Diane, a friend of mine from work who knows quite a bit about my mental and emotional journeys of the past couple of years, wrote this quote inside my birthday card last month:
"If you bring forth what is within you,
what you have will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you don't bring forth will kill you."
--attributed to Jesus in The Gospel according to Thomas
A few days after receiving that card, I began reading Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, one of my bucket-list books. It's written by a social psychologist who spent many years researching confession and inhibition. The basic premise of this book is that "excessive holding back of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can place people at risk for both major and minor diseases" while, on the other hand, "confronting our deepest thoughts and feelings can have remarkable short- and long-term health benefits. [...] Not disclosing our thoughts and feelings can be unhealthy. Divulging them can be healthy" (p. 2).
These influences only serve to reinforce the work I was already determined to do: learn to be and express my whole, true self without fear or shame.
18 March 2012
13 March 2012
Redefining "travel" (again)
The first time I went to Spain, as a senior in college in 2001, I kept in regular contact with a group of friends and family via email. I wrote a mass email almost every weekday for four months and pushed it out to all those who had expressed interest (or who had at least not expressed disinterest).
The second time I went to Spain I started this blog. I liked the idea that people could choose whether and how often to keep up on my travels without my having to clutter up anyone's inbox. I used the blog to communicate not only about where I was going and what I was seeing & doing, but also how I was feeling and thinking. In looking back, many of my posts were just as much about my inner life as they were about traveling abroad.
When I got back, the blog went dead for a while until my dad pointed out that travel to the Oregon coast is still travel. I'd gotten it in my head that the only travel worth writing about was travel abroad, but Dad had a point.
And now I am reconsidering my definition of "travel" once again. Sure, I might journey to different places a couple times a year, but most of the journeys I take are in my head. And I take a lot of them.
No, I am not talking about tripping out on drugs. I'm talking about thought experiments, new ways of thinking about the world, new "places" I'm discovering in my mind through reading and conversations.
This birth year, for example, I have decided to read 10 "bucket list" books. You know, books "everyone" should read at some point in their lives. I polled my FB friends and have come up with this list (in no particular order):
I want to learn how to be and express my whole, true self without fear or shame. Or, as my friend Diane put it: I want to learn how to set myself free.
And so I have decided to repurpose this blog. I will still write about trips I take to other cities, states and countries, but I also want to use it to communicate about the books I'm reading; the new ways I'm learning to think, see and be; and the actions I'm taking and habits of mind I'm forming in order to set myself free.
The second time I went to Spain I started this blog. I liked the idea that people could choose whether and how often to keep up on my travels without my having to clutter up anyone's inbox. I used the blog to communicate not only about where I was going and what I was seeing & doing, but also how I was feeling and thinking. In looking back, many of my posts were just as much about my inner life as they were about traveling abroad.
When I got back, the blog went dead for a while until my dad pointed out that travel to the Oregon coast is still travel. I'd gotten it in my head that the only travel worth writing about was travel abroad, but Dad had a point.
And now I am reconsidering my definition of "travel" once again. Sure, I might journey to different places a couple times a year, but most of the journeys I take are in my head. And I take a lot of them.
No, I am not talking about tripping out on drugs. I'm talking about thought experiments, new ways of thinking about the world, new "places" I'm discovering in my mind through reading and conversations.
This birth year, for example, I have decided to read 10 "bucket list" books. You know, books "everyone" should read at some point in their lives. I polled my FB friends and have come up with this list (in no particular order):
- The Book of Revelations (from the Bible)
- Civilization and Its Discontents - Freud
- Femininity - Brownmiller
- The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Freire
- The Communist Manifesto - Marx
- The Power of Partnership - Eisler
- East of Eden - Steinbeck
- Invisible Man - Ellison
- Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions - Pennebaker
I want to learn how to be and express my whole, true self without fear or shame. Or, as my friend Diane put it: I want to learn how to set myself free.
And so I have decided to repurpose this blog. I will still write about trips I take to other cities, states and countries, but I also want to use it to communicate about the books I'm reading; the new ways I'm learning to think, see and be; and the actions I'm taking and habits of mind I'm forming in order to set myself free.
18 December 2011
September 2011: Oregon Coast & Wine Country
If there is an advantage to being behind in my blogging, it must be that, by the time I get around to writing, only the highlights of a trip stand out in my memory, saving me the time and effort of a detailed recounting and you the time and effort of reading it.
In September of this year my mom and I traveled together again, this time to Newport, Ore. for a few days and then inland to wine country. What I wanted most from the trip was for it to be easy and relaxing. I didn't care about having a detailed itinerary or trying to cram a ton of fun into a few days. For the most part these goals were met, though one incident, which I will get to, did put a rather disturbing & eerie spin on the trip.
The Sylvia Beach Hotel
I'd been hearing about the Sylvia Beach Hotel for a few years as a pleasant place to stay and a book lover's heaven. A communal library, rooms named and decorated in honor of authors, no Internet, and no cell phones allowed. Mom and I stayed in the Steinbeck room, whose most prominent characteristic was a 3D mural of an old car coming out of the wall between the beds, its headlights acting as bedside lamps. There were jars of Doc's specimens on high shelves around the room (from Cannery Row) and plastic frogs in the bathroom.
At some point we toured the other rooms, which are open to viewing during the day as long as no one is staying in them. My favorites by far were the J. K. Rowling room done up in Harry Potter paraphernalia and the Colette room, which had a fireplace, a private deck, and sumptuous decor.
The Restaurants
One of the best things about the Sylvia Beach Hotel is that it is right across the street from one of our favorite restaurants, April's at Nye Beach. The photo on the right, I believe, is worth at least a thousand of my words, so I will leave it at that.
We also ate at a restaurant on the bay, which unfortunately did not ring my bell. The most interesting part of the meal there was meeting, in the wine bar upstairs before we were seated, a handsome man in his late 30's or early 40's who seemed very interested in meeting new people. In addition to being handsome, he was open, charming, a native Spanish speaker, and had led and interesting life. But it seemed to me that there was something not quite right about him. Maybe it's due to my overactive imagination, but I got creepy vibes off him and would not have been surprised to find out that he was a serial killer. I hope for his sake that I was ungenerous and mistaken.
Although our hotel included breakfast, Mom and I opted instead most days to walk to Cafe Stephanie, a little place nearby that proved to have good coffee and excellent quiche. I highly recommend this place.
The Backpack
And here we come to the disturbing incident to which I referred earlier.
On the second or third day in Newport, Mom and I took our customary long walk down the beach. At one point she saw a hotel towel in the waves and took it upon herself to rescue it. As she trudged inland to deposit it on a sand dune, I took the opportunity to survey the landscape.
That was when I saw the backpack. It was about half-way between the surf and the treeline. No one seemed to be near it, and there was no one playing in the waves for hundreds of feet. I thought it odd that someone would have simply walked away and forgotten it.
When Mom rejoined me, the wet towel now disposed of, I pointed the backpack out to her. After some discussion she trudged back out into the dunes to check it out. At this point I was merely curious, and I was content to let her do the hard work of navigating the dunes.
I watched her approach it, saw her pause as though trying to decide something, and then saw her move toward it with an air of determination. She picked up the backpack, then bent down and picked up something else and stuffed it into the backpack. And then again.
As I watched her do this, a family of three approached me. "Is it yours?" they asked, gesturing toward my mother and the backpack. "No," I said with some surprise. "I just saw it out there and my mom went to investigate." "We saw it earlier and looked," they said. "There is a phone there, and some money. It is strange."
Eventually Mom came back down from the dunes, backpack in hand, and told us what she had found. Several empty wine bottles. A few bottles of anti-psychotic meds. Discarded clothing. A cell phone that had likely been picked apart by the seagulls. A few dollars cash. A train ticket with the owner's name on it. But what pushed it from curiosity to concern for me was the Spanish homework. It led me to guess that the backpack belonged to a high school student, who perhaps had gotten high and drunk and had either wandered off or was passed out somewhere between the rolling dunes.
Mom and I went back out together but found no one. I did find a digital voice recorder and some socks, which I added to the backpack's contents. By this time it was clear to both of us that the police should be involved.
When a police officer finally did show up at the hotel, not terribly long after we'd called, my mom left our room to meet him and I followed shortly after. I found them just outside the hotel, rummaging through the backpack. We showed him the drugs and told him about the wine bottles. We showed him the homework and the train ticket. He found pot and a pipe in the bottom of the bag. I told him about the voice recorder, at which point he tensed and asked, "Did you listen to it?" I hadn't.
After he was satisfied that he'd seen everything, he filled us in. The backpack belonged to a man who had been found dead on the rocks just an hour earlier. Not a high school student but a college graduate. There were more details, but considering the police officer's demeanor and the ensuing lack of press about the incident, I don't feel it my place to divulge them.
Needless to say, this was a shocking and depressing discovery, and the after-effects stayed with us for a long while. For the next few days, every time I looked at my mom, all I could see was her marching up the beach toward the hotel with a dead man's backpack slung over her shoulder.
McMinnville
I hardly know how to segue from that to the rest of our trip, but the fact is that we did go on, albeit with a little more gravity.
We left Newport and drove to McMinnville, where we spent some time wandering around downtown in the growing dark before deciding to do a little wine tasting there. Unfortunately most of the shops were closed, but there was one that was open: NW Food and Gifts.
When we stumbled upon the place, they were just half an hour away from closing, but the owner was in the tasting room with a young couple who were vacationing together. She might have been from California; he was definitely from England. We were invited to join the impromptu tasting party, at no charge, and proceeded to spend the next hour and a half working our way through perhaps eight different wines, joking and laughing with the owner and the young couple.
NW Food and Gifts is another recommended destination, if for no other reason than the sincerity and generosity of the owner. The shop also features food and gifts that are all locally produced, and the art on the walls are by local artists. Support your local economy! =*)
Wine Tasting
We stayed in McMinnville that night and headed out to the vineyards around Dundee the next day. We visited Winter's Hill and De Ponte Cellars. We may or may not have visited a third winery, which may or may not have been Domaine Serene.
The tasting fee at De Ponte seemed a bit steep to me, but they let us split a flight, and a couple of their wines were extraordinary. Mom bought a bottle of one we both loved and is saving it for some unspecified time in the future when she I and can have it all to ourselves.
The tasting at Winter's Hill was just okay, but I went home with a bottle of their Golden Nectar ice wine that proved to be super delicious when I opened it for a friend's birthday dinner to go with the pineapple upside-down cake. I would absolutely buy that again, and of course (if I remember correctly) you can only buy it direct from the vineyard.
After all that wine I thought it prudent to eat something, so we drove into Dundee and happened upon the Ponzi wine bar, where we ate some meat and cheese and ordered another flight of wine.
The End
The ocean seen and much wine drunk, we headed back to Portland. (So much for a short post free of unnecessary details!)
In September of this year my mom and I traveled together again, this time to Newport, Ore. for a few days and then inland to wine country. What I wanted most from the trip was for it to be easy and relaxing. I didn't care about having a detailed itinerary or trying to cram a ton of fun into a few days. For the most part these goals were met, though one incident, which I will get to, did put a rather disturbing & eerie spin on the trip.
The Sylvia Beach Hotel
I'd been hearing about the Sylvia Beach Hotel for a few years as a pleasant place to stay and a book lover's heaven. A communal library, rooms named and decorated in honor of authors, no Internet, and no cell phones allowed. Mom and I stayed in the Steinbeck room, whose most prominent characteristic was a 3D mural of an old car coming out of the wall between the beds, its headlights acting as bedside lamps. There were jars of Doc's specimens on high shelves around the room (from Cannery Row) and plastic frogs in the bathroom.
At some point we toured the other rooms, which are open to viewing during the day as long as no one is staying in them. My favorites by far were the J. K. Rowling room done up in Harry Potter paraphernalia and the Colette room, which had a fireplace, a private deck, and sumptuous decor.
The Restaurants
One of the best things about the Sylvia Beach Hotel is that it is right across the street from one of our favorite restaurants, April's at Nye Beach. The photo on the right, I believe, is worth at least a thousand of my words, so I will leave it at that.
We also ate at a restaurant on the bay, which unfortunately did not ring my bell. The most interesting part of the meal there was meeting, in the wine bar upstairs before we were seated, a handsome man in his late 30's or early 40's who seemed very interested in meeting new people. In addition to being handsome, he was open, charming, a native Spanish speaker, and had led and interesting life. But it seemed to me that there was something not quite right about him. Maybe it's due to my overactive imagination, but I got creepy vibes off him and would not have been surprised to find out that he was a serial killer. I hope for his sake that I was ungenerous and mistaken.
Although our hotel included breakfast, Mom and I opted instead most days to walk to Cafe Stephanie, a little place nearby that proved to have good coffee and excellent quiche. I highly recommend this place.
The Backpack
And here we come to the disturbing incident to which I referred earlier.
On the second or third day in Newport, Mom and I took our customary long walk down the beach. At one point she saw a hotel towel in the waves and took it upon herself to rescue it. As she trudged inland to deposit it on a sand dune, I took the opportunity to survey the landscape.
That was when I saw the backpack. It was about half-way between the surf and the treeline. No one seemed to be near it, and there was no one playing in the waves for hundreds of feet. I thought it odd that someone would have simply walked away and forgotten it.
When Mom rejoined me, the wet towel now disposed of, I pointed the backpack out to her. After some discussion she trudged back out into the dunes to check it out. At this point I was merely curious, and I was content to let her do the hard work of navigating the dunes.
I watched her approach it, saw her pause as though trying to decide something, and then saw her move toward it with an air of determination. She picked up the backpack, then bent down and picked up something else and stuffed it into the backpack. And then again.
As I watched her do this, a family of three approached me. "Is it yours?" they asked, gesturing toward my mother and the backpack. "No," I said with some surprise. "I just saw it out there and my mom went to investigate." "We saw it earlier and looked," they said. "There is a phone there, and some money. It is strange."
Eventually Mom came back down from the dunes, backpack in hand, and told us what she had found. Several empty wine bottles. A few bottles of anti-psychotic meds. Discarded clothing. A cell phone that had likely been picked apart by the seagulls. A few dollars cash. A train ticket with the owner's name on it. But what pushed it from curiosity to concern for me was the Spanish homework. It led me to guess that the backpack belonged to a high school student, who perhaps had gotten high and drunk and had either wandered off or was passed out somewhere between the rolling dunes.
Mom and I went back out together but found no one. I did find a digital voice recorder and some socks, which I added to the backpack's contents. By this time it was clear to both of us that the police should be involved.
When a police officer finally did show up at the hotel, not terribly long after we'd called, my mom left our room to meet him and I followed shortly after. I found them just outside the hotel, rummaging through the backpack. We showed him the drugs and told him about the wine bottles. We showed him the homework and the train ticket. He found pot and a pipe in the bottom of the bag. I told him about the voice recorder, at which point he tensed and asked, "Did you listen to it?" I hadn't.
After he was satisfied that he'd seen everything, he filled us in. The backpack belonged to a man who had been found dead on the rocks just an hour earlier. Not a high school student but a college graduate. There were more details, but considering the police officer's demeanor and the ensuing lack of press about the incident, I don't feel it my place to divulge them.
Needless to say, this was a shocking and depressing discovery, and the after-effects stayed with us for a long while. For the next few days, every time I looked at my mom, all I could see was her marching up the beach toward the hotel with a dead man's backpack slung over her shoulder.
McMinnville
I hardly know how to segue from that to the rest of our trip, but the fact is that we did go on, albeit with a little more gravity.
We left Newport and drove to McMinnville, where we spent some time wandering around downtown in the growing dark before deciding to do a little wine tasting there. Unfortunately most of the shops were closed, but there was one that was open: NW Food and Gifts.
When we stumbled upon the place, they were just half an hour away from closing, but the owner was in the tasting room with a young couple who were vacationing together. She might have been from California; he was definitely from England. We were invited to join the impromptu tasting party, at no charge, and proceeded to spend the next hour and a half working our way through perhaps eight different wines, joking and laughing with the owner and the young couple.
NW Food and Gifts is another recommended destination, if for no other reason than the sincerity and generosity of the owner. The shop also features food and gifts that are all locally produced, and the art on the walls are by local artists. Support your local economy! =*)
Wine Tasting
We stayed in McMinnville that night and headed out to the vineyards around Dundee the next day. We visited Winter's Hill and De Ponte Cellars. We may or may not have visited a third winery, which may or may not have been Domaine Serene.
The tasting fee at De Ponte seemed a bit steep to me, but they let us split a flight, and a couple of their wines were extraordinary. Mom bought a bottle of one we both loved and is saving it for some unspecified time in the future when she I and can have it all to ourselves.
The tasting at Winter's Hill was just okay, but I went home with a bottle of their Golden Nectar ice wine that proved to be super delicious when I opened it for a friend's birthday dinner to go with the pineapple upside-down cake. I would absolutely buy that again, and of course (if I remember correctly) you can only buy it direct from the vineyard.
After all that wine I thought it prudent to eat something, so we drove into Dundee and happened upon the Ponzi wine bar, where we ate some meat and cheese and ordered another flight of wine.
The End
The ocean seen and much wine drunk, we headed back to Portland. (So much for a short post free of unnecessary details!)
28 September 2011
Travel Plans: I give up!
Seriously! It seems like writing about these intentions jinxes them.
I didn't go to Montreal this fall (though Mom and I did go to Newport, OR for a few nights and then into Willamette wine country), and there's no way I'm going to be able to afford New Zealand this year, no matter how much I want to go.
So I'm giving up. Not on making travel plans, but on announcing them. I'll write about it once I've gone and come back, but not before.
Which reminds me, I actually do have a story about the trip to the coast. Will have to post that soon...
I didn't go to Montreal this fall (though Mom and I did go to Newport, OR for a few nights and then into Willamette wine country), and there's no way I'm going to be able to afford New Zealand this year, no matter how much I want to go.
So I'm giving up. Not on making travel plans, but on announcing them. I'll write about it once I've gone and come back, but not before.
Which reminds me, I actually do have a story about the trip to the coast. Will have to post that soon...
01 February 2011
Travel plans: past & future
In September 2008 I was going to Munich for a few months to study German and possibly find teaching work, but 24 hours before I was supposed to get on the plane my living arrangement fell through and I doubted my ability to find something suitable just as Munich was ramping up for Oktoberfest.
In January/February 2009 I had plane tickets to go to Madrid and Chicago, but I got a job instead and canceled that trip.
In April 2009 I had a ticket to go to Montreal for a long weekend, but all the flights everywhere were thrown off by the dense fog in San Francisco that grounded planes for a couple days. I only made it as far as Seattle before giving up and coming home.
When Munich in '08 didn't work out, I wrote:
"Plan to go to Italy in January or March [2009] for one month to take an Italian class and work on the novel.
"Plan to go to Germany next October [2009] for one month to take a German class and work on the novel.
"Plan to go to China in 2010 to teach for a semester at a Chinese university, to learn some Chinese, and to work on the novel."
Sadly, none of these plans have come to fruition due to life circumstances and lack of funds. (Though I have found other ways to fit in working on the novel. Hurrah!)
As soon as I got back from the Caribbean last month, people started asking me, "Where are you going next?" I find it interesting that I seem to have built a reputation for myself as a traveler despite so many failed attempts to travel. But I can hardly blame people for asking when I have managed to leave the country three times in the past five months.
And it just so happens that I do have two ready answers to the question of where I'm going next.
-In September 2011 Mom (and possibly my brother) and I plan to go to Montreal for a week or so
-In March 2012 my friends Joe & Linda have offered to show me around their native island of Maui
I'm also thinking about:
-Chicago this spring, to visit friends and because I've never been there before
-Paris in December 2011/January 2012, because I love that city and it seems like a good opportunity to try out the Couchsurfing network
-New Zealand, perhaps the week immediately following the week in Maui in 2012
My ever-growing list of places I'd like to go sometime in the future also currently includes Italy, China, Japan, Argentina, Ireland, Belgium, The Netherlands, and South Korea. These are, of course, in addition to revisiting Spain, Portugal, England, Wales, France, Scotland, Germany, Switzerland and the Dominican Republic.
I really hope I'm not jinxing these plans and aspirations by writing about them. =*)
Where else should I go?
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