Searching for grumps.

I don’t often write in the mornings but today I woke up tangled in headphones, my computer humming next to my newly opened eyes, reading glasses errantly waiting on the sheets where my out stretched hand had lay last night. I had fallen asleep in the middle of something. It rarely happens to me, as least since I finished my undergrad.

I got home just after 11 last night… maybe closer to 12. It was a night that helped me see clearly. Sometimes you don’t know why you’ve done something until, in one moment, it all becomes strikingly clear. It doesn’t feel right and you (yes, I) feel completely crazy then, like lightning out of a bluebird sky, you just get it.

I have a group of friends who have known me through all my triumphs and my entire history of epic fails. They have loved me unconditionally and yet, have always been completely honest with me. I have one friend in particular who I have an unspoken bond. It is the kind of friendship we just took up. Like the quote about greatness – some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them, we were thrust into friendship. Whether or not we liked it, trapped together as we sometimes joked, for 10 weeks one summer it became a bond that would be impossible to break. He is the one person who could make a seemingly unreasonable act like flying across the country in my last week of classes in my final year of university seem impossible to ignore. I would be lying if I said that moving west didn’t have to do with being closer to this friendship, being closer to seeing his young daughter grow up. The other friendships I have out here are equally hard to ignore. Last night, surrounded by this it became crystal clear. I am here because they are this important to me. They are the life I need and want and I couldn’t live without that any longer. I am saturated by love and support and the hope and promise of what is to come. Without the coffee shop friendships, being a restaurant regular, without even knowing where to get groceries I have a community here. Different yes, but a community all the same.

When I got home I was unsettled. I was overwhelmed with happiness at being back with a group of people I am so connected with but something was missing. A long conversation with a dear friend put some of what I left behind into perspective. I walked away with a greater sense of context but with a less clear view of where I fit into it. So, as I do whenever I need my heart to skip a beat or to find truth and beauty in my own life, I watched One Week. It just felt like it was the right time to be inspired by someone else’s journey with direction but without destination. Ben, the protagonist is, among other things, searching for Grumps, a mythological creature from his childhood that came to represent living life the way it was meant to be lived, for our selves. Grumps eludes Ben for the greater part of the movie and only when he is at the end of the country with out anything but the clothes on his back and completely alone and at peace does he find what he is looking for, able then to go home and get treatment for the cancer he is battling. Is Grumps extinct? Have we stopped looking? I feel the pull of something else out there, that is why I write, why I take pictures, why I feel drawn to places and people without reason. That is why I came West. Just searching for Grumps.