Damnit. I just crafted a post that took me nearly two hours to compose, and described why absolute honesty and openness in all matters would solve all of society's biggest problems...and when I hit the spell check button it entirely disappeared. It's true! It really is! Now I'm irked and not going to rewrite it all. Society be damned. But... I will recap.

Mostly I just wanted to say that I think honesty, absolute raw and consistent honesty, combined with the dissolution of secrets and white lies would change the world. No one would ask if their ass looked big, had they taken an honest look at themselves, so no one would need to feel compelled to tell a white lie, and in fact, to do so would be a great indiscretion, instead of vice versa. White lies lead to a series of honesty-hindering self-beliefs that don't encourage or nurture self-growth which leads to self-confidence and independence, thus fostering personal responsibility, thus fertilizing our decaying society when abandoned.

Raw honesty and openness might sting at first, but I'm certain with gentle tending and persistence, it causes the most fruitful and beautiful changes in ourselves, our relationships, our society, and our world. Raw honesty and openness with no euphimistic spins or cover-ups would create a comparative Eutopia to the world in which we dwell at present.

What do you know today? What truths? Before I ask a question that is likely to elicit a white lie type response, I have to remember to stop myself and ask why? What is this really? What am I really feeling? What do I really want from the person I am about to ask this question of? Quite often the answer I hear myself reply with is not at all related to the answer to the question I almost asked, and the answer I'd have gotten would have filled me up about as much as a gulp of air accidentally swallowed and later released as gas.

I'll plug in an example... While I might have asked, "Honey, do these pants make my ass look big?" I stop myself, and think, and what I realize when I do, is that I probably meant to ask, "Do you not only accept me the way I am, but like me the way I am?" and instead I choose to ask nothing, because now that I've identified the real question, I've also identified the emotions behind it, and I know the answer to the question, anyway; I know that through your previous actions and words, you've told me, (one way or the other) probably will again, and when you choose to express these things, they hold much more value than if I were to ask you, and you had complied in a white lie style. I've identified that for some reason, I'm really feeling that I need reassurance from you, and I know that I can tell you that in honest and meaningful ways that will be far more productive and offer growth--than if I ask you if my ass looks big. I might as well be asking if you want fries with that... Hollow answers to hollow questions--is this the food of America? The extent of our ability to relate to each other and know each other?! In the name of politeness?!

Next time I find myself in the position to tell a white lie, or take my time to compose gentle words of honesty, I intend to be honest, and encourage growth, instead of foster inflated ideas due to the dishonest nature of white lies. And if in doing so I have to be open enough to admit deficiencies I may be feeling, then I'll do that as well. It only serves to further complicate matters when one tells a lie, any kind of lie. While I can't manage the implications of trying to change the world, I can make a go at it, one interaction at a time. Being absolutely honest with ones self and others certainly takes practice, but like any other discipline, once mastered, its rewards are limitless.

This Mountain/Desert Life

Been here since Labor day. The beginning of September, and the changing of the seasons is blowing in these mountains as surely as the sage grows in this desert. In fact, the winds had begun blowing in the daytime the very day I arrived; here that always means the on-set of autumn. Days so hot you sweat and evenings that make you go looking for the feather quilt, stored in a chest drawer or on a closet shelf somewhere late last spring. The features here though, that make it home to me, are the huge clear blue daytime skies, always intensely blue, regardless of season--and the clear inky night skies dotted with bright glittering stars and constellations. On occassion, one can see the northern lights from this hilltop. It's really a lovely place.

It makes up for the rattlesnake I had to remove between my parking spot and my front door. It makes up for the flat tire I got because I'm driving on rocks the size of mellons for at least an hour a day up and down this 10 mile gravel road. The nearest bus stop is 15 miles from here, and I don't really mind the drive, although it is eating the rubber from my Bravada's shoes in an endlessly hungry way.

Everything is slow here. It's slow to come and go from here, which is a solid indicator of all things about living here. Dial-up internet is slow. Going to the grocery store is slow, getting the mail takes 20 minutes, to and from the bus stop, 50 minutes. The days are easy and slow. We build things here, we create. Mom and I canned salsa and peaches all week last week. This week I'm building a kennel outside the barn window so the barn cats may go inside and out, without worry that they'll stray and be found by a hungry cyote, as several of their predecessors have.

The cyotes are neat. Orion has found his singing voice, he'd never howled with cyotes before we arrived. He's so funny when he does it--his voice haunting and filled with longing so deep-rooted it's moving. Mom feeds her four dogs on a raw diet, and has been introducing Orion to turkey necks and chicken gizzards. He thinks he's died and gone to doggie heaven, I'm certain he doesn't believe a better place could exist in the world.

There's a military training facility very near us; it is after all, the desert. They are playing war games this week and the windows rattle like an earthquake hitting when they let loose their bombs and flame throwers, and whatever other weapons they are testing at the moment. For the last several days and for the next several, I will imagine the terror of the Iraqi people with more than just my vivid imagination. They shake the ground, they blow pieces of mountains apart. What if they miss, sometimes I wonder...

There is a forest fire burning somewhere between Wenas and Ellensburg, along the Old Ellensburg pass. It's a logging road that goes through Manastash ridge, one of my favorite places to camp. It's filled the whole canyon with smoke since yesterday afternoon. I heard a helicopter and I thought maybe it was transporting water to help put it out, but when I went out and looked, it was just a low flying military helicopter. They buzz this place often when they are playing their war games.

Yes, autumn has begun to weave it's way. I used to hate the fall, because everything was dying and dead, and the anticipation of winter is cold and gloomy. But for a few years now, since I met Jaden, I've grown to appreciate it more. I have come to accept the idea that everything is temporary, and also in one state or another of decay. It reminds me of the dying raspberries we used to walk beside when I went to visit him in the fall. Those walks, we took so often, as I think back to them, to remember which was which, I think about what state of growth--or decay--the raspberries were in. Having walked the same path for several years, serves for me a constant reminder that the dying down in winter is always and conisitently as sure as the light and airy spring that will bring them to bright green growth and berry season. Here, it's apple season, everyone is harvesting. I see them every morning and afternoon on my way to the bus stop, picking, picking, like squirrels gathering nuts.

Once I find a job, we'll move into town. It's nice to be near the parents way out here in the hills, but it's nicer not to be right next door to them. For now though, it's what my soul needed.

Here's my photo-journal of my drive home from the bustop today. Hope you enjoy!

It was a hopeless situation. They were each desperately lonely, and bonded quickly by the absence of their significant others, during one of those twists in time when everything seems to be going so wrong that there's no possible way to untangle the web, but then all the knots seem to magically disappear because a couple of stolen moments make everything bearable for a brief period of time. And not just bearable, but flutter-tummied euphoric. The joy they experienced together, the empathy for each other's plight, the being together through each other's thick details, reaching out and holding hands in a time each of them was so alone and isolated; it was precious, if ethereal.

Zeph remembered when he took her to the place of his birth, an island on the dark blue sea, and they sat on the floor of the building with the broken columns tumbled by age and harsh ocean weather. There were so many stars, a gagillion bazillion doesn't even begin to do the number justice. There was no single unlit spot in the velvet midnight sky as seen by her eyes this night. They drank and drank, to the point where they were so slobbery drunk and slurring so badly they barely understood each other, and broke out laughing each time either made any attempt. He had been teaching her his native language and though she could write it nearly fluntly now, her tongue simply was incapable of the harsh gutteral noises strewn into nearly every word, at least it seemed that way to her. She certainly didn't speak it drunk, though he spoke their common language with ease, when he wasn't drinking, anyway.

He had wrapped her in his arms and she was enveloped in calm, though now completely surrounded by the whitecaps of a growing storm on the sea. He had whispered sweet nothings in her ear. He had brushed tendrils of her hair out of her eyes and run his fingers down her cheek. He'd held her when she cried, and in hinted-at promises she had allowed herself to imagine a better life. He'd held her all night long, resting his head in her nook. Oh, it was a life she doubted very much that she'd ever come to live, but playing with the idea of it, however romantically inclined it was, had been better than facing the circumstances of her realities. She had told him that if it was meant to be it would, indeed, be. He had said that in ways he loved her, and in ways, she loved him, too. He had wanted her, and indeed, she had wanted him. The rules were set against them; they both knew it. They bent them, but they hadn't broken them. It was nicer to pretend there weren't rules. Nicer to pretend they existed in their own space and time, that there was a brighter future, a night when stars would again light the sky, and a more perfect oppertunity borne of more fortunate circumstances would find them nestled together again.

He loved her that night, and she loved him. What they shared was never intended to cause injuries, because it was never intended to be shared with anyone else. It was just a night they took just for themselves, both selfishly and selflessly, and agreed it was just for pretend, just to escape, just for a moment. Innocent in its own twisted way; but you know, like Elphaba, Zeph wasn't really evil, just terribly misunderstood. She claimed it was all a game, an unreal moment, silliness, absurd even. Her ego would let her do nothing else. He heart would continue to beat, but it would mourn quietly for a long time to come. She remembered the way the moon had looked oval, and the way the sea water misetd her face in the breeze. She remembered the warmth and security she had felt, wrapped in his arms. She wondered about what could have been. She remembered he had told her, should their paths not cross again, he wanted her to know that she was his dream girl. That he loved everything about her; that he had what if'd the same possibilities that she had. It was a warm piece to hold on to, and for the moment, she did. Letting her eyelids slip closed, Zeph drifted off into a sea of dreams where the statues wore all wind-worn and the air smelled of salt.

Looking around her two bedroom apartment in Albany, OR, she wondered how she had managed to collect so many extra and unnecessary things in the short year she had resided there. All sorts of odds and ends that she didn't want to deal with. The old drivers seat from the jeep, which she had replaced because of it's broken mount, just before she had sold the jeep a few months earlier. Two large boxes of fabric from 1949 that she had accepted from a senior at the center and promised to make good use of. A box of ribbons in every color imaginable, that she would never use. Not four, but five boxes of canning jars that she had intended to can last years peaches in. Two extra cat carriers that she no longer needed. One of the twins had run away from her friends home that they had stayed in for a couple of months while she had saved money for the deposit on the apartment she was now packing up and leaving. She didn't even recall where the other carrier came from.

Now everywhere in her home, she saw these extra things, and more than ever knew this was not the way to do things. Not the way to keep it simple. When she had moved in a year ago, everything she owned had fit into a 6 X 10 storage unit. Now she'd be lucky if the things all fit into a 17 foot moving truck. A lot of her plants would not. The potted garden she had created in her back patio area would not likely be making another move with her. She hated giving them up, but the plants had already been mobile with her through three moves, some of them four, and she knew that they would use nearly 1/3 of her truck space. She picked carefully the ones she would take, and sent the rest three hours south with him, where she knew they would be well tended. Besides, maybe this next place would be *the* place, and she wouldn't need potted gardens that could be mobile, she'd be able to put things right in the dirt and just know in her heart she'd be there long enough to see them bloom. Maybe.

She'd accidentally ended up in Albany. Well accidentally in a purposful way. She knew from moment of arrival that it wasn't home, and she wouldn't stay. It wouldn't do for her to have her son have this be the place he remembered living out his high school years and making important decisions about his future in. There was no way that could happen. The place was not extraordinary in any way. Not terrible, but nothing good, nothing going for it. Nothing to spring eternal hope, drive for something better. She had a wanderlust, that's easy to peg, but it was more than that. It was a deep seated conviction that screamed--if this isn't right, do something, do anything, to change it. Keep trying different things and one day, you'll happen upon the right thing. You can't help but find it if you are constantly searching.

The packing had been miserable, it's always hard to know what to keep and what to toss. The cleaning requirements for moving out were two pages of detailed instructions that essentially sterilized and made new an ancient home. She doubted anyone else had ever done as complete a job as she did. It was exausting. On top of that, there was replacing her broken bedroom window, where a week earlier and in a tiff, her boyfriend had knocked the fan into the iron lamp on her desk, which had knocked over and broken the 3.5 X 4 foot pane of glass. And then there was the "professional" carpet cleaner she had hired as required by the move-out forms, who turned out to be a 17 year old kid who promptly added $50.00 to the quote she had been given the day earlier. By the time she discovered the bb hole through her son's bedroom window she was too tired to decide whom she thought had shot the offending ball of metal; she hated that she even had to wonder whether it had been her fifteen year old son, or her 29 year old boyfriend. So many ugly truths had to be faced if she had to question that. It would be something she would put off for another day. Or week. Or ever.

Finally, after a full week of packing, a run to the dump, and two to goodwill, and a two day trip to the storage building on her parents property with the moving truck, another day's drive back, followed by three days of solid scrubbing, she left Albany for the last time, claiming that she would not stop again in that town even if it was the nearest place to her and she had to pee her pants, she would drive by rather than stop there to so much as use a restroom.

It had been a rough move, and she was glad to be finally back to the one place she really considered home. Central Washington. Today she had three things on her mind, three things to get done. She would go get her son registered for tenth grade today. She would look at jobs and rental homes here. She would call and shut the utilities off at her old home. These three things she could face. Everything else would have to wait...