To Know the Dark

There is no day I anticipate and welcome as much as Winter Solstice. Like many of my fellow Pacific Northwesterners, I am a diagnosed Vitamin D deficient. I crave light with the trembling desperation of a junkie. Every morning from the Winter Solstice through the end of February, I note the sunrise and sunset, confirming the day is a minute longer than the day before. Then two minutes. Until one day, though it is still Winter, I'm running in 6:00 a.m.dawn. Winter Solstice is the true beginning of my new year, a day without the entanglements of religion, gifts, resolutions, overeating or travel. It is a day for reflection and remembrance, for letting go and looking forward.

This year I felt a particular need to mark the turning of the season. The last day of 2012 and the early months of 2013 were filled with darkness; at the time it was hard to imagine a way forward. Yet, by the time we reached the Spring Equinox, we'd transformed our lives. Like sunflowers following their heliotrope instincts, we'd turned our faces to the light. I wanted to acknowledge that transformation as this year of turmoil, transition and finally, peace, drew to a close.

I've practiced yoga for many years, but with the exception of some weepy Savansanas (Corpse Pose, a lying-down meditation) after a particularly intense practice, I've avoided its mystical elements. Not out of skepticism or indifference, but from an acknowledgment that there is only so much a busy brain and body can focus on. My practice has been physically and mentally transformative and I've benefitted emotionally from the residual grace of active meditation.

This Winter Solstice offered me the opportunity to take part in a unique celebration that was also a fundraiser for a local center for victims of domestic violence. The event was a group ceremony of 108 Sun Salutations. A Sun Salutation is a series of 8 or 12 poses performed in a flowing sequence, following the natural rhythm of yogic breathing—deep inhalations and exhalations. The number 108 is sacred in many Eastern religions, which you can explore here and here, but I most enjoy knowing there are 108 stitches on a baseball and that Stonehenge is 108 feet in diameter. And now I enjoy knowing I can move though 108 Sun Salutations non-stop and not hobble, wince or otherwise regret it the next day.

We were instructed at the beginning of the three hour practice to set an intention for our evening. My intention was to allow gratitude to carry me through the physical challenge. Gratitude for a strong, healthy body. Gratitude for opportunities to do the things I love, in a place of beauty and community. Gratitude for the love which surrounds me. Gratitude that even in a time of darkness, my husband and I had each other and we had the strength and the resources to change our lives. The women who seek help from places such as Dove House are in crisis; they have few, if any, resources left. I offered this practice in gratitude for an organization that supports, shelters and empowers women and children escaping domestic violence.

Completing 108 Sun Salutations was humbling, exhausting and soul-stirring. I left my body behind and focused on one breath after another to make it to the end. The collective spirit of our community brought light and breath to women and children in need. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have given and received so much in return.

Wishing all a gracious embrace of the darkness and a glorious return to the light.

"To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."

—Wendell Berry

The Music of Silence

“Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.” ~ Marcel Marceau I struggle with silence. I write in the pre-dawn hours to classical music, during the day to one of a few dozen playlists. I run to NPR when I need to keep a steady, easy pace, switching over to up-tempo music when the legs are ready to work. I walk to podcasts. I read to music, or worse, to the news. It is so quiet here at night, I can't sleep without a white noise machine.

But I'm discovering the music of silence.

Autumn brings me to the forest. In the late afternoon, when my eyes have swelled and my brain has shrunk from hours in front of the computer, I take long rambles through the woods. I force myself to go it alone. To listen. It's scary for me to set out without music or podcast, for it means I have only my thoughts to keep me company. But there is music in the silence.

The salal and salmonberry rustle as creatures take umbrage at my intrusion. My knees click in complaint, for they've already suffered a morning run. My breath puffs and my heartbeat thrums as I plod up a steep slope. The susurration of the tide on the shore far below, the bellow of a foghorn, the whine of a plane propeller, the pneumatic holler of geese and the uneven call and response of my worries and hopes create a symphony of sound.

The quieter I become, the louder the world seems. I have silenced social media, finding the crowded, noisiest rooms are the loneliest. Writing is lonely enough. And filling it with others' noise means I'm not present on my own page.

Welcoming stillness may just give me a chance to hear the most important thing. And what could that be? Shhh...

Listen... 

Blowing through the jasmine...

I walk down the hill to the town plaza, thinking the Thursday evening concert on the dock will be the ideal coda to yet another blissful summer day. Yesterday’s breathless 84°—the warmest day of the year—segued into today’s carefree, breezy 76°. The Plaza is empty. I check my watch. The concert should be well underway. Then it hits me. It’s September 12^th. September. Public school has been in session for several days, the detritus of the Wooden Boat Festival had been hosed away on Monday. Summer—regardless of the sun’s tango with the magnetic Poles—is officially over. There hasn’t been a concert on the dock for two weeks.

I wander through the marina, coming to rest against the warm bronze flanks of a sea otter. The hard consonants of places where dark bread and sausage are eaten at breakfast mingle with rounded drawls dripping with humidity and tangled in mangroves: the final busloads of tourists amble down the ochre blocks of our Victorian seaport to the terminus of the piers, gazing as I do into the bays and the vista beyond.

To the east, the Cascades etch jagged lines into a cerulean horizon, bookended by Mount Baker to the north, Mount Rainier to the south. To the west, the Olympics are confections of cobalt, softly rounded in the late afternoon light and stripped of snow.

Wrapping the peninsula like a velvet ribbon is a bank of fog that stretches from the Salish Sea through Admiralty Bay to the Port Townsend Bay, where it curls around Marrowstone Island. Fog horns blow—a winter sound incongruous with the sparkling diamonds of sun bouncing off waves and a sky radiating heat like warm denim. The Coupeville ferry emerges from the white ridge, blaring a warning siren in its wake as sailboats and cargo ships slip into the cottony nothingness. I imagine this fog cutting us off from the world, and we become forever marooned in Summerland.

What has happened to me? My autumn anticipation—visions of soup and flannel, leaves and wood smoke, pencil shavings and pumpkin—used to begin its eager percolation in early August. Even in Seattle—where I learned to love summer after years spent in searing central Washington and the sticky Midwest—I’d had enough by Labor Day. The city grows dull with dust, its gardens and trees limp, its citizens twitchy with a saturation of Vitamin D; it just feels wrong in that place of espresso and indie bookstores to go so long without the soporific cleanse of cascading rain.

But here.  I am not ready. I haven’t worn long pants in months and my legs are tan for the first time since 1988. My arms are a frenzy of freckles, my hair lightened to a coppery gold. More than the physical changes, something has clicked inside. I crave sunlight and heat for the first time in my life (right, so heat is relative. Stop at 75°, please—anything more is just showing off). It's emotional, this connection to the blue and the gold of summer. I tremble to let go of the stillness of warm forests and busyness of the waterfront, to the coming and going of strangers along shaded sidewalks, to the weekly beer dates in the beachfront courtyard of our favorite pub—where pet goats and games of pétanque are minor distractions to the lazy drift of beautiful vessels just beyond.

It's often foggy here on summer mornings, typical for a maritime climate. This is good for writing productivity. But by late morning I can no longer type away in the sunroom. The rays eat away at the fog, blue overtakes white, the computer screen fades in the outrageous bright, and I become drowsy with the heat. I slather on the sunscreen and cart the laptop to the waterfront, to write to the sound of shrieking gulls and the slap of waves. I could do this every day, 365. I fear I have lost have my Northwest duck feathers that hardly notice a rain shower.

It's coming. Today and tomorrow a cheerful sun beams from the weather app on my iPhone. By Sunday it's yanked away, replaced with a faucet drip of rain or a smudge of overcast. Yes, we will have Indian summer—late September through mid-October will bring those glorious sunrise, goldenrod days and crisp nights. But it's coming. The endless mutations of gray, green, and brown. The steady tick of rain dripping from evergreen boughs and rhododendron leaves. Days when the high temperature is the same as the low.

I console myself with the knowledge that I now live in a place described as having a Mediterranean climate, with half the rainfall of Seattle (only twice that of Phoenix, hey!). But in the absence of olive trees and cicadas, Roman ruins, and terraced vineyards, I'm not fooled. I will mourn the brown lines of my sandal tan as they fade from the tops of my feet, the shriveling of blackberries I grab by the handful as I bike along the Larry Scott trail. I will mourn my shadow when it no longer falls onto the sand before me. I'm with Henry James on this one.

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” ― Henry James

 “Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. for those few months, you’re not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don’t have the rest of the year. you can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. summer just opens the door and lets you out.” ― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

Slip Sliding Away

I locked the door behind me and slipped into the cool morning, my final e-mails sent, my final bank statements reconciled. I slipped the key into the mail slot next to the front door and just like that - no fanfare, no trembling of the earth -  I became unemployed a full-time writer. I think I've done what I could to set this up so I can look in the mirror every morning and assure myself it's going to be all right. Private health insurance for me, new and improved life insurance for the hubs, enough set aside for a disaster. I have a sense of direction and a few self-imposed deadlines. I rearranged my office, ordered a stand-up desk for my laptop, made out a writing to-do list and sallied forth.

The Gremlin of Self-Defeat perches on one shoulder. Picture him nearly tumbling off, he is cackling so hard. The Faerie of Belief (who looks amazingly like Glinda, the Good Witch of the North) twirls her sparkly wand and makes all sorts of soothing noises, but thus far hasn't been particularly helpful. Like, not giving me the right words so I don't have to sweat them out on my own.

Still, I had a lovely transition to the writing life last week, attending the Port Townsend Writers' Conference. The Conference offered the inspiration I needed to believe I had to give this a try. That even failure would be better than a lifetime of woulda-shoulda-coulda. It's been only a week, so I'm a little wobbly with what I'm supposed to be doing, besides writing. Which I was doing before unemployment  I decided to try writing full-time, of course. But now I have so many more hours to fill. And finding they aren't enough for all I want to do.

In the past week, I revised an already-published short story and sent it off for consideration for a new anthology. I'm revising/polishing two other published short stories for a couple of contests and two unpublished shorts and a flash fiction piece to send out to journals. I started a new short story. I'm thinking I'll take a day or two each week to work on these - a little cross-training for the main event.

I landed on 128,000 words a couple of weeks ago - roughly a 340 page novel. I'm so close to the end, but struggling to write the final scenes and bring all the pieces together in a tidy but satisfying dénouement. I decided it was time to print out the whole crazy mess and start a re-read and a revision from page one, trusting I'd find resolution of the end along the way.

Ah, Jeez. What year is this? How does 2015 sound for a goal end date? Crikey. This is going to take some time. I park at the beach and read aloud to myself in the front seat of the car, red pen in hand. I spent Sunday afternoon filling pages with plot notes that I had to sort through and transcribe. Two mornings spent rearranging scenes. Literally laying them out on the floor and rearranging them, storyboard-style.

But more on the process of revision later. I had a couple of a-ha moments last week, thanks to some super-amazing lectures and workshops which I'll share in a subsequent post.

In the meantime, here I am, with Gremlin and Faerie on my shoulders, doing their thing. I had some very dark moments during the week, rereading and falling into my own plot holes. I thought, "Julie, this is shite. Really, sweetheart. It's crap." But then I'd read a passage or part of a scene and I'd feel it, I'd feel the story. I'd lose myself and forget to look for junky little filler words or moments of telling instead of showing or a better verb.

I tell myself I have to see this through, I have to take it as far as I can. There will always be jobs - I'm through with careers, but I can always find another job. I won't always have this time, this summer, maybe I won't even have this hope. But I have it now. And I want to use it, before it slips, slides away.

Whoah God only knows, God makes his plan  The information's unavailable to the mortal man  We're workin' our jobs, collect our pay  Believe we're gliding down the highway, when in fact we're slip sliding away 

~Paul Simon

 

Benediction by Kent Haruf

Benediction by Kent Haruf My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Holt, Colorado – a blunt-edged town on the eastern edge of Colorado’s high and dry plains – where time ticks like the cooling engine of car. Storms build in billowing clouds on the horizon, summers grind through with breathless heat, winters drive ice and snow from across the flat middle of the country. It is as it has always been. It seems so little changes in this quiet, gently ticking community, but one moment it’s the 1960’s, the next it’s the new millennium, and you find yourself at the edges of your life.

So it must seem to Dad Lewis, on octogenarian who has just been told his future is measured in weeks. When he wipes a shirtsleeve across the Holt’s dusty surface and peers in, he sees a world so very different from the one he shaped when he was a young husband, growing a new business, a daughter and a son. The new preacher, banished from Denver for speaking out for a gay colleague, is hardly the model for atonement he expected as he waits to be ushered into the next life; the daughter of his neighbor, once a fresh and bright teacher, has returned a retired spinster; “the War” refers not to sandy beaches on France’s Atlantic coast or even jungles in Southeast Asia, but to barren mountains in Afghanistan and vast deserts in the Middle East. His children moved on long ago. His wife is an old woman.

But in this brief interlude between learning his long life is ending and taking his last breath, Dad Lewis has an opportunity to make one last impression before he returns as he came: from nothing into nothing. What will his Benediction be?

This is less a story than a series of vignettes about regret and compassion. Kent Haruf rarely grants redemption to his characters, just as life itself doles out redemption in meager dribs, offering only enough grace to keep us going until our time plays out.

Kent Haruf is a master of the understatement. He is a sublime observer, less a storyteller than a whispering carney offering glimpses into the circus of life. His narratives are quiet, moving to a gentle rhythm. At first glance, they can seem as dry and simple as the flat, square towns on Colorado’s eastern border where his stories are set. You think you have taken it all in, standing there on the edge by the feed store, looking straight down 6th avenue to the water tower that rises like at sentinel on the other end of town. But as Lyle, the preacher-turned-pariah, learns during his midnight rambles down silent streets, what is really there is rarely what you see.

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Ghosts That We Knew

The Universe gently letting me know it is still watching, listening, remembering...  

A group of eight women discovering each other over salmon and fruit salad. Strangers becoming fast friends as women do - sharing intimacies of childbirth and marriage, our deepest fears and silliest thoughts - and then having to ask your first name again, because you look just like the woman who used to teach Hot Yoga at the rec center.

Some of us are mothers; some of us are not. Some are married as many years as we were old when we met our husbands; some have remained single. Some wonder if they had more cash, would they have they courage to walk away from failure?

Some drive up in Mercedes; others have no idea when the oil was last changed in the rusting Toyota pickup.

We come together through a love of books and a desire for fellowship. Perhaps we are new to town and keen to make friends. Perhaps we need an excuse to escape a too-familiar routine. Perhaps we crave conversation that does not center around Sponge Bob Square Pants and refusals to eat the spaghetti that was our child's favorite meal last week.

We discuss the book: a rare meeting of minds as eight women revile the month's read in equal measure. We marvel at our host's mad chef skills as she cracks open the baked thick crust of salt, revealing an entire salmon, steaming and tender: Pesce alla Sale à la Olympic Peninsula. Three of us run out to our cars in search of corkscrews we know are shoved into dashboard boxes or picnic tote bags. When we come up empty and are forced to drink ginger beer without a cheap Pinot noir chaser, we decide it's an excuse for another bacon-jalapeño scone. We eat tapioca pudding made with milk from the goats we milk on our farm.

Which leads to a discussion of breast-feeding. As discussions about ruminants do. Who is, who wishes they weren't, who misses it. Pockets of the table fall into silence as those who are secretly glad their breasts remain high and firm even as they ache with dreams of unborn children and those who simply cannot imagine the logistics of nursing a three-year-old try to find something to do with their thoughts.

A side conversation begins. Did you start Terry Tempest Williams's When We Were Birds?

It's waiting on the nightstand; I had to finish tonight's book first. I can't wait.

Another voice joins in, breaking away from the conversation about pitocin-induced labor. "Ooh, Terry Tempest Williams, I love her! What's this one about? What's it called?

"When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. It's a series of essays she wrote after her mom died. You'd love it. It's amazing."

One of us curls up inside. One of us remembers a summer's night a year ago, a crowd streaming into a high school auditorium, an audience hushed as an author reads from her elegiac, elegant book of essays inspired by the journals her mother bequeathed her. Journals the author discovered, after her mother's death, were empty.

One of us remembers that it was a year ago tonight her womb emptied.

One of us marvels at the way the Universe wraps seductively around chance and feigns to be Fate.

One of us mourns. Mourns that she had forgotten until this night what this night is.

One of us sees the beauty in spending this evening in the company of women who don't know her sorrow, not yet. But if we did, she knows we would care. We sweet mothers soothe her with our stories, we childless ones smile and allow the others to reminisce, commiserate, to delight in the bounty of their creation.

A phone beeps with an incoming text. One of our sisters, in a neighboring state, has just given birth to her second child. She texts us from the hospital bed, proud and exhausted. She attaches a photo. It is a son.

One of us reads aloud the opening page to When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations On Voice.

One of us returns home to reread the words she wrote a year ago. These words, here: The Scariest Thing

So lead me back Turn south from that place And close my eyes to my recent disgrace Cause you know my call And we'll share my all And our children come, they will hear me roar So give me hope in the darkness that I will see the light Cause oh they gave me such a fright But I will hold as long as you like Just promise me that we'll be alright

Ghosts That We Knew ~ Mumford and Sons

Leaving Pieces Behind

“She left pieces of her life behind her everywhere she went. It's easier to feel the sunlight without them, she said.” ~Brian Andreas

What I have here are two tickets to see the Seattle Symphony performance of Camille Saint-Saëns' "Organ Symphony" conducted by maestro Ludovic Morlot. Next weekend. Stellar seats – Orchestra Center row H, seats 7, 8. These are our seats, you see. This is the last concert of our season package.

We could go. It’s a Sunday matinée; we could make the peaceful hour drive to the Bainbridge Island ferry terminal, leave the car and walk on for a relaxing 35 minute crossing of the Puget Sound to Seattle’s waterfront. There could be a picnic lunch of fixings from Pike Place – a salmon sandwich on rosemary bread from Three Girls Bakery, a bag of Bing cherries and tender-sweet apricots from Corner Produce, truffles from The Chocolate Market. Then a stroll down to Benaroya Hall for two hours of aural heaven. We'd be home by dinnertime.

But this is the second time we’ve planned a return trip to Seattle since our move, only to look at each other at nearly the last minute and ask: “I don’t wanna go back, do you?” And for the second time the answer is: “Trade here for there, even for an afternoon? That’s a negative, Sailor.”

Each place has its time. Imagine if those freeway signs informing you of commute times could flash your residential expiration date: <<Julie: Please Prepare To Leave In 5 months, 4 days, 3 hours>>. It would be so nice to know when you should start collecting boxes from your neighborhood grocery store.

Some places I left before my time had reached its true end: Chad. New Zealand. Others I never thought I’d stay as long as I did: Ohio. Destinations unplanned and all the sweeter for the interludes: Colorado. Japan. Illinois. Places I’ve lived, but never tire of returning to again and again: France. And those where I am completely at home even though I’ve never claimed a fixed abode: Ireland. Sonoma County.

I made this move with trepidation, even though it was the place we had long ago determined would be the place, the last place we would call home. I feared the regret of leaving a place I loved before its time. I feared the longing for the hard-fought familiar, the comfort of routine, of feeling I was where I belonged.

But what I feared most was the silence. When we last moved to another idyll of mountains and sea, with nights so quiet you could hear the stars falling, the silence fell over me like a thick wool blanket. It smothered all rational thought until I could hear only the sound of my muffled cries as I tried to claw my way back. That took such a very long time.

We left that island for a blue and green city of glittering high rises and snow-capped peaks, farmers markets, cafés, concerts, and freeways frozen like airport parking lots, wailing sirens and booming jets. The bustle and chaos - the presence of millions of others and their dogs and Subarus - was a balm to my raw and lost self. It gave me a renewed sense of life and possibility.

But I am not the same person who was once blindsided by peace and quiet. This silence is not that silence. And the sense of possibility and renewed joy for life are not fed by brewpubs or bookstores, by traffic or meetings. They come from within.

Story setting came up during a recent meeting of a virtual writers’ group I connect with on Sunday afternoons. We were discussing what informs our work. While characters and their stories sustain me, the spark is most often initiated by places where I’ve lived or traveled: a writer’s cottage in a Bavarian garden; a tiny hotel room in Tokyo; a slaughterhouse in rural New Zealand; a castle ruin in the Pyrénées. My writing has a vivid sense of setting because place has so often defined my soul.

And now, on the tip of a peninsula forming the break between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound, in a small town of rainshadows and storytellers, of porpoises and poets, of farmers and boat builders, I am embracing my redefinition.

I don’t know if this seaport of part-time work and full-time dreams will appear in my writing. Perhaps it’s just meant to be the place where I write.

In the meantime… Saint-Saëns anyone?

Wherein I rail against cheap wine and contemplate unemployment.

For many years, the résumé folder on my hard drive remained unopened. A small lifetime of sorts passed by, rendering those dozens of NAFSA: Association of International Educator conference presentations meaningless and nullifying my skills in various software programs (PeopleSoft? Access database? Anyone? Bueller?). I let the bones of my career as a study abroad program administrator calcify. Once I turned my back on the Ivory Tower for the green shores of Aotearoa, I never looked back on that decade-plus of world travel and helicopter parents (would I have turned to salt had I tossed one last glance over my shoulder?). Then it was off to the world of wine, first in vineyards, then in store aisles and finally in a cramped office in Seattle’s University District, sipping and spitting dozens of samples a week. A terrific gig, really - leading people to phenomenal wine is awesomesauce.

Inserting impassioned parenthetical:

Working in vineyards in foreign lands sounds very glamorous, but the months spent pruning and training vines wrecked my hands and wrists: for several months I couldn’t hold a coffee cup, I had to sleep on my back because of the pain, my liver suffered from the massive doses of NSAIDs. It was bliss. Best job I ever cried in pain over.

So when I see people who would bite off their right pinky toe before tossing Kraft Cheese Singles on their grilled sammie throw good money after cheap wine, it breaks my heart.

Ever ask yourself how a labor-intensive, high-overhead agricultural product made from raw ingredients subject to the vagaries of weather and disease can be produced so cheaply? Because the "winery" used crap juice. Best case scenario the juice was rejected by producers who don't want their names associated with poor quality, so they bulk it off. Worst case, your $5 steal was produced not by people, but by machines, factory-style. It’s made from fruit laden with herbicides and pesticides grown on a massive farm with little regard to land stewardship, and the wine was manipulated to taste exactly the same every time, vintage in-vintage out (if it even boasts a vintage). You paid for a bottle or a box, a cutesy label, overhead, maybe even an ad campaign. You did not pay for wine anyone gave a shit about, except to rip an easy buck from your wallet.

You can do better. You should do better. You don't have to spend a lot for quality vino. Ask me for a $10-12 wine recommendation. I'm thrilled to oblige. Because I love wine. I love the process. I love the people who grow the fruit and craft the wine with passion and integrity. Because I will never forget the shooting pain in my hands as they closed around a pair of pruning shears or wrapped a cane around a wire. Those tortured hands were producing something of beauty.

Alas, a manifesto for another time.

I find myself opening that résumé folder not once this spring, but twice. I may be in for a record number of W-2s to track down next year. So far, the count is three (Wait, you say, I missed one! Yeah, well, you blinked). Pretty sure I’m guaranteed a fourth.

Unless.

Here’s where I admit I am strangely relieved that the non-profit for which I have been Business Manager since April is about to go belly up. The Board of Directors recently passed a unanimous vote to close it down over the summer (ahem, not my doing, folks – this is a disaster eight years in the making. I’ve just been paying the bills for six weeks. In theory. Well, not the bills - there are plenty of those. How to pay them, and myself, is another matter entirely).

How can I be relieved the spectre of unemployment and over-paying for inadequate private health insurance is now a real-life ogre? Because it has forced me face what I’ve been pushing off for yet another “Someday.” It’s giving me an out.

I’ve known since those anxiety attacks of mid-April, which I wrote about here, that my head was trying desperately to tell me something. The message finally found a way through my heart, with those terrifying moments of choking panic (which have ceased, tap wood). And this is, in part, what I believe the message to be:

...  ... ...

This is the hard part. The part where I stare out the window for long moments, check my iPhone for possible life-changing Facebook updates, rearrange the coffee shop punch cards in my wallet. Because it’s so difficult to come out and just say it. Here's a practice run:

I think I should let this job run its course, not look for another one for (an undecided period of time) and write. Finish my novel? Maybe. At least get it to the point where it's ready to be turned loose on beta readers, which means a couple more rewrites. Pour out some of those short stories clamoring for attention. Pull together a book proposal - a several-week endeavor. Submit said book proposal to those agents and publishing companies I have yet to research. Attend at least one week of the Centrum Writers' Conference in July (located conveniently one mile from my house).

And heal. Heal after a year of loss and anger. Run and bike, walk on the beach, cook healthful meals, open my home to friends, read Thomas Hardy, find a park bench overlooking the bay and sit. Sit still. Work on being present, not six months or six years or twenty-six years in the past or similar time spans in the future. Be amazed to have a partner who needs no explanation, who asks “What are you waiting for?” Have faith that even without my income and with the added burden of said stupid health insurance policy, we’ll make it.

Step off the ride, leave the carnival. Do Not Pass Go and definitely do not collect $200.00.

There. I’ve gone and said it. I might just do this thing. This “What do you do, Julie?” “Who, me? Like, what do I do for work? I’m a writer.”

Right. Well. I just submitted a résumé to an art gallery in town, in response to a Help Wanted in the weekly paper. My résumé’s pretty cool, actually. I mean, how many people do you know who have a Masters degree in International Affairs and can boast a stint at a slaughterhouse in New Zealand? What’s that? You say you want to see this résumé? What, you hiring?

Then again, I promised my husband if I ever sell this book, I’d buy him a vineyard in the south of France. Because next to growing stories, growing grapes is the best job there is.

Emptying Tomorrow

What's said in the marriage, stays in the marriage. Mostly because age is kind and I can't remember the petty comments we've flung at each other over 21 years. The loving comments are said often enough they are ingrained in my heart. But there is something Brendan said to me long ago which I will share with you: "Julie, you're not happy unless you have something to worry about." This resonates still because, well, it's mostly true. I would cut the word "happy" -  worrying doesn't make me happy. It makes me.

Let's rewrite that sentence: "Julie, you're not, unless you have something to worry about." Anxiety is my fuel.

This terrific blog post about anxiety and the creative process flowed into my Twitter feed last week: Let's Talk About Anxiety and the Creative Process. It got me to thinking about the nest of anxieties I create and where it fits into my writing life. Author Dan Blank reminds us we all bear the burden of uncertainty and our fears are relative - no more, no less than the guy in the coffee shop we are eavesdropping on. But in this up-by-the-bootstraps, My-Facebook-Life-Is-Perfect society, we are loath to name our anxieties lest they reveal the gross flaws in our character.

On the heels of Dan Blank's blog post was an interview with comedian Marc Maron on WHYY's Fresh Air. Maron is hilarious guy, clever and endearing. And a chronic fretter (Fretterer? Fretishist? Chronically fraught?). When asked by host Terri Gross if he related to the idea of suffering as inspiration for his creativity, Maron replied "...I have found that ... I experience a tremendous amount of dread and fear and panic. I think that misery for people that incredibly anxious or frightened is something consistent. I think obsession sometimes works as almost a spirituality. You know, you have a routine that your brain kind of loops around that you call home, but that's usually in defense of some other part of you that's unruly. And for me, I think it's anxiety and panic and worry and dread." So what you're saying, Mr. Maron, is that you are not, unless you have something to worry about. You bow at the altar of Dread. Hey, we're a religion!

A couple of weeks ago I went out for a trail run. On uphill stretch I realized my heart was trying to leap from my throat. I stopped but could not catch my breath. This scared the shit out of me and made my heart race even faster, which made me panic more, which... A man passed me and we waved at one another. I thought it would be bad form to collapse in front of a stranger. Finally my heart slowed and my lungs opened. I hobbled back to the car, chilled and cowed by my body's betrayal of my mind. I'd been on that same stretch only days before and bounded up the same path. I chalked it up to running on an empty stomach and tried to push away darker fears.

Early the next morning while sitting on the sofa, writing and drinking my morning joe, my heart zoomed. I could have been sitting in a cramped airplane seat in the middle of a 10-hour flight, the way the panic attack came on. Now I was scared. I know, I know, I should have called my doctor (new in town, I didn't yet have a GP and I was one week away from a new health insurance plan taking effect. God Bless America, Land of It's Cheaper to Die Than Visit the ER). The next day I sliced my coffee intake in half (a fun few days of withdrawal drudgery ensued) and all but eliminated alcohol. I wondered, at nearly 44, was this the start of hormone-induced perimenopause? I eat clean, I run, swim, bike, yoga - I'm fit as a fiddle. A little creaky and soft in many spots, but sheesh...

Although I couldn't completely rule out a physical cause for my racing heart (and I do have a doctor's appointment scheduled. In June.), I'm pretty attuned to my emotional heart. I knew all those tiny eggs in the nest of anxieties I've been incubating over the past several months were hatching in the warmth of spring. And some of them are full-grown birds of prey, coming home to roost. Here are my chicks and hawks, complete with ID bands so even if I set them free, we'll keep track of each other:

Things I Worry About Constantly

• something will happen to Brendan and I will be alone
• I will contract a terminal illness (Cold comfort that I already have a terminal illness. It's known as being born)
• I will fall victim again to depression and an Amber alert will have to be issued for my soul
• I will have another running injury and be denied the addictive substance I crave: endorphins
• I am irrelevant. This is wrapped up in the heartbreak of infertility, miscarriage and the failed attempts to adopt. I have a surplus of love that feels like it's draining into a black hole of regret and sorrow
• Money. This is back again, after taking a few years' hiatus. We've given up a lot to follow our hearts' calling and the compromise, at least in the near future, is financial security
• I'm missing fundamental truth of my life, something that's right in front of me. And I'm not getting any younger.

Not on this list:

• Writing

I search for it. I listen for the scratching the door. But I feel no anxiety about my writing. This is not a matter of self-confidence - I have no illusions about my skills and talents. It's simply the one open space in my life not crowded by my fears. Perhaps more importantly, I don't feel anxious when I write. The world slips away and I don't feel much of anything - not my belly, my bladder, my stiff neck or aching shoulders. I feel the story.

Nor do I entertain illusions about publication, as least not through the traditional channels. I've released myself from that pressure and those expectations. When I finish this monster and return to writing short stories before tackling the next long-form project, I'll hope for the same publishing success as my recent short story endeavors. I'll do all I can to bring my novel to the shelf, but I remind myself daily that the writing process is what brings me peace and fulfillment, not the reward of extrinsic acknowledgment.

Perhaps this is the fundamental truth about my life over which I seem to lose so much sleep. And I'm not getting any younger.

But I did run that damn hill again.

Our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strengths. Charles Spurgeon

Entering the Wilderness

“At times you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.” ― Alan Alda This year - no longer new and fragile, but not yet settled in its skin - has been defined by intuition. I've held my intuition at arm's length, examined it from all sides and shoved it back in the drawer. Only to take it out, shake it out, and embrace it at last.

Intuition is what you turn to when you have exhausted the alternatives. It's the last entry name on your dance card, the partner ready with a firm hand and a sure foot to waltz you into the new day.

We knew, way back that dreadful New Year's Eve day, that moving on was the only option worthy of our consideration. But we argued against it, fearing the unknown; fearful of losing the comfort and security which appeared like magic in our bank account every two weeks; of losing our identities, our community, our friends.

But we knew. I knew the moment I heard Brendan's shaking voice on the telephone telling me he was coming home. He must have known several minutes before, standing up from his chair and standing up for his dignity. We would have to go.

And we did. We moved on, in our own time. In our own way. Ten weeks later - our decisions made, papers signed, notices given, bags packed, boxes filled - we turned faces westward, toward the water, toward the mountains. Toward home.

I gave in to intuition again last week, knowing that no matter how much you hope something will be the right thing, it can often be the wrong time. Or you're not the right person. So I rinsed off my gumboots and set them on the back patio. Yesterday morning, I walked down the hill to a new job, one my gut tells me is the better choice.

Without tapping into intuition, creative writing is about as inspired as a grocery store list. It's what compels a writer return to the page day after day. By releasing our creative unconscious, by listening deeply to our instincts, we connect with our characters and through them, our true stories are revealed.

I had a word count goal in mind for this first draft - something in the 110-115,000 range. A complete novel. Not a long one, but something of substance. Not that word count much matters in the dung heap of first drafts, but it gave me an end point from which I could see across a chasm of edits to less crappy drafts. I also allowed for Plan B - the Intuition Plan - that gave me an out if I felt Draft 1 was ready to be pillaged and plundered by my red pen in search of treasure worth salvaging.

Not surprisingly, the Intuition Plan was put into effect 'round about the time I unpacked the last box, set my office to rights, and this long winter of our discontent came to a close. I had a beginning, a bunch of middles, and an end. I had started to write circles around myself, falling into plot holes and bringing the earth down around me in my attempt to clamber out. It was time to bring scenes together, to strategize and lay out, in systematic fashion, the story's arc. And to shake out the bogeys.

April 1, (no foolin'!), 90,000 words of Draft 1 became (magically!) Draft 2. While I was upending all other constants in my life, why not toss my writing routine into the mix?

Early morning sessions with my blue Pilot and Moleskine, scribbling to fill blank pages with scenes and silliness became, after a few awkward attempts, early morning sessions with my red Pilot and 8.5 x 11 Helvetica-filled Hammermill.

And hours - at all hours - of retyping and tweaking, shuffling pages and shaking my head.

I worried that editing would mean an end to creating. Yet, despite the taking away that is inherent to the revision process, Draft 2 finds itself 5,000 new words the richer. And I'm still in the early scenes. I'm have a sense of what Draft 3 will entail (You didn't think this would be over any time soon did you? Honey, we're just getting started): the fleshing out and enriching of detail, the gathering of historical minutiae, most of which will be discarded in...Draft 4? I jest. Or not.

But Draft 1 - there it is, on the table, in black and white. Now being sliced and diced into something resembling a story by my fine point red pen.

I'm still a bit wobbly - one month into this new life - my emotions giddy but uncertain, like a colt taking his first steps. The world around me is so fresh, brimming with the vibrant colors of new growth, the richness of blossoms and sea air, the madness of wind and the changing tides. I feel that delicious disconnect of being far away on holiday, in a place that is so beautiful you feel simultaneously calmed and energized. But I'm not on holiday. I'm in the wilderness of my intuition. And I think I'll stay here awhile.

I guess my feet know where they want me to go

Spring entered as she should: with hair tangled and knotted, streaming in the wind. She shivered as the sea air pierced the holes in her ratty sweater, but her bare toes burrowed in the sand, the only surface which absorbed the sun's fragile warmth. Tossed between two seasons, one wan and weary of red fingers and runny noses, the other brazen and heady with the scent of lilacs and sweat, Spring arrived to claim her equinox.

And so have I arrived on the other side of winter. It began in a stew of anger and bewilderment, passed into determination and defiance, ending at last in hope.

Had you told me at Winter's Solstice that the turning of the seasons would find us not just in a new home several zip codes distant, starting new jobs—hell, completely new lives—I would not have thought it impossible, but not likely. Had you told me what we would have gone through to get here, I would have slammed the door in your face. Absent a door, I probably would have asked you to get me silly drunk.  

But we did what we seem to do best: we took the pieces that remained and we rebuilt. I hope we did it with dignity. I hope what we left will make it easier for someone else to stand up and say "No." Or whatever form of "You will not fuck with me" one is comfortable with issuing (see above comment about dignity). I hope the truth we shared will be set free.

But that is in the past. It belongs to Winter. This moment, in its blossoming present, belongs to Spring.

I find myself in this town which seems to capture all the precious places that have shaped my character and spoken to my heart. It is the pastoral peace of my childhood, in the gentle climes of Oregon's Willamette Valley and the mountain-to-coast splendor of the Olympic Peninsula, (where I am once again, a short drive from the home of my formative years). It is the feisty mix of town and gown of central Washington, where hyper-educated ivory tower types knock elbows at the bar with old timers who have more sense than money. It is the casual warmth of New Zealand, the muddy cheerfulness of Ireland, the pride and passion for place and history of France. It is a place of such profound beauty that my heart skips with joy each time I wander out the door.

I cannot make sense of what happened this Winter. I can neither believe the cliché "It was meant to be,” nor in a cosmic manipulation of circumstances that made this end - this beginning - inevitable. I do believe that we took back control of our lives, at least as much as the universe allowed. Without knowing the outcome, we set out the intention to move forward with hearts open to possibilities.

And now I have what I have so long wished for: a room of my own and a part-time job that will allow me the hours and energy to write, in a community steeped in creativity. Water and forest surround this peninsula in the rainshadow of the Olympics. It reaches for Canada while turning its pert backside to the Big Smoke smothered by rain.

And I’m terrified. Terrified by paychecks gone “Poof!” in the breeze, terrified by the budget that marches in columns more red than black. Terrified by the cursor that blinks black on a white, white, empty, empty screen. If we’re talking clichés, how about “Be careful what you wish for”?

But I can’t squelch the hope and joy which blooms inside, anymore than I can halt Spring. And who would ever wish to?

My writing routine has been torn asunder by the move, the transition, the emotional strain of our bittersweet farewell to Seattle, the risk we took by not leaving quietly, the physical wrenching of two people in their mid-40's tackling the same moves they made with disquieting regularity in their mid-20's.

The routines are the first thing to go in a move. The challenge is to embrace the new while clinging to those most dear. I have more time to write but a more wily work schedule; I must be ready to crack my knuckles and call upon my muses at odd hours and in unlikely places. But my morning pages are immutable: the last routine to go in the final throes of moving, the first to return.

The story hasn't stalled completely; I have worked on scenes here and there these past weeks (those morning sessions). I am so close to the end of this first draft that I am tempted to begin a rewrite to fill in the missing parts and call it Draft 2. But I've latched onto a magical final word count for Draft 1 and for the moment, until I get back into the groove, I work toward that end before I allowing myself to edit. But I have written the ending. Now I write just below that ending, trusting I will know when it is time to stop. And to begin, again.

Theory of Convergence

"I have this theory of convergence, that good things always happen with bad things. I know you have to deal with them at the same time, but I just don't know why they have to happen at the same time. I just wish I could work out some schedule. Am I just babbling? Do you know what I mean?" ~ Diane Court, 'Say Anything'  "Julie, I'm so glad to know you are writing. With all that's been happening, I wondered if you still had the energy or will to write..." So said my colleague as I stood in her doorway. I'd just regaled her with a breathless recap of the book proposal workshop I had attended the previous weekend (a shout out to publishing divas Jen and Kerry and The Business of Books. If they offer a seminar in a neighborhood near you, get thee registered).

The energy and the will. With all that's been happening. Still writing. I was touched that someone would wonder if I continued to write despite the distractions of anxiety and anger. And surprised to discover that instead of becoming the thing I push aside, writing itself has become the distraction. The refuge.

Where do you retreat in times of crisis? I turn within. I read - finding solace in others' worlds and words - January alone saw me plow through a half dozen novels. I exercise, tucking in the headphones and letting the miles unroll beneath my feet in an attempt to outrace, or at least wear out, the demons. I try to control what I can, while waiting for what I can not to play itself out. 

And in the endless play of shadow and light, in the convergence of good things happening with bad, my writing life has blossomed. Two stories published in the past two months; writing workshops that have injected me with inspiration and motivation; connections made with writing buddies who surround me with empathy and enthusiasm; the application to an MFA program finally out the door after months of equivocation.

And 80,000 words. That's where she stands.

In July, when I started The Novel (at another time of crisis; beginning to see a pattern here), I had a vague notion of a word count goal. 100,000 words seemed just shy of impossible; 50,000 wasn't novel length. Seventy-eight grand sounded about right.

I upped it to 84,000 in October; 92,000 in December. Now I'm headed for .... 105,00? 110,000? Does it really matter? The story will know when it's finished. And then the real work - the slicing and dicing, the killing of my darlings - will begin. And begin again. So much to do - the research, the details, the fleshing out of scenes, the dialogue to bring to life. So many revisions ahead of me that if I think about it all too much, I won't attend to the blank page in my hand.

But in the meantime the story flows. Characters whom I never intended to introduce run into each other in the queerest of ways. Portals open in walls of solid stone. Characters find depths of compassion they are afraid to admit.

I have altered points of view and tenses. I have changed character names and flirted with revising history (talk about an A-ha moment: listening to Ben Affleck interviewed by Terri Gross for WHYY's Fresh Air about the film Argo. Affleck discussing how a writer isn't REQUIRED to follow historical fact with precision. The key is remaining true to history's essence. Discuss.)

After grinding through an extended period of doubt and reluctant writing in the late fall, I find myself aching to get to the page each morning. I transcribe and add to my scribbles at the weekend, curious to discover what my brain wrought during the wee hours, while at its most relaxed and vulnerable.

In coming posts I'll explore the process of assembling my book proposal, how I'm applying what I've learned about scenes in commercial fiction, what it feels like to change POV thousands of words, images and plot points into my story. And what I've been shy about discussing: being published, despite myself.

There is a hint of coming convergence of good with good in life as I know it. It may be February on the calendar. But it is looking like Spring in my life. Beginnings, renewal, growth, hope and all that.

"You probably got it all figured out, Corey. If you start out depressed everything's kind of a pleasant surprise." ~ Lloyd Dobler,'Say Anything'

The Light That I Have: Reflections On A Winter Solstice

You wouldn't know looking around our small apartment that Christmas is but a few sleeps away. We've forgone our annual wet and windy visit to the Boy Scout Troop 100 Christmas Tree lot at St. Alphonsus Church across the street from Ballard Market. Although the stack of holiday greetings grows daily, the cards and letters remain unopened, as do the boxes of cards I bought for our own missives. I won't be watering poinsettias well into March because neither red nor white bloom graces our table. I can hardly be bothered to light even a candle.

We've decided to keep our heads down and plow through the rest of this year without celebration. Maybe we fear attracting any more attention from higher powers that seemed to hold the screw to us during 2012. Maybe we're just weary. Maybe celebration right now feels wrong.

But I can't stop myself from yearning for light, from reaching for the promise of renewal that the Solstice offers. It is not Christmas that holds my wonder and feeds my anticipation. I absolved December 25th of unreasonable expectations and spiritual significance some years ago. I just like the lights on the tree.

It is this ancient tradition of honoring evergreens and the burning of bright light in the darkest days that allows me to find solace in the Solstice. I think upon this day as the year's end, the time to pause and reflect as the seasons shift and the earth stutters, then marches resolutely toward Spring.

This was a year when light and dark were in constant flow, when the weight of deepest sorrow was counter-balanced by the relief of joy. Yet I come to the Solstice feeling smaller somehow, a bit shrunken and defeated by the 365 days that have passed since the night last receded, then grew full again. I watched as a loved one received the death sentence of a terrible, prolonged disease. A few weeks later life inside me stilled once again, even as I imagined names and hair color, tiny hands to hold and a little voice calling after me. I've had to stand idly to one side, fists clenched, heart pounding in rage, as the person I adore and respect most in the world agonizes over present and future and what little control he has over each seemingly stolen away. I've looked in the mirror at a body that seems hell-bent on thwarting every good thing I try to do for it, forcing me twice under a surgeon's knife and taking away in recent weeks the one thing that brought me endorphin-surging physical release. I've had to accept that many of those who've known me the longest are the least interested in discovering who I have become. And then, in the last days of this year, my voice joined the chorus of rage and grief as a stunned nation absorbed, helplessly, the news of the slaughter in Newtown.

And yet.

And yet there is light. There is laughter. There is deep happiness and certain peace. There is the celebration of twenty years of marriage - defying odds set against two very young people who knew one other five months before vowing to spend a lifetime together, listening to their hearts instead of their heads. I'd do it all again. One hundred times again. It takes my breath away to think how easily we could have slipped past each other during that busy, distracted spring of 1992, never to know what soul mate meant.

There were winter days in medieval ruelles of Paris and late summer afternoons in Irish meadows. Hundreds of miles of Seattle pavement under my running shoes (and there will be hundreds more, believe me: Body and I are working out the terms). Sunsets over Shilshole Bay. The sweet joy of new friendships blooming. The unexpected embrace of a colleague who says, "Things are better with you here." Laughter, dancing, beer and music in a beautiful community that is home, with spirited and loving people who are my family.

And there are my words, my sentences, paragraphs, pages. The slowly but steadily growing word count on a manuscript which has become my anchor, my refuge, my way - thank you, Richard Hugo - of saying the world and I have a chance. Perhaps Hugo meant that by the act of creating art, the world and I have chance together. And that perhaps I can, I should, I must, use my words to pursue what I believe is right and try to create good out of so much sadness.

Brendan and I went for a long walk late in the afternoon of this, the shortest day. I'm not one for portents, but I'll share this photo I captured of a Bald eagle against the cerulean sky and diamond-bright moon. I'll take the raptor's presence as the last blessing of this long season of darkness and be grateful for a moment of grace, no matter what the next seasons may bring.

I am ready to meet this longest night and then watch as, minute by minute, it shrinks into the New Year and succumbs to the light of Spring.

"I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have." Attributed to Abraham Lincoln. No matter who said it, I like it.

Delightful By Contrast*

Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it. ~ Henry David Thoreau

So much for taking advantage of a few hours' comp time. I managed to leave the office at noon as planned, but then I made the unfortunate decision to check work e-mail as my lentil soup warmed on the stove.

It’s now after 4:00 and my iPhone sits on the counter beside me. I‘m waiting for responses to several e-mails and phone calls, hoping to douse Friday afternoon embers before they spark into weekend fires. IT malfunctions prevent me from accessing the database I need to fix problems flinging themselves at my inbox. The frustration winds into knots that cramp my shoulders and throb in the base of my neck. The tension headache pulses just behind my eyes. This was to be my time to write, to reconnect with my manuscript. Instead I'll pound some random thoughts into submission and force them to coalesce into a blog post.

I’ve been thinking about the fine line between routine and rut. I've been thinking about it a great deal since returning from Ireland. Because I seemed to have escaped the latter, yet I now struggle to regain the former.

I’m pretty taken with my routines. I guard them jealously. These are the small bits of my day I can control while the rest of life swirls heedlessly around me. The precious hours between 4 and 7 a.m. when I write, run, contort my limbs into camels and plows; that hour before bedtime when I settle in with the book of the moment; the Saturdays when miles of pavement pour forth in front of me and I race to the finish, knowing a quiet day of writing is the only other item on my to-do list.

I started my manuscript in early July and quickly settled into a productive pattern: writing every morning before and most evenings after work, all day Saturday after my long run, a few hours on Sunday in between errands and cooking. I planned my writing around Brendan’s interminable work days, making the most of the little time we have together.

The beauty of a long holiday is the chance to step out of the well-trodden path that threatens to harden into a rut. Yet, one of the things I love most about travelling is the creation of a little world that only you and your travel companion inhabit - a world of private rituals and routines that shape your adventure and later, your memories.

Simplicity defined our Kerry Way routine. And in this simplicity we found our bliss. I would rise while the B&B was yet asleep and make a cup of dreadful coffee from the Nescafe instant packets tucked into the tea service tray in our room, then creep barefoot to the guest parlour to write. To write until I could smell bacon frying, to write until I could hear the dog barking, to write until footfalls overhead told me other guests were waking. Brendan would collect me and we padded with feet still sore from the previous day's miles to the dining room, our stomachs whimpering with hunger, forced to wait until the civilized hour of 8:30 to be fed.

After a breakfast of - wait for it - muesli with whole milk, soda bread slathered with butter and orange marmalade, scrambled eggs and smoked salmon on toast (for her); scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage with toast (for him); a full pot of coffee, black, our work began. And what a job it was: to hike 12-20 miles along the Kerry Way to the next bed and breakfast, to a hot shower, a dinner of fish and chips or lamb stew and pints of Guinness and Bulmers, to reruns of American shows we've never seen, to that day's Irish Times and one or two pages of our vacation reads, and at last, to our pillows where hours of fresh air and hard walking led to instant, sweet, deep sleep. Rinse. Repeat. 180 miles. Eleven days on the trail, five more mucking about Co. Galway.

I showed up at the page every morning. Routine maintained. But the thoughts I thought I would have during those long hours on the trail  - of my  characters, their plot still in a tangle - I had not. I thought, in fact, of little else but my next footfall, for deep bogs, rocky climbs, meadows strewn with gorse marked our way. I thought of the hot shower and cool pint that awaited a few hours and many miles away.

In other words, I broke out of my rut of living days, months, years into the future, and explored the precious path of Being in the Moment. I let go. It almost hurts to look back at the photos Brendan and I took of each other along the way, for the peace and happiness we found is writ large in our eyes and limbs. There was nothing more on our minds at those moments than the quiet joy of being where we were, doing what we loved most, with the only other person we could imagine sharing the moment.

But one cannot spend the rest of one's life on holiday. Unless one is Sir Richard Branson.

So, it's back to the grind. Or not.

I wish I could have picked up where I left off, stepped right back into that productive pattern, that familiar routine. But life has gone a bit pear-shaped since our return. Our work schedules have yet to right themselves. Frustration distracts me. The diminishing light and cooling temperatures mean no more late afternoon writing sessions on the patio, my back warmed by the summer sun. I still have so many hand-written pages to transcribe into Scrivener that I'm producing little new material. I feel scattered and disconnected, as if an essential part of myself is missing. Left in the west of Ireland, on the side of a hill made of granite and covered in gorse.

Just yesterday, three weeks after our return, I felt a spark. I gave my brain free rein as I transferred early morning scribbles from September 16 into my computer manuscript. I stopped playing secretary to my notebook and returned to being a writer.

Which was my plan for this afternoon. Until I looked at that cursed e-mail inbox.

While I wait for my phone to ring, I may as well peruse our vacation photos. To see what peace looks like. Join me, won't you?

The Kerry Way Slide Show

*All of us, from time to time, need a plunge into freedom and novelty, after which routine and discipline will seem delightful by contrast. ~ Andre Maurois

Not All Who Wander Are Lost*

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

There was never a question that the celebration of our 20th wedding anniversary would involve passports. It was just a matter of where. I recall having plans to celebrate our 15th in Greece, but we found ourselves living in New Zealand that year, so we traded in visions of the cobalt Mediterranean for the reality of the cerulean Pacific. Not a bad deal. Greece is back on the table for our 25th. Italy sat at the tippy-top of the list for a long while. I've travelled it knee to toe; Brendan and I have been to the Veneto and Trentino together. But there is so much we want to do in Italy, we couldn't decide where to start. Italy got reshuffled back into the deck.

Southeast Asia was mentioned. Enchanted by Cambodia and Vietnam during his stay in 2005 as a Fulbright Teacher-Scholar, Brendan can't wait to return with me and I can't wait to go. But it requires more preparation and planning than we have energy for right now. Then there's that walking and whisky tour of Scotland we've mapped out, with a long weekend in Iceland on the way over. Maritime Canada. Mongolia. I've been after South Africa for some time now and I've just about got Brendan convinced, but not in time for this year.

At some point in early spring we realized we were over-thinking the whole program. If you know us, you know we'd pick up sticks tomorrow and move (back) to France. France forms the foundation of our dreams. It is where we both entered adulthood, Brendan working at a family-run vineyard and Cognac distillery the year after he graduated the University of Oregon, I studying at the University of Savoie. It is the reason we met, a shared struggle over Proust in Advanced French Literature. Brendan was completing his teaching certificate at the same university where I was finishing a double major after a year studying in Chambèry and a summer teaching in Japan. We've returned to France several times over the years, mostly together, on occasion alone.

When we moved to Seattle from New Zealand, we did not resume our former careers as a high school teacher (Brendan) and study abroad program manager (me). This meant no more summers off for Brendan and the drying up of my frequent flyer mileage account. We determined that for the next few years, given the demands of our jobs that zap time and energy for complicated journeys, we'd limit our travel to the one place we know we love, where every visit solidifies our desire to make a life there, someday: France. It is travel with a strategy. We keep up our language skills and culture specific know-how while scoping out long-term possibilities (I'm talking retirement here, people, nothing like a little 20 year vision). We visit a new region each time, staying in one place to really learn it, then end the trip with a couple of days in Paris. We even have "our" hotel in Paris. It is never work to plan, but it's an adventure from start to finish.

This year, for our 20th, Burgundy called. We decided to base ourselves in Beaune and bike the countryside, rent a car for a long weekend hop over the German border to visit friends in Freiburg, take a few day trips by train south to Macon and Beaujolais; we'd drink and eat and bike our way through one of the most beautiful regions of France we've never seen. Done deal.

So, we're headed to Ireland. Come Wednesday, our anniversary, we'll be lacing up our hiking boots and setting stride along the Kerry Way.

It's been a year of tremendous change and turmoil. Events exhilarating and exhausting have left us with such a need for peace, reflection and a complete unplug from our current of thoughts. One afternoon as we mulled over where to pick up the rental car, which weekend to dash to Germany, if we should bypass Paris to spend a weekend in Champagne, Brendan turned to me and said, "Let's go to Ireland." In that instant, I knew. I felt immediate peace.

By just speaking the word "Ireland" aloud, I feel my heart rate slow, my shoulders relax, my jaw loosen. I envision those long, quiet hours on a trail, surrounded by every shade of green, blue, gray and gold the fields, sea and sky can offer, the clouds overhead as creamy white as the sheep that watch us as we tramp through their paddock.

This will be our fourth trip to Ireland in ten years. We do the same thing, in a different area, each time. And that thing is The Walk. We surrender all planning to the darling, generous, efficient, tremendous team at Southwest Walks Ireland. We simply arrive when and where we are told. We rest and rise the next morning to begin days and days of walking. There is a map, we have our packs, we hike hill and dale, stopping to marvel, rest, eat, talk when and where we will, trusting we will find our way each day to that night's lodging. In the evenings there is a snug B&B, a warm pub, a steaming bowl of stew, a Paddy's over ice or a pint of Guinness with a head taller than my hand is wide. There is music, there is silence. And always, every day, there is the long, long walk. 

In the early days we stick together, chatting, bubbling over all the things we haven't had time to share in the rush of days and weeks when we hardly see one another. But soon we fall silent. Words are no longer necessary when your hearts are in perfect synchronicity.

Warm beaches on remote islands or ocean liners on the high seas don't interest us. We both rest best when we are in motion - it is a mélange of play and exercise that allows us to let go of the pressures and expectations of our everyday lives and brings us back to the sweet and simple people we are at heart. Walking our way through a holiday adds a significant dose of zen - there is nothing more meditative than the motion of one foot in front of the other for hours on end. And nothing more delightful knowing you do not walk alone.

This is a bittersweet journey. We embarked on our last visit, in 2006, just a month before we moved to New Zealand. An enormous adventure blossomed before us, dreams on the cusp of being realized. Thinking of all that has happened in the intervening six years just rocks me. Starting over more times than we'd bargained for. Saying goodbye far too often - to loved ones, to babies, to dreams. It is staggering.

We shared that last hike in Ireland with two of our dearest friends, two men as in love and committed as Brendan and I could ever hope to be, who had been together at least as long as the anniversary we celebrate now. We made plans during that hike that they would join us in New Zealand when their retirements were finalized; we'd open a café, have a small farm... One of those men is gone now, taken by cancer. Even after two years, my life will never be as bright without Peter in it.

Ireland is in celebration our lives together, this amazing adventure that we've lived in the 20 years, 5 months and ten days that have passed since our first date. It is to recapture peace that we have lost in a tumultuous year. And it's to touch that fragile, tender part of the soul that needs looking after, before you set it free to dream again.

 “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith

*All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. - Gandalf, "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien

L'Excuse (or, I play the Fool)

I may as well put it out here first thing. Because I can't think about anything else until I come clean. I haven't been writing. Not, "I haven't been writing recently." Or, "It's been days since I've written." No. I haven't written in weeks. Weeks. Not quite months -  I smashed together a couple of flash fiction pieces in March and April. A few book reviews. Does a restaurant review count? No, I didn't think so. I do have a reason. Reason, a variant of Excuse. Excuse happens to be the term for "the Fool" in French Tarot. If you hold L'Excuse, you can play the card on any trick you wish, but L'Excuse can never win the trick. How very à propos. So, here's my Excuse.

I was studying for the Level 3 (Advanced) Certificate from the Wine and Spirits Education Trust. I sat the exam on Sunday. I think I passed. It was wicked and hard. I remembered that Grenouilles is a Chablis Grand Cru but forgot that Vougeot is in the Côte de Nuits; I knew that Coonawara's terra rossa makes smashing Cabernet sauvignon, but couldn't for the life of me remember the principle Sauvignon blanc production region in Chile (Casablanca, wine fans). Fortunately, essay questions made up the bulk of the exam. Once I started writing, I felt on solid ground. Except that the written portion of the exam took place AFTER the blind tasting. With all that ** and ** sloshing around in me (at least I hope to God that's what those wines were; it was a blind tasting after all! And we're asked not to offer any identifications until we receive the exam results. In three months.), I was in prime form. Off I went to write how to cultivate and vinify grapes for a botrytized wine.

From the end of February, I devoted my weekends (and evenings when I could muster the energy) to a growing stack of flashcards, to notes in a carefully plotted rainbow of ink colors, to maps of regions and charts of processes, to diagrams of Coffey and pot stills, to drawings of Vertical Shoot Positioning with replacement-cane vs. cordon-spur pruning.

But Sunday afternoon, when I turned in my exam materials and the borrowed #2 pencil, the need to keep appellations, classifications, soil types, climatic conditions, aging requirements and vinification procedures nestled in drawers in my brain came to an end.

Yes, my day job involves wine. And beer (I prefer an informal approach to studying the glorious world of malt and hops. It involves a bottle, a glass and an opener). But the WSET certificate was far more than a professional endeavor. This continuation of my wine education, which began formally at the New Zealand School of Food and Wine in 2006 and informally at a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris in 1990, made me ever more passionate about wine (and its more rough-and-tumble cousin, spirits - all that rectifying and reflux makes it the more masculine of pursuits). It was a way to connect the intellect with the heart. So much of what inspires me about wine is intuitive and sensory - after years of tasting with intent - or has come from my experiences traveling and living in regions known for wine production, from personal relationships with winemakers and farmers and of course, from my own experiences in vineyards.

But truth be told, there were days and nights when I ached to write and I turned away from the computer and from my notebook nearly every time, to refocus my attention on my multi-colored notes and highlighted text. And I felt like a fraud each time. I had that twitchiness you get after you haven't worked out for a few days. The twitchiness turns all too soon to lethargy; writing chops atrophy just like blood-and-sinew muscles. You stop using them long enough and they stop caring much about what you do.

But if you aren't too far out of shape, it takes just a few weeks of consistent workouts to feel those lean muscles forming underneath your lazy fat. You stand a little straighter, your lungs don't empty out so soon, your find yourself craving...

...the pen, the keyboard, the rush of words that push at your synapses and burst from your fingertips as you pelt at the keys. I can't say that the more I write, the easier it gets. But the more I write, I want to write more often. The general idea is to get better at it.

Last week a stranger who is considering hiking in Ireland contacted me via a mutual friend. I've hiked in Ireland several times; Brendan and I are returning in September to hike the Kerry Peninsula. So, I wrote Heather a general e-mail about what to take, how to approach the experience and what to expect. It was a packing list with anecdotes. Here's what she wrote in reply:

Dear Julie:

First of all, wow.  Just ... wow.  You write so beautifully.  I don't know what you do for a living, but if it doesn't involve writing, you should quit whatever it is you are doing and change careers.  Immediately.  I've read this email three times now and I get more excited about the trip with each read-through.  Thank you!

No, Heather. Thank YOU. Shit. But I love my day job. All that wine...

And so I return. I set aside the formal pursuit of one passion and turn my soul to its other calling. It's going to take a few painful, exhausting workouts to get back in shape. I knew this was coming. I just have to begin. To write.

I think I'll have a beer first.

Me and Mon Ombre

It's been a while since I've travelled alone. In another lifetime, domestic and international travel was integral to my job. It was a groove of frequent flyer miles, hotel points, car rental upgrades; a suitcase that was always half-packed with the essentials, just waiting for the next journey. Being home was the exception, the interlude between dashes to the airport. I've never regretted giving up the hassles of travel, particularly the post-9/11 frantic harassment of airport security and the dismal state of airline service. Happily my travels these days are mostly for holiday, on flights bound for Europe, hand-in-hand with the only person I can suffer to see me through turbulence and jet lag. Brendan and I are viaggiatori simpatici. We dream of the same destinations, push ahead with equal energy levels, become tired and hungry in tandem and bicker over maps and directions without really caring who's right. We always find our way.

But I cannot deny the certain bliss of traveling alone. Undertaking a solo journey abroad is like dumping 1,000 pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on dining room table. It begins as a mission of intoxicating near-impossibility, but as you organize patterns and fit those first pieces together, you covet your independence and encircle your puzzle with protective arms, not wanting anyone to interfere with your reverie.

For a reverie it is. Traveling alone means slipping into a dream state, where anything is possible. With each encounter, snafu and discovery, the surroundings reflect you in a mirror that only you can see. This solitary state makes you vulnerable to the world and somehow floating above it. At any given moment, no one really knows where you are, what you are doing, tasting, hearing, seeing. The delightful and the disconcerting occur. During the private journey you rejoice and suffer alone.

Being a solo traveler is sitting in silence at a café on the Île Saint-Louis, sipping a chocolat chaud and watching the sun set Notre Dame aglow.

It is falling to my knees in the crypt of the Shoah Memorial before the tomb of the unknown Jewish martyr and crying alone in that vast, dark space.

It's being asked for directions to the Censier-Daubenton métro stop by a panicked looking Parisian elementary school teacher who has a gaggle of five-year-olds attached to him by a long strap; then being stopped a few minutes later on Rue Mouffetard by a grandmother, looking for the church where a funeral is about to begin.

It's lugging my suitcase up six flights of a stairs that curl like the inside of a sea snail shell, because I can't fathom squeezing myself into the tiny lift.

It's ordering a second glass of Minervois at a restaurant deep in the Marais, wondering if I'll remember the route back to the hotel in the dark.

It's running at dawn on the beach at Cannes with no one to keep watch over my shoes and socks while I wade in the Mediterranean.

It's meeting a vignernon and thinking how my husband would love this kind, gentle man who makes the most wonderful Armagnac I've ever tasted. And thinking, we'll meet again, and Brendan will be with me...

I fell into a deep sleep on the high-speed train carrying me from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to Cannes on the Côte d'Azur. There was one change of trains, long into the journey. I awoke with a jolt when my iPod slipped from my lap and fell to the floor, jerking away the earpiece. I caught the tail end of the conductor's announcement of our arrival. In my jet lagged haze, I grabbed my bag and stumbled down the steps of my two-tiered car, knowing I had but a few minutes to make my connection. I climbed a set of stairs and crossed to the main terminal, looking for the departure quay. Then it dawned on me. This compact, bright, calm hall was not the hurly-burly Saint-Charles station in Marseilles. I had disembarked in the idyll of Aix-en-Provence. And my train - the one on which I should have remained - had just left the station.

Likely this wouldn't have happened had I not been alone. Then again, I wouldn't have the memory of those moments with the stationmaster, chatting about hunting wild boar in the vineyards of the Rhône, before being deposited on the next TGV that whisked me away to Cannes.

The Sea, The Sea*

My dad likes to tell the story of how he saved our childhood. As he neared the end of his last quarter at Oregon State University, his job search took him to Chicago. A successful interview set our family of six, which included three boys under the age of twelve and a toddler girl, on the track of a comfortable life in the flat suburbs that stretched west and north of that mighty stone and steel city. He had all but signed the contract, when he agreed to one last interview at a remote marine sciences laboratory on the Olympic Peninsula. He drove the long miles from our home in Corvallis to a bend of a road that overlooks a bay that feeds into a sea, which kisses Canada before spilling into the Pacific Ocean.

I was twenty-three before I visited Chicago for the first time.

I have a pair of olfactory memories that frame my childhood. First is scent of rain. Rain on pavement, rain on soil, rain on roof tar softened by summer warmth, rain on freshly-mown grass, rain on the fur of the neighbor's black Lab, rain on pages of library books, releasing musty secrets, rain, rain, rain that sluices off the Siuslaw Hills into the Willamette Valley and puddles in sweet, earnest Corvallis.

The second is the sharp, sweaty odor of the beaches of Dungeness Bay, which are strewn with ankle-twisting stones, rotting kelp and pock-marked driftwood.

And from the coast rise other memories that I inhale when the wind is right. There is the stone-fruit headiness that bursts forth when a carpet of coastal sand verbena is crushed under the toe of a blue salt-water sandal. The flirty, green spritzes of common vetch as its ropy stems and delicate purple flowers dry in meadows succumbing to an August sun. The forests of Douglas fir, which pitch out wafts of medicinal, masculine resin, beckoning you into their cool shadows.

-- Although I grew up on the anvil-shaped Olympic Peninsula, under a mountain rainshadow that allows tourist brochures to claim it as the driest Pacific coast community north of Los Angeles, I don't do sea things. I fight a bilious belly if the thirty-minute ferry ride from Edmonds to Kingston rolls a little too much in the winter swells. I've been sailing...twice? I love to swim, but I prefer the tidy confines of the lanes at my local aquatic center to the slimy, cold depths of local bays. My idea of a vacation in hell is a cruise, trapped on a floating city of carbohydrate-laden breakfast buffets and spray-tanned bachelorettes.

But I am as spiritually attached to the open water as I am to writing, to running, to cooking -- activities I can exist without doing or being a part of, but if I am kept from any for too long, my soul begins to shrivel. Living by a bay, a sound, a sea, an ocean is as much an action as it is a state of being. It gives me a sense of forward motion and the perspective of possibility.

How fortunate I am to have lived in Colorado's Western Slope, where in winter the Rocky Mountains unleash oceans of snow by night and the Grand Mesa kicks up the waves of sun by day. And in Appalachian woodlands lush with humidity that rises from the storied waters of the Ohio River. Or in central Illinois, where once a sea of tall grass prairie reached to the horizon; it now pulses green with waves of cornstalks and rows of soybean. And in the arid valleys of central Washington state, whose sub-Alpine hillsides taught me how to hike, whose friendly country towns sheltered me through a bitter adolescence to my soaring university years and ushered me into marriage. These unique and precious regions bade welcome and I called them home for many years. But they are, each is, miles, hours, days from open water. And being close to water -- water that shifts with tides, that is briny with salt and gastropods -- is now a non-negotiable for me.

Oregon's rain seeped into my skin as my first memories formed. Rain is as soothing to me as Big Bird's simple joy and Mister Roger's sky-blue cardigans. But the sea sinewed my heart and nourished my imagination with minerals and bacteria and protein.

I am working now on a series of connected stories that I hope to mold into something greater, someday, when the stories are ready to be pulled into one. The sea is becoming a character in her own right. My challenge is to turn my back on this character and write her as much a villain as a beloved. Although the sea represents endless possibility, her unforgiving, unfathomable depths make her the epitome of impossible.

*The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch. One of my favorite descriptions of the sea is the book's opening paragraph:

"The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold."

Hello Panic, My Old Friend. You've Come To Fly With Me Again.

It starts with a red-hot ball at the bottom of my rib cage and shoots on a wire up my chest, to the back of my throat, and flares in a starburst of electricity that flushes my cheeks. My lungs clench and the red-hot ball drops into my bowels, where it run molten through the twists of my intestines. My legs tremble, my feet tingle, my fingers turn to ice. In my brain the screaming begins. I can't. I can't. I can't. The plane rolls forward and I know it's my last chance. If I scream aloud, they'll stop the plane. They'll let me out, into the open air. I won't spend the next ten hours trapped inside a titanium tube, hurtling across an ocean, unable to step outside, unable to breathe. It's my last chance before an ascent into madness. I pull the wire-bound collection of The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles from the seat pocket in front of my knees. I direct my remaining bright spots of rational thought to the first clue of puzzle #24: Fly with a long proboscis. My hand shakes as I write "Tsetse" into the squares. My body presses back into the seat at the plane tilts toward the sky. It is too late. My next breath of fresh air is ten hours away.

Julie, you can't recall a time when you weren't claustrophobic, can you? Remember that Hootenanny in a barn on a dairy farm on the Olympic Peninsula? Hot apple cider, fiddlers, and a maze made of hay bales. You crawled in the dark, through the musty bales, bumping nose to tail with giggling grade-schoolers, searching for the exit. You got about twenty feet in and began screaming in terror, scratching and crawling your way out, to emerge choking on wails and hay dust. You would have been about five or six.

Or that show of silly bravado when you were twenty-one and descended into the gurgling bowels of Paris to gawk at piles of bones in the creepy half-light that reflected off weeping stones. You came to your senses just as they began to take leave of you. Fortunately, your companion was a Paris beat cop who had a crush on you. Bruno whisked out his flashlight, his badge, and you held onto the back of his leather jacket as he pushed back through the line and up the spiral staircase, shouting "Step Aside! Emergency" You emerged in a December downpour that ran with the tears you couldn't help as your heart unclenched and you gulped the air.

Elevators? Oh yeah. All about elevators. Was it San Diego State? UCLA? Some shiny-hot campus where you had to deliver a presentation to a class of International Business students. The classroom was on the twentieth floor and you walked it, didn't you? Damn straight. You're the one walking through four levels of the parking garage to reach street level without taking the elevator, the one whose husband curbed her enthusiasm about registering for the Big Climb Seattle - a charity run up the stairs of the Columbia Tower - by reminding her she'd have to take the elevator down.

And there are elevators that simply cannot be avoided (Hello, Swedish Women's Clinic on the 14th floor of the Nordstrom Building). So you'll wait at the bank of elevators, letting cars load up until everyone disappears so you can take one alone. Should even that be unavoidable, you will hover next to the control panel, helpfully punching in everyone's floors, just to be certain no one fucks around with the buttons and somehow stalls the car. Because then it would be over.

But flying was never a problem.  After my first transoceanic flight in 1990, I flew around the world- to Asia, to Africa, back and forth to Europe. Then, one warm spring day in 1999, I sat on the tarmac of Willard Airport, outside Urbana, IL, in an idling American Eagle turboprop. I was headed for a connecting flight in Indianapolis, then onto Denver for a conference. We sat on that tarmac with the doors closed, as the central Illinois heat turned our little plane into a stalled rotisserie. That's when my first on-board panic attack took flight. Just as my mind began to pull free from its hinges the plane rolled forward and the air conditioning whooshed icy relief into our cramped compartment. Somehow I got to Denver and back again.

Since that day, I haven't flown without spending at least a few shaky moments in the grip of claustrophobic anxiety. But I've kept flying. I have no qualms about crashing into the ocean in a fiery ball of wreckage. Not a bad way to go considering the many alternatives. I just don't like being trapped. What deep, dark corners of my childhood hide my need for control, for space, for cool, fresh air? Exorcising those ghosts on the tarmac of Atlanta Hartsfield really isn't opportune. So, I turn fight the lack of control with deeper, darker forces of anger and determination. I can't not travel. Being forever trapped on one continent is worse than a few hours in the air.

Crazy, lovely irony has kept my wings aloft. I spent many years as a study abroad coordinator - travel is in the job description. To Australia and Spain, to Japan and Belgium, off I went my with my heart in my toes and my stomach roiling. One job kept me traveling nine months a year, several times a month, through a territory that spanned Seattle to San Diego, Phoenix to Portland, with staff meetings in London and Atlanta every six months.  I built up frequent flyer miles galore, and what else is there to do with frequent flyer miles but to fly someplace? My husband and I even moved to New Zealand, which is nearly as far as you can fly non-stop. Fourteen hours. In a 757.

So this is where I tell you that yes, I did seek help. I'd gone to a behavioral therapist years before, as a high school student. There I learned a trick or two, something to do with cognitive dissonance, about telling myself to panic just as I began to panic - my brain wouldn't be able to manage the conflict between forced panic and the avoidance thereof. That sounds pretty good in a textbook, but I reckon the therapist who led me through the mental image exercises understood as much about my phobia as I did about Geometry. Which would be for shit, since I failed Geometry. My own therapy is New York Times crossword puzzles. Cognitive dissonance via wordsmithing. It's hard to panic when you are trying to remember who won the 1962 World Series (Seven letters: Yankees).

But I'm no martyr to my cause. A few weeks before a major trip I present myself to my understanding physician and renew my prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. It takes off the raw edge of panic - a chill-pill for an over-active brain - but I can tackle a crossword without chewing my lips bloody. Several years ago, I forgot to take my pills out of the bag that I checked through on the non-stop flight from Paris to Seattle. I didn't realize the little orange vial was beyond my reach until I was on the jetway, fumbling through my carry-on. I was alone and my meltdown was invisible from the outside. I flirted with walking away from the flight, but realized my bags would travel without me. I could stay in Paris forever. Or I could take the QE II across the Atlantic and hitch a ride from New York Harbor. Or I could stop being ridiculous and muscle through the panic. I thought of the poor sods on my flight who might suffer from a fear of crashing and realized that they might need my steady hand if we started to go down. I'd be calm for them, just in case. We all survived that flight, I'm happy to report.

So here I am, packing my bags for another flight across the Atlantic. I am doing something ridiculously cool: attending two wine-tasting conferences in the South of France, followed by a few days on my own wandering in Paris. Hours and hours on a plane where I can read to my heart's content, fall asleep watching whatever pointless Katherine Heigl movie is showing on the "romantic-comedy" movie stream, and relax, which isn't something I do very often. We forget that in traveling, it's not just the destination that matters. It's the journey that offers us the opportunity to challenge who we think we are.

I just hope the hotels have stairs.

Can I Keep the Music?

It drives Brendan batty when I forget to turn off the car radio (yes, radio. We're working with the shabby-chic theme by keeping the original "sound system" in our 2001 Toyota Corolla). And since I'm a big fan of the upper end of the volume dial, cranking the ignition generally means getting a blast of All Things Considered or Shabazz Palaces (if it's gonna radio, it's gotta be public. Commercial radio ranks near the top of things that send pointed, ruby-red fingernails screeching down my internal blackboard). Yesterday I did it to myself. After laps at the pool and a decaf Americano at El Diablo, I tucked myself into our grey, dented chariot and revved her up. Out of the plastic speakers came roaring The Hallelujah Chorus, from Handel's Messiah. I did what any sensible person would do faced with the dozens of soaring voices of the Robert Shaw Chorale. I turned the volume higher and added my own uncertain soprano to the mix.

The Messiah, written by Baroque composer George Frideric Handel in 1741, is one of the Christmas season's most iconic works. It was originally intended as an Easter composition, celebrating the birth, death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It didn't become a popular Yuletide tradition until well into the 19th century, but now it swells and soars in cathedrals, concert halls and car radios during November and December, as sure a sign of Christmas as the flocks of poinsettia that congregate at Fred Meyer as soon as the Halloween candy is taken away. And I never tire of it.

I adore sacred Christmas music, particularly medieval and Renaissance English, French and German carols in a minor key: O Holy Night, Silent Night, O Come O Come Emmanuel, What Child Is This, Coventry Carol, Un Flambeau, Jeanette, Isabella, the Wexford Carol...They hint of mystery and magic, of cold winter nights when the sky bursts with bright stars or the air is hushed by falling snow. This music framed my childhood memories of Christmas and is the foundation of the joy and wonder for the season that I hope I never outgrow.

The irony of my adoration of sacred music is that I do not believe the mythology which inspired the compositions. I'm one hundred percent on board that Jesus of Nazareth was a real man, a great teacher and humanitarian, and that he was a martyr to his faith. But it stops there for me. I have no use for religion of any kind. From my upbringing, which included stops in Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, non-denominational Evangelical, Protestant this-that-and-every-which-way churches, I turn full circle to the unhindered state in which I was born. With that slate wiped clean, I willingly admit the presence of a higher power- God, if you will, since we're speaking English and of the Western World. I'm not an atheist nor an agnostic; to put it simply, I don't believe in a Messiah. I believe the North Star of my moral compass is a force which surpasses all understanding, but that this force has not, nor will it ever, take human form.

So, this could be a tricky time of the year. It is Christmas after all; how does a non-Christian celebrate a holiday honoring the birth of Christ? Of course, the holiday season is more than just the 25th of December (a date aligned with pre-Christian seasonal traditions, not the birthdate of Jesus). It is a season that transcends religion, that embraces and celebrates the universality of nature and humankind.

This time of year is powerful. I have come to regard winter as that most peaceful and private of seasons, when I find myself listening the most closely to the silence within and without. It is a season of renewal, of the longest night that heralds the beginning of growing light and life. No matter the nature of one's faith, we come together at the holidays to celebrate family, tradition, compassion and peace. We bring light to dark nights through our music, our dinner tables, our rituals and our hearts- which seem to open a little wider before we set shoulder to the grindstone on January 2.

This is what I celebrate. I celebrate the nature of faith that is most deeply present this time of year: faith in tradition, faith in the promise of a new year, faith that hope is greater than anger, that peace will overcome conflict. That music is one of the most potent expressions of emotion makes sacred holiday music a powerful blend of tradition, hope and divinity. I'll turn up the volume on any of these any chance I get.

Sweet Solstice, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to All!