An excerpt from my moleskin entitled On the plane to California:
Finally. Life feels like it has not been lived for the past week. Only one thing on my mind, guiding my every action: this departure. It felt/feels like a point of no return and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t leave anything behind or leave one thing undone. And yet the home that I left behind me looks not like a place that I have departed from purposefully, but one that I have left in haste: the paints left to harden on the palette, my books, shoes, socks and papers scattered on the kitchen counter, shirts dangling out of open drawers in my bedroom. Papers litter the floor and sweatshirts tumble out of an open closet. I left the house like I would any other morning, except it didn’t feel right this time being unable to imagine the day that I will return. A finality in departure and a length of absense that I could not and am only beginning to understand. I left feeling most heavily the burden I have left on my family: my absense and the mess to clean up. “She needed wide open spaces” the song goes…. and I am struck by how much this adventure is about me at this moment – everyone supporting, all forces mobilized, and sad and scared to see me leave, finally, to live my own adventure.
Leaving a place of course always inspires gratitude and love for the things that might drive one crazy from day to day. And I have experienced, in the brief pauses in the rush, madness and mahem of the past week, moments of both profound happiness and sadness all at once. Profound happiness at the thought of the places I’ve spent time at and the people I’ve spent time with this summer. And sadness of course that I will never be wuite the same person that I have been at these places and with these people. I think of times with friends, with family in California, and especially at Gran Gusto restaurant, a very special place.
Here at the IONS institute of noetic sciences in Petaluma, California, coming to the end of a second fun/intellectual/eye-opening day with a few of the other fellows in a crowded dorm room, I already feel so far away from that day of departure and so fully immersed in this place and the future. But I feel compelled to take myself back to it for a moment, by copying a journal entry onto the blog, to say to you what I might have not properly said in the moment, which is quite simply thankyou and I love you all! This blog will be my gift to you.
