There were fireworks on the day I decided to leave.

So, I've decided to leave Austin. I've decided to leave Texas.

Yeah.

I haven't really caught up with my decision yet. Every time I try to really think about it, I just get...ellipses. A blank space filled with something uncertain. A shade of disbelief.

Who am I without Austin? On one hand that is an easy question to answer. Wendy, Wendy, in love with eternity, in love with mystery, in love with the unknown. On the other hand, my whole adult life has been in Austin. I wandered in as an insecure 19 year old and turned into...exactly who I want to be when I grow up. The process has been unexpected, miraculous, heart-breaking, boring, lonely, beautiful, amazing. It has been full of laughter, full of play, full of beautiful humans, full of shit, full of disappointment, full of music, full of magic, full of dancing, full of intoxicants, full of hundreds of broken expectations, full of lanterns, full of crystals. And full of God. Most definitely full of God.

A part of me wants to separate out my experiences from Austin. There was my first love, a crippling depression, some bad decisions about men, groups of friends coalescing and dispersing, countless drunken shenanigans, a handful of miraculous Flipsides, the revelation of God, the discovery of what I want to do with my life. And it all happened here. Austin.

There is no way to separate it out. Austin was the background.

In a way, that is what Austin does. Every year it takes in thousands of young folks and watches them while they wander around having fun, bruising their knees and hearts, until they finally stumble upon the truth of who they are. It somehow keeps them safe, ever watchful but gentle, never too heavy-handed. People float in, thinking they will only be here for a short while and then years pass and they realize they don't really want to leave. Austin was only supposed to be a temporary stop, until I got my degree and moved on. Which is, basically, what happened, just fourteen years and three degrees later.

I don't think Austin lets you leave until you are ready.

And I am writing this at Spider House on Independence Day. Outside on the patio, under the Christmas lights, drinking sangria and smoking while I write, write, write. Spider House and Austin, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. I almost can't think of one without the other. How much time have I spent at Spider House writing? How much time have I spent at Spider House in general? When I first came to Spider House I used to write in my thick black journal about how fucked up I was, how ugly, how no one would ever love me. I wrote most of my papers as an undergraduate here. I remember staying up late into the night, writing a paper here about Kabir and sound. We came here on my 21st birthday, and I ordered a Shiner an hour before I was officially 21. I still remember the bartender looking at my ID and hesitating before she gave me the drink. I also remember getting overstimulated and climbing under the table that night. Natalie and I came here the Monday after our first Flipside. We sat in silence, holding hands and crying. There was this. And this. An evil, narcisstic ex-boyfriend used to come here every day and ruined Spider House for me for a couple of years. But I came back.

And now I am here, thinking about leaving.

One of the things I have learned in Austin is that I am not good at good-byes. I used to think that leaving was easy, that I could walk away from that apartment, that job, that lover, that friend without a backward glance, without a pause, without feeling a thing. Only to find myself astonished a few days later when I couldn't stop crying. Now I know that I have to honor all the endings in my life. I know I have to process leaving and that I am going to cry and feel like my heart is breaking and that this is completely okay.

So, in the next six weeks I'm going to go to all the places where my heart has broken and stare at them. I'm going to go to all the places where my heart grew and transformed and take it all in. Many of these are the same places, so that should save some time. I already cried today thinking about Sculpture Falls, breakfast tacos, and the Texas sky in the summer. My friend Laura said that I shouldn't let my grief convince me to stay. It is an adventure.

But how am I going to live without the giant-ass Texas sky in the summer? Especially when it was full of fireworks on the day I decided to leave.

god bless texas

This morning as I approached the drag, there was a curious juxtaposition of religion and politics. There was the preacher standing on the half-wall, hollering something about Jesus, bible in hand, sounding like a carnival barker. "Getchore salvation here! Three tries for a dollar!" There was the fellow calling out "Vote for Kinky!" trying to collect signatures for the petition. There was even a little choir to provide accompaniment for the preacher, although they lacked his fire, approaching meekness. On my way across I got a "Kinky Friedman for Governor 2006" bumper sticker, and on my way back I was the proud recipient of a "God's Simple Plan of Salvation" pamphlet. I think it is the exact same pamphlet I got when I first started college at UT, ten years ago.

God Bless Texas!

Super colossal cold front

One of the things that is ridiculous yet somehow lovable about Texas - cold fronts. All of the weather reporters have been going on and on and on about what a big, no giant, no massive cold front we are about to experience. Massive, monster, mammoth. And once this super colossal cold front comes through, just how bone-chillingly cold will it be? 88 degrees. A mere 88 degrees.

What is oh so lovable is that everyone has been looking forward to this stunningly cold 88 degree weather. I am wearing a long-sleeved shirt! And I am excited about it! When I walked out of my apartment this morning, and the sky was overcast and the breeze was actually cool, I nearly wept. No exaggeration, no poetic license - I felt so grateful I really wanted to cry. And then I walked to the bus stop in the wind, listening to the trees crinkle and murmur above me, and I thought about all of that space above my head, up and up and up, space that I never pay any attention to. And I felt grateful.

Gratitude is an unusual emotion for me, probably because I rarely appreciate what I have. But I have been feeling it a lot lately. And I just want to take this little moment to tell everyone who I've met along the way - thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You probably won't hear it from me again, so you better revel in this little moment and soak it up before it vanishes entirely. So, before it's gone, I want to write again - thank you.

"Man I ain't changed, but I know I ain't the same"

I've been listening non-stop to KGSR in an attempt to win ACL tickets, and they just played "One Headlight" by the Wallflowers. This song will forever and always remind me of when I first moved to Austin - the two are inextricably intertwined. I had an absurd car, as always, a 1986 Mercury Cougar, affectionately known as the "Great White Slug," or slug for short. The slug had faulty seatbelts, no air-conditioning, only one window capable of rolling down, and its very own ant colony, whose inhabitants would skitter up my leg at inopportune moments, such as when I was changing lanes, dancing vigorously at stop lights, or runnin' from the law. At the time, I lived in a messy apartment off of Riverside and worked at Barnes and Noble at the arboretum. This was before there was an overpass from IH-35 to 183, which meant I had to sit at that god-forsaken intersection for at least two rounds of stop-lights, usually ten minutes or more. Sweating and listening to the radio. No cross-breeze. Giant summer clouds above. Heat. Watching cars zip by, off to work or families or errands or lovers or studies. And almost every time "One Headlight" would come on. The first few measures of that song instantly transport me to that time and place. I feel like that person again. The thing that strikes me about that time is the faith that I had in my future. Even though I was young, and insecure, and poor, I truly felt like life was going to provide me with amazing opportunity after amazing opportunity, all lined up one after another for fabulous me. Nothing but insights into the world, big-ass love, beauty, and marvelous jobs that challenged me and paid me oh so well.

Add ten years and what do you get? A nihilistic secretary with a pointless master's degree and loads of student loan debt. With no idea what to do with her time here on earth. And a blog. Still has a messy apartment, still has an absurd car, still poor.

I wonder what I would say to 19-year old Wendy, with her soft, unshakeable optimism, sitting at that light under the big sky. What can anyone ever say to younger versions of themselves? Avoid that job, that man, that thought? The rub being, of course, that you become who you are precisely because of that job, that man, that thought.

Isn't my current unknowing a gift? Is it? "The realization of the fact that he has no aim and that he is not going anywhere is the first sign of the approaching awakening of a man or of awakening becoming really possible for him. Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go." Gurdjieff, in "Search of the Miraculous" by P. D. Ouspensky.

Am I really where I need to be?

sushi happy hour, tipsy from half a beer, sitting on bench on Congress, unexpectedly fooling around on new sofa, drinking sangria on porch, christmas lights

I didn't know it, but I was there for the puppet show

mindfulness and restlessness. restlessness and mindfulness. capricious, changeful, fickle, fitful, flighty, fluctuating, fluid, impulsive, inconstant, indecisive, irregular, irresolute, irresponsible, kaleidoscopic, mercurial, mobile, movable, mutable, permutable, protean, restless, reversible, shifting, skittish, transformable, transitional, uncertain, unpredictable, unreliable, unstable, unsteady, vacillating, vagrant, variable, variant, varying, versatile, volatile, wavering, whimsical, cursory, ephemeral, evanescent, fading, flitting, fugacious, impermanent, meteoric, momentary, passing, short, short-lived, sudden, temporary, transient, transitory, vanishing, volatile, etc.

things i saw and heard in the rain: half rainbow over woman in a petticoat lowering her umbrella in the shower, cyclists, the cover of the brother's karamazov used as a book mark, wavy brown hair held back by shiny bobby pins, a kiss-me-i'm-valerie shirt ("What's your name?" "Valerie" "Funny you finding that shirt"), two men in orange shirts sitting next to one another, "Ah, so you're a generalist. You want to know what's going on and how we got here", "you're a triple seven, that's high spiritual, high consciousness", "I bet your walls are lined with bookcases", austinites cozied up together under the covered patio of spiderhouse - uncle tupelo playing, woman with pink hair and a truckers cap tranquilly sitting in the rain holding two dachshunds, a cell phone disguised as an austin chronicle, the ringing of the aforementioned cell phone, "Are you here for the puppet show?", "I feel like I've won something!", dachshunds barking at orange and white cat, a puppet show whose main character was a hermaphrodite, trees ever-crisp and alive in the rain.

I feel like I've won something, too.

sunspots and afternoon showers

I am starting to appreciate how my life starts over at 5 o'clock every day. Leave work and suddenly it is a new day full of unrealized potential. Yesterday's second day took an unexpected turn when I started to drink sangria and listen to the Yeah Yeah Yeah's. This rapidly evolved into unrestrained dancing, which then segued nicely into my new favorite show of all time "So you think you can dance?" In the progressive/indie/intellectual world I vaguely inhabit, I often feel like I am supposed to be ashamed of watching reality TV. But I no longer give a damn, because that show fills me with giddy, wiggly goodness. Gaiety and glee. And I'm a big fan of glee. I start rearranging my life while I am watching. Quixotically creating caricatures of the future. "What dance classes can I take? Should I audition? How good could I get in a year? Okay, if I started to take 1-2 dance classes a day..." and so on and so forth. No, I am not a ten-year-old girl, but damn, sometimes it feels good to act like one.

I finished the bottle of sangria. This, combined with the giddiness from the show, resulted in some ecstatic couch rolling. New soft couch. Big pillows. Blue pillows. Burying and unburying my self. Somewhere in there I convinced Natalie to go to Spiderhouse with me, where we could drink more sangria, only this time outside under christmas lights - an environment better suited to sangria consumption. I lured her with the possibility of a thunderstorm. A well timed roll of thunder, and we were rapidly on our way, out the door, down the street.

I talked with the barista about sunspots. He wanted to be an astronomer when he was growing up. Apparently we are at a low point in sunspot activity. They run in 11-year cycles.

It was surprisingly quiet on the patio, probably because they had the music turned off. No raucous laughter. People studying and talking quietly. Occasional lightning. After about twenty minutes it started to rain. I watched as everyone made their decisions - stay outside or head for cover. Undecided. A fellow sitting next to us mentioned how it rains every afternoon in Maui. People will be sitting outside eating, it will start to rain, and everyone continues on unperturbed. Drops collect on their eyelashes, unbatted. After fifteen minutes the rain is gone and by the end of the meal they are dry, eyelashes and all.

It would be nice to live somewhere where it rains every evening.

We eventually moved under a tree where the drops were less troubling. And there we sat, talking and drinking sangria in the rain.

Sometimes Natalie covered her glass with her hand to keep the rain out.

There was more to the evening - more sangria, more wild dancing to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, more time on the couch. But I prefer to stay under the tree in the rain.

blueness blueness

The Texas sky in summer. I don't know how it happens, but it gets bigger. It can hold more. More clouds. Big ones. Not those wimpy, wispy cirrus bastards that make you think of morning and the ocean. Cumulus clouds. Brobdingnagian ones. Somehow the sky can hold an ever-expanding number of clouds while still showing boundaryless blueness blueness. Ceaselessly, simultaneously, stormy and stormless.

And the whole time it is a bright, sunny 95 degrees.

I miss Emily. She loved the sky. We became friends in the summer.

calm and delighted by the world

I spent yesterday with Kim, Zak, Violet and others in Bailey Park, mostly playing with Violet and talking while people played volleyball. Violet is amazing. At 9 months old she already has so many qualities that I am working toward achieving. She is happy, mellow, interested in the world around her and prone to big smiles. I started calling her PFS baby, because she always seems to have a perpetual faint smile. Faint smile while playing with my bracelets, faint smile while looking at dogs, and big smiles when interacting with adults. It was great to spend time with her. I wish I could be so calm and delighted by the world.

It started to rain lightly while we were there and most of the volleyball players high-tailed it to their cars to wait out the shower. But the CM crew stayed out in the rain. It was fabulous. I love how green everything looks when it is raining. The trees were vibrant, crisp and alive against the stormy sky. I just hung out with everyone, Violet in my lap. Playing with a happy baby in a park in the rain. Dare I say it – life is good.