What is Left is All There is

April 25, 2008

In moments, sometimes brief and sometimes extended, that I am able to maintain a fantasy about the great profundity of my life, I am just fine.  Not a happy fine, but a maniacal, tortured, driven or ecstatic fine for sure.  These fantasies have a stupor-like effect on me, drugging me up and blurring my vision and dulling the pain of I-don't-know-what-anymore.  The pain could be childhood trauma, or the toxic human world bent on self-destruction.  It could just be the inevitable suffering of life -- the passion, the angst, the inevitable loss -- the soul banging its head against the wall of the body.  Of late, as my twenties draw to a close, I have been less able to maintain my fantasies.  They appear to me like the shifting shine on shallow puddles that dry up quickly.  I find myself stranded with great visions and am commited regardless.  It no longer gives me the same adrenaline rush.  There is no sense of grandeur, just a knowledge of what I must do and the human frailty and clumsiness which makes it so hard sometimes. 
   
    I feel alone here, very alone. 
    In my aloneness I want to destroy myself
    and some days I do,
    little by little, shamefaced and sorry. 
   
    Today I recognized something new, the world left over when delusions die.  The world that is always there.  The world of grass and trees and weather and bodies and words and gazes and dogs and cats and children and food.  After my fantasies fade and fade so quickly now -- what is left is all there is and I wonder if that could make me happy. 

I think my life would look very different if I was a yogi

April 11, 2008

First Day Out -- Innocent Fool

I am on my journey!  Aren't we all?

April 10, 2008:

I tried to get going on Wednesday up to Oregon, but had an anxiety attack when I realized I could not fit my treadmill in my truck without sacrificing my large box of textbooks among other necessities.  So my treadmill addiction will have to recede and my exercise consist of long walks in cold Canada -- the land where summer never quite comes.  But I needed to rest Wednesday night and I did.  I took a bath in the bathhouse and watched the sun go down in the tops of pine trees and the cars woosh down 116 and Bloomfield.  I got into bed and could not even stay awake for South Park.  I woke up at 4:30 Thursday morning and did not want to get out of bed, a warm sleeping giant at my side and patches snoring on the beanbags.  I sported bedhead to Hardcore and sat for an hour or so and sipped the strongest coffee on the West Coast.  The best coffee I have ever had actually, and the best community I have known.  It took no more than a few weeks of getting coffee at Hardcore and dating a regular before some of the old wise men informed me that I was a part of the family.  I used to get confused by this and suspiciously ask myself how they could say this to me -- "They don't even know me..." but it was I that didn't know how powerful and loving community can be when people are allowed to be themselves and celebrated for it.  Regardless of the strangeness, or because of the strangeness authentic community can display, I feel at home at the mismatched compilation of furniture that adorns the supposed-to-be -coffee-drive-through that is really a dream like down to earth space for people to gather and share their experience with other wanderers. I will say this to all of you now -- You are a part of my family.  Thank you for teaching me about community.  It was hard to leave.

I made a scene outside my truck crying fresh mascara onto Greg's brown jacket.  How can I leave this little house and family where I feel so safe?  Why leave someone I love so much and love to live along side? I didn't want to go at all, but learning calls us to places we have never been -- to empty places, hard places, unforgiving and cold places, to deserts and oceans and forests and the square boxes of institutions called houses of learning. 

So I got gas at FLyers down the road, but could not turn left on 116 for the steady flow of traffic.  I gave up and turned right and decided to catch 101 from Cotati.  Then I realized I had to use a bathroom, any bathroom.  I stopped at the Valero on 116 and the lady inside shook her head and said she only had a port-o-potty, sighed and shook her head again -- "I can't let you use that.  Use my private bathroom."  I was grateful.  As I pulled out of the Valero, I tried to roll up my window and it collapsed into my door.  Frustrated and really wanting to go climb back under the down comforter, I pulled over on the old gravenstein hwy, fixed my window and ended up taking Todd road to Llano and finally to Highway 12 and then finally I hit 101 at about 9:30 in the morning.  I laughed at how difficult it was to physically leave and how my head felt empty and I was blindly hurdling myself in a metal object up to Oregon on the longest road in the Universe.  It took me thirteen hours and one speeding ticket (a 48 in a 45 in Port Orford) to get back to my family. 

Notable places and occurences on 101 North:

The Oriental Buffet in the shopping center off the last exit in Arcata - $6.75 for a big plate of decent, made-right-there sushi.

The Ocean big and terrible and kind bending over the edge of the earth

Orick, or Oreq, or Orec (the town obviously can't decide how to spell it)
is a little town north of Arcata, or is it north of Crescent City? that consists of a stretch of main street which is 101.  There was a sizable old theatre with a Marquis that read TONIGHT JAMES BROWN on one side and ORICK GOSSIP CONVENTION on the other.  I tried to imagine what a gossip convention in a town of three hundred people would look like and why anyone would submit themselves to this public torture.

The Redwoods -- I sat on the forest floor and found myself surrounded by medicine -- Angelica, Liver Wort, Trillium, WIld Ginger and of course Redwood itself is used at least by Micheal Moore as a mild anti-viral.

A Policeman telling me that he wasn't going to ding me for not having my insurance card, even though I presented him with proof of insurance my insurance company gave me to present to Policeman, and just ticket me $145 dollars for a 48 in a 45 because I sped up a little too fast as I was leaving the boudaries of Port Orford.

The amazing feeling that I was spinning my wheels at fifty miles an hour, making little progress, realizing I had been on the road for ten hours and was still three hours away.

HWY 38 from Reedsport to Cottage Grove.  Fabulous, empty, straight and gorgeous with old farm homes meadows and what I wanted to imagine was the pristine, unpolluted Umpqua flowing out to the sea.

The strange realization that land use laws and agricultural policies create separate worlds across invisible state lines.

I was back in Oregon.   Land of my birth. 

It is warm in the Willamette Valley.  I brought the sun with me and every one is half naked pretending it is eighty degrees outside not sixty-five. 

For friends and family

This little blog is so you can follow the inevitable spiral of my life into the unknown.  I want to be a good person and I want to be a good clinical herbal therapist.  I quit my job, left my boyfriend and beloved shack of a home in sunny california to do my first in a series of clinical training internships at the Dominion Herbal College in British Columbia.  I didn't make it as I was turned around at the border due to an obscure immigration law requiring I have a study permit and medical examination for this four year distance learning program I have already almost half-way completed.  So I was kicked out of Canada and now I feel homeless, groundless and nauseatingly free, not to mention poor.  Drama unfolds around me as it always does and I feel like I keep being held back by my teacher The Universe in the workshop on Loss and Perseverance -- "How to Deal With the Fact That Life Totally Sucks Ass Sometimes."  Apparently I am a slow learner.  Or maybe I am just blessed with a teacher who is willing to be patient and keep telling me the same thing over and over and over --

and I still don't understand.

Over the Edge, My Dear, Over the Edge

    April 21, 2008 --

    With Regards to events more important than my ejection from Canada and delay in studying clinical herbal medicine -- my dear dear friend Heather, who is more like an angel than a human being hence it is very difficult for her to maneuver in this clumsy world -- has gone to the emergency room twice since I have been here.  I am glad I am here in Seattle to fall asleep with my head on the foot of her bed at the ER and to take care of her child today while she went to the ER with her husband Brian -- another dear dear friend of mine.
    All three of us lived together in Eugene, during college.  I was and still am the wildly emotional and unstable friend that somehow complements their sometimes too placid family existence in Edmonds.  Brian is a successful financial investor with his own investment company called Sitka Pacific, which is up 11% in a market where everyone else is losing millions and billions.  He used to do graduate work in quantitative ecology at the University of Washington until Heather got Hodgkin's and he dropped out of school to take care of her.  They went into massive health care debt to save her life and Brian realized that they needed money and went from intellectual saving the planet to intellectual saving his family.  He realized all the principles of an ecosystem applied to the market and he began his work.  Ten years later he is doing quite well and manages many accounts from which drip out his management fee daily. 
    Brian has the eyes of a wild animal who stares at everything and nothing at the same time. 
    I think both Heather and I feel like emotional wrecks next to him and maybe we are.
    My poor friend Heather is devastated by being hospitalized, of course, since she went through cancer.  She cries when they take her blood and put in an IV, because during cancer the chemo and all the blood draws begin to have a negative effect on vascular tissue and it becomes steadily more difficult for nurses and technicians to find an ample vein.  At Stanford, I watched Heather get poked for thirty minutes before they found her vein.  I have been witness to this torture in the company of other cancer patients too, like Pam my smoker friend who had cancer in every organ of her body but her lungs.  May she rest in peace.
    What is going on with Heather now is a bit of a medical mystery, of course, unless they start running the right tests.  She seems to be suffering from severe heat stroke, triggered first by Hot Yoga and secondarily by sitting in a sauna with me.  THe first night at the ER she tested low sodium and high blood glucose.  I wonder if she went into hyperglycemic shock -- the blood being saturated with glucose pulls water, sodium and potassium out of the body as urine is formed in the kidneys.  Her father is diabetic, so there is a good chance she may be diabetic too. The doctors and nurses were very worried that Heather had an elevated blood glucose reading in the ER and they could not get her sodium back to normal, but they gave her no explanation as to why.  They just gave her the records and told her to see the doctor first thing on Monday. And they told her not to drink any water.  Only juice and no solid foods. 
    She was still fatigued yesterday, but gained her strength back by evening.  This morning she went down again and started to get vertigo and muscle spasms.  Her face went pale.  SHe said "Abby, I feel like I am dying."  I looked at her -- so sad she had to deal with this great difficulty of having such a sensitive body in such a toxic world.
    "You are not dying.  When you figure out what is going on, I think you will feel better than you have felt in many years."  Heather is brilliant and committed to her health.  She is constantly educating herself on nutrition and has everything it takes to heal herself -- if someone could just figure out what is going on so she could move in an effective direction.  She wanted me to give her some herbs today.  I could have given her some strong licorice extract, since it has an aldosterone-like effect and helps the body to retain sodium, but I thought it best that she get treated by physicians at the ER.  They went to the University of Washington Medical Hospital.  This is where she was initially seen for Hodgkin's, a cancer her father also had.  Heather has her father's body and ironically, they do not speak to each other.  Heather cut her father off long ago.  He is an irrovecabley unhealthy and destructive influence in her life.
    I hope this is a healing crisis for her and not just a crisis. 
    I do think we always have this choice.

Me? I had a panic attack last night, cried uncontrollably for several hours and called my boyfriend fifty times crying into the phone how I did not want to lose him.  His phone was obviously off and he has not called me back yet.  This is what happens to me when I don't smoke tobacco, everything I have run away from hunts me down and holds me to the ground. 

I realize I come closer and closer to accepting the finality of solitude.

I am afraid and refuse to accept it completely, replacing awareness with self-destructive habits. 

I wonder how I could be twenty-nine, full of love, but have no family. 

I know that I have prayed for the freedom of detachment, but it feels impossible to mourn  my attachments completely.  

I return to my desires.

The line of a song is haunting me:

"It is better to accept
 the truth hidden
 from the eye unwept"

Grief wipes our vision clean, but it is also terrifying and exhausting.  Sometimes I would rather smoke a cigarette.

    April 20, 2008 -- Anectodotal Exits

    I wanted to tell a few stories about the Border before I let go of this drama with the Canadian government.  After all, other things have happened since I was kicked out of Canada for no fault of my own.
    I want to remind people that we are in a new political reality due to the destructive arrogance of the US administration and it rears its ugly head at the interface between nations -- at the borders.  The Canadian border has become much more strict and I have two stories to illustrate this shift.  The second evening I was held at Customs I overheard a man with a thick accent sniffling and saying "but I have one address and a phone number.  Can you just call my friend?"  Apparently he was visiting two people in Canada and he had the address of one and the phone number of the other.  The agent told him he would need both addresses to enter Canada and he would have to turn around.  What they do not tell you is that once you have been made to turn around and go back to the States, it is much more difficult to cross the border a second time.  I learned the hard way, just like this man was learning the hard way.
    So no more frolicking in Canada without a care or destination.  You better have the zip code of each address of each person you might see, or it is back to the folds of the skirts of the Lady Liberty, or the ragged pant cuffs of Uncle Sam, or the stringy nest of his dirty beard, whichever US you live in.  I am sure there are more versions of my own country than I could ever phathom.
    At the Consulate a large African American man approached the secretary only when his number showed up on the screen and a loud beep signaled Counter 5 was ready for him.  I was seated near counter 5 so I got to hear the details of his misadventure.  He said politely to the young lady at Counter 5:
    "I have spent thousands of dollars on reservations to spend a week in Canada at the Telus festival."
    "What is the Telus festival sir?"
    "It is a snowboarding festival hosted by Telus.  Telus is Canada's largest telephone network like At&T."  The young lady nodded her head.
    "I was told to turn around at the border because I have a misdemeanor on my record."
    "I will look you up on the computer...just a moment..."  She tapped on the keyboard and read his record and a grimace folded her neutral expression.  "I am sorry sir there is nothing I can do.  Just to let you know, thet border has become much more strict recently and they are not letting many people in for vacation purposes."
    "I have never been convicted of a crime or put in jail.  How come they won't let me in to Canada?"
    "They just see that there is a misdemeanor on your record and the border decided not to take a chance."  The woman's voice fell like heavy, tired footsteps.
    "Well what do I do to get in?"  The man was getting more frustrated.  The secretary took a deep breath and paused.  She obviously did not want to say it and very slowly she formed the words.
    "I am sorry...sir...It takes up to a year to process these kinds of complaints."
    The man was still and his lips parted and from my seat in the sea of immigrants I could hear a small gasp.  He turned around and walked out.  I looked him in the eyes as he turned around to leave and wanted to tell him with my eyes that he was not alone.
    More comical and ironic is one more story about the second time I was at the border and told to go home.  When they finally decided to let me leave an officer commanded me to "swing around and pick up my passport on the way out."  Then he walked away with my passport in hand, out the building, to one of the drive up booths.  I was very upset and confused at this point and not thinking clearly.  I was sitting in my truck, engine running, in the entrance to the Exit.  Two men who appeared to be somewhere from within the Middle East were standing in the parking lot twenty or so feet from me.  I was crying and visibly confused, I am sure.  They started waving their arms and yelling "You are going the wrong way...Canada is that way!"  They pointed east to the sign that read Vancouver.  I rolled my window down and spoke loudly over my engine.  "I was denied.  I can't go to Canada..."  They put their arms down, stood still and silent with wide eyes.  There was no response, just surprise.  I suppose they thought because I was a white woman I must have been going the wrong way.  Why would I not get over the border?


    April 18,2008

    I finally got my meeting with the Canadian Consulate Officer Eldridge.  I got up at 5:45 in the morning, took a shower and put on a dress.  I took off the dress and decided it was better to feel comfortable.  I put on my black jeans and a black turtle neck and a black jacket and brownish high heels.  I put eyeliner on.  Warpaint.  I smoked a cigarette and drank a strong cup of coffee.  I got on the Interstate-5 South at 6:45 a.m. and went sixteen miles in 45 minutes.  I parked in the first overfull parking garage I could find.  It was an almost accident every time I went up a  spiral level.  I parked in a corner spot with very low clearance on Level E.  I didn't give a shit where I was or how far I had to walk.  I was on Sequoia.  The consulate was on 4th between Union and Pine.  I got there at ten minutes to Eight in The Morning.  There were already fifteen people packed in a small waiting room.  Walk through the metal detector.  No cell phones.  Take two tickets.  One for them.  One for you.  Must fill out the checklist for a temporary visa to be seen at all.  I really don't need to apply for the temporary visa.  Every US citizen gets an automatic six month visa when they cross the Canadian border.  I mean its Canada Eh?  Cheers.  God save the Queen.  Whatever.
    I need a study permit.  I need permission from the Canadian Government to study at a school I have been studying at for a year and a half.  Unknowingly naughty I have been unknowingly naughty.  In violation of immigration law Officer Eldridge tells me.  I have been in violation unknowingly in violation.  I ask her questions in room number seven.  Tell me how I fit into the category of temporary worker.  Tell me why I need a medical exam when every US citizen is exempt from the medical exam.  Tell me how it works in Canada when you sue your school for incompetence.  Tell me.  She finally waves her hands and says enough -- "Look there is no Immigration Law.  It is up to the officers what you have to do.  If someone is sitting in my office and applying for a visa and they look sick, I can make them take a medical exam.  It might sound strange to you, but the border immigration officers have more power than me and the immigration officers in Canada have more power than them.  What the border says goes and honestly, I agree with them.  You need to take a medical examination." $500 later.  2 months.
    Fine.
    Fine.
    Tears.
    A few sobs.
    Fine.
    Kleenex.
    Rolling down the cheeks.
    Tears.
    My soul exploding.
    School was all I had left.

    And then Officer Eldridge, beautiful red head she was, said something that destroyed my nucleus of comfort.  "You have been in violation of Canadian law for a year and a half.  I can approve your study permit and it can be revoked when it is processed inside Canada at any point."  She stepped out.  She came back.  She talked to counsel.  My study permit -- she said -- would not be denied.  I asked --- there is no chance they will revoke it two months from now?  No she said.  No.  Not now.  We just agreed.
    Agreement.
    Mercy.
    Two women across a plastic wall.
    One hole to speak through.
    Thank you Officer Eldridge.
    Red head beauty.
    I cried.  Relieved.  Wanting to prosecute my school like superman lifting the other foreign nationals above the turmoil in my red cape.  Your hours have not been wasted.  Here is a million dollars.  Dreams of justice. 
    Finally I got my audience with the consulate and it turns out --

    my school fucked me -- even if they didn't mean to.
   
    The border was nice.  They could have detained me.  They could have kicked me out of Canada for good.

April 15, 2008

Hi World.  Well -- Canada won't let me in and it is all very strange.  I was denied at the Border twice.  I am not in Clinical Training right now and it is very sad to me.  I really got the run around at the border and realize I am experiencing the fallout from a new political reality.