"What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"

The view from my deck- at 2 p.m. and 2 a.m.

 

For years I kept a journal- or a diary is the more appropriate word.  Somewhere along the way I decided that I was dwelling in my past.  So I stopped.  But, I like having the blog so I can go back a year or two and see what I was doing at about the same time, and compare.

Memory is malleable and mine is unreliable.

This last year was eventful.  

This apartment feels so normal- to wake up to the sounds of people all around, to open the curtains and see a plane fly by, hearing the post drop through the slot in the door.

Yet, Tasmania feels like it always did, some secret, almost unexplainable paradise.  I feel so lucky to have so much in my life.

I am happy to be here, and I am happy to be there.

 

Whether here or there I am the same person- I go through the same cycles of behavior and each time I find myself a little surprised to be acting in such a way.

Living through these bizarre summers, each so different from my internal sense of the word 'summer'.  Here summer is this incessant light, the sun is so close that its light follows you from one side of your apartment, to the other- from one side of your day to the other...

That is the truth of the light, one long day.

Here the sun does not guarantee heat like it does in Tasmania.  

Summer weather is volatile like Tasmania, rain could come at any time.

Neither has the predictability and consistency of a California summer.

There is a reason so many songs are written about California.

It's summers, it's warm nights.  Californian summers have a feeling of opportunity, yet without the grave price of winter.

But I don't mean to sound as if I am eulogizing something I have lost.

This is what I have learned, I can love and appreciate all the places and people that I keep muddled up in my brain, that I remember in snatches and scraps through my fallible memories.  This is what makes me seem a bit scattered- I am always trying to work through so many cues.