My favorite writing is when an author takes mundane details, frequently overlooked drab aspects of reality, and gives them a huge blast of attention. When done well, you’re walloped with a full sensory experience. A delightful new take on something you may have taken for granted, or never entirely noticed.
I find myself grounded in the moment through similar times I’ve had relating to whatever they’re describing, say – I don’t know, an experience with a spatula. I would never think a spatula worthy of distilling down so far as to peer into its soul. So intently, as to find the appropriate entry point, dash in, and delight.
Writing like that takes both patience and presence, and historically my mind is somewhere else.
Those are the details I need to focus on though. The little quirks that happen when your home is 14-feet long, 7-feet wide… and your boyfriend is six foot four.
What it’s like to not have a hometown. To always be passing through.
How this experience stacks up against the way we used to live, like normal people, in a house.
What it’s like to sit in our little cargo trailer conversion through an intense storm. The rain starts: fat drops, like long red nails tapping on a keyboard.
It intensifies.
Gets so loud that you can’t hear the thunder. The flashing lightning reveals quick takes; tree branches wave wildly, as if desperately trying to flag down help.
The grass we’re parked on has rivers coursing through, weaving their way underneath us. You only see it in silvery white bursts of lightning though, the rest of the time it’s black.
It’s been four months since I slept inside a regular home, and I don’t miss it at all.
I smile thinking, “no one tells you about this part,” and then, “I probably won’t mention it either,” as I take the pee chamber of our composting toilet, and let 2 days of mango colored urine glug out over the dead pine needles by the woods at the edge of the property. “It’s golden hour,” I think, with a smile. The sun is sinking, and the clouds assume their sunset position.
What it’s like to realize you’re so used to being stressed, that when you eliminate it from your life, you find yourself going out of your way to find something else to be stressed about: it’s become that much of who you are.
Studies show that on average, human beings spend half their waking hours somewhere else, lost in their mind. For as long as I can remember, my mind ran me. I didn’t know any other way; never consciously sat down and assessed how I should think. Never thought to establish where “I” am in the jumble of the mind. What I’m responsible for, and realize there’s a choice in how I show up.
I spent so much of my life running away from things. Now, in what literally could be perceived as running away, I’m learning trying to be still.
Slowly becoming more and more conscious of my thoughts, surroundings and experience. Doing my best not to be so passively reactive, and actually show up for myself in my mind.
It’s not uncommon for people to embark on different types of quests to find and connect with themselves and life in a deeper way. It is however, uncommon for them to flip their lives over, on purpose, in the process of making that change.
Here I am, fully committed.
Drinking coffee.
Taking notes.
TRAVEL & ADVENTURE 