In a few hours I’ll be on a plane to Maine. I have a list of exciting projects to last the rest of my life there. P has mentioned multiple times, “you have such an interesting life.” I’m not sure how sustainable it is, but as M mentioned the other night, I can certainly afford it for the foreseeable future. Now, my room in Seattle is empty and old roommates are moving into it in a couple weeks. My childhood home in Surry awaits. Kate and I hang on the edge of discussing projects and plans in Maine. My family anxiously awaits my return.

Six years. Oh, so much. As I measure life in six month increments, six years is many lifetimes. Once I’m settled, J and I may continue talking regularly via skype. When I consider this, I’m reminded of our hundreds of hours of conversation. I just was reading an article about how our brains can be rewired to disassociate traumatic events from triggers by recalling them and then replacing the memories with better ones actively. This makes much sense to me.

I’ve only had a wink or two of sleep tonight, which can’t be good as I’m still recovering from sleep deprivation at Black Rock. Mom asked me what my plans were once I got home, and I told her to spend quiet time with Kate and catch up on sleep. Then, continue work on the garage. My anxiousness kept me awake, but now my body is trying to shut down. I’m feeding it coffee and Tums now. Within an hour, I’ll be on my way to the airport for a 5:15am departure.

Home. Or well, back in Seattle. Saturday I head home to Maine.

I adapt to another life in Black Rock. Living for weeks in the desert, eating in the commissary, showering in the shower trailer. Working in the dust, sleeping in the back of the Suburban, with occasional trips to get out of the city. A couple friends and I watched the Saturday burn from outside the city and a few folks without tickets to the event were shocked that we were out there by choice.

When I was leaving, F asked if P was coming with me and said that we were cute together. I couldn’t comprehend a response. With all the time that P and I spent together, it was a reasonable assumption to make. But what happens at Burning Man, happens in an alternate, nearly schizophrenic world. It doesn’t stay there, it isn’t separable. At times it seems to stay physically, but events still cause ripples outward in time.

As I stop and redraw my life; consider what paths it will take, I’ve been thinking about how different it could be, how circumstantial it is on my intimate partnerships and on their lives. I recall trying to convince L that I wanted to support her, and her misinterpreting that as my wanting her to “cry on my shoulder.”

This is the end of a period of my life in Seattle. 2011 has undoubtedly been a year of transitions. Having Burning Man form a corner of that change only serves to make it more abstract, with jagged loose ends comprising of threads made up of compassion.

What would life have been like if L hadn’t run off? Who knows. What if Burning Man wasn’t such a temporary life? Everything continues to underscore how complex life is, and find peace with that.

On a somewhat related news, I’ve been considering starting a charitable foundation. That just feels absurd, but I have the resources to do so. Notably, I’m only considering it. While I’m confident I could do so, I have to humbly laugh at myself for not watching TV instead.

I’ve been working through some issues with a coworker. He doesn’t know me and has been reading my emails such that he believes I think don’t respect him, or “think he is stupid.” It has been a frustrating experience, but I’ve been learning from it; particular how to deal with people who tend to get angry easily.

On the commute home the other night it got me thinking about experiences with people I’ve dated where they got angry and directed it at me for small things.

In Chapter 10 of We are Become Pals, by the A Softer World folks, one of the main characters says something rude to someone and “The hurt on her face was so sudden and so unexpected.” I seem to always remember Z getting upset with me when we ran a ride light on bicycles together once because I didn’t leave enough room for her to avoid riding over a man-hole cover. In other circumstances, it could have been slick. If we had stopped to check for traffic, it would have been a slower situation. Under the circumstances, it was fine, but her anger hurt. I really loved her and that hurt. This wasn’t an isolated incident. Mostly, I opened up, then was severed, and what had been cautiously advanced began flailing widely.

I had similar experiences with M; such a period of feeling hurt in retrospect.

My cousin Sierra had lunch with me today as she passed through Seattle. We spent some time discussing the fallacy that life is simple and that everyone is just making the wrong choices because they’re stupid. I give much room for everyone being different and having lived their own individual lives. Still, I don’t pretend to understand it, and I’ll only postulate so far as to their reasoning. Even then, for only so far. I feel incredibly fortunate to have finally fallen in love with someone who is openly and willingly emotionally introspective and available. To some degree it is finally being in the same place as well. Some activities, like tracking down people who have checked out from the reality that I live in, remind me how lucky I am to have that.

When M called me her “ex-partner,” I had some internal doubts. Her lack of commitment, in fact her phobia of commitment, was the demise of our relationship. A conversation with Kate about the definition of partnership determined that building something together was key, and you can’t build anything if you can’t follow through. Perhaps some people disagree. I could see some “activist types” disagreeing whose goal is a utopia rather than simple solid progress.

I’m moving to Maine.

I haven’t known how to say this exactly, but as dates draw closer it is remarkable simpler. This weekend I head to Burning Man. I return around 9/6 and on 9/10 I have a one-way airplane ticket to Maine. Of course, I had a one-way ticket in March before my father died, but that was more of an open-ended deal and less of a move. I expect I will return to Seattle at Christmas to spend time with my Mother. If all goes well, Kate and I will both fly out for a bit, and then drive the Suburban and a U-Haul trailer back to Maine. So that may be when I’m really moving. That I have most everything I need in both places right now has made it confusing. Perhaps the biggest shift is that I’m planning on almost entirely moving out of my bedroom this week.

Why? First, nothing was made more clear by my fathers death than the mortality of my family. My grandparents are all nearing eighty, making moving back to Maine “someday” a non-starter. It has to be now. Second, it is the life I’ve wanted. Every time I’ve come back to Seattle from visiting home, I haven’t felt right. This has usually been dismissed by others as being the product of a vacation but that hasn’t added up. I miss the woods; not the woods where we all go hiking on the weekends and camp in the tents we bought at REI, but the woods that I wake up in every day and have the smell of fresh cut firewood. Third, an incredibly lucky bonus on my part, Kate. Some time ago I bet Tanya $20 that I would marry Kate, and I intend to collect on that bet. As a man who doesn’t ever bet more than a shiny nickel, my seriousness should be evident.

Kate is a huge part of my life, present and future. The romantic story of our past is cute as well, but elementary school was a long time ago. I’ve gotten past needing a label for my relationship with Kate, because all of them require caveats and additional explanation. This is appropriate, because you can’t tell one life from the other any longer.

A friends facebook photo listed a few people that I know that liked it. I can’t even summarize how I know those people, but they’re from both coasts and I have long and different histories with them.

One of K’s patients said to her “40, 50, 60, 70, 80– it all goes by so fast. It’s a short, crazy life, and if more people knew that, we wouldn’t get into wars and all this nonsense.” In this context, it’s been a helluva ride. For the first time in a while, I’m really looking forward to the future.

When Dad passed away, sometimes when talking to people about what I was going to do I would lightly kick the wall of the house and say, “and then there is this…” The wall would give a strong solid thud. Last night Kate and I had dinner with Matthew and Peggy. There was also as a surprise accompaniment of Trevor and Jennifer, new neighbors of theirs, who have gotten a bit of national attention for their container home lately. Trevor said that Matthew had mentioned I had always planned on building a container home. Being a social event, I didn’t want to turn conversation to my father’s death, so I just mentioned that life happens and I had a house now.

A house. A castle, I thought the other day as I was looking out one of the many south facing windows overlooking the field. We were chatting with a neighbor at the beach the other day who, as a gardener, admitted to coveting that field.

Everything is different. Every time I came home I felt a pull back here that some would try to dispel. Everything is right. So much is new and unknown and constituted of a future of challenge. I’m really happy about this.

I’m here for a month. Then I’m going back to Seattle to visit the office, assess how working remotely has gone, visit life there and prepare for Burning Man. After Burning Man, I’ll stick around Seattle for a week or so, then come back to Maine. In particular, I’m returning before the Common Ground Country Fair, where I grew up volunteering. When I started volunteering at Burning Man, I looked back at my experience at the CGCF. I realized how well it had prepared me well for Gate at BM.

Yesterday was spent on the logistics of workings from Surry. I’ve been slowly working on dismantling my childhood bed. The frame is 48″ x 84″ (4′ x 7′) making it a rare “Super Single,” but I saved it anyway. It contained an old water that had no baffles and wasn’t much fun, which I disposed of earlier in the year. Most of the frame made it to the basement, I need to find help to get the remaining heavy portion of the frame moved still. I moved my bed and furniture that I had stored in the spare room when I moved to Seattle up to my old room so I could make the spare room into an office. I’ve been staying in my fathers room so far this year and will continue to do so, because its floor plan isn’t interrupted by a chimney (from the wood cook-stove in the kitchen) like my old room is. I believe my intermittent problems with my land-line are finally solved, with the continued help of a Fairpoint (Formerly Verizon, Bell Atlantic, New England Telephone and NYNEX; telephone company churn is amazing) technician; time will tell. Fairpoint‘s bleak financial state means it is unlikely to get DSL service in the near future, so Internet service was installed by Premium Choice Broadband. The name invokes distrust in the company, as does their unprofessional website and confused FAQ. All of my neighbors use them, as satellite is the only other option, and seem happy enough. The hole they drilled through the house for their cable didn’t increase my confidence either. I’ll fix it up later myself, I need to run a cable to the living room for the new DVD player, to replace yet another that has stopped reading new DVDs, which also has some internet streaming functionality. I also got the plow move out of the way to start site work on the garage. So a pretty productive day.

It was also hot, in the low 80s. In fact, it was still a “cool 80” in the bedroom when I went to bed last night. I wanted to go swimming all day, but couldn’t find the chance. But when Kate came home, caked with dirt from farming, she asked me what I thought about swimming. Yes! We’re lucky to own a family beach down on the lake, so off we went. A good portion of the neighborhood was there too, so we spent a bit socializing before actually getting in the water, but neighbors are great too. When we were leaving I said “Have a nice night” to my neighbor John, who has known me since I was born. He replied that he didn’t know how it could get any nicer. Indeed, an evening on the beach on beautiful Toddy Pond after a hot day is pretty hard to beat.

Time has been fully distorted. I can’t grasp that I’ve only been here three nights so far. This morning I was thinking about if I should go to the grocery store today for vegetables for dinner, and remembered that we’re eating with friends and family the next three nights. This is all very good.

Up early, after the phone rang from family on the east coast this morning. On Friday I head to Maine for a month, the first of many stays that will eventually transition into trips to Seattle to visit, rather than the other way around.

Big changes, whose outline I knew before I rode into the deeps of Alaska and Canada. They’re more defined now, and the shape slowly seeps out for others to see.

Mom stirs in her tent, half awake, and smile in back of my Suburban. After 20 days on the road, setting up a tent isn’t fun and the back of the truck is conveniently dry. It also carries meaning, as I look forward to seeing Kate and building a relationship together, the truck reminds me of those past.

So much is changing, as my reevaluated priorities take form from action. Nobody is up to date at any one time. Much else is unknown and insecure, and I suppose that it always is so it is worth accepting this.

Have I not been writing because I’ve been busy? Has Kate received that energy like Z or M once did? Perhaps with so much change, I’m feeling out what I want, and acting on it, without much idle reflection in the middle.

Moving forward, and I’ll look around at what remains when I get there.

Not the best dreary cold day to be lying around an airstrip alone.

I’m back.

Maybe for a week, before I head off to Alaska to figure out the rest of my life.

That is shadowed about being sad about being back.

I miss:

• All the time I was spending with K
• Tractors and pickup trucks
• The apple blossoms and the peepers
• That feeling I get when my grandfather talks about:
• The woodlot
• Rebuilding the old ice house
• The lack of able men in the neighborhood
• The forest management plan
• Missing me
• Looking out the window from the rocking chair
• Morning coffee at the village store
• The warmth of a fire in the cookstove
• Family

Now what?