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A long absence, my friends. Thank you to all of you who are keeping up now and then on my movements.

Today I'm sitting at Miriam's coffee shop, where I often come to use free WiFi. Theresa's here, too, and I think we are in the mode of farm interns plotting our next steps. I've also seen three other familiar Coupeville faces. I'm going to miss that about small town living. You get to understand why gossip is such a big deal. The details of note become very small: I saw so-and-so at the coffee shop; Mr. D was at the library today looking at magazines, and he smelled like beer; there weren't too many people at the ice cream store, and the waffle cone machine was broken.

My favorite thing gossip-wise is the crime watch printed every other week in the local paper. Of course, the dispatch takes pains to conceal identities, but includes the funniest details. For example, an entry earlier this month reported police were dispatched to a local business that had a bird - "possibly a finch" - trapped in the store. Linda likes to tell of one report in which someone had reportedly broken into an elderly woman's home and stolen her eyeglasses and a "Girl Scout packet." Of course, there are plenty of swerving drivers and people in distress at the local hospital; but i enjoy the detailed ambiguity of the reports. Each one is a snippet of a story, a mini cliffhanger.

Which is comforting when I often feel myself in the midst of a big cliffhanger that is all about me. Besides the crime report, I've also found myself recently cultivating an addiction to Hugh Grant movies and Cream of Wheat (a childhood comfort food). Since just before my birthday, I started cutting back on sugary dessert foods; and in return I've found I have a huge appetite for dairy, bread, and cereal. To provide the counterbalance, recent aversions include people who whistle in coffee shops and looking for paid work.

So over the past four months, I've been getting tan, buff, and better able to wield a pitchfork. I've shared a lot of photos of beautiful places, had a lot of visits from loving and dedicated friends and family. I've gone kayaking, harvested some of the most beautiful food I've ever seen, and experienced a life of somewhat quiet trailer living.

To be completely honest, through all this I've been experiencing a lot of anxiety about life. A lot of it centers around the idea of needing to choose a path, find a passion, be focused on something that will prove to be meaningful. It also has had to do with feeling myself split in my allegiances - to friends, to family, to myself, to a sense of place. And added to that - as a gigantic backdrop - there is financial crisis, energy crisis, and security concerns of all types bubbling to the surface.

What I've started to realize is that every choice is both the path of truth and an escape from that path. The moment I start something new and fresh, I begin to see the ways that I'm still continuing an old and on-going story. The farm time has been about an attempt to sit still and take things in - be aware and present. But, you know, it's been very hard to do that. So if there will always be a tension between movement and stillness, between reality and the ideals we have about the world, then I hope I can find a way to reside somewhere peacefully within that tension - rather than continually trying to resolve it.

I wanted to share this with you all because I think many people, maybe all of us, experience this kind of tension. I've always, perhaps selfishly, enjoyed uncovering the dents in people's perfect-seeming lives - because that's where I see our shared humanity. And that's also where I discover how much we are all projecting our ideals onto each other and failing to see what is actually there. A lot of messiness, and a lot of beautiful struggle, loneliness, and courage.

This is all to say that I'm going to Philly again, and I'm freaked out about it in many ways, but longing to find a home one of these days. Knowing it won't be just in a physical place, but somewhere in myself.