The cabin trip with peeps was a much needed bunch of quality time. As usual, when I see them after much time has passed I feel like I have come home. More and more I am starting to realize that my sense of “home” is really where my people are.
My roots are not in geography so much as friends, and not just friends but friends that have, over time, become my family.
One of my favorite parts of these trips and get togethers, is the ability to watch us all evolve. I love being able to see the changes from the beginning; adolescence, high school, college, marriage, kids, etc.
It’s such a great pleasure to be a witness to them as they find themselves, expand and grow and still somehow manage to maintain their fundamental selves. Their centers are still so much the same while the whirlwinds around them shift almost by the minute.
With a passel of people around the dinner table, fixing foods and drinks in a group in the kitchen and playing games, socializing and catching up where we left off… I left the cabin with a sense of balance that I didn’t realize I was missing – then spent Monday in a small depression of withdrawal.
I sat in the hot tub the last night there and watched the stars and decided. I must make more of an effort to stay in the lives of my friends. The friends that are my family. I can’t keep going 8 months between visits.
When all is said and done, I feel like sometimes – my friends that I grew up with in Alaska are the only ones that have seen me from the beginning. The only ones to witness my evolution and see me at my worst and greatest and still be in my life. They have seen the widest picture of my potentials and my pitfalls.
Furthermore, I have noticed a trend in my Alaskan friends. Whether it is the country up there that requires us to become this way, or if just by chance we all managed to find one another – but my friends of childhood for the most part are the most independent people I know.
They are the sorts of friends who offer support but expect you to do all that you can by yourself first. They are the types that listen but if you are creating a pattern – they interrupt it. They are the types that don’t expect, assume or require anything more than quality time and genuine honesty. They do not have entitlement, self-centeredness or vampirism. They are in fact, for the most part – strong, independent and confident people who want to spend time and love with those like themselves. And because they are so strong, they are also incredibly generous, with time and love and resources. They have it to give because they are not constantly worn down by unhealthy relationships.
I wondered then, as I observed the way we all watch each others children, call each other on our shit, laugh at the entertaining pranks and things that are probably too wrong to repeat in writing – why do I feel so worn out while in Portland? What is going on in my relationships in Stumptown that creates the need for me to cave and escape so often AND by comparison make me feel so relieved and re-centered to visit my friends from youth.
Why do I, in what is a troubling period of my life- of which I can’t actually blog about till next week – why does it feel safer to hide from my Portland friend circles rather than go to them for support? Then while I was with my Valdez core – I didn’t feel the need to hide, but I also didn’t feel the need for full disclosure as I suddenly felt secure and safe and knew that what I am struggling with would be in good and capable hands if I couldn’t manage it myself. Therefore I had more strength to keep it quietly within and more resolve to solve it later. Because I would have support from them if I needed it, and I knew it without doubt.
The thing I believe I have discovered is a comparison to the quality of friendships in my current life of which I need to really focus on and re-evaluate the way I involve myself with people I intend to love indefinitely.
There is obviously a problem when I feel safer away from certain friends than going to them in time of trauma. A problem that is brought into clear and powerful focus when I am with others friends I feel safe and loved enough by that the crisis feels less threatening and easier to control.
The disparity is telling. Hence the reason I know I have been investing myself in the wrong places and will endeavor to correct this. I want to be whole and powerful and strong and generous with the right friends and be an equal partner to those whom I love.
The cabin this year was a brilliant eye opener to how powerfully blessed I am. Thanks guys.
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