I did something the other day that helped me feel like I’m really in the Pacific Northwest: I went to Portland, a city we visited when we first traveled to this area in 1999.  I made sure to visit Powell’s City of Books, which my husband and I went to when we were here back then.  Something about returning to a place I had been before made being here more real to me, like I had closed an open loop of some kind.

What really did it for me, though, was crossing the Columbia River and seeing highway signs pointing to Seattle, the first city we went to in ‘99.  Back then there were no direct flights from Austin to Portland, which was our ultimate destination for a convention, so it was cheaper to fly to Seattle and rent a car to drive to Portland.  We love road trips, so it seemed like a fun compromise, and it was.

The Jet City greeted us with a freak thunderstorm, uncommon in this area of the country.  As the plane descended below the stormy cloud deck, an enormous bolt of lightning shot out from the clouds, striking a spot along the eastern edge of Puget Sound that glowed for several seconds afterwards.  “Welcome to Seattle!”, the sky gods seemed to say.  As we drove from the airport to our hotel, we marveled at the tree-lined hills, which were even more impressive the next day in the sunlight.  I instantly knew I had to live in this place one day, a sensation that grew as we spent the next five days driving in Washington and Oregon.  We saw Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Beacon Rock, Multnomah Falls, the coast of Washington, and what was once the world’s tallest Sitka Spruce tree until a windstorm toppled it several years ago.  And it was glorious to be outside in August without feeling like the Sun was trying to kill us.

Over the next 22 years, I never once forgot this place, frequently dreaming of moving, often during Central Texas’ blazing summers.  Whenever we told people where we wanted to go, unless they had been here themselves, they would wrinkle their faces and talk about the constant rain, not understanding that was a big part of the appeal for us.  They also spoke of people being unfriendly, something we haven’t found to be true at all in our time here.  Perhaps it’s different in the larger cities like Portland and Seattle, but where we live, almost everyone we’ve met have been very nice and polite.  People on the trail by our house smile and say hello as they pass by, something that would be considered weird in Austin in my experience.  Perhaps it’s due to the smaller size of the area we live in, which only has about 350,000 people in the metro area as opposed to the 2.5 million people of our former hometown.  Ironically, it seems that the more densely populated an area is, the more distant and isolated people become from one another on a personal level.

So here we are, “Home by the Sea” (h/t to Genesis), a short and beautiful 2-hour jaunt West.  This is reflective of one of the continuing visions I have had for a year or two now, ones that involved the restoration of something of an “inner house” that I realized recently represented my intellectual Self.  I have relied heavily on this intellectual Self to analyze and process a great deal of baggage that was weighing me down and even dragging me backwards at times.  Following the restoration of this inner house, which is perched upon a forested cliff overlooking the pounding Sea, I found its living room filled with large trunks which are filled with my life’s emotional experiences.  Now that I have restored my intellect, it’s time to process the emotions to restore my emotional Self to wholeness.

The general state of my inner house is reflective of the real one I live in, which is still lacking some furniture and has boxes that need unpacking.  I find it interesting and encouraging that my mental processes now parallel my real life instead of being so disparate from one another.  It was very difficult essentially living with one foot in the real world and the other deeply embedded in my psyche, but it was necessary to my healing process.  I still have the emotional work to do, represented by going through the trunks in the inner house as well as going through the remaining boxes, which contain just as much of my personal history as the trunks do.

I’m taking a bit of a rest from the ongoing process of healing and growth at the moment, but I’m looking forward to going through the physical boxes and the psychic trunks, here Home By the Sea.