Yosemite Part 1: Pizza, Wine, and Sleep Deprivation

Festie B has been traveling again, and it feels oh so good!

As my dearest Festie M knows well, I am most myself when I am outside participating in my favorite forms of moving meditation. Namely: hiking, climbing, running, yoga etc. etc. Basically, I like it best when I can engage in wholly exhausting physical activity, eat (lots of) delicious foods, sleep till full, rise early, and do it all over again. (it’s #thesimplelife I prefer, not to be confused with that one terrible show Ace often talks about)

The best example of this might be the trip to Tuolumne I took last month. Aggressive schedule packed into just a few days? Check. Super cool climbs with new friends? Check. Ridiculous amounts of burritos? Check. Sleep…ehhh, we might have muffed that one up, but the early rising was definitely in the mix!

Before you hit the jump, please note that I was very bad with my camera on this first trip and took almost no photos with my Canon. This seems to be happening more and more these days…thankfully, that magical iphone of mine does a pretty good job taking up the slack…

///

What is good

It’s now been over three weeks since I left my job in that “real world” (RW) I reference sometimes. And I thought I would feel lost – that I would miss it horribly and at some point realize that I had made a huge mistake. That I would never fall back into the habit of drawing and dreaming that I claimed to have missed the entire time I was out in that RW.

But…

I’ve been too busy waking up early to enjoy the dewy cool air before the last of summer burns it away, climbing rocks with strangers because I can, driving between little cities in New England in search of adventure (and free camping), and sleeping under the stars with only the chorus of the forest to lull me to sleep. I’ve been too busy filling my sketchbooks with words and drawings, slowly letting three years worth of ideas flow out through the end of my pen. These new lines of graphite and ink remind me of who I’ve always been.

This is where I’ve chosen to come. This is where I’m meant to be.

This is what is good.

///

B, from somewhere-in-Maine

mel·an·chol·y

/ˈmelənˌkälē/ a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause.

Origin

Middle English: from Old French melancolie, via late Latin from Greek melankholia, frommelas, melan- ‘black’ + kholē ‘bile,’ an excess of which was formerly believed to cause depression.

Melancholy is one of my favorite words.

It makes me think of cauliflower and cantaloupe, and it’s kind of fun to say. It also conjures up memories of a time when CE and I affectionately called each other Collie (which originated from the nickname Colin… and continued to warp into other similar sounding names like Zollin, Zoll, Dolin, etc.)..

And in my brain I can imagine a version of myself that lives in a different universe.

Her name is Melan Collie.

Despite the name, she leads a happy life. Her hair is always multi-colored and never fades. All she eats is fruit, it’s all she needs. The grass is soft and spongy, so no one really wears shoes. Melan travels and roams freely.. I imagine her thoughts are fairly basic, but mostly happy. Pretty much just shapes and confetti rolling around in her head. I think she probably has a dog, or whatever animal/thing is the equivalent in their universe. Maybe it’s just a rock with a smiley face drawn on it.

Unlike Melan Collie, I, in this universe, feel pangs of melancholy quite often.

I like to imagine myself as a bright, bubble, sunny person. I try to project that every day. But sometimes, I can see that maybe Melancholy is my natural state. Maybe the real me is melancholy. It’s kind of a big, giant loop.. I start to feel melancholy.. A pensive state of sadness, typically with no obvious cause. Pensive is the key word. It’s dangerous when you start to think about sadness and discover there is no reason behind it. No ‘thing‘ that made it so. If there is no reason, can there be a solution? How do you solve a problem… When there is no… Problem?

Is this a riddle? Perhaps.

But I guess, the thing about feelings of melancholy is that, often, as quickly as they set in, they vanish. The black bile simply evaporates, to return – another moment, another day.

Xx