I haven't updated with a daylog for a while. I feel I should, because there is some important stuff going on.
I moved to the Oregon Coast. I got a job instructing at a community college. After three years of sterility and unemployment, I am now in a new place and doing new things. I have a job that is meaningful and almost prestigious. And I have dozens of miles of ocean and mountains to play amongst on the many days when there is not otherwise a call on my time. And there are palm trees. There are many more palm trees here than there are in Montana.
Every day, I think about what I am doing, where I am. And I know that, most probably, five years or so from now, I will remember this time of my life as a halcyon time, rich and wonderful and excellent times. An epoch that will be hard to summarize or rediscover. But every day, when I try to find those feelings inside of myself, what I actually find is: "What am I doing here?", "I'm tired.", "What if this all falls apart?", "I need to buy more bagels." Whatever is going on around me now, whatever essence is infusing my life, I can't feel it currently. I just feel like yet another man, rushing through life, late for an appointment.
In what is a conveniently easy analogy, the Pacific Ocean is a mile's walk away. Since arriving here, the entire Pacific Ocean has been something I've barely seen or dealt with. Even when I do visit it, it is more a barrier to my travels than an object of concern. There just isn't much to do with the ocean. Like Life and Being itself, it is so large and universal that it is hard to comprehend anything by thinking about it. I instead find myself drawn more upwards to the mountains, to the rivers and streams that cut into the mountains.
Some things are too big to grasp directly. Only when traveling in the other direction, and seeing their small, insignificant origins, do we come to understand what they are.