Summer Blues and the Ghost of Snow

I sit at the kitchen window, staring at the cat. It's hard to believe I'm here, that the cat is beside me, that this window is one I can consider mine. We are back in Seattle -- home -- but we've portioned off too many pieces of ourselves and left them in enough corners of the world that now, home is too small a word to hold all the places it recalls. California, Seattle, Seoul, and now back to Seattle, with countless other cities and towns littered in between. Our first month back balanced on the endless generosity of friends and family, of their air mattresses and spare floor space and patience. Meanwhile, our backpacks strained, as did my sense of belonging; I felt like a blur in a photograph. Physical distances can close so quickly, but traces of isolation still lace my blood, and coming back to Seattle - the same apartment building, even - make all the changes in me and in the city more acute and harder to reconcile. It's not reverse culture shock - nothing so urgent as that. Rather, I imagine I'm resurfacing from amnesia, that the world I knew spun on and lives were lived while I chased my own unseen. Events were missed with the details excused, and stories retold for my shadow. There are moments of dissonance, feelings of being invited to laugh at an inside joke you don't remember, of trying to recover a dream first had by someone else. In every overdue phone call or delayed hug I feel that lingering gap, gentle and persistent: a mild miasma of time apart settling over the reunion. The smoke of foreignness and inaccessibility to which I grew accustomed just needs to be given the time to dissipate. 

It takes longer than a plane ride to catch up. It takes longer than the fall to land on your feet.

Regardless, it feels good to be back.

So much has happened that I haven't really processed. Adam and I got engaged in Cambodia at the dawn of the new year, alone atop tucked-away stone steps inside Angkor Wat. Just a few months later, we left the lives we'd built over 2 and a half years in Seoul, parting with friends, muddling my way through heartbreaking goodbyes, and making last trips to favorite haunts. We became the ghosts we always used to feel.

We spent a week with elephants in the mountains of northern Thailand, helping in small ways to keep their sanctuary a reality. We were ceremonially blessed by grandmothers from the nearby village, befriended by resident cats, and escorted to breakfast by rescued dogs. In Chiang Mai, we trailed our fingers along the stripes of tigers lounging in the late morning heat, and at night we wandered the stalls of markets crowded with noise and smells and sweat. In Krabi, we watched the rain smooth mountains into mist and swam between sheltering islands to tease the smiles of giant blue clams.

Farther south still, we stepped into autumn on the edges of Australia and met old friends along the way. Countless marsupials were fed and cuddled at every opportunity. We drank whiskey with Ned Kelly's death mask, close enough to count pores in the plaster, and felt cold for the first time in weeks. Adam drove on the left while I questioned if the maps were right. We held our breath for the chance of a platypus, scrutinized tree lines for fur among leaves, and scanned waves for a flash of dorsal fin. We startled wallabies in the underbrush and played chicken with geese made indignant by our very presence on the path. Our voices echoed in caves and drowned in the thunder of waterfalls. 

In New Zealand, we sat in silence under the Southern Cross while cows whispered through the neighbor's fields and we witnessed how stupid sheep can be. I saw how green the grass is on the other side. We solved puzzles to escape a bank vault and rushed through a vertical cycle of luge and gondola while recklessness reined over better judgment. I lusted over mountain ranges and touched moss-coated history lessons. We marveled at the faded corpse of a giant squid before we were crushed by the weight of war memories one hundred years heavy. We sipped Sauvignon Blanc on a train passing Mordor and drank ale at the hearth of the Green Dragon. I cried at Hobbiton, at my nerd dreams come to life, at having to leave. My arm was tattooed and my appetite frequently fished-and-chipped (and craft beered).

And then it was over. We fought jetlag to rejoice in familiar faces and forgotten foods before preparing yet another rearrangement of belongings, and now here we are, resuming life as ex-expats from scratch. Despite leaps in progress toward the trappings of reestablishment, I'm finding difficulty in the stillness. I keep expecting another airport, adjusting phantom backpack straps on shoulders rapidly losing their tan, and making acceptance of where I am - geographically, metaphorically - a daily exercise.

We documented our travels well, and I'll be fleshing them out here over time with the stories they deserve as the hundreds of photos are organized and edited. For now, I'll just revel in the Seattle summer blues, paying dues of adulthood, and await the ghost of snow.

We're home.

Kind of a Big Deal

Things have been happening since April.

I flew back to the U.S. for a short visit, which was filled with family, friends, forced cat cuddles, rehearsed answers to inevitable questions, hectic running of errands, walking in good weather and good company, and a LOT of good food. I felt a little out of place and as if the time was spent in a vacuum of premature nostaligia, but it satisfied a need for the familiar and it satiated a craving for the trappings of "home" a little while longer.

I started wearing jean shorts again for the first time since my early teenage years, body image be damned. My legs, like the rest of me, aren't getting any younger, and if I can't bear to bare my skin now, then when? I'm trying to pay less mind to the matters of thighs and the blues and purples of veins whispering through thin skin.

I've had my first patbingsu of the summer, the cold, sweet clarion call of the season.

Most importantly, I've made a decision. It's kind of a big deal, and it affects quite a lot. After much research, deliberation, and support from Adam and my supervisor/mentor at work: I've been accepted to a teaching certification program, and next month, I begin the first course. It's a big commitment on top of my current teaching schedule over here, but it's also a big step toward a future I really want. Doing this requires a certain sacrifice and a little change of immediate plans, but if all the logistics work out according to plan, I'll be a certified teacher by 2016.

So things are happening, and I'm excited. Here goes nothing, and everything.

Cicadas and slumberlust

A flash of sunlight through a wing, a glimpse of glint among the leaves. The heat-spurred chorus of the cicadas pushes past my headphones – music pours into my ears, but the insects flood the stream. The heavy blanket of summer malaise dampens our shoulders and our desires to do much of anything but muddle through until fall.

Here we are: sweat-drained bodies on sodden bed sheets, limp smiles under umbrellas-turned-timpani drums as the monsoon breaks overhead, foreheads never wanting for company with a constant spackling of damp hair. A months-long longing for sleep in the maddeningly inescapable humidity as we wring out a little oxygen from water we breathe.

Through this steamdank haze, an unassuming intensity leans in every so often, clearing its throat in the doorway and sending me flying. The feeling of stepping off a curb you didn’t know was there – that same reeling as if the world slipped out of reality for a moment and took you with it – and the ground, solid and unyielding, interrupts just as you realize you’re falling to meet it in the first place. These breaches through the mundane are basic truths that nonetheless jar me out of placid comfort:

I am very far away.

The people I love won't live forever; neither will I.

We all have a finite number of heartbeats.

The big things, like the little things, don't ultimately matter. Do they?

This season of cicadas and slumberlust offers a warning: In the cycle of song and death, some choose careful dormancy while others burn in passing brilliance. Both paths require sacrifice, and neither is without its unique resistance. Regardless of choice, time delivers us to the same end.

If I ever remember how to sleep - my hopes lay sooner in wine than in September - this strain of memento mori will make a terrible lullaby.

This Side of Paradise

I recently joined my parents on a trip to Mount Rainier. I had been wanting to visit for years, but while it's a mere 2.5 hours away from Seattle, I had just never been able to just plan the drive and go. And oh, now all I want is to go right back again.

The road to aptly-named Paradise - a small stretch of clearing on the south slope of the mountain and home to the visitors' center and the historic inn at which we stayed - was designed by collaboration of conservationists and engineers to create minimum impact on the environment and maximum impact on visitors making the drive. The mountain reveals itself gradually through the glances afforded by the road's meandrous climb, its monstrous beauty made all the more entrancing by the moments in which old-growth trees block it from our view like winter clouds blot out the sun from our sight but not our minds.

At 5,400 feet, we reached Paradise. Over 48 hours, we hiked more than 20 miles (with temperatures in the 80-degree range), felt the thunder of several waterfalls in our chests, watched solar flares through a sun scope, and at night, spotted lights on the mountain from climbers' camps and gazed at the rings of Saturn and the clustered stars of the Hercules Nebula through a GPS-programmed telescope worth more than I'll make in 50 lifetimes. I saw my first glacier, fell in love with the Avalanche Lily and the Pasqueflower, encountered as many furry and feathery creatures as Snow White could want, and ate one of the best meals of my life from a recipe passed around by National Park chefs in the Northwest. And wildflowers, subalpine wildflowers everywhere you looked. At Mount Rainier, I felt so laughably small among such powerful forces that have been in the world for so long before I came and will be for so long after I am gone. I renewed the appreciative pain I always feel in such pure places: that while I inhabit the same world as this mountain and its meadows and air, I am too far removed from its purity of form to ever really be a part of it.

I saw and felt and knew a place so devastatingly beautiful that I ached.

Above the visitors' center, dozens of trailheads lie just beyond a humble stone stairway engraved with the words of John Muir, a sort of love-letter description of his most hallowed of the "fire mountains" of the Pacific Coast: "...the most luxuriant and the most extravagantly beautiful of all the alpine gardens I ever beheld in all my mountain-top wanderings."  But there is another thought from Robert B. Marshall in his tribute to John Muir that I find just as fitting: "One cannot describe Mount Rainier, one cannot describe the Grand Canyon, one cannot describe his beloved Yosemite; humanity is silent in their presence." Even though I have written my share, words will always fail to describe Mount Rainier, and so I have written more than enough. Photos, too, will fail, but their silence is more reliable than mine.
 

Lupines for days.

Before I knew their name (Pasqueflowers), I called them Lorax Trees

Sitka Valerian

   

Magenta Paintbrush

Corn Lily (False Hellebore)

Cinquefoil

Avalanche Lily

Bathtime in Paradise River

Under Narada Falls

  

Above Myrtle Falls

 

Nisqually Glacier

Grouse in the House!

The second fawn (twin?) is hiding behind the white log

To wrap it up, here are some other tired, sweaty, hiked-out animals. Note: unless you ever go hiking with me, this is the only time you will ever, ever see me in a baseball hat, plus the messiest bun ever. Live it up while you can.

Sitting on boulders counts as bouldering, right? (Hi Dad)

Snow day, every day! (Hi Mom)

And Summer On My Mind

Summer is a time of watermelon juice dripping down your arms, off your elbows, and onto the grass. It is a time for cold beer in the warmth of the sun and the familiar balm of lazy evenings with friends. A time for outdoor music festivals, afternoons by the water, and a pervasive sense of ease in the city. A time that moves a little more slowly as the days stretch and the glow of sunlight lingers almost until bedtime. And, of course, it is a time of skin, skin everywhere.

Bikinis abound right now, with legs and torsos and shoulders out in force playing catch-up in Seattle's rediscovered sun. The pale bodies on display are, on the whole, lithe and lean. Typically, this means my tendency to compare myself to every other female in my vicinity kicks into overdrive, but this year, I've been (mostly) able to stay in the lower gears and actually be a little proud of my body. For some reason, I can accept what I've got, and what I've got is good.

Well, actually, for two reasons.

Katrina and Karena of Tone It Up

Karena and Katrina of Tone It Up popped up on my radar a few months ago when I was stumbling around on Youtube looking for... I'm not quite sure. Maybe motivation. Inspiration. Something different than what I had been doing, which was a hodgepodge of Jillian Michaels videos and a smattering of cardio, usually running, throughout the week. I had no concrete idea of what I wanted or where I was trying go with all of it - wanting to be fit, sure, but I didn't really know what "fit" looked like for me.

Now, Jillian Michaels is still my girl and she'll always have a special place in my heart. I fell in love with her years ago during college in Santa Barbara (land of the beaches and the accompanying babes), when Stacy, Barbara, Alex, and I would watch The Biggest Loser while stuffing ourselves with Freebirds nachos, ice cream and Indian food. We longed to have her body, her strength, to have her scream at our lazy asses, as surely she could scare us into fitness unlike anyone else. We enjoyed kickboxing classes through the university and we walked everywhere (and also at times I was unhealthily thin, at times unhealthily sedentary), but Jillian's drill-instructor-style verbal abuse was the kind of psychological beating that got me to push myself in my workouts. But after a few years of worship in the Church of Jillian, I gradually grew immune to her yelled dogma and my eye began to wander.

Thus, the Tone It Up girls. They are quite different from Jillian - incredibly feminine, endearingly silly, and all about having fun in fitness (and in life in general). I won't lie - I kind of hated them at first. They're gorgeous and seem to live on the beach in cute clothes and glorious hair. They're sweet and giggly and genuinely seem to enjoy doing what they do, and sometimes, on particularly crap days, it can be hard for me to handle their perpetual perkiness. Basically, they're perfect and I couldn't stand it, because I couldn't possibly ever be like them, and that's exactly what I wanted in full blown envy rage.

Katrina's hair is so beautiful it makes me stupid.

As I poured over their blog, I saw that they indeed hadn't always been so perfect, and that they had been a lot like me: slenderish and healthy enough, but not quite as "fit" in terms of muscle tone and overall lifestyle. I learned that what they do is achievable, and their food motto is smart and simple: "Lean, Clean, and Green," emphasizing lean proteins, foods as organic and as unprocessed as possible, and as many greens as you want - and as they say, a piece of fruit never hurt anyone. Most importantly, they still like their wine, cocktails, and chocolate, and they know it's okay to indulge sometimes (again, cold beer in the sun is just part of summer). Like I've written before, it's all about balance, and no one can, nor should, be perfect all the time - I'm certainly not. It's just common sense, elevated.

True to their name, toning is the major focus of their exercise approach; sure, you can be thin without muscle, but muscle strength and tone is what helps define a thin, healthy body. All of their videos (seriously, there are tons and tons on their YouTube channel) are rather short - no longer than 20ish minutes and sometimes as short as 8 or less. Cardio is, of course, an important part of fitness that they really emphasize, but their toning videos steal the spotlight. I love them - especially some from their first "Bikini Series," like the ab-focused Itty Bitty Bikini workout, the Beach Bum which kills my butt, and the all-over toners: the Bikini Strap and the Sandcastle Workout. They combine basic individual moves (like dead lifts with a row, or squats with side leg lifts) to make the circuits as effective and efficient as possible, and the girls' personalities are so engaging - they do the routines like sane, normal people with senses of humor, not tireless machines. They don't make it look deceptively easy all the time (push ups are hard), but because they're so laid-back - sometimes even goofy - when demonstrating the moves, it's easy to forget about the whole "work" part of working out. Again, I'm not usually one for flowers and rainbows and bunny giggles when it comes to exercise, but these girls are all inspiration without the intimidation, and it makes me want to be their friend and meet them for brunch on Sundays. Plus, their beachy sets and California style encourages the Santa Barbara blonde in me to resurface just a bit, and that's not so terrible a thing.

Karena, those shoulders. Katrina, those abs ...and that hair.

Anyway, long story short: I love these girls, and I owe them a lot. Because of them, I'm developing the abs, the legs, those cut shoulder muscles I've always wanted and the strength that comes with them. They've helped reinforce the message of loving your body, even if there are some days I can't always hear it. I still do Jillian videos sometimes, and thanks to Barbara's fantastic new blog, I'm getting exposure to new challenges, but Karena and Katrina at Tone It Up have won my girl-crushing heart. Now that the weather has finally caught up to the season we're in, I am happy to oblige in proper bikini-clad form: sunscreen on my white Seattle skin, watermelon in hand, cold beer in the fridge, and summer on my mind.

Capitol Hill Block Party, the warm-up for Bumbershoot right in my neighborhood.