Thoughts on the ride home
Sep. 18th, 2015 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI'm heading down from camp, got several hours' drive ahead of us. I'm thinking about transience, a suitable subject for fall I suppose. I came to Fort St James and enjoyed the community, especially at first, but I haven't really settled here. I've met people I like, but I haven't made friends. I've been acting on the assumption that I won't be here for long and so I haven't settled in deeply because I don't want to form roots and then tear them out. As a creature of extremes I am either very present or completely disconnected; I don't know that I could have chosen a middle path.
And now that the end of the summer is in sight, I'm uprooting myself completely. I'm looking forward - already - to a sort of distributed Vancouver/Williams Lake existence that feels like home. I'm not sure how that will work for me, but I suspect better than this summer did in the sense that I won't be isolated, and worse than this summer in the sense that I won't be outside nearly as much.
I said I didn't root here and that's not completely true. These woods will always be a home to me, familiar when I return. I really would like to see them through a full season sometime, see the landscape in snow, complete the cycle that began for me with budbreak and will end when the leaves drop after this incandescent fall and cold begins.
Maybe I'll come back here after graduation, or maybe somewhere near here, and my first year will go like that. The future two years on is opaque to me; it's only the next year and a half, and then the far distance, that I have a sense for.
Either way, right now I an walking lightly on the world. I'm not shaping any part of it very strongly to my will or desire. It makes me feel a little immaterial, a little like a ghost, a little ineffectual. It's fine, but it's not a useful feeling and I suspect it will be especially unhelpful at school. I'm not particularly looking forward to adding a third location to my potential home-feeling places. I think that would be spreading myself so thin I might disappear altogether.
I don't feel easily pinned down right now partly because of that feeling of transience, of unreality. I feel like there is no "me" to pin down, merely a collection of waiting for the endurance test of school to be over.
I don't know. Transience. That's where I am right now.
It also occurs to me that a home is a lot like a partner where it requires time and attention from me, but provides me with support and happiness and engagement in return. I suppose I don't have time for any of those right now anyhow.
And now that the end of the summer is in sight, I'm uprooting myself completely. I'm looking forward - already - to a sort of distributed Vancouver/Williams Lake existence that feels like home. I'm not sure how that will work for me, but I suspect better than this summer did in the sense that I won't be isolated, and worse than this summer in the sense that I won't be outside nearly as much.
I said I didn't root here and that's not completely true. These woods will always be a home to me, familiar when I return. I really would like to see them through a full season sometime, see the landscape in snow, complete the cycle that began for me with budbreak and will end when the leaves drop after this incandescent fall and cold begins.
Maybe I'll come back here after graduation, or maybe somewhere near here, and my first year will go like that. The future two years on is opaque to me; it's only the next year and a half, and then the far distance, that I have a sense for.
Either way, right now I an walking lightly on the world. I'm not shaping any part of it very strongly to my will or desire. It makes me feel a little immaterial, a little like a ghost, a little ineffectual. It's fine, but it's not a useful feeling and I suspect it will be especially unhelpful at school. I'm not particularly looking forward to adding a third location to my potential home-feeling places. I think that would be spreading myself so thin I might disappear altogether.
I don't feel easily pinned down right now partly because of that feeling of transience, of unreality. I feel like there is no "me" to pin down, merely a collection of waiting for the endurance test of school to be over.
I don't know. Transience. That's where I am right now.
It also occurs to me that a home is a lot like a partner where it requires time and attention from me, but provides me with support and happiness and engagement in return. I suppose I don't have time for any of those right now anyhow.
