Gravity

First view of Nome. August 2013.

Like a hammer on nail I have pounded myself with the questions, “What are you going to do with your life? Where are you going to be?” For years. Career-wise, of course. Because I view work, not as a method of income, but as a manifestation of my values and my vehicle for contributing to humanity. A privileged mindset, I am well aware. And the answer to what I should be doing was forging the path towards the greatest career euphoria that would every day reflect and strengthen my values and make the world a more compassionate, wondrous place.

Like all ideals, that day hung in the future like a star that I was to follow, guiding my path, every action’s greater worth residing not in its present moment but in its role in driving me closer to that grandeur.

And I had it all planned. Decades of my life written in ink on lined paper. It went something like: Work as a theatre director at the best regional theatres in the United States and at the best national theatres around the world. Earn an M.F.A. Maybe a Ph.D. Write and direct my own scripts with the best, most passionate, innovative theatre individuals around the globe. Teach theatre at a private, liberal arts college. Create something new.

Then, one day, a spark caught the corner of that paper and swallowed it in flame. And all the visions of how my life was going to play out swirled in a pile of ash. I still don’t know where that spark came from. I just know the ember tore away the scroll of my life’s narrative, and I stood on the edge, clenching palmfuls of what was supposed to be. I didn’t need to look up to see the star had gone out. The light had turned off.

But like a body when it burns, I found, picking through the ash, the densest pieces of my foundation remained: an overwhelming need to tell stories—true stories—with people who expand the edges of the universe.

After much anger and confusion and deep grief, I threw the ash in the air, and looking up, I saw another star, this one in a place I never knew stars could glow. It shone with a light I did not recognize but instantly trusted without cause or explanation or any cerebral capacity. The light resonated viscerally, hooking the compass spinning in my gut, pointing it North to KNOM in Alaska. That was March 2013.

Months later in August, I arrived in Nome. Touching ground I felt my body reuniting with my spirit. It was as though I had arrived long before I landed and had been waiting for my physical being to rejoin me, to encapsulate me once again and add sensation to the essence, to let flesh feel the tundra that the psyche had long rolled in.

Perhaps that is why I felt like half a soul the year leading up to KNOM. Pieces of me had been slipping away, heading North.

And in these past few months, for the first time in long memory, I feel gravity.

What are you supposed to be doing?

This.

Where are you supposed to be?

Here.

But I am also learning that those questions are useless. Language fails. Words are the product and transmitters of reason, and fate rarely acknowledges such rationale. It prefers to communicate either by a slap in the face or subtle currents sensed by sitting still and feeling what tugs. The question is not, “What should I be pushing myself towards?” but rather the awareness of what is pulling me. And go do that.

Right now that force is grounded.

For how long? Well, the earth’s magnetic field exists in flux. North is an ever shifting orientation. For now, the compass is at rest. And I am grateful for the respite.

Sunrise from the KNOM Studio. January 24, 2014.

Glad Tidings

Well, we’ve caught up with each other, us volunteers. We’ve been reading aloud our autobiographies to one another, and slowly those stories have begun to merge and twist. Now, we’re all on the same page, and the illustrations that had shown us on separate paths sketch us in the same clearing. Right on schedule I’d say, seeing as we’ve hit the four-month mark of living and working together. No longer are we unfolding origami marvels. We’ve splayed ourselves on the table, creases exposed, saying with a silent opening of palms, “It is what it is.”

Each of us comes from different parts of the country, different backgrounds, educations, family structures, all those elements that create and shape a life. And throughout these past four months, we’ve been unpacking this self luggage. Here’s a quilt of my family history. Here’s a sock of my morning routine. Here’s a g cleft of my mirthful laugh, a sharp sign for when I’m sad and overcompensating. Here’s a petal from my last relationship; it’s brittle, so let’s not handle it too often. Here’s the coin of my self worth, and here’s the vault of my values. Over weeks and mornings and dinners and walks to work and those rare car drives, we’ve unpacked these bags, gone through the show and tell. If you were to turn the suitcases upside down and shake them, other than faded boarding passes and particles of lint, only air molecules would rattle down.

So after decorating our identity around the house and office and each other and after filling with enough plaster the little figurine molds of ourselves that reside within each other’s minds, our inquiries have shifted. Question marks no longer attach to that time before encounter. Now, we latch such punctuation to the immediate future or to the just slipped present. “How was yoga?” or, “Will you pick up eggs at the store?” have replaced curiosities like, “What was your relationship like with your brother while growing up?"

Basically, after four months of living and working together and pulling each other’s underwear from the dryer and drinking coffee silently and unshowered at noon after just crawling out of bed, there’s just not much mystery left.

So when you reach this point of all standing in the same place, staring at one another, all your belongings sorted on the shelves, there’s the option to just get bored of each other. Honeymoon’s over, babe. And marriage’s thrills aren’t as flashy or as frequent.

But we can’t get bored of each other. And here’s why.

On Friday December 20, I go home for a late lunch. I eat, pour a cup of tea, and raising the mug to my mouth, I set it back on the counter. I walk to my room, close the door. And what has been building for the last two weeks releases.

I sob.

Body shaking. Bed shaking. Tears pooling the pillow. Air sucking in and out, gasps shattering. High and low pitches grating and cracking past one other. Snot smearing out my nose and down the back of my throat. My face distorted into something resembling a gargoyle, one of those stone ones atop old cathedrals.

It’s a rather ugly scene.

And I’m alone. And Christmas is next week. And all I can feel is the cold Alaskan wind swirling around me, shooting outwards in a million directions, and traveling thousands of miles before ever reaching my family and friends.

I can physically recall the sensation of every person I have ever hugged. I can feel their pressure, their bones, muscles, breath, fabric, etc. All those elements that compose one body enveloping another. I have turned to this ability often over the years. In times of celebration, in times of nostalgia, in times of need. I enter that space, remembering my parents, my siblings.

And I can’t do it.

Not because I have forgotten. But because the action seems so futile. And next week is Christmas. And mnemonic reconstruction cannot replace their far-away, beloved body.

The wind keeps swirling and searching, and in it I hear my voice from last year, the one vowing to never take another job that would separate me from my family at Christmas. And audible as a dripping faucet on a silent night, I hear the clock ticking, as Tennessee Williams wrote, “Loss, loss, loss.” Time, irreversible time, is passing, taking now and next week with it, swallowing a rare, irreplaceable opportunity to be with the ones who matter most.

And that’s why us volunteers cannot get bored of each other. Because we are all we have.

In this strange, distant, wondrous land, we…Well, I’ll speak for myself. They are the ones here who matter most. From a stack of applications and scrupulous interviews, we were thrown into a year of intimate quarters together. By accepting this job and traveling to this place and receiving each other without the demands of expectation, we became a family: learning each other, supporting each other, celebrating each other, yielding to one another. Often we’ll congregate around a counter, a table, a couch, perhaps talking, perhaps not, just to be within each other’s presence.

Every Sunday evening we have family dinner. And every Sunday, sitting down to a warm plate and lit candles, we take hands and say, “Thank you,” me to a God, the others to wherever they channel gratitude. And in that circle, at that table, surrounded by those people, I feel like the lucky one.

So to my fellow volunteers, my Nome family, thank you. Merry Christmas. Glad tidings. For I am glad to be spending this time with you. Often I feel like a prickly pinecone surrounded within a wreath of goodness, because all the things this season is supposed to bring—cheer, joy, generosity—you offer daily and freely. Whenever someone asks about my experience in Alaska, I say you all are the best part.

And though unpacked, we will continue to learn more about each other. Not just because time will continues scribbling its narrative. But because there are still bits of treasure left in our pockets, in the lining of our jackets, in the toe of that one unwore pair of shoes. And then there are the pieces that we carry closest—in the hollow of our pelvic bone, between the slot of our seventh and eighth rib, within the cradle of our left thumb and forefinger. And as we stretch and shake about and enter moments of quiet trust, these bits will fall out, dropping into each other’s palms, sometimes surprising even ourselves with fragments forgotten.

We have eight months ahead. Thank you for allowing me to share them with you.

Merry Christmas.

Born Free

Walking home Saturday night, my boots, which for the past three weeks have slipped across the road, now meet traction. The powdery snow, after weeks of falling and sifting and stirring, has created an almost grainy underlayer, burying the black ice that has twice smashed my body to my knees and has for weeks dripped every step with caution. I stop, skimming my sole over the street, friction scraping its track. I smile, and crawling into bed that night, my limbs tingle. My toes start bouncing, waving back and forth. I pull the covers up to my chin, giddy with the thought of tomorrow, feeling every bit my five-year-old self the night before Christmas. Sleep cannot pass through my body soon enough, and the sun cannot open its bright eye early enough. Blah. The clock moves so slowly, and I am too buzzy to rest.

But sleep does come, overstaying its welcome, in fact. I rise at 11am and pull back my curtain. The snow amplifies the sun’s feeble light, multiplying and spreading its few rays to illuminate this mid morning hour. After an oatmeal breakfast and a chance for digestion, I skip up the stairs, almost clapping. I pull on my black leggings and Texas Longhorns sweatshirt. And bounding back downstairs, I lace up my shoes.

“Where are you going?” Emily, my housemate, asks.

“Running,” I say, my chest swelling, loving the very word on my tongue. And turning on my heel, I’m out the door.

Pausing at the edge of the road, I reach out my arms and lift my chin to breathe in the cold, sharp air, releasing a silent paean. Then I’m off. Legs falling into their familiar cadence. Feet slightly sinking into the first fine layer of snow before finding the solid thickness beneath, then pushing off to stride ahead. My ears sting from cold, but I know another quarter mile, and I won’t be able to feel it. Same with my hands. Always beginning tucked into their sleeves until the steam from my body forces them outwards to the cool beyond.

I turn towards the airport. The slushy ocean on my left, steel gray with a strip of neon orange edging the horizon. Hills rise to my right, clouds blurring their tips. And all around me, snow. It’s been falling for a month, and I am still baffled by its enormousness. Coming from middle Tennessee where flurries melt by noon (and it's only ever flurries), until arriving in Alaska, I’d never seen the world stretch in unbroken whiteness. Like a giant whiteout bottle spilled over the earth. Turning down a hill, I increase my pace, passing multicolored figures tomcod fishing in the harbor. No cars pass and the silence is absolute, absorbing even breath and pace.

This motion of legs reaching and lungs expanding provides a continuity. The continuum began in seventh grade, jogging the humidity heavy streets of my Southern neighborhood. Then into high school cross-country. Then college, where like a midnight vigilante, I ran beneath the rose and amber streetlamps, roving over, through, and between every blade of grass and tree on that ever-revealing campus. It was there, where after years of resentfully stomping through the motions, I fell in love with this action. To the point where I’d have to force myself to stop after an hour of freedom to return to studying. Then abroad, running along the canal, when flowing and frozen, discovering neighborhoods every bit the English architectural monoculture. Then in California, around and around the tree-draped perimeter of McKinley Park, passing rose gardens, duck pond, playgrounds, and stretching lawns of every outdoor recreation. And now here in Alaska. A string attaching all these places, braiding into sinew and stitching their terrain through my limbs.

What I learned in those places holds true here. That I cannot know the curvature of the earth I stand on until I feel it pounding beneath my feet, separated only by a slip of fabric and a slab of rubber, inhaling its atoms into my lungs, mingling in the space between muscle and vein, learning the nuances of its incline in my cells as oxygen and carbon slip past each other through membrane. And in this process, anxiety tucks itself into bed. Worries sort themselves into drawers. Fear takes off its mask and watches it disintegrate to dust. And in at least one moment during every run, I hear my best friend yelling to me, “Born Free!” Like she did that day sophomore year of college when from on a hill, she saw me running below and called out to me, cheering me on.

Looking at the white hills of Nome, I remember the summer of 2010 when my family visited the Grand Canyon. Standing on the edge of phenomenon, I wished I had never seen a picture of that sculpted landscape. I wish I had never heard of that chasm. I wished I was a pioneer, heading west in a covered wagon, having just spanned the Great Plains, and now without tale or forewarning, happened upon that site. Jaw dropping. Eyes bulging. Breath forgotten.

Since that moment, I have wondered what the places I have run over looked like before something stronger than beak or claw or grip or less patient than water or sand or wind gouged and shifted the land. I’ve fantasized of witnessing terrain without expectation or industrial alteration. And looking at Nome’s white hills, the stretching tundra, the Bering Sea, I sense the endurance of my run connecting to the-- from the perspective of eyes that will only see a few decades-- timelessness of this topography. And though empowered by blood and endorphins, I suddenly see my small life flick like a mere snowflake in the wind. But dear God, caught on a gloved finger and examined, it’s close to majestic.

Returning to the corner outside my house, I begin my cool down. And like at the end of every run, I say a prayer of thanks. For returning home without injury. For the ability to run. For a safe place to ramble. For the example shown by my family that this action is valuable. And this time I add, for being in Nome. For the snow. For the few hours of daylight. And for the tiny molecules of Alaska now circulating through me, adding another link to this chain.

Radio Story of the Pilgrim Hot Springs Geothermal Project

In October, I traveled 60 miles north of Nome to Pilgrim Hot Springs, a land of steaming geothermal pools. From late August until last week, researches and drillers were living onsite, working 24/7 to answer Nome's energy question: Can Pilgrim fuel a geothermal power plant? Engineers say yes. And the crew worked all summer to confirm that answer. Listen to an in depth story of the project.

Pictures from Pilgrim Hot Springs:

Wellness

“Were you here late last night?” My boss asked at our daily morning meeting.

“I was here later than I should have been,” I said, thinking of the 2am timestamp on my story in dropbox.

“I asked you if you could finish the story by the end of the day, and you said yes. If you aren’t able to finish a story, you need to tell me. You’re learning to write news and edit audio and code audio. It’s going to take time, and you do no benefit to yourself staying late. Now, what stories are you working on today?” she asked, moving on to the day’s news.

Was I just reprimanded for finishing an assignment? I worked until 2am, but I completed my first story with audio cuts from interviews I recorded. And the story’s been airing all morning. And I’m not sucking overtime pay. I’m a volunteer. I don’t receive overtime. And I’m being reprimanded?

The next day, the staff handed the Volunteers two sunboxes to place in the Volunteer House to counteract SAD when the light diminishes. Then they reminded us the work kitchen remains stocked with fruit, nuts, and granola bars for us to eat if we need a snack or if our blood sugar dips. As a side note, they said the gym where we receive a free membership is extending its weekend hours.

That was three weeks ago. My boss is still telling me to leave work earlier.

Besides my parents, I’m not used to authority figures, especially employers, caring about my wellness. My background in theatre and academia taught me to do whatever I had to do to get the job done. Health and sanity were never mentioned. Probably because they got in the way.

In college my bedtime was 4am. That is, if I wasn’t pulling my weekly all-nighter to write a paper. At my last theatre job, a 12-hour day was considered getting off early. In both environments, work ended when the task ended, and you did whatever you had to do to get the job done before the deadline hit or the curtain rose. If that meant not sleeping for 48 hours, then shut your mouth and keep working.

And I loved it.

If I entered a semester thinking I could succeed, I’d tip the scale until doubt spiked my adrenaline to panic as I piled on more classes and rehearsals than time or sanity permitted. Weekly, I’d shout expletives at myself with lips smirking as I opened my laptop at 12am to begin a paper due at 9am, buzzed off the risk of not finishing, the challenge of forcing myself to, and the triumph of body slamming into the deadline, finished paper in hand, still warm from the printer.

High stakes. Low certainty. Cortisol was my ecstasy.

At the interview for my previous theatre job, the employer said: You will work 12 to 16 hour days, 6 days a week, no vacations. You will be hungry, tired, and unwashed, and you won’t care because you’ll be so exhausted. But every day you’ll be working with a professional theatre company. What do you think?

“It sounds like touching fire,” I said, “terrifying and magnetic.” And I wanted to grab the flame with both hands.

Theatre people love to work, and they love to work hard. They open a vein, drain it on stage, and get off on it. So him telling me that I would work morning, day, and night in a job that’s all-consuming, that will take everything from me, that I will fiercely love and fiercely hate and consider leaving theatre forever and, ultimately, learn more about my craft than I ever have in my life…well, it was lighting a spark in a powder keg, a spark that welded an alloy of passion and ambition, an alloy that has always glinted my eyes at any chance to skid broadside across concrete to do the work that makes sleep and food and showers and anywhere else in the world unnecessary.

Then I come to KNOM, and three weeks in, I get reprimanded for working until 2am.

I’m learning what this whole wellness-concerned work environment means. I’m trying to limit myself to 9-hour days. I’m trying to take lunch breaks. I’m trying to sleep 8 hours. I’m learning to respect my health and sanity and to see them not as the wings of my work but to see my work as one of the passengers among many on the airplane of my life. I’m learning to abide by what my Dad told me sophomore year of college, that though I may love my work, my work will never love me and that work needs no rest, but I do. I’m recognizing that occupying myself solely with my employment whittles the million capacities of my humanity to a few sinews of my being, a fate that will leave me dancing hollow round the prickly pear. And hardest of all, I’m learning to efficiently create work I am proud of while supporting my colleagues and then to leave work and live a quality personal life within a community.

Masochism is a hard pleasure to break, but concern from the upper hierarchy for my person beyond my product is a challenging but beautiful thing to begin accepting.

Nome Tundra

Three Weeks

“We’ve canceled your position,” My boss told me 24 hours after landing in Nome to work at KNOM at their Public Affairs Director. “There is no Public Affairs position. You’re now a News Reporter.” She explained I would retain the public affairs duties of Elder Voices and Profiles but those tasks would be secondary to reporting news. The shift would balance the responsibilities of the News Department while making the department, which consists of the News Director and two News Volunteers, a cohesive team.

As my years of theatre improv training taught me, when presented with new information, just say yes. “Sounds great,” I said.

My first task as News Reporter was bending my mind from the shape of composing long form human interest stories to spitting out short news stories. I prefer mulling over my writing, wandering into the dictionary and thesaurus, placing words on the page like a Buddhist monk places individual grains of sand on a mandala, always gravitating towards timeless, doughy themes, nothing topical.

News rejects such indulgence. “Get it on the page and accurate,” my boss said when explaining news writing. “Forget perfectionism. A story a day is the goal.”

And let me tell you, it’s a rush. Combing news sites. Interviewing. Researching. Picking up the phone and dialing any person on any topic with the words, “I’m a reporter,” throwing open doors and mouths in full permission for nosiness. And the work is interesting, ceaselessly, whisking my brain from one topic to the next: adolescent obesity to caribou migration to fusing Native healing with Western medicine, for example.

 It’s also a mental Stairmaster. Because news is a french fry—hot and salty one moment, cold trash the next. It doesn’t retain relevancy. News is what is happening now or what is going to happen. By the time it’s broadcast, it has expired. So the mind keeps climbing, grasping flashes in the pan.

By the way, I’ve been here three weeks. Before arriving I had never written news, broadcast live, edited audio, called for an interview, conducted a field interview, or touched broadcast equipment. Three weeks in, I’ve done all that. I’ve even dj’ed.

The KNOM staff induces this rapid transition. Though I came to KNOM with zero experience, walking through the door, the staff treated me as a radio news reporter. Instant belief. Instant support. Brief but thorough training. That mindset transferred to me, allowing me three weeks after walking into a radio studio for the first time to have already broadcast live news stories that I wrote.

At KNOM they pull you off a cliff, telling you, ”You’re a bird,” and though you’ve never sprouted feathers, you find yourself flying.

Sunrise in Nome, AK

Baths

As Thoreau went into the woods, I am going to Nome to learn to live deliberately. I lost myself in California. For a terrifying series of months, I became a person who I didn’t know and who I never want to meet again. Every time I stepped into the shower, I hunched over, wanting to take a bath, when for years I had taken baths only when sick. Finally, one day, I did take a bath. Folding to my knees, I switched the water from showerhead to faucet, and cradling myself into the tiniest packet of flesh I could, I prayed as water rose above my ears, Dear God let it wash over me and let me escape. Just for a little while. Let me leave this person who has become a stranger to me: angry, defensive, isolated, a 180 of the person I knew in college.

Part of the stress came from working a six-day, 85-hour week, week after week after month after month, a schedule leaving no time for reflection, outside work relationships, outside interests, or conscious time spent not working. But I was doing the work I had dreamed of doing with beautiful, ever-inspiring people. And I was learning, every day, about theatre, leadership, and business. I was also learning that it was possible to be so miserable for such a sustained period.

The worst part about being miserable is making the people around you less happy than they would have been had you not been around. It’s unacceptable and shitty, and inside you repents a constant apology for your presence.

But I was always around people. There is no solitude in theatre, and as an introvert that meant I was tired, permanently. Physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually tired with no time for recharge and no space to process why I had disappeared beyond my own recognition. A fellow introvert once said solitude is to her more important than food. I would have not eaten for a week just to have not seen or heard a single person for a day.

With every interaction draining a little more of my extinguished energy, every person became a threat. Once when walking into a coffee shop, a stranger turned to me and started speaking, and I jumped backwards, alarm blaring, screaming inside, “What do you want!? You want to take something from me. My time, my energy, my money. I have nothing left to give but myself, and I don’t even know who that person is anymore. So back off!” I don’t remember what he said.

I had slipped past my own recognition, and I had no one to bring me back to myself. For thousands of miles people only knew the stranger who had arrived in California a few months ago. They didn’t know the person I had called myself, the person who I remembered as a friend, the person who in my memory radiated life’s light. I needed someone who knew me. I needed someone to slap me across the face, look me in the eyes, and say, “This is who you are. Right here. You. All those wonderful things inside you are not lost. There is still hope and kindness and friendship and laughter inside you to give to others.” But how could these people pull me back to someone they had never met?

To that point in life I had identified myself through my actions and my relationships. I was a student. I was a director. I was a daughter. I was a sister. I was a friend. But those signposts were for a geography  I no longer inhabited. I was no longer a student, the role defining my existence since age five. I no longer recognized myself in the mirror of theatre, my driving action, the fire I thought eternal, the animation of my inner passions and earthly purpose. My family was a voice on the phone, and friends were facebook pictures. Who was I if I could no longer point to what I did or who surrounded me and say, “That’s me.”

What was I? Who was I? I don’t know. But I discovered a self, my self, a deeper self that existed beyond those constructions. Is it a heart? A soul? God? DNA? Faith? “The animating spirit,” a phrase my high school English teacher used to describe what can only be seen in absence when looking into the eye of a supermarket fish lying in ice? I don’t know what it is, but beneath the thousand layers of my past, my dreams, my actions, my labels, my names, my possessions, my words, my thoughts, my relationships, my skin, all I had read, all I had seen, all people had told me, all I had told myself, all the prayers I had ever said, I found a self, not something that beats or pricks light, but something that endures, something I contain that no being can touch or take or possess.

From that center, I slowly began the process of deconstructing my self-imposed isolation, reconstructing my identity, and grasping the open palms that had been held out to me all along.