Blog: I Am Of The Mist & The Mystery

I just got back from spending two weeks in the Pacific Northwest. The trip started with a day & a half in Portland with my parents, followed by three days on the Oregon coast with the rest of my immediate family, & three days back in Portland before Evan & I took a long weekend to go up through Astoria, Olympic National Park, Forks, & eventually Seattle. It’s all part of an annual excursion that my family takes.

You see, every year my parents put together a family vacation/reunion of sorts that includes both my parents, Evan & myself, my sister & her family, & my cousin Jackie & her family. This tradition started at Table Rock Lake about fiver years ago, but has since migrated around the continental US. We did San Diego, California one year, Winter Park, Colorado another, & then this year we decided was going to be for Portland, Oregon.

If you were unaware, Portland, Oregon is actually the place of my birth. My parents had moved up to Portland from Kansas City a couple of years prior to my birth with my already birthed sister & lived there until just before my fourth birthday. My dad eventually took a job in Eugene for a while & I spent a portion of the summer with him there. Additionally, we used to frequent Portland & I even spent a couple of summers in Seaside with my friend Carson’s extended family in high school. This trip made me fully come to the realization that, for whatever reason, the Pacific Northwest (PNW) has always felt more like home than Kansas, even though I grew up there. I didn’t fully understand why that was until these last couple of weeks or so & I think, after some time decompressing upon arrival back home coupled with some deep introspection, pattern recognition, & meditation, I am starting to understand why.

I think it is worth noting that I am definitely the black sheep of my family, as this is what a lot of this blog will center around. That dissonance. I’m the artist, the one that lives in another state, the world traveller, the queer one, the leftist, the activist, the deconstructed, the one who is a bit “woo woo,” the one who has actually gone to therapy, the progressive, the adventurous, the diagnosed neurodivergent, the fact checker, the empathetic, the reader, etc. etc. etc., you get the picture I’m painting. So for all intents & purposes, I feel that I seldom fit in with my family. I feel like I am the odd man out & that was really hard for me for a very long time.

If I’m being real, I would argue that it’s still hard for me. I see my family & we’re typically courteous enough, but I never feel like I fully fit in. Maybe that’s partially my fault, maybe I don’t try hard enough to do so, but I have gotten to the point where I don’t think I feel like trying much anymore. It’s far too draining to try & pretend to be someone I’m not, especially if that’s the made up version of me that ends up winning their affections. I tried for years & years to change that, extending myself in all sorts of different ways, but every time I did I was met with either resistance, short comings, or outright rejection. It has been a rough, mostly one sided battle.

I promise you that this isn’t just a blog meant to rag on my family, or give you a picture of myself to sympathize with. All of this has a point, as does the introductory paragraphs regarding The PNW. I just needed to set two separate scenes for you all before I tried to show you the intersectionality between them.

As I stated above, I was born in Portland, in the heart of Cascadia. I am the only member of my family to be born in the Pacific Northwest.

I can hear it no, the ‘yeah? So what?’ of it all. Patience young padawan, we’re getting there. I am quite literally of a different land from them.

I know, I know, hold on. We’ll dive deeper, I promise.

When it comes to the argument of nature vs nurture, it seems that in the end, most of the research ends up pointing to the answer of the question actually ending up somewhere in the middle. It is both nature & nurture that contribute to who a person is & who they will become. The nature of genetics & environment aside, you also have to understand that nature is woven into our DNA.

My family lived in Portland for several years prior to my birth & all through my gestation period into my birth. This means that all, or most of, especially in the early 90s, of the food consumed by both of my parents, all of the water, the air, etc. was that of the Pacific Northwest. The molecules that construct my physical body; my brain, my endocrine system, all of it, originated, or at least spent a good deal of time, in the Pacific Northwest. It is literally in my bones.

Now, I’m sure that one could argue that we are constantly becoming infused with our environments. Our cells reproduce & heal using vitamins & minerals gathered from the things we consume, from the regions that we live in. Yes, but the root code, the stem cells that went to work 3D printing a human being, those originate from somewhere very specific. A very specific time & place, & I am the only member of my family who has that specific material at the center of my mechanism.

So, while my family was built of the plains, built of dirt & grass, sun, wind, dust, flint, agriculture, farms, red meat, wheat, corn, dramatic seasonal cycles, & earth, I am built of the mist, the mystery, the smoke, the endless trees, & the tides. I am stitched together with berries & fish, salt, driftwood, cold water, volcanic ash, moss, & basalt. I am, for all intents & purposes, an entirely foreign land to them, one that they like to visit from time to time, but that they tend to migrate towards the familiar within, clinging to farm land & orchards in place of hazy beaches or deep abyssal forests. I do not fit in or align with them in my entirely because I am not of them. I am not of the plains, I am of the coastal rainforest.

I don’t mean for all of this to further alienate me from them, or to justify that alienation. It was just like something clicked for me that I’d never thought about & at the end of the day, it could be entirely farcical. I honestly just found it to be an interesting angle to explore. Maybe I’m simply searching for meaning or pulling threads that lead nowhere, but I’m genuinely curious if there are other people out there who would fall into this same framing. Are you a black sheep of your family? If so, are you of a different place than them or is there something else entirely different at play here? I don’t know, nor do I have the answers, it was just an epiphany that I had that sent me down a rabbit hole of thought to the above listed outcome.

At any rate, I hope you all have yourself a lovely weekend. It’s interesting to think of the people in our lives this way; those who embody the characteristics of the places they were made. Again, maybe I’m insane, it’s more likely than not, I just felt something click with this idea & I wanted to share to see if any of you felt the same or have a similar lived experience. Anywho…

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Blog: The Buck That Falls Short Of The Ballot Box

I need to get something off of my chest & I want to do so in a way that is both delicate to those involved yet still holds space for the harsh reality of hurt that I feel. I also don’t want this to just be some “woe is me” dump, because I want to share all of this because there is a continuous conversation happening around me where the themes of this story are concerned. With that knowledge in mind I wanted to get on here & convey this feeling & this pit that eternally resides in my stomach because I know there are others out there coping with the same feelings & many of you have been for a while.

It’s hard to make people care. Flat out. It’s hard to get people to change any rigid expectation or opinions formed through life experience in favor of seeing something they’ve never seen before, or thought they would have to deal with. You cannot make someone be empathetic if the systems ingrained in their psyche tell them that you might just be deserving of any pain that they may cause you. Unfortunately, that kind of conditioning doesn't leave much room for authentic human, non-judgmental connection. This is how a lot of us are feeling right now, specifically those of us who belong to marginalized communities or stand firmly planted in the support of those being outwardly harmed by the current administration in the United States.

I want to relay a story to you all. I won’t be overly going into specifics nor am I here to publicly shame anyone, but I want to tell this like it is. This last Christmas I had a falling out with my family, it revolved around politics & I ended up leaving Christmas day to drive home to Nashville to be with Evan who bumped his flight up a day so he could be here to support me. A gem. Since that day I have felt an ever widening chasm between my family & I. Communication diminished or outright didn’t happen at all until my birthday last month & if I’m being entirely real with you all, I am still very hurt by the whole ordeal & the continued support they have for someone who is not just doing harm to those within my community, but ripping families apart across the nation. I’ve spent months mulling over this feeling, wondering if maybe I’m overreacting, if my hurt is justified, etc., but not matter how much I try to turn it over in my mind or release the hold it has on me, the ache doesn't seem to go away. It’s made it so that I actually feel very uncomfortable going back to Kansas. The idea of which immediately floods me with anxiety.

Now I am in a position where I have to face that anxiety & hurt head on. You see, annually, my parents are gracious enough to put together a family reunion. The location changes every year & they do so because so many of us live in so many different places around the country. It gives them the opportunity to see us all together & build an experience & memory around that. Cute. On paper I’m grateful for it. In reality the booking of the tickets the other night has sent me into an anxious spiral.

I’m going to divert for a second here & answer a question that may linger following the precious paragraph; then why not just back out? Because, I love these people. Genuinely. They are my family. So I show up over & over again with hope, with the desire to be seen or heard because I don’t want to be the loner that doesn’t talk to or see his family. I don’t want my nieces & nephew growing up thinking I abandoned them for something I’m sure will be explained away superficially because those conveying the information don’t understand. I want desperately to belong to them, whole heartedly, & without having to minimize the parts of myself that don’t fit into their ideal image, but on the other hand I’m having a really hard time being the ‘squeaky wheel.’

I’m having a really hard time with three things in particular. I’m having a hard time setting aside the hurt I still feel from them. I’m having a hard time with reuniting under the knowledge that some of these people, who claim to love & support me, still actively & fervently support a regime that seeks to do Evan & I & our friends harm. & if I’m being entirely real, I’m having a hard time seeing the principles they claim to embody reflected in them.

There’s dissonance, duality. God knows I am far from perfect but it is bringing up an impossible moral quandary within me. I don’t & cannot seem to understand how people who, for all intents & purposes, are ‘good people,’ who would give the shirt of their back to someone in need, can be in support of something so heinously hateful & damaging. Not only to this nation but also those within it. I don’t understand how people who claim they will do anything to support you out of ‘love’ find that ‘love’ to be in short order when it comes to casting a ballot. I cannot wrap my head around it & it’s killing me.

Let’s forget me for a second. Let’s put aside the LGBTQ of it all & just focus on some other people. How does the buck for loving your neighbor, for “treating the foreigner among you as native-born” stop when someone has crossed into this country out of desperation & fear? Stop when someone is brown or black? Stop when someone risks their life to come here in hopes for a better life for their family? How is that Godly? How do you sit in a pew praying to someone who advocated for the poor, the maligned, the outcast, the immigrant, the sex worker, the addict, the “least of these” & told them to “come as they are” just to cheer & speak favorably about people being ripped from their families or sent out of the country without due process or stripped of their rights as a human being? How is that Christ like?

I don’t understand the dissonance & it eats away at me because I know how these people feel about people like me. I have heard it my whole life. I know how these people persecute & judge people like me. I hear it now. I have the privilege of being CIS, white, male, & somedays ‘straight passing.’ I know how people talk about people like me because they talk about people like me TO me with a cross around their neck & “Jesus in their hearts.” Then they sell out their neighbors, their friends, their family members at the ballot box in favor of the lies of ‘less taxation’ or the promise of a return to when they had more white power & other people couldn’t annoy them with the sprinkles of equality this nation has given them over the years. You are called to walk by faith, to let people know you are Christian by your love, but when the curtain is drawn, when the selection is private, you sell anyone you can down the river for a spoon fed lie about egg prices. How is anyone supposed to feel supported & loved in that?

Maybe when they come for us then you’ll finally understand. Maybe when they decide we no longer can get married, no longer live together, slap us with a criminal charge, or just send us to El Salvador, Kenya, or Libya, then you’ll finally understand. But I’m not holding my breath on that one because you don’t seem to understand when it’s happening to nationalized citizens whose only crime was being born with a little more melanin.

If you are like me & so many that I know who find commonality in the feelings within this blog, I am truly sorry. I don’t have the answers for you, clearly. I just want you to know that there’s someone out here that understands, that feels for you. I want you to know that your frustrations, your pain, your rage, your anxiety, all of it is valid & justified. You deserve to live in a world that sees you for the amazingly unique & complex person that you are & celebrates that instead of expecting you to shrink yourself or inflicts physical or emotional harm because of it. My love & my broken heart go out to you. Take a piece if you need, I hope that it makes yours feel a little more full.

From one bleeding hearted liberal to another,

Much love & safety to you all,

-C

Blog: Ponderance & Teacups

Lately I’ve found myself leaning more & more into ponderances & have caught myself marveling at the ‘through lines’ of it all. Yes, I know ponderances isn’t a word, but I enjoyed the cadence of it in my brain & the way it fits in form. To ponder is to think carefully or in detail about & adding the suffix “ance” insinuates a state of being, ponderances therefore being states of thoughtful thinking. There’s something shimmery & quant about that. Like nostalgia set to theory. I don’t know if it’s the years, the journey into mindfulness, the season of life, or what the cause of this often aloof status would be, but it’s brought about many connections in my head that warm the heart & bring me to marvel at the grand ‘happenstance’ of it all.

One such ponderance & the conclusion that it led to finds its way back to me almost on the daily in the form of teacups. I am a lover of beverages in most of their forms. Most dietitians I’m sure would scoff at the amount of “wasted calories” that I drink, but there’s something altogether entertaining about a drink that’s tastes invigorate the senses & occupy the mind. I am a tea drinker, of course, because of this love (in addition to coffee, cocktails, juices, craft sodas, tonics, etc. etc.). I find the combination of flavors, as well as their medicinal properties, to be fascinating & therefore I consume some form of tea almost each & every day. The existence of this love for beverages has also led me to the accumulation of many a drinking vessel, all of which sit in the same cupboard awaiting their specific & unique intended use.

My mugs, which are often the cup chosen for tea time, actually sit opposite all of the others in my kitchen. However, the tea strainers all sit with the other tea items; the teapot, the ceremonial tea cups, etc. & with the tea paraphernalia lives two very distinct tea cups that are actually one of the newer additions to the collection. Did I mention they also come with a story?

When I go to make my tea; when the water has been warmed, the mug & the leaves has been selected, & I go in search of a strainer they always catch my eye & I can’t help but smile as my fingertips drift over them to where the things I need are stored. They don’t look like much. They’re small, entirely porcelain white, except for the blue lined base & two little raised details that sit on either side of the cups; a soft greyed purple & a blush pink flower & a few cerulean & sage leaves. The tea cups are unassuming. They’re delicate & beautiful when taken in but when places in a collection I’m not sure they’re the first thing that most people would notice. That’s definitely not the case for me as they stand out like a spot in the night, anchoring me to lineage, fate, & a bond between peoples living on opposite ends of the earth.

I don’t know entirely where the teacups originated outside of knowing that they are Japanese in make & in origin. They were brought across the Pacific Ocean, packed carefully in with an assortment of other personal treasures & articles of a life being transplanted from one country to another. Through time & years they ended up in a home on a hilltop in Hillsboro, Oregon where a first generation Japanese family lived with their daughter next door to my parents & their daughter at the time. I’m not sure at what point the family moved away back across the sea, but I do know in the interim, in that time spent as neighbors, they & my parents became rather close. Just as my sister did to their daughter. I have no recollection of the bond or the family in my early years of life because I was a newly minted human being & I’m fairly certain they were gone before my time of memory, but when they departed this country they left behind certain items & gifts, two of which where these teacups.

Years went by & stories were told & the family became a staple of the history that is my immediate family though the years had drifted us apart. Technology had changed, each of us had moved ten times over, the children were grown & starting families & lives of their own, & the ties & bonds slipped nearly into fable. My mother would often sit & express how much she longed to reconnect with the friends whom they hadn’t been able to reach for the many years of separation they'd endured. That was until my love stepped in.

Evan is notoriously good for finding things & people lost to the internet, he should probably be a private investigator, & in the span of around thirty minutes to an hour, he was able to find the socials & email for the family now living in Japan. From there my mother began to reconnect which then led to her connecting me with the daughter of the family whom now I share an online connection with delighting in the photos she posts of her & her blossoming family. And then there are these teacups.

My mom isn’t a tea drinker, if she does, she’s a mug drinker for sure favoring something that comes in a bag over loose leaf. She has not the desire for the ceremonial, meditative aspects of tea brewing & drinking & in knowing that I do, she gifted me the teacups along with the story of their origin. It was a while later, after using them & having them as a staple of my cupboard of cups that I really realized the serendipity of what I had. The amount of life that these simple ceramic vessels had seen & endured all while intertwining two families from two entirely different cultural backgrounds & locations.

The cups were gifted or bought in Japan, where they were crafted. They were used by a family who crossed the largest ocean on the planet to start a new life in an entirely different country. They were passed, lovingly, to my family as their previous owners parted these lands where they sat, waiting the years for the one member of my family who would use them for their intended use to be gifted them. They would then reignite the stories & the desire of connection in which my chosen partner, someone from an entirely different family, from an entirely different part of the country, would reconnect the two separated families. And now they have a home in my house in Tennessee where they frequently spark my sense of wonder & amazement at the sheer tenacity of the invisible string that guides us along. Where they are an anchor point of admiration & love across time, space, generations, & peoples.

I know someday these cups may break. I’m sure out of clumsiness that some day I may accidentally knock them from their shelf & shatter them into a million pieces. And while the idea of losing these points of reference & reverence saddens me, I know that their meaning & their purpose will have been served & that their timing, their patience, & fortitude will have amounted to so much more than just a pair of teacups. Things are just things, stuff is just stuff, but meaning & love & companionship leave behind marks. We can never see them but they are very much felt & maybe, who knows, when the timing is right & if these cups have outlived a love I carry for their practical uses. Maybe they too will make another trip across the sea where they will be returned to a member of the bloodline that gifted them so lovingly to mine & the intersectionality will continue.

Blog: Now You're Family

I swear this is my last blog about Fiji…unless you’d like it not to be, I’m sure I can squeeze another two or three stories & life lessons out of that amazing trip! For now I’ll leave you all with this blog in hopes that it leaves you as inspired & hopeful as the experience did me!

One thing I thing that ended up being very different from my expectation of Fiji was the reality of it. I think we’re often times, especially in the US, thought to view Fiji as the perpetual postcard; a place where no matter where you look you’ll find picturesque white sand beaches, palm trees, & crystal clear waters & while that does exist it is definitely an exception, not the rule.

Majority of the residents of Fiji live below, what we in the western world would deem, the poverty line. The housing of those who dwell on the islands often consist of tin roofed, one room homes with an outdoor kitchen & while I’m sure a lot of us would find this difficult, the Fijians don’t seem to let it dampen their spirits.

It’s true of a lot of tourism driven countries where the lives of those who were born & raised in said country live drastically different lives than what those visiting are presented with, it creates an odd disconnect. There’s a very odd feeling when you’ve spent x amount of dollars to fly halfway across the world, hop on a privately escorted shuttle service, & are being taken to a resort whose rooms are bigger than majority of the homes of those who reside there. It’s an odd disconnect when you’re met with something clearly meant to welcome visitors that often has an “off limits” feel to those whose country it is.

This is not the point of my blog, but I feel its worth mentioning in order to set the scene for what I want to talk about.

While riding in one of the aforementioned private escort shuttles to go river tubing I overheard a conversation between one of my fellow divers, Elaine, & our driver that day. Elaine had sat up front with the driver & the two had been talking for quite a while before he mentioned the following. He said to Elaine that even though the Fijians may not have the room or the food outright, there is always room at the table & room in the home for one more. That no matter how hard life appears they are always willing to sacrifice a little room or a little food for someone else. I soon found out this was a common feeling amongst the Fijian people.

I wish for the life of me I could remember our driver’s name that day, shame on me for forgetting the openness & outward kindness of a stranger, but he also mentioned that to Fijians, once you’ve been on to the islands once, you’re a part of them. He said that to his people each of us was now family & that at any given time their doors were open to us for as long as we wanted or needed.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if the rest of the world worked that way? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we all thought as such & acted as such? That no matter how hard things were for us, we always have the time & energy to embrace those who come knocking on our door & say “how can I help?”

You see it occurs to me that the people that have the most, the countries that have the most, are often the ones who are most cut off to helping their “family.” We were welcomed, graciously, into a home in a village with around twenty people. Asked to take a seat, to make ourselves comfortable, & were then offered a portion of the owner’s lunch. A lunch that he had to farm for six months to get to produce crop. He not only offered us up the portion, but the entirety of what he had to eat for that afternoon with a beaming smile & radiant joy! Why aren’t we all like that?

We, in the US, have so, so much. A lot of us do anyway. Yet we shut our hearts, homes, & borders off to those who desperately need to be welcomed, to be shown through the door, welcomed, & offered a plate & a seat at the table & if they are offered entry it’s usually with stipulations. You have to give your life to MY God, have to work towards MY system, have to do something for MY cause or life. Acts of kindness & support rarely come simply from the goodness of ones heart. We need to cut the divides, to cut the ego & the “I’m better than” attitudes, & proudly exclaim to those who come willingly to our door “now you’re family.”

I hope you have a fantastic weekend & find a little moment or two over the next week to make a stranger feel loved, even in the smallest capacity.

Much love to you all,

-C