Maslow's Hierarchy

It wasn't until after our evening bike ride - me and five other girls romping around on the trails a mile from my house, the spring greens so sharp, Baker picturesque on the horizon, the temperature perfect, the dirt dry but grippy - that I realized yesterday was the one-year anniversary of us moving here. 

First trillium of spring

It felt like only days ago that I stood in a semi circle around our shitty pit fire with my wonderful friends in the backyard of my home in Idaho. I felt so much love welling up in my chest through the final weeks before our departure. Adult platonic love really is something and I'm grateful to have so much of it in my little chosen families. 

One last good sesh

After we moved, it was pretty darn good for awhile. I've written about that a lot, about all the new experiences and wild adventures and constant novelty. But nagging at me was this sense that I hadn't really begun to live yet. I didn't know until I didn't have a job how wrapped up in my self image work was, how even though I was comfortable financially I was super uncomfortable feeling untethered, imagining my friends and family thought I was an indolent wastrel, having a beer with lunch, going to barre class, surfing job descriptions but rarely applying because I was too picky, looking at my phone all the time.

Exactly a year ago

And life was really so great besides that, but then suddenly the door opened at the one place that I really wanted to work, and I stole into the foyer and set about making myself indispensable. Everything I've learned, from my parents at my first job up to the myriad often painful lessons of my chosen career, I poured into giving them the best impression possible. Wow, I wanted them to say, she's so communicative, so fast, so responsive to feedback, so professional, such a great writer. 

(She's also a weirdo who loves playing dress-up)

The first article and the second and the third were easy, and then I got an assignment that really played to my strengths, and I knocked it out of the park. And they kept pitching me stories because one of the reporters was on leave, and then this week they said, does it make more sense for you to be on staff? and I grinned like a crocodile. 

Life was good before - I have new friends that I am head over heels in love with, I survived the rainy season, I'm really fit, I volunteer at the food bank to feel less bad about the state of the world - and now I have a job. The job. The job that I wanted for a whole year. 

The people here...

PNF

Brevard makes me a little angsty. I wrote about that almost ten years ago too - I'm starting to repeat myself. When I lived in California and Idaho I felt starved for constant canopy and wanted to drink it in every time I visited, but I'm getting plenty of that now. This visit, I felt less desperate to get out on the trails that I know so well. But I still went for a few runs, and the forest still grabbed me right in the same pleasure receptors that it always does. 

The forests of Washington are more beautiful and lush and primeval but Pisgah exists in my bones and flows in my blood. 

It's not even particularly lovely this time of year, just the mottled gray-brown of organic matter and the big bare tulip poplar stands casting their bar code shadows over the coves, the intermittent green of the rhodo and laurel. It's the only time of year that you get some hints of topography, ridges and subpeaks normally blocked by foliage. The smell of sun baked leaves is so strong it sits in your mouth and in your nose. It's quiet except for the punch of footfalls through disintegrating ground cover, the diverse bird call, the pugnacious chittering of tree vermin. 

For some reason running in Pisgah makes me want to write, maybe out of habit since I used to scribble something down after almost every run, before I was getting paid to do so. I just did it out of pleasure and necessity. 

I told Morgan that and she hypothesized that it's because the forest is so storied, so ancient. Yeah, I'd buy that.