East Grove Blues

A few thoughts have been rolling around my head of late.

The first is fairly hard to describe. It is the differences of wisdom. I have learned many lessons in my 29 years, but it seems to me that I have forgotten nearly all of them. The jewels of wisdom leave as soon as I realize their truth. Does that truly make it wisdom then? Or is that more along the lines of temporary intelligence. Is there such thing as temporary wisdom or for that matter intelligence? Sometimes I go back and read old journal entries and think that I sounded rather pretentious at that time, but at that time I thought I had actually come across earth shattering revelations.

It is strange to feel so old and so young at the same time.

I was reflecting on a friend of mine. They do something really well, far beyond almost anyone I have ever seen. It is fun for them and a huge part of their life. But it did not give meaning to them. It was something they did, and if certain things hadn’t have gone the way they did, it probably would have killed them. How can something that brings joy not give meaning to them? Then they had kids. It was the greatest gift ever given to them, because now I see how much meaning it gives to their life.

That led me to question the meaning of my own life. Am I pursing goals because it gives me temporary joy, or is it something that drives my very existence. I don’t want to over blow this in anyway. I am quite happy with the way things have been going. Life at this moment is actually really good. That doesn’t seem to keep me from questioning myself though.

Perhaps I would be more worried if I wasn’t questioning myself.

The world feels like it is moving in so many different directions at once that it is hard to tell where we are at and what we are doing. It’s all so dependent on who your circle of friends are and what frame of mind the people around you have. I have always found myself feeling that I was neither here nor there. Always just one or two steps away from a group, making myself hard to define. Am I a hippie hipster conservative liberal organic communist? No not really. I just am and I am trying for something. Here on the other hand is nearly everything I could ever be summed up in a few short minutes. I would love to make a video of this, but they have already done what I would want.

http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2012/02/this-must-be-the-place-coffer/252784/

Life is about connections. For a while one of the connections I have is with the past to the present. Making the old new again and finding that balance between modern facilities and a life style that is both physical and rewarding. Typing on a computer all day removes us from a life connected to the ground around us. We loose meaning, direction and fulfillment. We become tech bots in a digital machine. On the other hand when we remove ourselves completely from new technologies we become stagnant and dead to society as a whole.

I am sure I have stated this a million times, but balance is very important. My vision of the future is a mixture of old and new techniques to create a more beautiful and connected world. Bring people back to the land, but staying connected to the cloud that brings all of humanity under its burgeoning influence. I am not much of a profit and only fate knows what will really happen in the future. All I can do is hope and so I will.

Why is it that when I lie awake at night thinking it comes out all depressing and such? I need to leave the crazy for my dreams.

Today I am going swimming!

The party has long since died down, but here I am awake and thinking so much that it is likely that I won’t find sleep anytime soon. The fans are whispering their lullaby’s but it isn’t having the same effect. Now they ask me questions that perhaps I am too scared to answer. How long must I lay on my bed on the floor waiting for the clock to blink me to sleep?

I have had a good reminder this week of myself and of others. Of what makes us who we are and just why we do some of the strange things that we do. At times I think I know who I am and what it is in this life that I want. As soon as I define just what that is, I somehow find myself doing the exact opposite of that. That makes me a fool and worse sometimes. Then like all people I am presented with a choice. I have to either face myself or run.

You can only run for so long before you catch up to yourself and make the same mistakes again. I’ve been running since college really. I don’t know what to do or why, so I bolt for one place or another. After time I catch up with myself and I go home to try and sort everything out. Failing at that I move on to the next thing and end up in a wicked cycle.

I’ve always tried to be a better person than I am. I read books on religion or philosophy and think that if I follow those rules than I will be a better person. That is utter horse shit. I always just end up feeling worse about myself, because I can’t live up to someone else standards. Who are they to tell me what to do? And so on and so on…..

Sometimes people bring out certain qualities in me. Not all of those are good, and in fact some have had terrible consequences. My last try at a girl friend was the opposite. I realized that I liked her because she brought out the best in me. The more she pushed away the more I tried to do better. To be the person she deserves and would care for back. That doesn’t work either. She left me and I was left without any identity. Part of me wants to run again. To take off and push off the pain a little longer.

I am tired of running. It’s like a hamster on a wheel, I am just not getting anywhere. What am I scared of? Well just about everything really. I’ve lost my identity right, so while I try to reform it I keep making bad mistakes and acting out of character from where I was a few months ago. But who was I a year ago? The same person I am now… It’s circles upon circles or sameness.

You can’t rely on others, or books, or words to make you what you are. I am scared of who I am and what it is I am supposed to be doing. Do I even have a purpose? I’ve lost myself in just about everything, from booze, TV, books to people. I’ve been told to find yourself you have to loose it first. But if I lost where do I look?

Before I get to aloof in questions I can’t answer I should get to my point. I know a lot of people and almost all of us are running. You may not even know it, but you are. I see it every day in people that I care about and I have had so hard a time seeing it in myself. I’ve probably said this all before, but I will say it over and over until I or someone else listens.

Right now I am staring into the darkness hoping that perhaps I can finally accept it. Ask me tomorrow though, cause I may forget and I might deny, but I do need to remember.

………………………

One mans story, is another mans shame.

I ain’t bound for glory, no no I’m bound for flames

I spent most of the spring setting the stones of normalcy down. A secure job, girlfriend, fairly busy schedule and all the things that are stable. After years of being in completely insecure jobs in high stress areas, it felt good to come down to earth for a while. I love traveling and even now I feel the tug to up and leave, but to have stability for once was, for lack of better words, nice. It was the best spring I had known in a long while, even if it wasn’t always easy, it was always worth it.

A lot of that is gone now. My girlfriend broke up with me, which surprisingly hurts more than I would have ever expected, and I am currently dealing with those emotions. I don’t really know how to respond, because I have never really felt this way before. Some days I am fine and others something triggers and I am at a complete loss. I don’t know if it is because I am older than before, or just generally infatuated. In the end it was probably for the best, but that doesn’t seem to make it hurt any less. It might even make it hurt more. It is weird to feel like this, because I am guessing it is how I have made several people in the past feel. My last three girl friends have broken up with me, which is also a turn of events, because I had always been the one to break up with every girlfriend before that. Karma has settled in and taken me for a ride.

There is somewhat of a bright side to all my moaning. I had always feared that I would never be able to really care about someone else. That everything I was doing was always just for myself and I couldn’t open up to these kinds of emotions. It hasn’t been fun, but it has been educational, and in a way, a relief. I wish I would have been able to learn it earlier, but I wish a lot of things that I can’t change. I hope I can keep learning though. (In the past I have thought I had felt this way, but it quickly faded or made me scared)

I loose my job in a couple of weeks. I had thought I would have been happy, but now I am looking for work and I feel completely adrift. I don’t know what to do and where to do it. I want to stay home, close to my plants, but I also want to work on something that I will at least remotely enjoy. I have worked in a factory and that sucked. I hated it. I don’t want to do that again. Life is way to short to spend it doing something that I loathe. Sorry everyone, but happiness comes before cash flow.

All the things I want to do require a different educational background. I have some good experience, but it doesn’t seem to be enough in this kind of job environment. I’d like to just live on the farm and work my garden, but I still have loan obligations, and that means I have to make some money. I am looking at graduate programs, but I would rather avoid school if I could. I don’t want to take the GRE, but I would like to learn more.

In the end I just don’t know what to do with myself. I hope to fall into something, which is what usually happens, but my luck isn’t running so hot at the moment. I think this would easier if it was one problem at a time, but to have all the things that were holding me up come crashing down has made my life not so easy. I am past the worst of it, but I can’t see my future anymore. Everything is foggy.

I know when I wake up tomorrow I will wish today was just a nightmare. It isn’t and that is going to suck.

I have been planning a project in conjunction with Hope Haven. It is a community in Burlington that helps disabled people live functional and productive lives. When I was asked to join YouthBuild I was told that I would need to find alternative projects to work on. I called up Hope Haven and presented them with a gardening project. They would benefit from produce and our students would benefit from having a place to consistently do community service.

As our program lost more and more students, without the prospect of getting new ones, my hopes for the project were not good. By last week I figured it would just be me working with Hope Haven on my own. I like to garden and we were planning a smaller garden than my original vision. Then I found out that I was loosing my job.  I had to tell them, after committing to the project, that I would no longer be able to fill my obligations. It’s frustrating to not be able to follow through with a good project solely because our funding got cut.

A part of me feels relief though. I could never get a strait answer out of my bosses one way or another on the project. I also could never get an answer as to if I would really have a job. While I now have no idea what kind of work I will be able to find in the future, at least I don’t have to worry about anything in Burlington. After about a week the nervousness of loosing my job is fading and relief is setting in. I am ready to move on to something else. I would to be able to fill out my service, but I also am getting tired of driving to Burlington everyday.

There is a small den of Coyotes in the timber. Molly found them a few weeks ago and we have been able to hear the sounds of a pack fairly regularly. It is cool to find something so wild and beautiful. Many farmers in the area will tell you that Coyotes are dirty animals and need to be shot. There was a student at SCC that actually had a dead frozen coyote in the back of his truck during the winter this year.

A coyote will kill a goat or a sheep if you don’t protect them, but should we really get mad at an animal that is following its instincts? I know I hate multi-flora rose, ticks and mosquitos, but they are just doing what they know how to do. Why get mad at a weed for doing what it is supposed to do? These are rhetorical questions that you can answer on your own. They are making me think at the moment and I am nothing but thought right now.

I am running on less sleep than I need and have been going through another period of transitions. This has left me feeling very aloof and disoriented. There is nothing quiet like running through the entire gamut of emotions in a couple of days.

After weeks of waiting we found out that Cali didn’t win the Radio Lia contest. It wouldn’t be that big of deal if A: they hadn’t of dragged it out and B: she had lost to someone with more talent. The winner’s songs were uninspiring and poorly done.  Then I found out that I won’t have my banjo for another three weeks. I was hoping to have it for this weekend after waiting an extra month for it to be completed. Now I have to wait again. It isn’t a huge deal, but the waiting is tiresome. I am a fairly patient person, but even I can only wait for so long before getting frustrated. Lastly, I was looking forward to a game of D&D tonight and it got canceled. I need to get some sleep and I shouldn’t complain, but I was looking forward to it. It is like being told you will get desert, but then you don’t get it.

I sent in an application with Pioneer for a job in Mt. Pleasant last week. I want to stay in Salem more than ever, but I don’t know if that will happen or not. I don’t know when I will hear anything back. I decided to send out another application for the same job in Johnston. I wouldn’t mind living up there, but I hate to leave my plants. There isn’t much I can do for them, and most of it I can do on weekends, but it is hard to leave something you love. I love to travel and I don’t want to stop, but I also want to be home.

Cali and I went up to Chicago this last weekend. I had the chance to see a bunch of friends, visit the art museum and go to the Brookfield Zoo. It was awesome and I definitely needed to get out of Iowa for a little while. We went to Eric and Anne’s wedding on top of everything else, which was one of the most fun weddings I have ever been too. It was great coming home though. I have lived in a lot of different places, but I have never had a home like the farm and now that I am here, I really don’t want to leave it for terribly long.

I feel like a seed that has been blown all over the world and finally found the place it wanted to settle, which was in fact, the place that it started. In all of this I guess what is getting is the insecurity of it all. When I finally think I know what I want to do with my life, it is at that point that I have no idea whether it will happen or not. I find this rather ironic in a way. I never worried before, because I didn’t have any set goals. Now I do and I am finding it rather hard.

I better stop here or I will just be repeating myself over and over and over and over and over……crap…..

I had a training for Americorps this week. We went for leadership and had several meetings on facilitation and different management styles. I am not overly fond of meetings, but they were surprisingly fun. Part of that had to do with being in a good group of people. Everyone was very friendly (some overly so) and it made for a pleasant time.

I got to teach a class on Yoga, which was a lot of fun for me. I enjoyed being able to share with people something that I love and feel is important. By the end I was really sunburnt and had to lay down for a while. If I get to much sun I get a head ache and need a break. We did some zip lines (which were fun), cleared trails (also fun) and had a session on Tai Chi (awesome!). I wish there was a Tai Chi class in the area that I could take. At least I still have Yoga and it will just have to do at the moment.

I also learned that my job is ending in June. I have been slowly becoming more and more tired of my job and so when I learned I would loose it I expected I would be thrilled. I was actually quiet hurt by. For one reason  is that they knew a while ago and no one had deemed it appropriate to tell me. That was unpleasant to think about. I keep getting forgotten about my my bosses and I do not appreciate that. It also means that I have to start looking for work, which is not something I really enjoy doing. One of the reasons I am getting into farming is I don’t have to look for a job!

I have started the application process again and I am looking for something I might remotely enjoy. I hope I can find something close by. I really don’t want to have to drive a long ways, especially for something I might hate. I have been looking at classifieds and nothing has really jumped out at me as something I can do. Justin emailed a link to a pioneer job in Mt. Pleasant and that looks promising. I sent out my resume and whatnot and I hope to hear back from them sooner rather than later.

I would appreciate a steady job. Something I can grow into, even before all the Elderberry stuff. I feel like everyone wants to rush me into this or that. I want to take my time and fall into the right job, not rush into the wrong one. I also don’t want to take on to much work. I know what I am capable of and try to push that as best that I can, but when I over do it I get scared. That is when it is time to run away to a different country.

I am trying to put my roots down, or at least connect to the existing ones. We’ll see what the next month does for me…

Most people have ideas and morals that make them who they are. For this analogy I think of them as pillars that surround the core of who I am. These pillars surround me and hold me up. The temple of self. When one of those pillars is damaged or even broken then everything that is you can come crashing down.

Think of a time that you did something that was the exact opposite of who you are. Something so out of character as to not feel like it was you at all, but someone else in your body. It shakes you, makes you question everything and leaves you feeling hollow inside.

This weekend I remember being me and from what I remember I did nothing that would cause me to loose my identity. I have a terrible memory and just the thought of doing something as stupid as I might have has not been easy. I tend to be hard on myself and when I come down, I crash. Sometimes I feel like I do stupid things just to have something to worry about and that is a negative feedback loop that I do not want.

I know I am in a bad place when I can not eat. I didn’t eat yesterday and when I went to make breakfast this morning the thought of food was disgusting.

Why be so worried about something I don’t even think I did? There is a chance that I did and the consequences of that chance frighten me. I am full of fear and when I am happy and healthy I can face that fear and laugh at it because it so silly. When I am low and vulnerable I can’t laugh, I can only worry.

My life has been really good lately. I couldn’t ask for better family and friends. The idea of loosing any of that gives me the shakes.

I know this is all probably unnecessary and that in a few days my life will return to normal. I know I just need to wallow in my own misery for a while. I know things aren’t what I fear them to be. I am almost certain that I did nothing wrong. Even for all that I still feel terrible. Sometimes you just have to stare in the darkness for a while.