the last of the domes

so, i turned in my keys today.
both sets.
but only one mail box key.

goodbye 1514 bellevue ave
goodbye my dear friend, the church dome next door
goodbye ivy colored wall i won't see turn bright red with the fall
goodbye {for now} hardwood floors, high ceilings and darling light fixtures.
goodbye {for now} glass doorknobs and built in bookshelves with glass doors.

as an aside, last weekend i crossed paths
with several artists i was working with
last year when i first moved into
apartment #509 and all of them, in
some cases before i even mentioned
moving, said they remembered fondly
the photographs of the space and the
lovely details of the building.

a lot of stress earlier in this month
{and by a lot i mean can't get out of bed in the morning or stop crying amounts of stress}
came from a conflict i only yesterday put together.
a crucial piece was missing
but i met by chance in the hallway
one of the two parties involved,
and discovered he had never been mad at me.

so thank you forgiveness gods for giving me just the piece i needed and for giving me a chance to apologize anyway.

so onward i go.

my new apartment is unfolding.
a landing-place to rest for an undetermined amount of time.
a lot of things on my "to do" list
like change my address with the bank,
cell phone, post office {whoopsie}, school loans, etc.
boring but necessary.

in the meantime, i'm enjoying getting rid of things.
i'm enjoying more windows {twice as many}
i'm enjoying having a kitchen two people can fit in at the same time.
i already love my view of sunsets and the mountains and the water.
i love the sun that hits my back when i sit on my bed in the morning.
i love getting to hang out with one of my best friends all the time.
and i love sharing food and going shopping together.

i am looking forward to:
getting the last of the house unpacked
having a place to make art projects
having enough presence to blog regularly
and enough stability and confidence to start auditioning
working to make artwork with inmates of the washington correction center for women
the project working with veterans that is looooooming
the fun of my relationship to return fully after a couple months of displacement stress
getting my feet under me with my new job
working out regularly
hanging out with dear ones again
feeling put together
praying not just because i'm maxed out.
yes.

dear iphone gods

as i was internally griping about having to drive all the way back to whole foods when i would rather be showering, relaxing, or doing the dishes that are long overdue, i realized that i would much rather be driving there knowing my phone was waiting patiently for me on the other end.

so thank you for returning my iphone to me today even though in the history of my whole food's lost and found they never ever ever have iphones turned in until today.

thank you.

thank you.

and did i mention thank you?

top down

this is a neighboring building and despite my aversion to the salmony
pink color it's painted, it offers a nice view of fall taking over the
world. it's a mystery to me why fall seems to happen first on the
upper floors. i thought time moved slower, not faster, the farther up
you go.

quasi haitus

hey folks.
i'm still alive.
i realize this has been about the quietest i've been since my blog really got under way last july. it's been an ugly few weeks of a stressful move {is that redundant?}, emotional family reunion/memorial {also redundant?} and job training and i've literally not had a moment to myself in two weeks and probably more.

i will be back.
soon.
like next week soon or else i'll explode with all the stuff that i need to write about.

so, thanks for your patience.

the cousins

well, the single, female cousins:
kathryn, rhitu, hannah and me. kathryn wasn't grumpy as she appears
below.

(not pictured)
there's the single male cousins in another room: nick and my brother
dagob.

and the married cousins: brenna and her new husband, mike & my sister
bimi and her not as new husband, chris.

but the crowning glory goes to the newly (and still shyly) engaged
cousin, melissa, who kept her left hand strategically under some paper
the whole conversation she had with us but betrayed her nonchalance
with an extra stretch to her smile.

then there are the absent cousins: my sister, ellie, my cousins laura
and annie, and my cousin, laurens. they've all recently started new
jobs or new schools and couldn't make it.

the view

from the new apartment, of course.

currently listening to: my aunt kathy practicing the viola.

the empty space

it's not quite so empty any more as we began moving our things in immediately, but here's the gist of it so far. i'm mourning the loss of a few elements of beauty the new space doesn't have, mainly, the nice wooden cupboards in the kitchen, the high ceilings and the hard wood floors, but i get to live with one of my best friends, have a big view of the sky, a kitchen that more than one person can move around in and a lobby and building with more interior charms {the stair case below being an example}. oh, and lots of built in shelves.

sharing a wall with the sky

my time here with the studio and the golden dome is coming to a close. after much heartache, two halves of a sleeping pill and a little black cloud that followed me around for exactly five days {a la eeyore}, we've put the security deposit down on the new place. my space has not so gently assured me it's time to move on, upgrade, and widen my field of view and so for the first time in days my spirit is resting quietly finally knowing we get the keys on the other side of this holiday weekend.

not so coincidentally my life is picking up in several areas at once and i feel myself going through a transition pretty well summed up in the metaphor of transitioning from the studio to the one bedroom. externally i'm leaving my little private haven of a studio with its peaceful view of an ivy colored brick wall and the many shades of blue washing across my lovely church dome. the new space is a floor higher, twice as big with extra closets to organize and share and the view across the six windows moves from a little peek of mount rainier to the south and then a sweeping view of the city, sound and olympic mountains. internally, i feel like i'm leaving an intense time of self-examination and personal growth. the distance i have covered hashing myself out in the meisner course is equivalent to lightyears of travel in the personal development dimension of the universe and it's time for me to open. open. open.

i've been very slowly moving my way through the book the soul's code by james hillman. as this is a psychology book, it's a little on the dense side, so i find a lot of benefit in simmering over the things i've read for a few days. the current quote rattling around in my brain is:

restless inquiry is not the only kind of knowing, self-examination not the only kind of awareness. appreciation of an image, your life story as studded with images since early childhood, and a deepening into them slows the restlessness of inquiry, laying to rest the fever and the fret of finding out.

i'm still putting together what this means for me in the coming months of living at the granada four blocks away, but i want to call foward a time of rest, a time of admiring the view and a time of seeing the bigger images of my life and letting them stand out in their beauty. i've been working so hard to get to the results of my art that i've missed out on the joy and life i take in making art. one step at a time, nathania. and breathe.

so, here's to our new place, where the sky and mountains will press up against our windows and our bodies will lean back in return.

......................................................

i only have the image from the new place
that was posted earlier this week.
while i wait for more, i thought i would honor the dome
and all it's glory before we part ways.
i do still have a project in mind involving the dome
i want to photograph it once or twice an hour throughout one day.
but the days left are numbered. i need to hop to it.

small rituals of sanity

the five, or more often ten, minutes i spend in the shower alone
always seem to start off with me looking up beyond the shower head
to some indeterminate space between me and the floor above.

i don't know what i say, exactly. i don't think i ever even finish a thought,
but i always seem to send a few silent words
in the pointed direction of god as the water starts pouring on my head.

the prayer emerges in the shape of big and full words
that are drawn out, rounded and whispered into the sudden listening stillness of my inner monologue.

i say maybe just a phrase or two what is weighing down on me at most
and then i'm off to complete the usual showerly tasks of soaping, rinsing,
standing under the stream of water as hot as i can stand it and letting my body release itself.

thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds

{10:15am submission for the day}

today was a dark day.
i've never been in a state like this before where i was completely incapacitated by anxiety. i have always been able to ride out the storm. plant my feet. take faith. but the resilience was gone somehow and i was left to my ineffectual attempts to cry away the heaviness of spirit.

it took me two hours to make it out of bed, three before i could gather up any motivation to find food for myself and a little over four hours before i could deal with anything resembling productivity without melting down into tears.

9am - sitting on the toilet, peeing and i start crying.
9:02 am - i go back to bed and cry some more.
10am - trying to wrap up some little things for a care package for a good friend and suddenly i'm holding my tub of colored tissue paper and ribbon and crying again.
10:30am - talking on the phone to a friend and crying.

let me repeat, i am not like this.
ever.
even in the midst of the breakup of the relationship that to this day had held the most {yet false} promise, i never was like this.
it felt like someone had died, except that no one had.

11:30am
the turning point was an unexpected call from my father. he lives in rural austria. i haven't seen him since winter of 2003. this is too long, even given the tumultuous {read: worst two weeks of my life. no joke} nature of my last visit. we've had conversations here or there throughout the last five and a half years, but nothing major. my mother is the conduit through which most of our relationship passes and that has maintained the peace.

but today he calls. and he calls to talk to me. his friend searched me on facebook and he had seen me there earlier in the day. immediately i thought of my status update: today is a dark day and somehow understood he had seen that and was checking in with me, but he had just seen my headshots and wanted to say how elegant i looked in them.

something about his honesty about the photos and my inability to hold myself together at all lead to the clearest thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds of communication between us that our phone call ended up lasting. the words that came to mind throughout the call were: he is caring for me. finally. without any fanfare. without any request or anything. he even used those same words when we were saying goodbye. it's nice to care for you. it was cut short as he offered to call one of his friends in seattle to see if i could go over and be cared for in person, which i definitely needed.

it was an effortless exchange and it was the nudge i needed to start my way to feeling better. i could then get up, do some laundry, take out the trash and recycling and feed myself and pay bills. i don't think i cried any more until i walked in to the house of my father's friends {i consider family, actually}.

i entered and found them calmly waiting for me to leave my house when i should have been arriving at theirs, get stuck in traffic, walk in twenty-five minutes late, which, at this point meant i was teary eyed, frazzled and trailing a black cloud behind me on a leash of piano wire. he hugged me for a long time. it was perfect and in place of my dad who couldn't do so himself, though i know he would have today, and probably a lot of other days in the past five and a half years.

it ended a much better day, and when i was leaving their house, i got the news that we're just waiting on one more call to go through to confirm the below as the view from our next apartment. breathe, nathania, breathe.