A whole month to the day since I last posted. A quick list of the things that have happened: "dates" four and five with M, a couple of blissful and incredible weekends in her town, at her house, bookends on my spring break travels, including meeting M's amazing daughter and more of M's friends. Two weeks camping in the middle of nowhere at Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park, Texas. Incredible experience at "roadside primitive" campsites, each one single, completely isolated by miles of wilderness. Return to LA for Moderna shot 1, preparation to return to a hybrid in-person teaching schedule, two days a week back at school with students. Tons of work on another chapter out of the dissertation that will be submitted for publication sometime soon I hope. A co-author requested I redo two of the extensive analyses in a new software platform that is all the rage, and that has been a really steep learning curve. A trial analysis ran for more than 17 days on my laptop haha. I now have an account with the computing cluster at my old school, so trial runs should be a ton faster. Plunge into the weird shadows of a depressive episode over the past few days, for reasons that were, at first, totally obscure, but now are at least slightly more clear. First of all, the weird tensions of a long distance relationship with M, and me feeling like I have had at least one aspect of my heart's condition tangled up in complications of some sort or another for years. Deeper than that, the realization that high school teaching is heavily vampiric in many ways, and requires so much of my time and energy. Of course, a part of this is that I am new at a new school, and have been developing two courses from the ground up, etc. But My heart wants room to do field work, research, write, play music again, breathing room. The full time teaching job allows for very little breathing room, and returning to in-person has felt rather stressful and like a reality check. The above, not where I was this last trip, but an example of where I would love to be. My soul is basically yelling at me to pay closer attention to the deeper activities I find more fulfilling. A recent dream had the repeated phrase "la mesa sagrada," in a wide variety of situations, and I kept encountering it in the dream. The Sacred Table. I have no idea exactly how to translate it, and of course it could just as well be resonating with a geographical feature, a mesa. My time in the wilderness brought up deep echoes of my time between December and August last year, traveling and being a hermit. Returning to Los Angeles for 8 more weeks of school has felt like a heavy, heavy burden. It is not that bad, but it has felt like the weight of the world itself. My time camping made me just want more, and more. If I had means, I would be out forever. And I would bring M and her daughter with me and their cats. haha. Uh, with consent of course. But seriously, if I could just travel all the time, or at least for weeks on end, I would be into it. Trying to fend off the pink flamingoes of self hatred. So the depressive episode was a sudden tumble into deep questioning. What am I doing with my life? Why am I teaching high school full time again? Why can't I make more direct use of my PhD? Why am I living in this gigantic city and not in the middle of absolutely nowhere? What have I done with my life? Feeling old and like chances are quickly slipping away. Feeling like a failure. It's weird when these storms come in, since I lose perspective entirely. The past year, I successfully defended, transitioned out, published two articles, traveled, got a job, fell in love, have been having a great relationship, moved to a new city, successfully taught remotely for months. But—I feel like a total failure in life. Oh yeah, also acknowledged 17 years of sobriety this week. I took a break from social media and spent some time meditating and trying to get some sleep, and got some of the above insight. I remembered that time is passing not just in a harrowing, frightening way, but also in a good way, moving me closer to the end of the school year and some down time, more time with M, more time to listen to my own intuition. I remembered that everything is not as big a deal as it seemed for a few days there. Things are basically okay. Some things are troublesome for real. Other aspects are incredible wonderful. I got some perspective back. Somehow, La mesa sagrada was part of the message, but I still haven't figured out exactly how. I'm staying open to anything that reveals why is was such a powerful phrase.