Unwild Rumpus

This is a night like no other. I see the bright moon above me..casting a night rainbow in the clouds around. A fading beauty with a pockmarked face racing in the skies above to keep up with my ship below. She lights up the ocean around me.. streaks of silver in the darkness. It's past midnight and it's just me and the ocean and the skies. Stars peep through the clouds, zillions of them. Not a single man made light around me to dilute the effect of this gorgeous night sky. My senses are at war with each other. My eyes see peace but my ears hear war. The still water surface, sparking in the moonlight is a calm like none other. But the same ocean is loud around me, forever restless. The waves relentlessly hitting against the sides of the ship, wind blowing against my face. This discordance between sight and hearing is jarring. But it's easy for me to accept because I live in a similar discordance constantly - the one between my calm, serene brain and my loud, restless

Summer 2009. I woke up when the sun was rising, made myself some coffee and stepped out in to the balcony of the rustic mountain lodge we'd slept in the night before. There was a cool nip in the air, almost uncomfortable, but the view was breathtaking. Sun rising over the rocky mountains, mist still clinging to the plants and trees around me. We were in Leadville, Colorado - a sleepy little small town nestled comfortably in the rocky mountains. And the morning air was making me nostalgic. I grew up in the mountains. My childhood was a lonely one but one filled with idyllic images of forests of tall pine trees over blankets of brown pine straw, lush valleys with a scattering of red tiled roofs, blue mountain ranges in the distance, crystal clear waterfalls after rains, foggy mornings.. the list is endless. In my heart I'll always be "mountain person". Even now when I am asked to close my eyes and imagine something serene, my first thought is a walk through dense wo

My high school, a gorgeous yellow building with a sloping red tiled roof, was nestled among the trees and overlooked a calm lake. Idyllic. We had a skating rink, a basketball courts, a sports field, woods all around, a cemetary, a convent with austere nuns, residential quarters with affluential boarding kids, and best of all - a calm, quiet library. The library was my haven. Wooden cupboards with glass doors lined the walls. The books arranged alphabetically by authors last name in each cupboard and increasing in difficulty and reading level as you went from one cupboard to the next. We started at the first cupboard near the entry way in sixth grade and then slowly made our way to the hallowed shelves at the back right next to the desk of the stern librarian. Shelves to which access was restricted. In a very Oliver Twist porridge scene style, I remember standing in front of the strict librarian asking "Please ma'am, may I have the keys to the cupboards with the classics?"