Armstrong park
At last I am here, to report from the wet woods. It’s lovely and lush, and the water in the forest is milky blue. We have been here for almost a week, venturing out to check out local towns, sample tasty organic meals…about everywhere, including the Tandoori kitchen in Santa Rosa. Evenings are spent in our hideaway in the woods, feeding the stove, reading, watching movies. All around us are mossy green trees, random mushrooms , water gurgling and running through the mud between the rains. The life here is bewildering in its difference from ours, and makes me wonder how and where we’d fit in. It is a real, tangible, cold footed fear that is puzzling to me. Meanwhile, there are delightful and gorgeous moments of recognition, be it a flourishing artists community, sights of sheep and goats that just make my heart jump and sing in a silly exaltation, yummy food cooked and uncooked and, of course, the delicious nature. And the fear, above the survival concerns, is of the quiet and the beautiful, of the other way of living that i haven’t tasted perhaps since my childhood summers. Of losing a part of myself that is a true blue urbanite, meandering, feasting on the contrasts and on the faces. My fear is that having found, hypothetically, that perfect place to work I’d just feel too content to scream out, and not convinced that serenity is powerful enough to spend my time on.
We really warmed the house up by now. The rain has been steady and forceful, reminding me of a rush hour pedestrian traffic in midtown Manhattan. Being enveloped in nothing but the sound of water falling on the roof, on the ground, on the trees is strangely muffling from the rest of the world out there. Yet there’s an urgency to it, and the need to decipher so much. I haven’t been able to draw a single thing on this trip, but took pictures, which seemed more justified. I see it as a somewhat purifying time, though, feeling as a human lava lamp with things changing places as they should.
