This week has left me without

...a car that often and reliably shifts out of park.

...clear skin.

...a working computer.

...my wallet.

The world exists

I've never had any doubt the world exists. Whether it could be counted on to stay, that's another story. We are never entirely settled. Time conspires against such certainty. If we're smart we count instead on the persistence of both perception and memory. --John Lane, Circling Home

I've been dreaming about houses, about a house. About a yard, a "stand-alone," a world all my own. With a dog and Snickers. With my lonely, cold, green couch that I saw today for the first time in 8 months. With bookcases and windows, a long dresser and room for recycling.

I love my apartment in Spartanburg, my city view. I love its light and wood and color and length. I don't want to move again--it feels like I'm always moving, always trying to find that happier spot. And then when I find it I move for a different reason and cross the country. This time, my reasons are more root-oriented. Though I don't feel settled and can't foresee feeling settled here when half of my heart is elsewhere, I want to live fully while I'm wherever I am. Spartanburg is home. It is sweet, lively, and close to more living. I have friends here. I have the coolest most wonderful job here. I want to inhabit it. But I can't really do that when I'm three floors up without any ground to churn, without a defined square-footage. My connection to the ground has come elsewhere, outside of Spartanburg on beaches and, mostly, mountainsides.

There are ways I'm working myself into this place. First, there's the fact that I work for a nonprofit that serves the community; that is the first rung of connection, of reason. Then, there's the connection to the humane society, my place there on Sunday mornings with the other people who walk dogs and the dogs themselves. From there, I'm spreading out. I want to connect with an environmental organization.

And then there are the goals. The goals of learning to kayak, of backpacking, of publishing in the journals I respect, of writing farther and wider, of writing closer and deeper.

My mantra--don't laugh--has become "CHOOSE THE LIVING." However much I love my quiet evenings at home alone, I can't do that every night. Seclusion breeds seclusion, I've learned. I have to get out. I have to meet people. I have to experience. I have to be more spontaneous, alive, open. Not reckless or irrational or out-of-character but a part of the world. I want to meet the world in the face, not through a tv screen or computer screen. By getting out of my home, I work to create a home because home involves more than a living space. It involves community, environment, action.

In less than two weeks I will return to my childhood home, to Hutchinson, Kansas, and its straight, flat streets and sad, struggling buildings. But I remember the life that was there, all of those twenty years of a hometown and family. What will it feel like to touch that old, torn couch after 9 months and 8 states away? How will it feel to hug my grandmothers again? Will they still feel like mine? How will my presence shift the relationship of parents to brother to cats in the house when this girl who has done things they never tried returns?

I want to recover the sense of place of Hutchinson, how it really is. Not the town I couldn't wait to leave. I want to go back to those places that are so familiar yet fuzzy in memory: Arkansas River, HCC, my block. The hill north of town that felt like a mountain--highest thing I knew--when I approached on my bike. I always made it and anticipated the cruise down, the rush of wind, and my father sailing ahead of me. I miss those bike rides with my father, our time in the country with only the wind as our friends. That was our one connection to each other. It was the thing I could do with him and he could do with me. We rode together, and then I stopped, and then he kept going farther and farther and longer until his body was too worn out from his job to go on.

He would love to ride out here in the Piedmont, but I don't know if his body could handle all the hills. Yet hills are what I crave--not on my bike but on my own feet. I crave the climb, the burn of my legs, and the rush from reaching a summit or view, of achieving a feat with my body alone. My body and its relationship with nature here is the real test of place. Leaving no trace yet leaving part of my self and coming away with a new part of my self. That is what hiking is: a journey to something new, to a new relationship with my self and the ground, the sky, the water, breath.

"I've never had any doubt the world exists," but I have to exist in it, too.