Womanhood

I have recently been focusing on the fact that I am a woman. I mean, obviously I am and have been for quite some time, but I don't always feel like it. I like to be free-spirited and childish and young, it's just who I am and that's fine. Truthfully however, I am also a woman and really honestly have been for quite some time. The words we use to describe ourselves can too often end up dictating our identity instead of simply stating it, and I have been referring to myself as a only girl for far too long and ignored my womanly characteristics, denied that I have been growing up. I am now 24 years-old and embarking on this fancy pants new job. I began flight attendant training on Wednesday and feel like I have been training for a year already. Every day I am required to wake up, put on make-up, and dress myself in business attire. I look like a whole new person, but I'm not. As I walked down the hall of my hotel today after my first observation flight (where I got to flash my new ID and cut lines and everyone looked at me knowingly) I looked down at my feet covered by tights and nestled into high heels (with bows on them, of course) and it hit me, I am a grown up with a career. I am woman. Now I still have to officially finish training and pass all my tests and get my new uniform altered to fit my short stature, but I am here. And I love it. Hear me roar.

New Year, New Career

I am about to start over once again. I spent the last year and few months adapting to Portland life and making it my home. Now, just as I start to feel happy and content I throw myself the big kicker, it's time to mix it all up. On January 1st I fly to Seattle, Washington to begin 5 weeks of flight attendant training with Alaska Airlines. A dream job. Another beginning. My whole life, once again, never more literally, up in the air. I don't yet know where I will be living or how often I will be home, I just know that once again things are about to change. I have said many goodbyes already, packed my bag, and am bracing myself for a brand new start. So here is the deal. I have decided that as a means to keep myself busy and give me something to work towards, as well as keep in touch with my dear friends and family, I am going to set up some year long goals for myself. 1. I am going to work on project 365, an activity in which I will be taking a photo a day for a year and posting it with a small caption describing the event. 2. I am going to spend my time in hotels and coffee shops writing. I have always wanted to write a book, so I am going to work on that and/or write small essays and prose. 3. I will be actively trying to post about these things and my adventures more often and therefor keep my blog fully up to date. For those of you about to follow me (and hopefully live alongside me) this next year, thank you. I appreciate feedback but mostly the interactions of friends living life together. So a Prost, to a new year and a new career!

Autumn Returning to Autumn

Autumn is just around the corner, but it's in the air now. Everyone is talking about the upcoming season as though it were a returning friend, and it is. The crisp air, bright leaves, and colorful memories of autumns passed return to envelop me in the reassuring embrace of an intimate friend. It could be at no better time as my first full year back home comes to completion. It is reassurance I am looking for as I continue to make plans for my future and search for contentment in my present. One whole year. Six years have come and gone just as quickly and carelessly as have I. But this is the year I stayed put. This is the year I returned home to be with family and to experience the seasons morph into one another and take over time. Each day dynamic so as to be continually new. Autumn returning to Autumn. Time continues as I stand still allowing the Winter Wind, the Spring Air, the Summer Draft, and the Autumn Breeze to swirl around me, whispering seasonal secrets and impelling me on my way through unexplored, kaleidoscopic time. Harvest and cider and mittens and scarves and pumpkins carved in close friendship and deep love. Lives being lived together and creating memories in the way must be meant to, for why else are we here together? The leaves have grown and now are getting ready to change colors and drop to new places at the roots, a new purpose. Already I hear them rustling as the low sun casts its long shadows on the warm ground.

To make her proud

And I know that she is proud of me, I don't have to guess because she is still here in me.  She comes out every time I dance, when the music floods my ears and the beat takes me over.  She comes out every time it rains and I want to run in it and when my rain gear keeps me dry and I am still fascinated, she is too.  And most importantly she comes put every time I dream, when adventure takes hold of my imagination and doesn't return it until I have found reason to believe the impossible, she is there the whole time.  For all along it was she that taught me to dance, to run, to dream and to believe in my dreams.  It's her I see when I look in the mirror, her blonde curly hair and her big blue eyes full possibilities.  I hope to always be a child.

Bus stops in big cities

Sunsets remind her of traveling.  It's the only time she ever sees them.  She has watched the sun rise over barren midwest lands, cold and tired from endless work.   And she has watched the sun unfold over majestic peaks of an endless sea of mountains, the alps spreading on from Austria and moving into switzerland, second by second being unveiled as the sun draws back the curtains of night.  On a ferry slowly meandering the inside passage she watched with excitement as the rarely seen rising sun lit up wild lands that few men, if any at all, have placed their feet.  From the window of a train heading north, a car heading east, from the window of a plane orbiting the earths circumference she watched the sun hang in the air for hours, refusing to leave it's post as she passed London, Greenland, Iceland (setting, not rising), wanting her so badly to see it all it refused to leave until it had illuminated everything on her journey.  And even here at home, while waiting for the bus to take her to her suffocating 9-5 position, the sun gleams it's yellow light on this simple street where she lives.  Perhaps she can learn to travel at home.

A year ago

She needed to be alone.  It wasn't that anything bad had happened.  She hadn't had any fights or break-ups, nobody had died, she hadn't been estranged from her family.  But still, she needed to be alone.
Her life had gone from simple nothings to extreme everythings.  People, work, travel, school, more people and more work and more travel...  She loved it all and she reveled in it and it had overtaken her, overwhelmed her, tired her right out.  She was exhausted and warn.  Thin.  She had learned and changed so much, had given to others and taken little for herself.  She had morphed and now she barely knew herself anymore.

It was time to be still.  To listen to her thoughts.  To wright them out over and over again, so as not to miss a single noun.  It was time to be still.  To do little and be intentional.  To do the things she had always wanted to do.  To play piano and paint pictures and ride mo-peds.  To watch documentaries and listen to books on tape.  To watch movies in bed.  To watch them twice in a row just because she liked them that much.  And to cry in them, just because they moved her that much.  That would be a big deal, when she let that first tear drop well up in her eye, become so full it flooded the brims holding it in place ad slid over the edge, like a suicide victim sliding over the slim edge of a roof top to their last few fleeting moments of bliss before their imminent death.  It can be scary to show how you feel, but exuberayting to learn.

And in these silent walls of someone elses life, she would reinvent her own.  

Settling or Something

So I am now officially "settled" into my new home in Sellwood, OR in SE Portland. I live in a large house with my sister Tabitha, brother-in-law Jon, and friend Chris. Every day since the 1st of November (when my dear BEEGEE's went home) has been spent unpacking, buying furniture (from the goodwill bins, or heaven on earth as some may call it), arranging, cleaning, visualizing, and watching gilmore girls. Since I have been in this house Jon's grandma has died, my best friend Brooke got engaged, I went to a Joshua James concert, and I rode up a nasty hill on my bike without stopping.
So now I am here, in the Rose City, the River City, the City of Bridges, the place I have always called "home". And I tell you, it is strange to be here. Lovely and awkard and boring and exciting and lonely and comforting. Some days I feel like the whole world is at my fingertips and I will never have enough time to explore the whole city. Other days I feel like I am right where I was when I left home at the age of 17 and all the growing I have done has somehow gotten lost somewhere in hidden void because some things never change.
And I love that I have a huge back porch and book shelf full of books I have read and still have yet to read. I have prints to frame of places that I have loved with my whole heart, and new art to find to fill the empty spaces on my sponge painted wall (although lets be honest, how many empty spaces can there really be on a wall that has been painted with a sponge?). I have a job to find. I have friends to still reunite with, and other friends yet to make. I have the rest of fall, all of winter, spring.... and dreams to realize so I can work on them becoming reality.

This is home, so I guess I am exploring my roots.