Reunion

Bolinas Beach bathed in winter sunlight, soft and rose-toned. One of those magical days that makes you think that Heaven must look like California.  Easy laughter. Long stretch of sand, open, free.  We have come home, and here we are, on a Saturday where the light looks like a fairy tale, remembering one another again.

My friend turns to me and asks,

“It’s funny, isn’t it? The way everything is different, but also---also exactly the same?”

I smile and nod, because I understand.

Yes.

Yes, she lives just outside Boston now, studying engineering, and I couldn’t tell you what her days are like.  Couldn’t tell you who she eats breakfast with or what time she wakes up or what her bedspread looks like.

And the girl next to her, the one I stayed up with until 5 am the day after we graduated high school? The one I say  “I love you” to whenever we hang up the phone? That girl? She lives in British Columbia now. She sends me pictures of her bundled in a big winter coat, looking surprised.

And yet.

Looking into the engineering student’s bright brown eyes, wrapped in her borrowed sweater, I see too that she is right.

In some ways, some essential ways, things are still the same as they have always been.

Still we walk along the water, and still the dog runs ahead of us, oblivious, content. We share a picnic of goat cheese and bright Satsuma oranges, their fragrance like perfume. We swap stories, comparing and contrasting our months away. We ask after each other’s families.

We still love those families.

I still take long hikes with my mother, wandering through the forest in happy silence.

I still help make dinner, mixing salad dressing and chopping cucumbers.

I still watch movies with my family, laughing at my little brother’s running commentary.

When I do the laundry, I still know just where everything goes, whose shirt is whose.

The fabric of my being, the memories I am woven from, they remain.

Still.

Big Beautiful Feelings

Big, Beautiful Feelings

Today, I am not in love.

I am nineteen, it is Christmas for another hour and a half, and I am not in love. Like almost every single woman in America (North America, the world), despite my feminist post-modern liberalism, there is a tiny voice inside of me that says, insistently, that this is a bad thing.

That I have somehow been paying attention to all the wrong aspects of my life. Like, for example, my dog. She receives more of my affection than a boy has in any relationship that I have ever had, to this day. They have never quite measured up to her. They probably never will.

My society tells me to fall in love, and importantly, be loved. Be loveable. This is the endgame: a boy who is completely and totally smitten with me. This is the mission we are all handed at birth: find somebody to love, and make them love you back. Ready, Set, Go.

But I was born with an active mind and raised with a healthy dose of social justice, and I think more often and more passionately about politics and world affairs than the boy across the dormitory hall.  I prefer to talk about the book I am reading for class than the random guy who added me on Facebook. The truth is, love is worthwhile, but literature is more interesting.

About a month ago, on a Saturday night, a boy broke up with me. By Monday morning, we were friends. By Tuesday, I would go so far as to say close ones. By Wednesday? Bros.  Today we remain the kind of buddies who laugh at one another’s shortcomings and always hug each other goodbye.

This scared the shit out of me. Here is why: Because I should have been more upset. Right? What was wrong with me? I had lost my chance at something beautiful. At “the future”. I wouldn’t have anniversaries, Valentine’s Days, long passionate kisses goodnight. I wouldn’t have a boy who was smitten with me.

But what I still had was this: girlfriends who let me sleep curled in their arms.  Poetry. Music to listen to. The news to read. A lot of homework to catch up on. A life to live.

But I was scared, because I wasn’t in love.

I wanted a Hallmark romance, and Big Ugly Breakup—because Big Ugly Breakups prove Big Beautiful Feelings.

What if I had some kind of defect? I could see the title in some medical journal, myself as a freak of nature:  “Girl Born without Capacity for Romantic Feeling, Miraculously Alive”.

 But then I got to really thinking about it, and this is what I realized: I had those romantic feelings, but I had about two dozen other things to feel joy about, too. A boy would probably never change my happiness significantly one way or the other. I had too much else in my life. He wasn’t going to be my savior, but he sure as hell wouldn’t be my destroyer either.

What I am trying to say is this: I don’t think romance is my endgame anymore. Do I want to love and be loved? Please, sign me up. But I’m not going to look every day. I have other things to do, you understand. I have other Big Beautiful Feelings to attend to.

And that is perfectly alright. 

In Flux

Name: Casey Marie O’Brien, Yes, spelled with an e, not an a, Yes, a C, not a K.

Age: 18 years old, nearly 19, not nearly grown up.

Height: 5’5”, just a hair’s breadth above average.

Dress size: 6, approximately.

Hair color: Brown, a healthy hint of red.

Eye color: Brown, “chocolate” if you’re trying to flatter me.

Identity: shifting

Identity:

Reshaped by

Playing truth or dare at 2 am,

Always picking truth because

Vulnerability is exhilarating,

And I am drunk on the open air against my own bared heart.

Reshaped by

Books read by window filtered sunlight

Ideas hand delivered by black ink stamp letters.

Idenity:

Reshaped by

Opening night jitters

Closing night tears

A bouquet of flowers, a card with love inside

Reshaped by

Goodnight kisses

Fingers curled in my hair.  

Goodmorning hugs

Legs touching beneath the table.

Reshaped by

Ripples of laughter like waves in the ocean        

Lastly,

Importantly.

Identity: Reshaped by

Friends who finish my sentences

Friends who hold me up when I didn’t even know I was falling.

Friends who lift me higher than I knew we could go.

Casey Marie O’Brien

Identity: Shifting.

Where I Was Born

Where I was born fog welcomes new babies like  a swaddling blanket

And the Redwoods stand over their sleeping forms like grandparents.

The ocean sings newborns lullabies

And the tall golden grass on the hills dances for them.

Where I was born a tall mountain stands tall and lonely above us all

There’s an Indian legend that says there’s a princess tucked in that mountain, its green curves her own, and I always liked to think

She watched over me,

slightly amused smile playing across her deep emerald silhouette

Where I was born deer stand startled in the front yard, surprised to see me.

Where I was born hawks wheel in the sky like acrobats

Their endless spirals begging the question

Why ever go straight.

If I walk down the street from my childhood home ,about four blocks, turning left    at the new yellow house that hasn’t been new in years,  I  find  myself in a forest of trees more ancient and more patient than I will ever be.

These trees taught  me to stand tall and to provide a place

for leaning.

They taught me to be proud and

stoic

but always to

let my roots tangle.

I find sometimes I prefer their quiet company

to the radio chatter of spoken conversation. .

When I was born  the redwoods lent me the deep chocolate color of their trunks for my hair

And the sea foam lent me its splash for the sparkle in my eyes

I’m built of this and more

I’m built to be

Wind swept

Seaworthy

Boulder strong

and no matter where I go,

As my feet skitter across states, countries, continents

I carry in my heart

A land of ocean and wild fields,

A land of misty valleys and wise beings

I carry

Where I was born.

Equilibrium

Hello all,
This post is about writing but what it's really about is passion. We all have something that we cannot live without (if not several things). I love to do a lot of things, but  my relationship to this craft is bigger than that.

My life without words would be empty---writing sustains me and has made me who I am today. This is more than loving something. This is being made of something. This is surviving because of something. I hope sincerely that all of you feel this way about whatever it is that you do, and I hope you do it all the time.

Without further ado...Enjoy!

Equilibrium

Somebody asked me yesterday,

“So you write for fun?”

No.

I write the way you breathe.

It's involuntary.

It’s a bodily response to stimuli, stimuli being

Sunset

Rainy day

Teacup

Curve of a shoulder

Delicate secret tuck of hip.

But so much more than that too

Isn’t it?

Because

Because

I hear God in a pen’s scratch

And  find love

In the

perfect

order

of

 lined paper.

I wish I could  explain that sometimes I think I would die without this

Without words

I am afraid, so afraid of who I would be without a pen in my hand, without my fingers

 tiptapping

on a keyboard to tell me where I belong

To say

Here

Here

Here you are.

I recognize myself in my words

That’s me,  there she is, I found her.

Because sometimes I wake up in the morning and my reflection in the mirror looks unfamiliar

My hair parts to the right at night, while I sleep

Moved I guess by unconscious dream fingers

And then in the morning my symmetry is reversed and the world feels flipped on its head,

Like standing up too fast.

And the only way it ever looks right again is

To write it all down.

 So  I guess

You could say I write for

Balance

I write for

Equilibirum

This is my stasis.

Aristotle wrote about the idea of final cause.

He believed that all things had a purpose and a place and we would get there, somehow.

This is my final cause.

Midnight on a Thursday,

Listening to the whirr of the fan and the soft beat of my own heart telling me I exist, yes

I think therefore I am,

I write.
I write, therefore

Therefore

I must be

Yes, yes.

I am.

Lap Swimming

 Hi Everyone, I arrived for my college orientation just a little over three weeks ago, and already, my life feels immeasurably different. This post is about change, growth, and new beginnings.  Enjoy!

Lap Swimming

Free lap swim until six o'clock

Pink painted toes curl against white tile

Hesitant to leave solid ground.

But I take a deep breath and spring forward

My feet splash through the cool clear blue

And I’m on my  way.

My heart is beating to the rhythm of a breaststroke

And there’s nothing left to think about,

Just legs propelling, arms pulling, lungs breathing

Progress.

I’m beginning to wonder if college is a little like lap swimming

Because no matter how prepared you are,

Towel and flipflops and Speedo,

Eventually, you just have to jump in

And when you do,  no matter how ready you are, you’ll still sputter when you swallow chlorine.

Your arms will get tired and by the end of fifteen laps you wonder how is this only halfway

Your legs will want to rest and you’ll be sick of holding your breath.

But then.

Then you’re at sixteen, eighteen, twenty

And you’re strong and lean and deliciously refreshed

When you get out the sun’s  on your back

And you know you’ll come back and do it all again.

I’ve only just leaped in to this new adventure

And I’m still only on my first lap

Trying to remember where my anthropology class is

And what day they come for the recycling.

Just trying not to miss Sunday afternoons in the wine country

Trying to laugh even when I’m tired

And the joke isn’t funny.

But I’m getting there.

I’m stronger already

I’m past wishing I could put my feet down

And I’ve started to kick.

I’ve started to

Stay up late

Accept compliments

Relish long hugs.

I’ve started

To swim. 

Finding Treasure

The natural world is always nearby in CR,  wildness reaching its fingers always into civilization, as if trying to take it back. Reclaim it. The jungle sings all night. Rain falls on my jacket in sheets,  the tendrils of hair that escaped my hood soaked and sticking to my face. In the pool a massive toad sits, enjoying  a night time swim. He is displeased when we disturb him to get in ourselves. Within the rainforest, life exists more vigorously, more intensely, than anywhere else on earth. Every square inch is carpeted with layer upon layer of organic material, living and dead. Leaves, bugs, butterflies, birds and mammals and strange lizards, hibiscus so big they could be worn like hats, heliconia flowers and birds of paradise in bright candyshop colors.

Walking back to my hotel room one afternoon, I see dark shapes in one of the trees. Climbing silhouettes. I ask the handyman if they are monkeys and he smiles at me, a gaptoothed grin that cracks his leathery face in two, eyes twinkling.

Si, claro. Monos. Yes, of course! Monkeys. As if this is the most ordinary thing on earth. They jump and swing with a strange sort of grace. I stand there in my bikini watching them, and the handyman chuckles and heads off to finish his work, amused by the American girl transfixed on the lawn.

Not just monkeys, in fact, but howler monkeys. They call to one another loudly, dolefully, and their noise is the most savage and bizarre thing I have ever heard. The Costa Ricans are unfazed, because to Ticos, nature’s glory is part of the everyday. They take great care in protecting it, respecting it. There is no place the monkeys are not allowed to howl. A few days before the end of my trip, I saw a young man not much older than me, maybe twenty, in faux gangster clothes (beanie, long gold chain) take off his flip flop, put a land stranded puffer fish in his sandal and hand deliver it to the ocean--fully clothed.

The result of this stewardship is a country filled with tropical wonders, amazing discoveries hidden behind each bend of their rocky unpaved roads. IIn two weeks in CR,  I  walked on a suspension bridge above the rainforest canopy and saw thirty shades of green beneath me. Swam in a thermal river, warmed by forces beneath the earth so that the water is as hot as any jacuzzi. The water was colored by jewel toned algaes, torqiouse and emerald.  I  rubbed  thick gray mud on my skin, and when I washed it away,  felt my face  smooth and soft,  made new. I   hiked to the top of a mountain and saw before me not one but two volcanoes, distinguished and strong. I flew over the jungle on a zipline 700 feet in the air, and  felt what the birds must feel. I have swum in the clear Pacific, watched the palms sway and the children play in the sand, bathed in sunsets painted in red, gold, lavender.  Every day, I found something new in Costa Rica, that little country endowed with so much to share. I became rich with memories, and each night I fell asleep to the sounds of the cicadas in the dark, and I dreamt of the beautiful things that little paradiso had to show me.