These past few weeks have left me in an emotional haze, like a Winter fog has eclipsed my mind while my body meets a stalemate, marinating in the quicksand. Thoughts seems to swirl in a thousand separate, cascading ways before reaching any remotely reasonable destination. It’s not you, it’s not life – it’s me; tt’s me and my idiosyncratic thoughts merging with my wayward anxieties. This year has brought about a lot of change: all of it necessary, most of it good but on the whole I realized there’s a lot that I’m still processing.
There are connections that have disintegrated, but then there are friendships that have been borne of that same radioactive relationship rubble. Job dissatisfaction isn’t uncommon, but then again balancing two careers on equal but opposite ends of the entertainment industry is. Life goes full circle, yes, but what no one relays is those circles are concentric. Like rungs around a tree, the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence – life builds, blossoms and builds again. I’ve found that a basic level of routine is inspiring, and nature is indisputably nurture. With the change in seasons, I’ve found myself waking up earlier and roused to leave the comfort of my home.
There’s something about witnessing the sunshine ebbing and flowing between clouds as scattered rain cleans the air and the feeling of freshly fallen leaves crisply crunching beneath my weathered sandals that grounds me back within the moment. No anxiety around the unforeseen future, no fear of the fleeting past – just a grasp on the breadth and depth of each moment. I find comfort within the confines of creativity, both wrapping my world in wordplay and taking pictures of the nuanced wonder that I’ve discovered lately.
Even though I’ve lived in Eagle Rock for a year and a half, this was the first time I’d actually noticed this little sign right off of the 210 – and we finally found a hike that takes us up to the actual Eagle Rock! (But, more on that later)
In the past year, I’ve seen a drastic shift from traditional lawns to Desert landscaping that takes our current drought into consideration. This is one of my favorite lawns, and somehow the sun always seems to halo on me.
Just call me the cat whisperer, and this one was a beauty!
Something to leave you with, because I just finished reading through ‘You Are Here‘ by Tinch Nhat Hanh and this part has truly stuck with me for the past week. If you’re looking for a good, quick read – I highly suggest it!
“When you look at the surface of the ocean, you can see waves coming up and going down. You can describe these waves in terms of high or low, big or small, more vigorous, more beautiful or less beautiful. You can describe a wave in terms of beginning and end, birth and death. That can be compared to the historical dimension. In the historical dimension, we are concerned with birth and death, more powerful, less powerful, more beautiful, less beautiful, beginning and end and so on.
Looking deeply, we can also see that the waves are at the same time water. A wave may like to seek its own true nature. The wave might suffer from fear, from complexes. A wave may say, “I am not as big as the other waves,” “I am oppressed,” “I am not as beautiful as the other waves,” “I have been born and I have to die.” The wave may suffer from these things, these ideas. But if the wave bends down and touches her true nature she will realize that she is water. Then her fear and complexes will disappear.
Water is free from the birth and death of a wave. Water is free from high and low, more beautiful and less beautiful. You can talk in terms of more beautiful and less beautiful, high or low, only in terms of waves. As far as water is concerned, all these concepts are invalid.
Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. We do not have to go anywhere in order to touch our true nature. The wave does not have to look for water because she is water. We do not have to look for God, we do not have to look for our ultimate dimension or nirvana, because we are nirvana, we are God.
You are what you area looking for. You are already what you want to become.
“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
Seasons have changed, the months have rearranged – and I’m still trying to catch my breath so I can convert thoughts to syllables and ideas to writable action. When I took my part time publicity position back in the Spring, I had little to no actual idea what I was actually asking of myself. Go after your dream job, they said; it’ll be worth it to do both, they said. At times, it feels like I’m taking two steps forward and one step backwards; at other times, I remember that I’m not a pawn – I’m a queen who can roam the board of life as she pleases. For me, this has been a year of evolution, transformation and change – for everything I’ve lost, the world has given back in spades, whether that means I’m actively pursuing friendships with a more solid selection of souls, or a career based on what I passionately believe in.
So, here I am – almost five months later, warped by wanderlust and exhausted beyond expectation, wondering if the means justified this end. The short answer is that they did; the long of it, is well, long. But when the adventure is about the journey and not the destination, it’s important to note that the journey has been a fantastic romp through this ruckus called life. I have so many stories locked in my mind, so many riddles yearning to be solved while I sift through memories like an hourglass – I’ve been waiting to break myself open and spill all.
At the end of July, I had a debilitating bout with my dilapidated car (which included, but wasn’t limited to: a broken axle, two new tires, new brakes, a new battery and a faulty transmission), which turned into a catalyst for anti-social behavior. I’d been feeling down and further than out, especially when I had to break several longstanding plans – including attending a wedding of a childhood friend so once the car was finally fixed, getting out of town and into the bold, beautiful outdoors seemed like the only solution. Though our sights were set on Shambhala, we were equally excited to travel off the beaten path and see what there was to see on our way. Last year on our drive, we admired Oregon’s Multnomah Falls from afar – but this year, we’d made it a mission to see it up close and personal – and man, was it ever worth it!
Photo Cred: Daniel Leist Photography
Located about two hours from my family in Corvallis but less than 45 minutes East of Portland in Oregon, Multnomah Falls sits on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge and relieves itself into Benson Lake. The tallest waterfall in Oregon, Multnomah Falls is a year round, two tiered waterfall that measures in at a magnificent 620′ between the upper and lower falls. For those that are feeling a little frisky, you can even take a quick quarter-mile jaunt over the Benson Bridge and get an up close and personal view of the falls from the footpath – or try your endurance and hike your way to the top for a birds eye view of the Columbia! If you are among the daring that do, you’ve just marched over a mile – and you conquered the first part of the 6.5 mile Larch Mountain Trail.
Back in 1915, Philanthropist and Entrepreneur Simon Benson loaned the City of Portland the nearly $6000 necessary to purchase Multnomah Falls and build the bridge sitting at 105′. Ask any of my friends, I’m beyond terrified of heights – but with a bridge as cemented and sturdy as that, I felt safe beyond belief…as long as I stayed with one hand on the railing and did my best to not look down.
Built in 1925 by the City of Portland to encourage tourism, the Multnomah Falls Lodge sits plush at the bottom of Larch Mountain. Not only is the venue documented on the National Register of Historic Places but it provides a wonderful deviation from your road trip complete with snacks, coffee and all the touristy knick-knacks you could dream of. If you’re in the area tomorrow, September 9th, Multnomah Falls and her sister waterfall Wahkeena are celebrating a century as a public park in the Lodge plaza – head on down and join in on the memories!
For more on Multnomah Falls head to their socials – Website | Facebook | Yelp
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.” ― Terence McKenna
While March marched on into our lives hail paraded down on Southern California, eliciting a sonic onslaught as if it were a troupe elephants gallivanting over tin roofs while blanketing Orange County beaches with a coat of unprecedented snow. And now? Spring has yet to be sprung, and it’s been a lovely past few days with a threat of a heat wave flowing in tomorrow. In a monumental personal feat, this is the first morning since Daylight Savings Time that I’ve woken up naturally and with my usual bounce in my step! For multitudes of reasons, I’m enamored by these few months before Summer – life is passionately on display as blossoms and wildlife color the sky, humans and animals alike couple up in cute, baseball gets into full swing and festival season reigns supreme. In the spirit of Spring’s impending arrival – here are some of my favorite seasonally inspired quotes on blossoms, flowers, nature, love and life with pictures from various trips to Big Sur, Ventura, Colorado and around Eagle Rock.
So far this year I’ve learned that if you’re on the West Coast you should literally pay no mind to Punxsutawney Phil; he might know a thing or two about weather on the East Coast but when it comes to us, just consider him Jon Snow: he knows nothing. For the past few weeks, Danny and I have been on a determined fitness kick. With festival season right around the corner and the wicked terrain of Lightning in a Bottle heading our way in almost T-3 months, we’re planning on kicking our own asses, taking some names and making our bodies into lean, mean, workout machines. A few weeks back, I snagged a sweet crystal ball off of Amazon and we’ve been having a ball (pun) snapping pictures using it. We’ve even managed to discover a few new walking trails around our apartment. Enjoy our journey!
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
[Mark Twain]
First things first, let me just drop this knowledge on you – Reading is Sexy; and don’t let a person tell you anything differently! I don’t mean reading articles from HuffPo, Lost at E Minor, Mother Jones or Science Daily on your smart phone or tablet. I’m talking tangible, hold’em in your hand and smell the page; wafting in wanderlust and adventure, syllable after syllable; ending up in a world you couldn’t have imagined in your wildest dreams while you’ve stayed static, stuck on the couch with your head in the clouds. When I was younger, my appetite for literature was almost insufferable for my family – every meal, every car ride, every turn – there I was, ears billowing out hushed musical tones while my mind wandered feverishly through the chapters.
As I grew older, I realized that my penchant for reading was only matched by my aptitude for math. Over the course of several family reunions in Washington I was taught how to use long division and counted by powers of two to fall asleep. Nature and nurture seemed to have a field day when it came to determining my true passion in life – on one hand, I could eat, sleep and breathe data, numbers and patterns – there’s something so simple, so logical, so straightforward about the output of data. In a similar but opposite context, I love extrapolating on the English Language, enamoring my work with poetic justice and jubilant prose while challenging the definition of sentence structure and simile. And let’s not forget, the joys of reading – of traveling infinitely inwards, shooting through the future and somersaulting through the past while staying firmly, yet delicately, in place.
It only makes sense through both nature and nurture. As the granddaughter of one of the creators of the ENIAC and great granddaughter of one of the only female writer of the Harlem Renaissance, it makes all too much sense that I’d find a unique penchant for both and be able to put it to work. But that’s not to say that I don’t find myself getting writer’s block every now and again. In my last few years as music journalist for The DJ List, I’ve had the wonderfully unique opportunity to ask music professionals how they get over an uncreative slump – they all tell me that fully immersing themselves in art has always worked the trick – and by in large, I absolutely agree. Both literature and music have a therapeutic, cathartic way of affecting my daily outlook, and my daily output. Fully immersing myself in another persons passionate creative endeavor more than fuels my fire to foster new ideas, or simply push through and finish what I’ve started. As far as my writing, personal, music blogging, gonzo journalism and the like are concerned – reading is by far the best way to expand my horizons on what I’m capable of, and the literature that already exists within the world. Through proper perusal of passionate creations, I see ways that I can make my own more harmonic, melodic, whimsical and descriptive.
Last year, my best friend challenged me to find my Top Ten Works of Literary NonFiction and that was a wonderful blast from the past but truth be told, my reading has waned in the last decade. Since College has ended, I’ve been on a perpetual mission to educate myself – in any way possible, and books have done just that for me. To out myself now – Book Clubs don’t do much for me, except potentially give me a room of disappointed faces when I announce that I’ve read three different books that definitely were not assigned while I’ve definitely avoided what we were all told to read. I get reading inspiration from across the board and I have to admit that for the last few years, with the influx of all sorts of social media, my reading offline had fallen by the wayside – but I’ve taken a bold stand to that and say no more.
Amazon has a wonderful book buy-back (well, technically – it’s an “anything” buy-back program, but whatever) where you can get books for as little as 1¢ (plus Shipping, so 5 bucks total – which is still awesome!) that I’ve been (ab)using since college. Like rare wildflowers, there’ve been an influx of lending libraries popping up around Los Angeles, as well as Corvallis where my family lives – and there’s a corner of my heart that’s infinitely happier for that. Beautiful bookstores, though few and far between, are havens of literature and apparently, actual Libraries still exist – and now you can rent CDs, DVDs, Blu Rays, Video Games and so much more than just books! On the flip side, if you’re looking to catalog your library or expand your literary horizons – I’m a huge fan of GoodReads, it’s basically the Facebook of reading; you can find your friends, explore authors and use your cell phone to barcode scan your bookshelves. It’s a book nerds dream – and if you go on it, you should definitely add me!
For 2015, I’ve decided to inspire my creative side with a reading challenge and figured 25 books over the course of the year was doable. Sure, I have to basically billow through a book biweekly – but with all the absent minded things I tend to do around my house, not to mention the bouts of latent lackadaisical laziness and semi-permanent procrastination due to writer’s block, and I could easily reach my goal; if not surpass it! We’re just past
In my personal opinion, science is one of the most beautiful subjects to write about – taking a process, breaking it down with language and reinforcing connection through poetic prose, symbolic symbolism and delicate diction. In a sea of science authors, Matt Ridley stands out with other greats of our generation like Richard Dawkins, Oliver Sacks, Simon Singh and Brian Greene. A personal fangirl of his writing since I was graduating High School in 2003, as a budding young biochemist at one point in my life I was enamored by books like Genome, The Red Queen Theory and The Origins of Virtue. ‘The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns On Nurture’ is a wonderful encounter with ideals we’ve been familiar with grade school – except instead of pitting them against each other, Matt Ridley makes an excellent argument for how nature and nurture work in tandem to produce the genetic world in which we thrive.
I’ve been recommended various Alan Watts books over the years, but it took until the past month to finally get through one. Taking into account how in love I was with Huxley‘s Doors of Perception and Pinchbeck‘s Breaking Open The Head, The Joyous Cosmology was a no-brainer first choice.
A lyrically written journey into the mind, Alan Watts impeccably conveys his journey into human consciousness, the ego and the psyche. A must read for anyone intent on exploring the bounds of the mind. Watts does poetic justice to moments where words typically won’t suffice, on a journey through the internal, mental and emotional manifestdestiny of the human race in the 21st century. And speaking of Watts and Huxley, while doing some research I found a wonderful interview from 1968 of Alan Watts and Laura Huxley, Aldous‘ late wife.
After experiencing a menagerie of types of healing and transformational moments at festivals along the West Coast, from Lightning in a Bottle to Shambhala Music Festival, I’ve been eager to learn some myself. During my first LIB, I watched as festies relaxed under billowing trees while a plethora of instruments were tuned around them and this past year, I watched as a sonic soundbath featuring tuning forks alleviated stress and relaxed my entire campsite. In Canada, I had my chakras read and realigned by a happy camper, explaining beforehand that last year he set a personal record by reading the palms of 50 people – last year, he wanted to break 100.
It’s purported through ancient scripture that the universe is held together with vibration and sound, and the more I read into vibrational healing the more I truly understand what this means.
This is my latest, and it’s a goodie. Mathematics is the language of the universe, and this wonderfully engaging and hands on approach from Michael Schenider is one of the best explanations of how math plays into the world as we currently know it. From the formation of gems and minerals to hexagonal shape of beehives and formation of historic sculptures and art from sacred geometry, this is a must read for math people, and non-math people, alike. Every chapter contains a section on how to construct various shapes like the platonic solids, promoting a beautiful discussion while delving into the history of our current numeric system.
My bookshelf is literally toppling over with reads, which makes me incredibly indecisive on what to pick up next. I’ve been reading The Alchemist outloud with Danny and it’s brings a whole new element to the read, and on my own I’ve been itching to get through some Alan Watts books, as well as an Alex Grey book on The Mission of Art. What are your recommendations for my next read? What’s on your bookshelf that you just can’t wait to dive in to? Let me know in the comments below!
After crushing it into the New Years at Sea of Dreams for the second time running, the New Years Day was spent marinating in the good tidings of the past year, and the first half of Friday was devoted to work. But, as noon settled in – I got the call from my boss that everyone wishes they had: If you have your work in, you’re dismissed. All week, I’d made it a mission to get ahead of myself so I could coast into the New Year; it was totally working. My parents were poised to pounce with a bevvy of beautiful options for the afternoon – we could go to Land’s End and enjoy the roar of the Pacific, or they could whisk us over the Bay Bridge and into one of two Botanical Gardens manned by the University of California School System,the other located at UCLA . As Ursula from The Little Mermaid taunted, ‘Life is full of tough choices‘; but when one of them happened to be a place I’d already been, and the later a place my family had never spent time, I knew exactly where we should be.
The sun just reached it’s pinnacle and we were off, galloping across the glistening San Francisco Bay into new territory, Oakland’s Strawberry Canyon. Within seconds we were lost in the wilderness, whimsically in wanderlust. Tucked away in the hillside, high above the city and it’s highest skyscrapers – the UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley is one of the Bay Area’s best kept secrets. Boasting over 12,000 rare and unusual plants selectively segmented across 34 acres and multiple greenhouses, these botanical gardens are among the most populated and diverse in the entire United States.
For you number nerds like me – according to their site, this is the breakdown in numbers:
300+ families
2,710 genera
9,670 species
12,800 taxa
19,300 accessions (each accession represents one or more plants in the Garden).
From Cactus Gardens to Herb Gardens, Medicinal Chinese Gardens and massive plots of native Californian, South American, African, Mediterranean and Asian plants – the botanical gardens represents the entire globe, with an emphasis on plants from Mediterranean Climates. Not to mention, there’s an amazing arena for succulents.
The gardens are open daily from 9 to 5PM and tickets typically run at $10 a head – but, know before you go: there’s free admission the first Wednesday of every month!
For more about the UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley, visit their various socials:
These past few weeks have left me in an emotional haze, like a Winter fog has eclipsed my mind while my body meets a stalemate, marinating in the quicksand. Thoughts seems to swirl in a thousand separate, cascading ways before reaching any remotely reasonable destination. It’s not you, it’s not life – it’s me; tt’s me and my idiosyncratic thoughts merging with my wayward anxieties. This year has brought about a lot of change: all of it necessary, most of it good but on the whole I realized there’s a lot that I’m still processing.
Just call me the cat whisperer, and this one was a beauty!
Something to leave you with, because I just finished reading through ‘You Are Here‘ by Tinch Nhat Hanh and this part has truly stuck with me for the past week. If you’re looking for a good, quick read – I highly suggest it!
So far this year I’ve learned that if you’re on the West Coast you should literally pay no mind to 
more than fuels my fire to foster new ideas, or simply push through and finish what I’ve started. As far as my writing, personal, music blogging, gonzo journalism and the like are concerned –
As Ursula from The Little Mermaid taunted, ‘
The Bouncy Kitty 
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