in college, on my way home from my poetry classes, an odd combination of words would often pop into my head, and i would dig frantically through my backpack for a pen, whispering the words over and over again as if i were trying to remember a phone number. i always had observations written on my hands. a girl "gave" me the word wisteria for my birthday. things like that don't happen anymore. and for a long while i was glad because writing was starting to give me anxiety. i mean it's a lot easier not to care about particular shades of pink or the number off whiskers on a cat. it's easier to just ride through life off of the momentum of statistics and headlines. but now i feel like i've lost my keen eye for the details, i don't notice things as much as i used to. the surrealism slid off of my glasses and i want it back. so what do we do? that's a pure gold question. it's so tempting to soothe my worry with action. but i know that the laws of the universe deem that nothing i want is upstream. that my "work" is to let go of the oars, so the details will sort themselves out. derrick jensen said something like, i spent so much of my twenties doing not much of anything, if you look at it from a production standpoint, but doing a lot, if you look at it from the perspective of trying to find out who i am and what i love. getting grounded. and that took a lot of time, a lot of time spent sitting by a river reading, or taking walks, or sometimes watching baseball. so i'm going to spend my time reading the jungle, taking long walks in the rain, and forgiving my coworkers for tonight's absolute lack of compassion towards a dying cat.

come december, i'm running away to central america with a boy. we're buying plane tickets on monday.