places you stay for awhile

on the circus tour i learned that everyday was worth about a week. roughly. give or take.

i thought it might have been because i was living on a bus with ten other people performing circus shows and filtering grease all the time. alas, it seems that i am either adopting an intensified way of living my life which makes everyday feel simultaneously short and eternal, or traveling sets you up for this kind of feeling.

It has been 40 days in europe. that is almost the halfway point. sometimes i feel like i have done nothing, seen nothing, experienced nothing. other times i feel like i am so alive and i am of course experiencing everything exactly how i need to. paris has been fabulous. we've been claiming to leave for days now but nothing. four days later and one attempt at an exit, we are still in our suburban apartment with our friends. So much has happened. I played at an open mic the other night near bastille and hotel de ville with a bunch of rockers. they were all wonderful and the host was an excellent character. a new father, full of raw humor that came off as distaste, but rather transparent in how much he loved everyone and what was going on.

bruno played a short set with a singer from the band NEIMO. ive never met a singer whose voice i have liked so much as his. his voice rang such pure tones and they traveled so far from his throat, yet they still held on to his body. he sang two songs by the libertines and one by the smiths that really touched me. 'and if a double decker bus crashes into the both of us, to die by your side would be such a heavenly way to die.' emilie doesnt like the foppy boys, but for a few minutes there his pete doherty-esque voice had her swooning. really.
i received the nervous pleasure of following their act. i was only going to play one song - crush in the ghetto, and i havent sang for others since circus tour but i dont count that, so maybe even since february. but i ended up singing three; two jolie holland songs and one saruh lacoff song. thats me. saruh lacoff. i feel like my voice changed from the moment i got up there and sat on the little performer's stool. it floated right out of my throat like it wasnt even coming from me and it trilled and flowed so smooth and sweetly. never heard that sound before. but then again, i've never felt that song truly before, or any song of such emotion. different states of being make your body move differently.

i was sick for three days here in paris so emilie spent some of the time alone while i stayed inside sleeping, playing guitar, and having a little wrestling match with my brain. charming, i know. paris is a fabulous city. full of people who are paying attention. i've had plenty of momentary connections with people which i feel like i havent experienced anywhere since ireland. at least not so prevalently. people in cars stopped at lights, people on the train, people on the street, people at the open mic. it's an old towne, but it has such a feeling to it, it radiates something fierce and elegant. its architecture is stunning and so magnificent to behold. there are old fountain baths in between creperies, notre dame towers over the seine, the hotel de ville is just another beautiful building in the city. and montmartre. where do you begin to describe the feeling of being in a music box in ballet shoes pirouetting down the hilly sidewalks at night. le cafe du amelie poulain. le cemetaire - city of the dead. such beauty. le moulin rouge with its neo bourgesie tourists awaiting a cabaret of fine french women. le arch du triumph with the list of battles won by sir napoleon dynamite...bonaparte. under PETIT is TESTE. PETIT TESTE.

and of course le LOUVRE. I spent three hours yesterday wandering through a jungle of egyptian statues, artifacts, scrolls; sarcophogi, and of course, the most holy, the book of the dead. I sat beside a statue of isis for forty minutes in awe of her. the eyptians worshipped her so fiercely as a symbol of femininity, joy, love, and music, and you begin to feel that spirit living inside you when you focus on her long enough. ive been pretty fascinated with her for the last year but didnt learn more than archetypal information. makes me want to study archaeology. it also makes me realize what a godless world we live in. at this point in history i feel like religion has turned so many away from any notion of god that can exist. a feeling of oneness, or a feeling that there is something grander than ourselves. the egyptians, among others, worshipped the sun above all, as it brought with it warmth to grow crops, a beginning and end to the flooding nile, and a return of the spirits of the dead. osiris was said to govern the world during the day and the underworld at night with the setting of the sun. the setting sun did not disappear, it instead traveled to light the underworld.

i have observed these forces for the past year and a half. I feel like that has been the focus of this time...figure out how to give love purely (which essentially meant working out shit with my family) and paying attention to the changing seasons, where different feelings manifested in my body, and various healing traditions. giving thanks for my food and feeling ecstatic, and watching gabby die. it was all with consciousness and understanding that there is great beauty in everything and it is all inextricably connected. nothing is separate and when we die we dont disappear either, we just let go of our bodies and our souls release themselves into the ethers where it is easier to remember that everything is connected. that's what i learned when gabby died. so this has been a god-searching year in a godless world, and there i was yesterday in the louvre looking at relics of egyptian culture which are steeped in spirituality, and i couldnt help feeling like i belonged somewhere. ah, too bad i missed the boat - by many thousands of years to be exact. shame.

but those egyptians...stone carvings, blue dyes, wood working, metal work, nature worship, irrigation systems, medical technology and mummification. When a person died, they buried them with statuettes whose purpose was to perform the agricultural duties for the deceased. even after death, the dead were said to occupy the earth at daytime and were not exempt from their agricultural duties.

it made me want to study the human body. nursing school, become a midwife. so many things to do with my life. study music, study anatomy, natural medicine, archaeology, geology.

so ok. moral of story is dont travel for a month and a week without taking a day or two off, and give yourself a mental and emotional break too. the other moral, is to take some personal time if you are traveling with someone else so that you dont become too grumpy. the other moral is not to eat only cheese and chocolate. the other other other moral is to remember you are loved at home. the world is your oyster. but the most important moral, is to balance time between cities and nature because otherwise all else will be lost in the imbalance.

i feel like this is the part of our journey that starts to pick up and soon we are going to be moving at the speed of light on the most beautiful beaches in the sunshine and relative warmth of the northern hemisphere in november. southern france. Madrid. Andalusia, sending little thoughts and wishes to morocco on the wind, but only thoughts and wishes. and then the western coast of spain, up to barcelona, and a flight to roma. rome for a day, and a trip down the east coast to amalfi for a week. a day in isernia, a three day hitch to venice where emilie and i go separate ways on december 12, and i fly back to my beautiful ireland for four more days in wport until my flight home to new york city.

i dont know the point of hitch hiking on a foreign continent other than to remind yourself constantly that you are alive and the world is an incredible place. when you set yourself up in risky situations as such where you are putting your fate in someone else's hands, you have no choice but to acknowledge your life and your mortality and when people go so far out of their way to help you and to listen to your story, you realize that the things people tell you to fear are outweighed by the beauty of the world. moira told me this summer that she believes the world takes the best care of dreamers and wanderers, but i think more truly it takes the best care of lovers and optimists. maybe all of those identities overlap. i thought for awhile that i was destined to a life of wandering and caravans. i dont know so much anymore. i love this movement and i love seeing the world, breathing in the air of different countries, talking to people from different places, but it makes me want a space of my own. a space like my cabin. i loved that cabin. In the middle of the woods with a big enough bed, the sun right in my eyes at 630 every morning, and just enough space to do yoga and have a little space for meditation and practice. endless woods to walk through. i want to make that space again. what i learned then was that i couldnt live in the middle of the country without balancing my time in the city. i need balance. whether i am living in the city and spending time in the wilderness or vice versa, i dont know. but i need both.

so, new york will hold that space for me when i return. i dont know where i will live, but it will be the cave, the cabin...sacred space.

alright, little friends. i miss you all. i hope you are all happy and having your own fabulous adventures. maybe they involve three day long hitches to belgium from berlin, or maybe they involve cuddling with someone you love, or maybe they involve reading, or maybe exploring abandoned buildings. either way, I hope you are all living beautiful stories. i hope your homes are cozy and you bleed all over your sheets. not someone else's sheets though.