Children behaaaave- that s what they say when we’re together

I’ve been meaning to post an update for a good long while. At first, I as too busy traveling, but recently it’s been more an issue of general aversion to technology.

Please allow me to squish my last several weeks of adventure into as tiny of a space as I can..

After I left Seattle on Feb 15, I wet up to Bellingham, WA.
After getting off the evil I-5, I got to enjoy this lovely view on Chuckanut Drive

Plus a surprise tea house and zen garden!

Let me tell you, I freaking LOVED Bellingham! So much that I didn’t want to leave, and after I did.. I went BACK!
I stayed with a really rad chick I had met while volunteering in Peru and her awesome roommates!

B-ham is a fascinating town that has it’s very own expert in every trade and locally-sourced anything you could possibly want. It’s also small enough to walk around and only a 10 min drive from killer hiking. My stay there was a nice balance of fun, exploring, bonding, and recovering from the previous two weeks of my trip.

Breaking off to travel solo was really liberating. I had no pressure to be anywhere by any time and was able to quietly reflect on the first half of my journey. Basically, I met this tremendously amazing person from Seattle on the M train in Brooklyn, we hung out once, he flew back to his land (MY land now, mwahahaha!), and the second time we hung out was a two-week cross country road trip from NJ to WA. While I was explaining the story to my freind in B-ham, she stared at me in disbelief and blurted, “WAIT- these things don’t actually happen in real life!”

And she was pretty spot on. Being in such close proximity to someone I hardly knew for such a long period of time was different from anything I’ve ever done before. It turned out to be an incredible experience that I’ll cherish forever, but wooooooooo boy, talk about INTENSE! Even moreso because, in the process of getting to know one another (and meeting one another’s families), I realized how he and I were polar opposites in so many ways. I don’t know how/if we would have ever connected had a little voice in my head not been SCREAMING at me to talk to him on the train that day.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that we had designed and participated in our very own bizarre experiment that should probebly be turned into a documentary. In conclusion, getting to know someone in this particular fashion is a great way to fry yr freaking brain.

During the last few days of my trip with spooky, i began to feel like the ground could disappear from beneath my feet at any moment. And if it did, I wouldn’t have thought of it as anything out of the ordinary. After all, if nothing is ordinary then isn’t everything, also? Wrap yr noodle around that one..

So, I essentially spent the majority of my first solo day wandering around B-ham, loosely holding onto a thin, 18 foot long strand of thread that acted as the only tether between my body and my head, which floated reluctantly along behind me like a helium balloon. This resulted in my body showing up places before my mind could catch up and caused some diffuculties in social interraction as well as a perpetual state of confusion as to where I was.

But after going for a quick run, I was back on track again and all was hunky dory. The next day, I ended up running a half marathon with one of the girls I was staying with. 13.1 miles was the farthest I’d run in over a year. When she first invited me to join her on the run, I had a fleeting moment of self-doubt. But that doubt fell victim to the “hell yeah” response I knew was pushing through right behind it.

The run was along one of Bellingham’s many gorgeous trails and was definitely challenging- both physically and emotionally. My running partner was a really sweet, badass girl who was particpating in some sort of domestic violence workshop and seemed to be a social worker in training. So in the process of getting to know one another over a 13 mile run, I started revealing things to her that I’d never actually directly told anyone before. Things that had been weighted down with too much shame and fear to ever express. Emotionally intense is the new black, yo.

So I got a free therapy session while declaring my issues to the sweet breeze and everyone running in the park that day. If it was gonna come out some time anyway, I’m glad it did while I was running alongside a bright, compassionate, and very strong young woman.

After pouring so much energy into self-discovery thru establishing deep social bonds at the speed of light, I was about ready for some time REALLY alone. So I slept in the trees of Larrabee State Park an didn’t communicate with a single person for an entire day. It was cold and rainy, but a much needed, nourishing visit with mother nature.

Sweet Jesus, just typing that took a lot out of me. I changed my mind. This will not be a review of my past four weeks. I’ll have to break it all down into manageable chunks. I’m tired and I write too much.

I’m at the farm now and have been for almost two weeks. It’s wonderful to be settled and in the middle of nowhere with lots of free time and hardly any social obligations. I’ll catch up on that another time. Now I’m gonna go serenade my new dog-roommate with my saxophone.