the cafe with the others. That inner jerk, the feeling like I could create the best moment for myself if I'd had all the ingredients, and I NEEDED to turn around to get that contraption to make it complete, it tugged...I grasped it, and I let it go.

There are so many of these moments that pull at us in life, and all kinds of things outside of ourselves we're convinced we need, that we should turn around, interrupt our walk and the peace of the evening breeze around us, to retrieve. But GOD, there is so damn much beauty around us all of the time that we're missing because we're so afraid to be still.

I left the tug alone, then I let it go, and I kept walking. I let sail boats sing to the tune of the breeze, the birds and the train. My moment was more complete than any I could have conjured on my own, and I felt an abundance inside stillness that can't ever be reached by distraction.

farewell trip.

I am away from normal life right now, living and breathing Northern air.

Before leaving the part of the united states that can't be effectively characterized (south? midwest? west? southwest?), I wondered how to characterize my temporary exit.

Because of various life epiphanies that I will elaborate on further in the future, I am abnormally crazy about my current place on earth. I'm usually pretty content, so this isn't too far from the pre-epiphany norm. But so many mundane aspects of life are incredibly beautiful, and the muck of discontentment lifted, as of late, just enough for me to see the beauty more clearly. All that momentum to say, I didn't need a vacation, and this is part of the epiphany.

I want to cultivate for myself an existence that doesn't beg for an escape.

So this Northern air that I am breathing isn't a vacation. It's just kind of a trip, and no matter how in love with the present I become throughout my life, I will always welcome new landscapes.

Another part of the epiphany is the value of the people in our lives, and it's two people in particular that motivated this trip for me. Over the course of the past three years, we have spent time investing in each others' lives, and they have taken care of me in the moments I was unaware I even needed care. They are a couple, so technically I am the odd one out, though it's never been that way. They've let me crash their Valentine's Day dinners, we cooked vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner together this past year, and the layered moments of every day life that I constantly tried to remind myself to not take for granted are too many to tell.

I came on this trip to move them away from me. That's what's motivating this new landscape, and the string of days here in a Northern place, and why I will leave with more interesting stories and memories, and also with a real and tangible ache.

relax.

Once I started a food blog. I thought that since I like food and I like to write, I would write about the food I ate and cooked and stuff like that. But I rarely did. I mean, I already had a blog. And when I would log in and it brought up that page, I think they call it the "dashboard", it indicated how many blogs I was managing, and the indication was two, and for a moment that made me feel a little more important. I wasn't just handling the demands of one, but TWO.

And I think about this and about how tempting it is in life to put more descriptive terms under one's name, things that show the world how much of a load we can handle, and how impressive we are. And then I think about how if you ask a person what they actually value, I mean really value, it doesn't usually have much to do with what they spend most of their time doing.

A friend was telling me a tale of her friend's educational experience while we walked home from a gelato date last week. We were passing by a community college, and I was probably lamenting how much my student loans hold me back from doing cool things in life. I do this a lot. Her friend, she informed me, pays SEVEN-HUNDRED dollars a month for his student loans, and he works at a burger place. She also said he's considering graduate school, as he can get his loans deferred. And this is exactly why I didn't ever want to get a masters degree. Because while I am NOT paying on my loans I am ACCUMULATING MORE DEBT that would eventually get me even further from doing more fun things in life and also not guarantee that I would get to spend time doing what I love. I have friends that took their graduate degree OFF their resume so that they could get a job, all the while paying money for the training they were having to hide.

And I think about both these things, what we value versus what we actually spend our time doing, and and also about what we pursue and invest ourselves in against all logical reasoning, and about how BACKWARDS the world can be, and it all makes me want to just go lay in a hammock under the trees with an optional read alongside an optional nap.

Lucky for me, I have a friend with a hammock; I've also got a book and a free afternoon.

high-lighter.

Lately I've been thinking about all the things we need to unlearn, the falseness we build upon, and how to get to the core, the real.

And It starts at Wal-Mart.

This was before I was aware what that place would become. We went there to get shock for our swimming pool and rings to throw in the bottom, to search for like dolphins or mermaids or whatever identities our childhood imaginations could conjure. There were no groceries or super-sections of super centers.

This particular trip culminated alongside the impulse purchases that have since expanded to include sanitizing wipes, though the disposable cameras have come and gone. Before all of that, there were candy and magazines, and a distinct memory of the beginning of not measuring up. I was in between my mother's silver shopping cart and a few girls my age. I was fair and brown headed and freckled and they were distinctly different, their skin kissed by the summer sun, their hair streaked blonde from the same rays, and that's the first moment I remember an inner tendency to compare. And from that tendency followed feelings of inadequacy. I was somewhere around the age of seven.

And somewhere around that same age, I began to have an affinity for women in long skirts and long hair and in my head, that's what I viewed as adulthood, the version I would like to live in. I had always been interested in fashion. I picked out the right bags and shoes for my beloved Aunt Mae that took care of me as a child at the age of four, and I'd shudder when my mom would leave the house in something red while wearing bright pink lip stick. Style was a part of my inner make-up, but that didn't have anything to do with the previous mentioned affinity. It had everything to do with the lightness the long flowing skirts represented.

This lightness could be seen from the tip-toes these mystical women walked on, the sun that was always out when they were around, the weightlessness in their laughter, the ease with which they traveled from room to room. They were the listeners, attentive, present. But they were hard to find.

So many of the women I was immediately surrounded by were anything but light. They were inspiring in other ways, but their steps were heavy, their demeanor distracted, their mannerisms stiff, their clothing not ever fitting quite right. The feelings that met me in line at Wal-Mart encouraged this phenomenon, in the form of unnecessary pressure and unachievable expectations.

Life is so much about unlearning the crap we stuffed into our formative brains in line at Wal-Mart, the sneaky sentences that hold us back, lessons we clung to that were not ours, thoughts that discourage and tell us to hide ourselves from others.

Don't shake the ground each time you take a step because of unnecessary baggage. You'll run out of places to walk and buildings that can hold you. Walk your thoughts to images of the wind blowing the curtains, the hang gliders of the world, the birds, and the people you know that walk with ease upon their toes. Take from them what's good, true, real, and walk lightly.

And get the helloutta Wal-Mart.

drout relief.

An Oklahoma summer is inevitably hot. There was that one, once, that was kind of rainy and mild. But most every other summer of my life can be characterized by heat. As my roommate would say, it makes us tougher, heartier people. This summer has really outdone itself.

Walking outside feels much like a slap in the face, and no one can shut up about it. I don't blame them, really, the weather talkers. It's a cliche topic, yes, but this summer's version is also extremely unbelievable. I've been saying "one-hundred and fourteen" out loud because of how outlandish that number as a temperature sounds. It goes without saying that the sky alongside these temperatures has been a sunny one. A cloud here and there, giving the ants roaming about a minute or two sort-of reprieve from the blast of heat blasting their shells. Otherwise, sun.

This is why the gray sky I looked up and witnessed Saturday evening, while tamping espresso, seemed so unbelievable. One-hundred and fourteen has become so commonplace that a storm, cloud covered sky accentuating shaky trees, is fantastical and other worldly. And then the impossible: rain. It started coming down, pouring, beating itself against the concrete like a broken heart, like a lover that keeps it all in bottled up inside itself for so long putting up with so much shit and lies and anguish and hurt, composed on the outside sipping tea and folding napkins until her frame, her insides can no longer physically handle the layers of pain and she lashes out, tearing holes, smashing glass and breaking down everything along her path. That was the rain. The storm breathed a weight of relief like the lover; The temperatures began to fall and we all took in the breeze like it was the first breeze of all our days on Earth.

And then the storm kept pounding and tearing across the landscape with scorn, and it blew gas lines and power lines and uprooted trees.

And it's funny that the things we need, I mean really desperately need are so often the things we aren't prepared for all the while and they slam down relief and confusion and unsettle us. And we scramble to figure out how to deal with no power, no air conditioning, broken stuff, canceled plans, ants in the living room and yet, we remain thankful for the rain.

summer ammo.

I started the season feeling a need to beat the summer, as if it had taken war with me (it had). This meant a necessary reach into my bag of weaponry.

I am not a particularly violent person. I'd much rather concede knowing I am right on the inside than put up a fight with a fighter. I don't compete with others well. I usually step aside and let them pass. I fail at Monopoly. This shifts as the temperature gauge goes higher. Summer brings out my inner warrior, and the only weapon I've had to use with consistency against the inconsistency of the world is running. It's been my antidote for a long time, and this summer, I've planned for it to be my grenade.

And then, after many runs in near one-hundred degree heat, no injury or exhaustion, I pulled something in my calf while sleeping. I suffered after effects of a charlie horse gone bad the night before a thirteen mile run; The summer had called in back-up. I toyed with concession.

Though I am not giving up, I am altering my course. Isn't that what they do in the war movies? Reassess their strategy, take inventory of their enemy, adjust accordingly? And part of my adjustment is to remind myself of my other summer time goal: enjoy, as a child enjoys.

I accomplished this with zeal yesterday, as my body zoomed down the pink Silver Bullet at Big Splash, right after exiting the Lazy River that had followed a run in with the Master Blaster.

A message to Summer: I've got back up, too.