day 32

A rough day, this one, in its way. We've been camping for three days in one of my favorite places on earth, Codorus State Park. It's not the Grand Canyon or Grand Tetons or anything at all truly grand, landscape-wise. Just a scruffy little Pennsylvania state park I've been going to ever since I was young, and now I'm delighted to take my own sons there. We laze around the camp, go swimming, fish the lake, ride bikes. One of the places on this Earth where I feel happiest, because of all the simple good times I have enjoyed there over the years. It seeps in, Codorus.

When we go there now we stay in one of the two yurts -- kind of round, permanently placed house-size tents on platforms -- and I realized why lying in the same bottom bunk I always occupy that the sight of the yurt's round peak window dome and wooden interior framing is a visual cue for feeling calm. Happy. In place -- how to explain this. Safe and at home in a physical context, maybe; a feeling essential to my well being but very hard to come by right now.

So I left Wednesday morning after packing up and cleaning out the yurt, the boys having already departed with their cousin and grandma. I was feeling pretty bereft; after a few days of quietly joyful departure from the rounds of anxiety and intractable problems that make up my current life, it was time to rejoin the battle against my personal homelessness and unemployment. (I am literally homeless, being evicted from current house without having found a new one). Just tearful and overwhelmed and dreading all that I must deal with all the while remaining upbeat and positive with the boys.

And then I realized that I always have this other place I can go, i.e. my creative/photography brain, that is like an internal vacation from the rest of my life. My own internal yurt. I had noticed a roadside cross near the park that I found appealing, and so I drove back to my mom's house that way and stopped and made a few photos, and after that the walls moved back a little bit. A little less despair, a little more sunlight. Got to keep moving forward even when the road is curvy and you can't see where exactly it's heading.