(above: detail, cobblestone, Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA.)

They, the ubiquitous they who appear to know everything, say that it’s impossible to move forward until you look back.  See who you were to see who you are.  Observe what it is that led you to the place you stand, so that you can avoid the same mistakes, find out what works, determine the next step.

This morning, while the world outside my door is covered in sparkling frost, windows fogging up with no more than a breath, I stood and watched a crow circling over the yard.  I could hear her calling to something I couldn’t see, scolding and dropping into the grass.  Everything else was silent.

*  *  *

Just over a decade ago, I stood at a similar window.  I’d just painted our living room, and the smell of fresh and drying paint made leaving the window open a necessity, despite the fact that it was freezing outside in Portland, Oregon.  A crow sat in the Rhododendron bush outside, and the frost had made the cat-spider’s web in the windowsill look like glass.

Life was about to change for me then.  I didn’t know it at the time.  I don’t know what I’d have done differently if I had known, but I was so wrapped up in my own head that I couldn’t see the way the wind was blowing.  My father had just died a few months ago, and I felt cut adrift — a girl playing at a grown-up life with no real connection to who she was or where she was going.  The world seemed very big all of a sudden, and I seemed very, very small, and it was terrifying.

The crow took to flight in the morning sun.  The frost melting off the web was returning the world to a normal that I couldn’t quite reach.

And I went back to bed.

* * *

It’s so cold here this morning that I’m wondering if I didn’t accidentally bring the Iowa weather with us by accident, packing it up in the back of the truck like another set of silverware, wrapped in a blanket that smells like iron and dirt and cornfields.  I’m wearing one of the new sweaters — one of the ones I made with my own hands — and I’m kind of amazed that it’s done.

I have trouble finishing things.  We’ve talked about this before.  Endings.  I’m not good with endings.  Long and lingering death by neglect, I’m good at.  Definitive stops, periods at the end of sentences, not so much.

Squawking crow outside hops over toward something almost imperceptible in the grass, picks it up, and is done.  She flies up onto the overhead wires with it in her beak, unaware that I’m watching her.

*  *  *

Six years past.

I’ve only been in Seattle for just over a year, but it’s home.  It’s more home than anywhere I’ve ever been — and I’ve been to a lot of places.  I love waking up.  I love walking outside to watch the seaplanes take off — they take off at the same time every day, and I mark my hours sometimes by the sound of the engines.  Even though I don’t go outside to smoke anymore (I quit, while I was there.  It seemed wrong to take that air and make it dirty and black instead of fresh and green.),  I still go outside with my sketchbooks and pencils, just about every morning.  Watch the planes fly off over the Queen Anne bridge, Olympic Mountain ranges framed by it’s man-made boundary.

I’m leaving it, though.  I’m leaving this little bit of home in a few days.  I’m packing what I own, which, decidedly, isn’t much (by my own choosing), and putting it in panniers, strapping it to a bicycle, and lugging it all from the top of Washington state to the middle of Baja, CA, Mexico.  The way it’s planned, it’ll take me three months.

I figured, at the time, that it would give me time to think and time to heal.  That while my thighs were being brutally tortured, I wouldn’t have time to think about the brutal pain in my heart.  Healing in motion.

And in the interim, I’d have a story.  I’d have an experience that was greater than myself, greater than any stupid boy that didn’t realize how awesome he had it.

Sitting on the walkway, listening to the Eastlake traffic, a murder of crows talked and gossipped on the roof of the daycare next door.  I knew them, a little.  I could tell which one was which, from months of observation and drawing, and the oldest of them (I’d assumed, from his authority), was telling the others what to do.  They had a bag of fries.  How they got a McDonald’s bag to the roof of the school, I have no idea — it had to be heavier than they were used to.

For the next six days, before I set off on the trip, I found crow feathers everywhere.  Literally, everywhere I went.  I have some of them taped and pasted into my journals of the time — found in Ballard on the cobblestones while I biked for practice.  In Redmond, after a long trek down the Burke-Gilman to its terminus.  Once, I even found one on the passenger seat of the car, which boggled me, since the car had been locked with the windows rolled up.

I took them as a sign to take flight.

Which I did.

*  *  *

My crow outside seems cold.  She’s puffed up her feathers on the wire, making her look twice as big, and she’s moved herself into the rising sun.

I’ve got a list here.  2009.  What I did, what I wanted to do, what I had no intention of doing but did anyway.  Stuff I dealt with that I never wanted to deal with again, stuff that I didn’t know was even an issue, stuff that makes no sense, even now, in retrospect.

Part of me still doesn’t believe that it’s the end of the year already.  That December’s rolled around again, and so many things have happened.  Part of me knows that 2009 is closing down, and I’m not all that sad to see it go.

I’m puffing up my own feathers in the cold, trying to find a sunbeam.

*  *  *

December, 2008.

I’m here.

I can’t believe I’m here.  Can’t believe the way God’s machinery turned to land me right here, in this hotel room in North Carolina.  A thousand, million, gazillion tiny actions, seemingly unrelated, culminating in my standing at a window looking out on a green, rainy parking lot rimmed with trees.

I’m content.  Completely at peace, even though I’ve had to walk through fire to get to this point, and I know that not all that further along, I’m going to have to walk back through it again to the place this long hallway ends.

But for now, listening to the rain and my breath and the hum of the laptops in the background, I’m okay with that.  I’m where I’m supposed to be, and I know I’m going to be here for as long as I’m supposed to be, too.

Later, I’ll put on pants (because you know I work better without them), make my way to an unfamiliar Starbucks, and feel the machinery of the world moving around me in silence.

On the way to the rented car, I’ll stop just long enough to pick up a black crow’s feather, and paste it to a page in the Moleskine.  I make no commentary on the page.

I don’t think I need to.

*  *  *

A truck’s just gone by, scaring my crow off her perch.  She flies, and I watch her go, until I can’t see her anymore.

It’s cold this morning.  I’m warm, confused.  I had a flight path, and now I’m where I’m supposed to be, gearing up to do what I believe I’m supposed to do.  My life’s changing again, flight path veering off to the right in a sharp L.

Maybe all you can do, in this life, is look back.  Evaluate.  Watch your path change with all the myriad decisions you make without even thinking.

And then…fly on.

When we moved out here, we went from five thousand square feet of metal box, largely populated with dust bunnies and the remnants of mice, to an extreme change — 650 square feet, with half of it being at least partially used by a business I’d been out here to set up over the summer.

For someone like me, who’s been in a constant battle with her crap for the last couple of years, it was hard.  Hard, but not impossible.  Coming to the realization that I am not my stuff happened much earlier, by about a year.  Not that it stopped me from having a pile of books taller than my entire body, or a yarn stash that was still just this side of insane.  But not impossible.

Flip side of my tacit acceptance of the slicing away of my material identity is the husband.  The husband who comes from two people who own a twelve thousand square foot house, with no available surface area and no storage left unchoked.    Plus a huge barn.  And a huge wood shop.  And a retail store.  And several outbuildings.  And our house, the garage of which was full of their stuff for the entire time we lived there.  This is the stock from which he came, what he grew up with.  This is normal.

I can’t breathe when there’s too much stuff in too small of a space.  It wasn’t always that way.  I kinda thought, at one point, that I’d end up like one of those folks who is found three weeks after dying from being smooshed by a pile of National Geographic magazines from the 1950s.  I acquired a metric ton of crap there for a while, despite the fact that it made me a little uncomfortable.

We’re here now, though.  In a small house with lots of light, waving trees outside, and the potential for chickens in the back yard.  And I’m having to watch J go through a lot of the things I went through when I first started getting serious about not having such a huge Entourage Of Crap.  There’s a panic, I think, that takes over when you start ripping things away.  As if our stuff can protect us from something undefinable, some nameless threat that’s out there, and won’t be able to get us if only we have enough t-shirts to last through the next century without reuse.  It’s a sickness, but a comfortable one.  Like we’ve got a techno-nest, feathered with dead computer parts and thirty-six pairs of nearly identical boots.

I’m trying to be compassionate while he’s going through all this.  I remember the very real sense of loss I had when I sent Minnie off to the library to donate the first batch of books, even though I’d read them (or not) and had no plans to (re)read them — it’s like there was all this memory and potential that was just gone.

(Scarily enough, I haven’t missed them since then, which is probably not all that surprising.)

Anyway, I had a point to all this, before I digressed into trying to figure out what books it was that I gave away all those months ago (which, yes, I really did just do…go figure.).

Point is that we’ve had to simplify a whole lot of processes in this move.  Find multiple uses for things.  And not having as much stuff to play Caretaker for has had the unexpected side-benefit of giving us more time for what really matters.  J’s been able to streamline his show, because he’s not lugging around a bunch of extra stuff that he has to dig through in order to get to what he does use.  I’m not having to go through seven hundred notebooks to find old ideas, because I can type in a keyword and most of it’s there in my Evernote.  It doesn’t take me fiftysixbillion minutes to get ready in the morning because I’ve got one of everything, and ditched a bunch of extraneous stuff.  He doesn’t have to lug through dusty, mouse-chewed stacks of paper to find the books he’s using.  The list goes on and on.

It’s an ongoing process, but we’re working on it.  I’ve started applying the principle to not just stuff, but methods, and to people, too.  (Is it more to maintain than motivating?  Does it help you move forward, or just remind you of the negative?  If it’s negative or high-maintenance, what’s the point?)

There’s a lot of lessons in 650 square feet.

And so much more to learn.

Y’know…

If I was to actually go into the absolute Crazy of the last four weeks, to actually lay it all out on a timeline and try to explain exactly, in detail, just wtf kept me from posting and, oh, say, living my normal life?

You would think I was lying.  Or better, send the soft-spoken guys with the nice white jackets who would probably take me to a nice little resort somewhere with jello and shock treatments.

I’ll tell the story soon enough.  Suffice it to say, however, that I went back to Iowa.

And now I’m here.  With J.  And the dogs.  And all our stuff.  And everything is remarkably peachyfine and North Carolinian.

No.  Really.

Sometimes, the speed in which life moves is insane.  Irritatingly slow or so fast that later, you sit back, shaking the OMGWHAT? out of your eyes, wondering whether you really just lived all that or if you dreamed it all.

Wow.  Just….*wow*.

I’m still in Greensboro, obviously.  Lots of reasons for that.  I’ll go into them later, maybe, at some point.  If I could just stay here, I would, but I’m out of cash, and half this month’s IYSSC shipment still needs to go out.  So I’m sucking it up and going back to the metal box in Iowa for a while, just to get that taken care of.

(And try not to go crazy in the process.  CrazIER, at least.)

Anyway.

I haven’t just been sitting in North Carolina eating bonbons and watching trash television or anything.  I’ve been busier than before, largely because I’m working really hard on singletasking.  Multitasking doesn’t seem to work for me, and that frenetic, slightly-insane feeling that I get every so often seems to be connected to and directly relational to the number of things I’m trying to do at once.

I know.  Go figure, right?

So I broke all my projects down and started doing one thing a day, starting this past week, and it’s working much better as long as people respect my schedule and don’t try to hijack me with other project emergencies (which doesn’t always happen, but thus is life.).

Since this is a catch-up post, I thought I’d show off a few of the things that have happened during or moved forward while I’ve been here.  (Because I’m nothing if not an egotist.  Ahem.) :)

Oak River’s the new evolution of Happy Housewife.  Right now, there’s only the halloween masquerade ball available, but that little bit above’s the Main Street, which I’m hoping to have live (with the used bookstore and post office and antique store) sometime in the next couple months.

The whole concept is that it’s interactive — like a game.  Storytelling and perfume all in one.  It’ll make more sense when you see it.  I can’t wait.

Just a couple of the fun ones from the masquerade:

See what I mean?  Fun.

Then there’s this new one:

There will be a ton more things on the site this coming Tuesday, but the gist is this:

In ‘99, I was working for a little transcription company that was transcribing all the California Heritage Quilt Project interviews.  If you don’t know what that is, which you probably don’t unless you’re a quilter, one of the CA quilting guilds came up with an oral history project to preserve the lives of CA quilters for scholars and historians.  They interviewed a whole mess o’ quilting folks about their history and such, and I believe they even had some kind of exhibition with quilted objects from the interviewees.

I was talking to a friend of mine in CA at the time, and he mentioned that his roommate for the week was a quilter, and it sparked the memory of the project — some of the interviews were pretty run-of-the-mill, but some of them were really, really interesting, and it struck me that nobody’s really collected the lives and stories of knitters in their own words.  Not just the *famous* ones, or the “important” ones, but JUST KNITTERS, who use sticks and string to create things both functional and beautiful.

A couple of emails and some feedback from the Library of Congress’ Folklife Center later, the domain was procured and the resource-amassing began.  There’s a ravelry group (look for “knitlife”…can you link to a specific ravelry group?) for it, if you think you might want to volunteer as an interviewer or interviewee or something after the fact.  (Transcriber, audio engineer, writer, designer — I can use all kinds of help, I’m thinking.)

AS IF THAT’S NOT ENOUGH…  :)

Last month or so, while I was thinking about what Oak River needed by way of locations, the idea of a coffee shop kept coming up.  And I’d just seen in the local Starbucks that they give away grounds for gardens and whathaveyou.

The two ideas congealed in my head somewhere (because that’s what ideas do in here), and we experimented a bit with sterilization/drying of grounds for use in scrubby soaps and sugar scrubs, came up with (what we think is) the best. recipe. ever. for both whipped lotions and cream-based soaps, and I formulated five “flavors” of coffee-scented oils that we put in every one of the Recaffeinated Bathworks products.  Caramel Macchiato, Vanilla Latte, Cafe Mocha, Black, and for the non-coffee-drinkers, Blended Green Tea.

We’re still working on lip balm perfection and new labels (the new logo kicks serious tail), and I’m building quite a bit on the site (on Mondays, my ORT/Recaf days), but it’s all up over at Recaffeinated Bathworks now.  (Only the shop link and the about link work so far.  Next week….)

Okay, so…as long as I’m listing just about everything (other than L&V and IY, which I think most of you know about and which have updates coming later in the month next month, but not yet.  And the Gaiman project, Fates Three, which we’re keeping mum on until we release the first freebie pattern.) there’s this, too:

Ostensibly, this is why I was in North Carolina this time.  I talked about it a little when it was starting, but now that the initial trip’s done, I’ve been writing patterns (and enlisting help in writing paterns for design concepts) like a mad fiend for this.  And writing, in general.

There’s a ton of information about it over on The Mountain Sole Project’s website, along with blogs that I’m *still* catching up on.

So there’s where I’m at at the moment.  Prepping to go back to Iowa, working like a dog on stuff, trying to resist the urge to just mainline my Starbucks to stay upright. :)

I plan to blog more often as part of my singletasking plan, even if just to keep track of stuff for my own records.  My focus on life in general is doing this weird shifty thing that I’ll explain later this week or next, and it spawns a lot of bloggybits that I haven’t had a chance to write up.

I have a list.

Is that anal?

(Don’t answer that.  I know it is.) :)

“And what does a pretty lady need with this much olive oil?” he asked, sliding the giant jugs to the counter.

The cash register beeped.  $33.99 (1), (2).

I’m making soap, I told him, and smiled a little, choosing to ignore the pretty lady comment, since I’d just watched him flirt with the ancient woman who’d checked out before me.  He’d called her pretty, too, and I know a schtick when I see one.

“Soap!” It was more of a bellow than an exclamation.  Maybe a little of both.  “Soap with this oil?  This is good oil, for the eating, not for the cleaning!”

I told him that it’d make better soap then.  The kind I could give to only the people I like a lot, instead of the regular stuff that was from inferior oil.

He laughed.  Got a box for the three-gallon-jugs, and told me stories of Palestine.  Of places where they make Nabulsi in the traditional way, with only olive oil and water and lye, cured on slabs of concrete that have been worn smooth by the curing soap.  Slabs as big as a house. Cut, by hand, into rough-looking bars that are so mild and natural that you can use them on your hair.

I watched his eyes while he spoke.  The way they softened and shone with pride.  It’s the best soap in the world, he said, and touched my hand.   You make that kind of soap?

I shook my head.  I fancy mine up with avocado oil and cocoa butter and colors and scented oils.

He patted my hand.  Whatever you make, it’s keeping you beautiful.  Don’t change a thing.

The young man behind the deli counter rolled his eyes.  I laughed and followed him to the car, as he insisted carrying the sixteen pounds of extra virgin olive oil for me.

And all the way back, I thought of seas of white, uncut soap on concrete, and tradition, and the tiny connections that make a place home.

The sunsets here are beautiful.  Orange, pink.  Fading with an inexorable, unbearable slowness to blue and black.

Another day.

Gone.

*  *  *

A while ago, I screwed something up.

We’re not talking some little thing that’s easily fixed.  We’re talking something big, something involving other people and a couple core parts of myself, too.  Something easily fixed, sure (most things are, really), but the fading of it, the moving from the orange-pink glow of day to the enveloping blackness — it’s hard.

Really, really hard.

The kind of hard where you wonder if you’re the same person.  The kind of hard where you know that not only are things going to be the same, but they’re going to be irritatingly the same.  You know better; you know different.  You are different.

Different, but wrapped in the dusk of Really Bad Choices.

Lessons learned.

*  *  *

Is it wrong to wish we’d never met?

Don’t answer that; I know.

*  *  *

There’s a scene in Lilo and Stitch, as ridiculous as it is to be thinking about Disney movies at a time like this, where Stitch is in a small wooded clearing, trying to read a book about a lost duckling, and he looks up at the sky and says, in the saddest little monster-voice, “I’m lost.”

I cry every time I watch that movie, at that scene.  Even though I know it all turns out for the best — that this little blue imaginary monster finds his family and all is well — I still cry.  Every. single. time.

I get it.

And I’m starting to wonder if there’s a me to be found.

Just over six months ago, I sat here, in frigid temperatures, coffee in hand, talking to a friend until my phone nearly died on me from all the time spent caffeinating in the dark.  There were piles of dirty snow and wet December streets, and my hair smelled like mangoes and pink grapefruit.

I remember thinking this was a strange olfactory dichotomy.

Nothing about me was healthy then.

I remember also thinking that if I could just give it a year, it would all sort itself out, as it all tends to do.

Faith, I thought.  Have faith.  In what you feel, in what you know to be true.

Three days later, I strapped on the high heels and loaded the office into a bag and took off for parts unknown, for reasons unknown.

I took the drugs that poisoned the cells that made me all yellow and tired, printed a boarding pass, took a deep breath.

I jumped.

I always do.

To be honest, it was about time.

I don’t even know where “home” is anymore.  Does it exist? Is it where your heart is?  Is it where you grew up, have roots, have connections to things larger and more deep than your Self?

Or is it where you’re planted, where you grow out instead of up?  Where you put your heart, where it’s cared for, where it’s needed?

All I know is that I sat here, just over six months later, wondering how it had ever been half of the time I allotted.  Amazed that the lack of snow and streets was replaced by puddles and steam from the day’s heat, drinking the same coffee, and looking at the phone, thinking that maybe a little reaching out was needed.

Six months, a day.

It seems like forever, and no time at all.

So much has gone on, so much is going on, so much is coming down the pike.

Another year.

Can I be happy now?

Life.  In motion.

I took this the other day (Tuesday?  Wednesday?  Last week sometime.) on accident, on my way out the door.  I was checking the backside of the phone for lens grime before shoving it in my bag, and managed to click the dealie while walking out of the bathroom.

I kept it, though, because it looks like motion.  Like there’s a story waiting to be told.  Like I’m in action.  (Which, of course, I was.)

Like I told some friends the other day, sometimes it feels like I’m made of stories.  Some haven’t been written yet, some have started and faded to inconclusion, and some are long since complete.

I’m hoping for a happily ever after instead of a stark the end.

* * * *

There are people who live in my head.

Some would say this is a sign of Impending Crazy(tm), which it probably is.  (Don’t most writers end up going nuts and walking into the sea with rocks in every pocket?)  Entire towns of people, each with a Story, each with a past and a future and a little normal life, all going about the day-to-days of living until one of them has a story to be told.

Outside of my head, I’ve lived a lot of life.  Like, all caps LOT OF LIFE, even.  More life than a lot of people ever venture out into.

It’s that living that’s always kept me from writing fiction, but kept me moving forward.  Trying to experience just a little more, understand a little more, figure out what makes people tick so I can know enough to write something worth reading, or, to bastardize Wilde, have a life worth writing about.

For the past three days, when it’s quiet and my arms are moving and my back’s aching and I’m schlepping giant thirty-pound pans of brightly-dyed yarn from one table to another, my mind’s been telling me a story.  It’s not my story.  But one of those people, born in my head, won’t be quiet.

I keep living tiny little fragments of someone else’s story.

(And if that came out of the mouth of anyone other than a writer, I’d totally call the guys in white.  Other writers’ll get it, though.)

What’s bothering me about it is that I’m not getting the whole story.  I’m not getting the why or the how, just the big The End, and I’m empathizing too much.  I twist up skeins in my life and feel this other, imaginary woman’s ending.

One day, it’ll all make sense.

*  *  *

I feel like, at some point not long ago, I was standing at the end of a very long hallway.  At the end was an alternate ending, cellphone in one hand, his head in the other.  And despite my knocking knees and a heart that was threatening to beat its way out of my chest with the nerves, I looked back over my shoulder at the life I’d built for myself and weighed it against the very narrow prospect of building something entirely new…and took a step forward down the interminable hallway toward what Could Be, versus what Was.

I knew, as I took the steps and waited for him to look up at me, to see I was coming, how it would end.  I knew even then that it wouldn’t be pretty.  At least, not for a while.

You take the hand of Fate, and sometimes, he makes you stand in the fire until all the other, old chains burn away.

And in the end, you have your own story.  Fate has other places to be.  He only promises you your own story; everything else is up to you.

Is five minutes worth a lifetime, even if they’re a really, really good five minutes?

Or is it better not to know what you don’t have?

The unexamined life may be worth nothing, but I’m thinking now that the knowledge of what I don’t know can make a crack in me that’s so wide it might never seal back shut.  I’m bigger now; I don’t fit back in the skin I had before, in the life I had before.

My knees are just too wobbly and new.

And Fate, having finished his coffee and having pushed me into this new place with the Vision Of What Could Be, has moved on.

I’m not sure why I didn’t turn and run.

*  *  *

(And no, I haven’t been drinking.)

*  *  *

Less figuratively, I’m six designs in on The Project That Must Not Be Named.  Both my pinkies are numb from all the knitting, but if this Project comes together the way I think it’s going to, it’s going to rock.

In addition, the new solar ovens I built last week are working like a freakin’ charm on the Intention Yarns.  All of a sudden, I went from being capped at about a 200-skein-a-day capacity to being able to easily do five times that by myself.  When there are minions helpers, and when I get some more counterspace, so to speak, we could probably double even that.

And it’s green.  Like, way green.  Like, uses no external power for anything during the whole process, green.

I may be all smooshy and questioning a bunch of things, but at least I’m doing my part to help the stewardship of the planet.

I’m kinda excited, can you tell?

*  *  *

The other day, at the Big Omaha conference here in, well, Omaha…Jason Fried was one of the guest speakers.  (Jason Fried, by the way, is the 37Signals guy — the people behind Basecamp and such, for those who don’t know.)  He said something that made my eyeballs quiver.

Inspiration, he said, has a shelf life.  When you get an idea, act on it, and act on it now, before it’s past its expiration date.

(Paraphrased.  But you get the point.)

I have four billion ideas every day.  I’m exaggerating.  But ask poor Adminnie — I have a *lot* of ideas.  All the time.  In the shower, on the bike, petting the dog, squirting dye on white yarn…doesn’t matter.  They just happen.

It’s frustrating, then, to be one person, with one set of 24 hours in a day, and only two hands.

People constantly tell me that they don’t know how I do so much.  And the fact is, I don’t do any more than anybody else in this world does.  I just tend to act before the expiration date of the original inspiration,  get other people involved, and hand it all off so I can act on the next one.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere for me.  I’m just not sure yet what it is.

Maybe that’s a story I’m still writing.

Slowly, I’m learning.

I’m learning that there’s truth in the statement Life is not a race to be won. That Life, capital L, is an often-meandering journey, made for us to notice, observe, and learn from.  It’s work, but it’s also slow, sunny afternoons with budding trees and a persistent wind from the South, and warm dogs that lay on your feet until they boil.

It’s more than a to-do list.

*  *  *

Things continue falling in place for The Project this summer.  I need to clean up some things here first, but the prospect of six weeks Away has given it all a purpose again.

I’ve talked to so many people already in the area where The Project is taking place that I already feel like I know it a little bit.  I listen to the music, watch the travel movies they send, read books and historical accounts, and generally find context for things I haven’t seen yet, but will.

I can’t wait.

*  * *

This weekend, I have four days by myself.  This house seems a little bigger without the endless parade of stiltwalkers and Crazy, but I think I can handle that.  A break from the Crazy isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Time to take a breath, evict some dust bunnies, clean out the refrigerator.

Or just sit in the back yard, under the waving trees with their green-swollen branches, and enjoy the wind.

I’d bet on the latter.

For a while now, the focus word for my whole entire life has been synthesis.  (Well, that and change and omgmovetoNCnowplzkthxbai, but we’ll narrow it down to just the one word for today’s bloggy purposes.)

Synthesis, or rather, the lack thereof, has been a recurrent theme in my life.  Not so much from a negative connotation of such, but as a constant, nagging thought — why am I constantly attracted to/obsessed with such seemingly disparate things?  I’ve said it before, but I have this deep envy of people who have One Single Thing they love more than everything else in the world, and know exactly what it is that they’re supposed to do with that great love.  I don’t have that.  I have a ton of things I’m reasonably good at/versed in/knowledgeable about, but no one, overriding passion, per se.

By the same token, I’ve been a little frustrated with that fact sometimes.  I fight this propensity with undue effort and energy.  (Which, I’ve found, often has the effect of screaming at the sun for being so sunny.  This screaming has what purpose exactly? Oh, right.  Venting.  That’s about it.)  I think, wistfully, about giving everything up and moving to a mountain cabin somewhere and never having another interest again.   (Which, by the way, would last for about four seconds, until I started collecting wildflowers or rocks or something and turning them into tourist-gift earrings or writing serialized sonnets about flora and fauna.  I’m constitutionally incapable of being still for too long.)

So I was sitting here on Friday night, up later than I’d intended thanks to some ill-advised Starbucks earlier in the evening, and making a list of all the weird stuff I’m obsessed with.  Not just passing obsessions or interests, but the things that I’ve followed for some time, or are core beliefs, or that I’m  relatively competant with (which don’t drive me batshit insane to do for extended periods of time).  The short list looked kind of like this:

• Writing – blogs and articles and books and crazy emails at two a.m. and stories about perfumes and imaginary people.  I’m probably forgetting a type or two.  But I write.  A lot.
• The yarn thing.  Making it.  Knitting it.  Dyeing it all purdy so that other people can have a yarn thing, too.
• Media.  Old, new, doesn’t matter.  I’m obsessed with the medium being part of the message.
• Travel.  Like, road trip travel.  I did not name this site moderngypsy, back in 1996 (!!!),  without a reason.  The lure of and desire for the open road, despite my simultaneous need for roots, is strong within me, Luke.
• Related:  The concept of Place as a character in our stories, be that fiction or real life.  It’s what spawned and developed the next one.
• Community, and the way it’s formed, nourished, and interacts with itself, whether from an infrastructure point of view or a societal one.
• Journal-keeping/art stuff/the recording of days.  Which probably falls under “media”, above, but is out there enough on its own that it bears a separate bullet point.
• Faith, and the belief that none of any of this is by accident.  Call it grand design or call it being called or call it leaping without looking and hoping there’s a net somewhere before the big splat.  Whatever.  Concept’s the same.

I’d found a book I wrote back in 2001 that I never did publish as a book.  (I separated it out chapter-by-chapter and gave classes online and off instead.)  While flipping through it on Friday, I remember having the thought, Wow…this isn’t half-bad….I should totally write another book.

Because, you know, I have so much free time.  Ahem.

Synchronicitally (my word — made it up.  Tell Webster.), I found my travel journals from the Every Fifth Rest Stop project of 2005 –when I drove from Iowa to Baja to Seattle and back to Iowa, stopping at every fifth rest stop, rain or shine, day or night, and drew something from the area and wrote commentary — and had the same thought.

AT THE SAME TIME (wow…this is beginning to sound like neck and armhole shaping on a knitting pattern, isn’t it?), I was looking at a friend’s site, who happens to be an amazing knitwear designer.  She does these series things — patterns that are all related and serialized and follow a nice little theme for the month/year/whatever.  And I was thinking that something like that would be really, really fun to do.  Restrain the creativity just a tad, within a certain context, and let it all fly.  Because, again, I have EverSoMuch free time to even knit, much less do a series, right?

AND (I know, bear with me here), right about THAT SAME MOMENT….I get an email from Travelocity that mentions a particular destination for cheap-ass airfare, with one of the “Related Attractions” being a road trip I’ve been wanting to take since the minute I heard about it.  A destination with a ton of history, steeped in Americana (which I’m also totally into — kitsch and history tend to overlap, and I love that.), and accessible all of a sudden.  There’s a whole community aspect to it, too, and that whole sense of Place thing that I mentioned, and and and….

Okay, seriously folks.  Do I need a divinely-inspired Clue-By-Four, or what?  There were more little “coincidences” over the next few minutes.  Maybe I was just seeing them because I had that filter on the ol’ blinders, or maybe I just finally had my eyes open to what was going on around me.  Something.  It doesn’t matter, really.  The fact is:  it was all just too convenient, too coincidental, too perfect to be an accident.  As things usually are when they’re the Right Thing To Do.

Over the next several hours, everything started coalescing in my head.  Congealing, even, despite the fact that the word congeal makes me squick on about a thousand levels.  But that’s exactly what it did — it congealed into this Project.  This small-but-huge Project that brings in just about every single aspect of what’s interesting to me, which I now have to hope will not only remain accessible, but also be interesting to any other human that doesn’t live inside my head.  And that I’ll be able to get it OUT of my head when the time comes.

I have faith.  (Or, as one friend put it, God doesn’t ask you to the prom if he doesn’t think you’ll look good in the dress.  I love my friends.)

Today’s been all about the research.  I need to know, not IF it’s going to happen, but WHEN it’s best to make it happen.  I’ve been reading the histories and scrawling out ideas.  That picture up there is the mindmap at seven a.m. — it’s four pages now, not including notes.

(just as a sidenote?  Just now, while writing this?  Another email from Travelocity with an even lower price for airfare to my destination.  I kid you not.  I called Adminnie in here to look, because I thought maybe I was losing my mind and hallucinating, or someone had laced the starbucks with hallucinogens.  But no, it’s right there in the inbox, staring back at me and laughing in a faintly-divine-sounding voice.)

What started as a random collection of ideas, thoughts, and competencies have all been thrown into this giant melting pot, and have indicated a desire to come out the other side.  To synthesize, and finally work together.

It’s about time I could finally see what’s in front of me.