Taos

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/garden/08idaho.html?hp

I love this house.  I love the idea of this house.  I want to live like this one day.  Hopefully I can afford it.

I fell in love with nature in Taos, New Mexico where they say the town either pulls you in or pushes you out.  The history of Taos is incredible and I could go on and on about it, but I could never do it justice.  I will just say that the town itself is a spiritual experience if you are one of the people it “pulls in.”

I remember arriving in Taos on March 4th of 2005.  It was not under the best circumstances.  I was a bit out of it.  My plane landed at Albuquerque International around 8pm and I hopped in a van for the three hour ride to Taos.  New Mexico, at first glance, is fairly unenchanting, especially in the dark, and, if you’re like me and you grew up in a city, the bare skyline leaves one unsettled.  Its expanse, its never ending horizon, marked with the occasional adobe or broken by a mountain in the distance, feels lonely and, for me, enhanced the deep loneliness I was already experiencing.  But I needed a bare canvas, a new beginning, so that I could redefine myself, which was the purpose of my extended visit anyway.

I arrived at my destination, a six bedroom adobe house on Blueberry Hill, but it wasn’t until the next morning that I saw my new home in daylight.  It was winter and it was cold.  Taos is a mountain town and there were mornings that the thermometer registered below zero.  The sky was gray and the ground was sparsely covered in snow.  What looked like tumbleweeds, to me at least, scattered across the brown dust and decorated the yards of the homes nearby.  The sacred Taos mountain presided over the barren land, its skull white for the winter.  The breathtaking beauty of it all eluded me.

It wasn’t until early April, when winter broke and my heart had opened a little, that I began to see how incredible my surroundings really were.  I am not sure if I became more and more enchanted with Taos as I came to life or if I came to life because Taos enchanted me.  I believe it was a solid mix of both.

I ended up staying in New Mexico longer than I’d planned.  What began as a month long stay turned into a year and I immersed myself in the culture and the land.  I found beauty in abundance in a place where I could not initially see it.  The endless brown horizon that terrified me upon my arrival ended up signaling freedom.  The mountain that loomed in the distance became a haven, literally and figuratively.  Nature has played, and continues to play, a huge part of my spiritual recovery/journey.

When I saw the house in the article I thought, ‘I want to build a house like that on Blueberry Hill,’ surrounded by the elements of the land that rebirthed me.  And maybe, just maybe, one day I will.

Old friends…

I found an old friend on Facebook last night and could not help but smile and laugh out loud a little when I saw her profile picture.  She was one of my closest friends during my freshmen and sophomore years of high school and the memories I have from the times we spent together are precious to me which is probably why my heart ached a little, the way you might remember a lost love, when I read through her profile.  There was a level of intimacy in my relationships during this time that I have not since experienced.  I think I was very vulnerable during those years, exposing my inner thoughts and dreams in a way that I don’t feel comfortable expressing them anymore.  So it got me thinking about friends – those that have slipped away and the relationships we still foster – and the impact each one has on our lives.

I’m a girl’s girl, a girlie girl, a huggy, you mean so much to me type of girl because my girlfriends have, very literally, saved my life more than once.  They’ve given me more than a shoulder to cry on, they have given me a lifeline.

My mother has always maintained incredible friendships with the women in her life whether they are a friend from grade school, high school, college, work, or now, one of her tennis leagues.  My mother’s impeccable example of how to make a friend, be a friend, and keep a friend paved the way for the amazing relationships I now share with the women in my life.  I only hope to pass that onto my own daughter one day.

Volumes have been written about female relationships and the intense bonds that arise from them.  I could write volumes on just a few friendships alone.  I know the ins and outs, the good shit, the bad shit, the jealousy, the loyalty, the back stabbing, the blind faith, the gossiping, the covering for one another, all of it equally trivial and monumental at the same time.  And all of it only something that two women, who have been part of the same friendship, can really understand.  I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at other women and asked them why they are friends with a certain person or that they have looked at me and asked me the same question.  The answer is always similar and it usually goes something like this, “You don’t understand.  We’ve been through a lot together and she’s…” (insert good qualities at the end).  And that is the truth.  The honest truth.  What we go through together and the different pieces of ourselves that our friends know, binds us.  The friendships that end or the friends with whom we lose touch, those never leave us, either.  I think that’s why my heart ached a bit when I saw my old friend last night.  She reminded me of a piece of myself that, while I left it behind a long time ago, still lives on in the memory of our friendship.

Sunday Funday

Ohhhh how things have changed.  Sunday Funday’s are a bit different for me now.  While they weren’t known as Sunday Funday’s back when and where I was still drinking, I definitely participated in them often.  Usually with beer (and the occasional beer helment) during football season or with Sunday brunches where food came second to bloody mary’s and mimosa’s.  Sunday’s were the perfect excuse to drink in the morning, which I did every other day anyway, but not out in the open since it was, for some strange reason, frowned upon.

This morning I woke up at 8:45am, had a great conversation with my dad, and then drove down to my sponsors house where we made pancakes, had a Big Book study, and went for a long walk.  It’s times like these that I can’t help but be insanely grateful for my sobriety.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still times that I wish I could have a traditional Sunday Funday because, well, they were, on occasion, fun.  From time to time, nostalgia will creep in and I will remember how nice it was to sit at a table with friends and recall the events of the prior night over a drink or two.  And then I am reminded of the fact that, with me, there was never a drink or two.  I was lucky if there were only five or six.  The morning always started off fun, but then the drinking (as a group) would end and my buzz would wear off and depression would settle in my gut which would lead me on a desperate search for another drink.

I don’t have to deal with that today.  I get to go on with the rest of my Sunday without living in fear that the depression will return.  And for that, I am grateful.

Future Tripping

I turned 28 about a month ago.  Sweet, cool, no problem….28, I’m alright with that age…I’m almost 30!  I have friends who have turned 30, are coming up on 30, are dreading 30.  I was looking forward to it.  Yes, “was.”  While I was home for the holidays, my sister made a joke about the fact that I am almost 30 and it hit me – holy shit, I’m almost 30.  I don’t even know what that means – almost 30 – but it felt, well, heavy.  So it got me thinking about, yes, you guessed it, 30, and it all came back to one thing – Sex and the City.

Sex and the City first aired in June of ‘98 and by the time I got to college, in Fall of ‘99, it was a full fledged phenomenon.  Here were these four amazing, beautiful, fun women in their thirties, each living life to fullest in New York City.  They wore fabulous clothes, dated handsome, interesting men, drank cosmopolitans, and they had each other to lean on through all of it.  Ohmigod, I, along with every other girl I knew, wanted to be them.  Hello, 30 looked AWESOME.  We would have Sex and the City parties where we’d drink and watch an entire season on DVD and figure out what characters we were most like.  (Side note – men HATE this.  I have had several men tell me that it’s so annoying that girls feel the need to define themselves as a SATC character…and, yes girls, the character we all want to be like…Carrie…she is the worst one!  Apparently “neurotic” isn’t a charming quality.)

Armed with the idea that THIS is how the 30’s looked, I was hooked on the decade to come.  There are a few problems with this scenario.  Problem number one, and perhaps the biggest problem, I don’t drink.  You could say I cashed in my drinking chips early on.  This means no crying in my cosmo with the girls after a long day.  This brings me to problem number two – assuming I’m Carrie, my Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte all live in different cities, the closest one over an hour away.  So, even if I wanted to cry in my diet coke, that would be difficult.  Problem number three, I live in Sacramento, which is a wonderful city, but it’s not NYC.  I know the city, I love the city, and it’s not the city.  Problem number four, the men I date, well, actually, that’s not much of a problem.  My dating life is pretty interesting.  Problem number five – while Target does have some cutting edge fashion, it’s not 5th Avenue.  The closest I get to designer clothing is my sisters closet, and that’s only when I am home.  Problem number six, and wait, THIS is actually the biggest problem, my life is not a half hour HBO series.

And now I am screwed.  Thirty doesn’t look so awesome anymore.  Maybe that’s the sudden weight I felt?  Back to my original question: What does it mean to be 30?

There were a lot of things I thought I would have done at this point in my life.  I thought I would have finished college, met my husband, or at least my fiance, have a career that I’d chosen…and while, in my case, I have had a few road blocks and thus taken a few detours, I guess I’m still hooked on the ideals that I set for myself as a little girl.  And I know I shouldn’t hang on to the “dreams” I had as a child and let them define my feelings around my current situation and obviously society’s standards play a role as well, though they’ve definitely loosened up over time.  There’s also this part of me that is ashamed to admit that I wish I was settled, or in the process of settling, down.  Maybe the impending doom of 30 is really more of a realization that I’m dissaatisfied with where I am at this point in my life….

But, back to reality, I just turned 28, so future tripping on 30 is probably a waste of time right now.

It’s a dawg e dawg world

So, here’s the deal…I have no idea what will come of this blog.  I have a friend who blogs regularly and I enjoy reading his blog and I’ve wanted to start one of my own, so I decided to do it…here it goes…