10/11- Port Townsend

I have a few beers in me. Only two, Chocolate Oatmeal Stout brewed by the Water Street Brewery in town, but it helps quell the giddiness I've had in me over the past several weeks of just being here in Port Townsend to a more even keeled sense of comprehensive expression... hopefully. This month has been a blast between having a month to simply hang out casually with my sister at long last to working at Tyler St. Cafe to having strange experiences into this metaphysical realm that has been delicately tapping me on the forehead all year like Chinese water torture and now seems to be breaking the skin, in a nice way.

For me, this time with Wendie has been quite over due and wonderful. Following the events I've already written about; the initial weekends activities, Todd's visit, and my Seattle excursion, things simmered down to a sense of normalcy and dailyness. She and I had this for about a year, two years ago, when I moved from Denver to Seattle back in '06 until I left again in '07. The intention then was to achieve what we really got a good dose of with this visit. A revisit to our day to day interactions that we had as kids growing up together.

To spare you all the full recap of my upbringing, Wendie and I had always been extremely close growing up for my first 13 years. I consider her to have raised me, and I say that with no jab at my parents, they were good overseers of my sister raising me, but she did a lot of the hands on work. My parents then divorced when I was 13, and she protected me as much as she could from the impact that will invariably have on a child, absorbing much of the damage herself. To my parents' credit they're main concern was to keep us kids together in the split, but also, and unseemingly contradictory, allowed us to make our own minds up as to who we wanted to live with. Wendie quickly and decidedly chose my Mom, so I then chose my Dad figuring with two kids and two parents we should spread the wealth. This lead to a separation no one foresaw, no one knew how to deal with, and was never remedied.

A few attempts were made with me following her, encouraged by my Mom, to Hawaii after high school, but the both of us were too much of a mess to make anything of that. The second attempt was my move to Seattle 12 years later which is the aforementioned move I just talked about above. It was nice being near by, but by then we had defined ourselves so much individually that our lives simply didn't coincide naturally, and so we saw much less of each other than we had thought we would. It didn't help that I didn't really jive with the city too well.

Finally we come to this month long visit I am now about to move on from. Sleeping here in the yard and on the couch I've been just... around, with no agenda of anything to do. Wendie has her active life that is orchestrated in such a way that visitors are more than welcome. I was able to join her going to work and help out, since she works in a non-profit with troubled finances and a need for things to get done that I am quite capable of doing. I would join her for coffee runs, grocery excursions, random drives, bike rides, or walks to just get out of the house. I was present when things would go wrong and she'd get frustrated, and I was there to hug, cry on, or talk to for those days of upset. In other words, it was real family again.

Toward the end of this visit she was starting to realize I'd be leaving soon and started worrying that we hadn't done any of the things we'd talked about doing when I was on my way. But neither of us really cared, and the ultimate goal of spending genuine time together at long last was finally being achieved.

Part of this was that I ended up sprouting a daily routine of my own. While helping her out handing out fliers for her work, Third Ear Project, I ended up finding work at a coffee shop in town, Tyler St. Cafe. They were hiring and I offered my 9 years of barista experience as a temporary fill in giving them time to really find a good long term fit. They also had people heading off on vacation soon and no one to cover for them. This turned out to be an amazing place to work.

I liked Teresa, the owner, from the first minute I sat down with her for the interview. She has a laid back, fly by the seat of her pants, approach to making the shop work and it completely works. There was a schedule board that I rarely looked at because everyone had the same schedule all the time and we would just move our hours around as we saw fit. There was no system for doing pretty much anything, so you were given free rein to do things the way you felt comfortable doing them. All of this worked because everyone there got along really well and were very capable of the job they were doing. On top of it, they were all hilarious.

It didn't hurt that all the people that I was working with up front were really cool, and really cute, girls to hang out with. It harkened me back to the good ole days at the Monkey Bean in Denver the way the place just came together in personality. It got me thinking quite often about the days I see far up in the future of finally settling down and opening a shop of my own.

What dawned on me, during this time in Port Townsend, was how this year has been going in the sense of traveling and settling. Back in March I envisioned these days of travel as being like those of my walk, constantly on the move. I pictured dreams of survivor man trudging through backwoods with Todd, learning how to eat plants, hunt game, and live self sufficiently on my own. These notions have long since been thrown out the window, but the contrast of the reality is stark.

The reality is that I'm not traveling all that much. As Todd puts it, I'm happily hopping lily pad to lily pad, and I love it. I've been getting my high adventure getting between lily pads through hitching, sleeping in the weeds, etc., but I'm thrown daily routine living time and again. From dropping in on Todd in Santa Fe for a week back in April, to staying at my Mom's in May for a few weeks, the five weeks I spent at Shelly's in Ohio, then seven weeks in Denver, and now another month at my sister's. This "trip", I can't help but think, is teaching me to stop thinking of moving around as traveling, but to see this way of living as just that, living.

Being alive is something I've been quite aware of lately. As stupid as a comment as that may sound, its the only way I can think of to put it. I feel completely energized and enthusiastic all the time these days. Not because I'm footloose and fancy free, but I've reconnected with a huge percentage of lost people in my life, and made just as many new friends on top of it. I've gotten quality, unrushed visits with family I haven't had time to see and friends I've long forgotten about. What is living a life if you're simply trying to catch up and maintain it constantly?

I've loved my time working at Tyler St. not because it paid for some upcoming things, but because I loved meeting the people there. Perhaps it was the lack of needing to go to work that allowed me to love it so much. I can understand dreading having to return to work day after day if you feel trapped into doing so. I know that was exactly how I've felt about jobs I've loved in the past. It was one of the things I really relished about film work was that you took it job by job. If you needed time off you just didn't take the next job that came along and gave yourself some time off. The worry on that was that you would run out of money between work, or maybe that next job wouldn't come in time to make rent. All of this builds to the realization that we spend huge amounts of our time on the maintenance of being alive rather than experiencing life.

Lately I've been experimenting with ideas on maintaining life. I've written about my new views on money as manna, the idea that it shows up when you need it and that there is no need to hoard it as a safety. I write about it only to share my experiences, not as a proclamation that everyone should be doing what I'm doing. This Tyler St. job was the most recent example of it.

Since deciding to take this trip back in January I've been figuring on going to England to visit Jane in November. I had no idea how this would be financed, but as time went on I've trusted more and more in the notion that money shows up as you need it. Leaving Denver at the end of August I still had no idea, and now it was two months away, but by then I did have the sense that work for that money would be in the northwest near my sister. Sure enough, Tyler St. came around and the money I made there paid completely for the ticket to England and back.

Over the summer I got wrapped up in reading books by Brian Weiss on hypnotherapy, theories on reincarnation, and developing ideas of the purpose of reincarnation. It started by Stacey suggesting the book Many Lives, Many Masters to me on our road trip, so I got it for my sister for her birthday in June. She loved it and looked up a hypnotherapist that lived near by, Ari Klein, to see more about what it was first hand. When I got out here and learned more about him I became quite curious to also see for myself, first hand, what exactly these books I was so fascinated with were talking about. I made an appointment with him, having no idea how I'd pay for it but with the option to cancel 24 hours in advance, and just trusted the money would show up. Sure enough, the next day at work four shifts opened up for the weekend I had planned to leave on. I snatched them up and that covered exactly the price it was to see Ari.

Todd and I have since talked about this theory of things appearing when you need them. Not just money, but people, rides, shelter, food. Since he's returned home his experience with Andre the billionaire he took to finding the Biblical quote "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." This lead him to really reading the Bible which to his surprise brazenly spoke, with no ambiguity, of this exact principle. If you go to that link I attached to that quote you can see for yourself. As Todd says, it isn't sending him to church, or converting him to Christianity, but it is quite validating to see a belief you came to through your own experiences show up in an ancient tome that has been worshiped for two millenia.

The hypnotherapy session in itself was quite fascinating to me. It confirmed nothing for me, but it definitely did reinforce questions I've been looking to answer and clarified a few points I now recognize as things to be wary of in myself. Primarily how I manage control.

I would be quite surprised if any would accuse me of being controlling of others, but I have long heard I don't relinquish control to others. While running the warehouse in Seattle my boss' most notable complaint, and the only one I can think of, was that I didn't delegate. Because of this I would work myself 12 hours a day to enact a labeling system that I devised, or rearrange the layout on my own to my design. Girlfriends often have accused me of being too much in my head and not letting them in to my real thoughts. I had never really thought of this as a control issue until I saw it as a way of keeping people from questioning my actual ideas.

I found it interesting that when I returned to work the next day, despite having the normal amount of sleep and such, everyone commented that I looked really well rested. In fact, I did feel much more keyed in. I'm quite curious to see where this takes me.