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November 2009 
Where would you choose to spend your life?
Posted on Oct 12th, 2009
by 
Centria
Centria
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for October 10, 2009:
Oh I love this question! Where would you CHOOSE to spend your life? That's the word that popped out at me. Where would you CHOOSE?
Do other people get to choose where they wanting to live their lives? Oh, lucky. I think my kids look like they are choosing where to live. Kiah's been to Washington DC and Europe and now Manhattan testing the waters. Christopher has a shanty in San Diego after a stint in Ann Arbor. (ooops, I do not mean shanty. I mean teeny little apartment that I get to visit next month for the first time, hurray, hurray!)
Back to CHOOSING where one gets to spend his or her precious life. My life doesn't seem to work like that. It's more of a backwards upside down kind of thing. Here's what happened when I was twelve years old.
We hopped into the family station wagon looking like folks from a TV sitcom. Mom and Dad in the front seat, sister and two brothers in the back. We were always cruisin' round the U.S. of A in our family station wagon. This time we were headed across the bridge to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Nothin' like the Grand Canyon, but we were heading way north and west. Five hundred miles away from our nice sedate small town and farmlands in the Thumb of Michigan.
So we get to our destination after twelve painful hours in the station wagon (who knows? maybe it was two or three days?) and pulled up in front of this nice little
A-frame cabin in the woods. No electricity. No indoor plumbing. The temperature lingered about 93 degrees. Two billion mosquitoes and black flies buzzed incessantly. You couldn't go outside without welts forming from bites. It was agony.
My mom and I sat inside with our novels. Dad and the two brothers ran free in the woods, excited to explore the outdoors. I wrinkled my nose at every bathroom visit and prayed to God (and here is where you might want to listen as I attempting to answer the question): GOD, PLEASE GET ME OUT OF THIS GOD-FORSAKEN LAND. I HATE IT HERE. PLEASE GET ME OUT OF THE U.P.!!!
So where does God decide little Kathy should live for her WHOLE LIFE? You got it. My God is apparently a big jokester. A prankster. A "ha-ha you silly little thing, you have just uttered the magic words." Guess where you're going to live?
Less than eight or nine years later I was following the love of my life (we were young and in love and wanting to go live simply in the back woods....you can see I momentarily lost my mind completely...obviously part of God's "plan"...)
So here we are, 30 years later. I can't tell you how many years I moaned and cussed and fought and cried wanting to be elsewhere. Somewhere with lots of people and coffee shops and bookstores and Lots to Do. Until Suddenly. Suddenly you wake up and find yourself in a beautiful land among incredible trees and animals and fascinating Things to Discover in the woods. You find yourself almost a bit enamored with the land, the silence, the Nothing to Do. You find yourself sinking into the emptiness, that fear of nothing, that lodged deep in the center of your being. You find yourself thinking....hmmmm....well this isn't quite so bad.
Hey, you say, maybe I'll agree with God. Maybe I'll choose to live here.
Ha ha, God! Gotcha!
(This is where God really laughs. Got you! he says. And now you can spend an entire year of your life going outside and blogging about it. Tell the world how much you love the place. C'mon...I dare you.)
Do other people get to choose where they wanting to live their lives? Oh, lucky. I think my kids look like they are choosing where to live. Kiah's been to Washington DC and Europe and now Manhattan testing the waters. Christopher has a shanty in San Diego after a stint in Ann Arbor. (ooops, I do not mean shanty. I mean teeny little apartment that I get to visit next month for the first time, hurray, hurray!)
Back to CHOOSING where one gets to spend his or her precious life. My life doesn't seem to work like that. It's more of a backwards upside down kind of thing. Here's what happened when I was twelve years old.
We hopped into the family station wagon looking like folks from a TV sitcom. Mom and Dad in the front seat, sister and two brothers in the back. We were always cruisin' round the U.S. of A in our family station wagon. This time we were headed across the bridge to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Nothin' like the Grand Canyon, but we were heading way north and west. Five hundred miles away from our nice sedate small town and farmlands in the Thumb of Michigan.
So we get to our destination after twelve painful hours in the station wagon (who knows? maybe it was two or three days?) and pulled up in front of this nice little
A-frame cabin in the woods. No electricity. No indoor plumbing. The temperature lingered about 93 degrees. Two billion mosquitoes and black flies buzzed incessantly. You couldn't go outside without welts forming from bites. It was agony.
My mom and I sat inside with our novels. Dad and the two brothers ran free in the woods, excited to explore the outdoors. I wrinkled my nose at every bathroom visit and prayed to God (and here is where you might want to listen as I attempting to answer the question): GOD, PLEASE GET ME OUT OF THIS GOD-FORSAKEN LAND. I HATE IT HERE. PLEASE GET ME OUT OF THE U.P.!!!
So where does God decide little Kathy should live for her WHOLE LIFE? You got it. My God is apparently a big jokester. A prankster. A "ha-ha you silly little thing, you have just uttered the magic words." Guess where you're going to live?
Less than eight or nine years later I was following the love of my life (we were young and in love and wanting to go live simply in the back woods....you can see I momentarily lost my mind completely...obviously part of God's "plan"...)
So here we are, 30 years later. I can't tell you how many years I moaned and cussed and fought and cried wanting to be elsewhere. Somewhere with lots of people and coffee shops and bookstores and Lots to Do. Until Suddenly. Suddenly you wake up and find yourself in a beautiful land among incredible trees and animals and fascinating Things to Discover in the woods. You find yourself almost a bit enamored with the land, the silence, the Nothing to Do. You find yourself sinking into the emptiness, that fear of nothing, that lodged deep in the center of your being. You find yourself thinking....hmmmm....well this isn't quite so bad.
Hey, you say, maybe I'll agree with God. Maybe I'll choose to live here.
Ha ha, God! Gotcha!
(This is where God really laughs. Got you! he says. And now you can spend an entire year of your life going outside and blogging about it. Tell the world how much you love the place. C'mon...I dare you.)
Access: Public
ha ha ha! God has quite the sense of humour
I know it, dearest. All these years I have been telling everyone the only other place I would live besides Montreal is on the West Coast, near the ocean, ah, the ocean my dear, guess where my beloved lives? Hamilton :)
it has a poor reputation, given its history with the steelworking industry, etc.
do i care, even the slightest bit? I do not! all i want is to be with him, in the best place for us both.
home is where the heart is…
I loved this post and my heart giggles at the common things that you say that i feel…
Yes.. i lived in Mombasa myself… then 7 years in India… and now i go back to Mombasa…
All the time.. i Never thought i;d say it to myself.. but i am happy where i am.. when i am…
I plan to stay permanently in Rwanda shortly… a place of hills and forestry mostly… and allot of good business… no corruption… i like that about Rwanda…
It;s true… we are in a sorta dream… where we are placed and faced with situations that we are able to handle and which give us the greatest growth…
Do you know… Like the best kid in the family… that parent always cares more for that one and saves the best bits for him/her… and also.. the smallest of mistakes or misdoings are quickly scolded and stopped from being connected with you…
Ha.. .i dare you.. to do something nasty like chop down a tree…
there will be 10 or more things that will stop you in your way…
For God loves the best kids… ;-) and stops us from continuing on the path astray
Thanks for sharing this sweet blog… we are all apart of a divine tree… :-)
Different shades of leaves.. but all part of a Grand tree… ;-)
Smiling Kathy, gotta love God's sense of humour, I can picture you there, some places we learn to love.
Hmm… I tried to move to the west coast (Vancouver) when I was 20 or so. Didn't work out (my girlfriend was homesick and I didn't want to stay 'alone', neither of us had a job yet, family opposition). Planned to move to the Okanagan (interior BC) a couple of years later when my sister got a teaching job there, but by the time she was ready to leave I had met someone special… The thing is, if I had moved either of those times I would have missed meeting the man. (Gasp!) Of course, I would have also missed him dying several years later…
Years later I 'followed the money' to booming Alberta (Calgary, then Edmonton). In Edmonton, I decided to go back to school. After my masters, I followed a doctoral fellowship to Victoria. Yes! Done with my studies now but here I still am—not in Vancouver where I originally tried to move all those years ago, but on the Island. Even better. Feels like home. (Ha ha ha! God, I am.)
Here's the thing, though: everywhere I have ever lived (except perhaps the town I grew up in) felt like home while I lived there. This did not mean that life went smoothly for me—far from it. You see, I may have been at home in terms of the physical places I lived, but I wasn't at home in the inner self way. Here in Victoria, at last, I have grown to feel at home with myself. I have come to see that everything that happened in my life, I chose, and chose, and chose—even when I didn't think I was choosing.
~ Nicole, you left me grinning thinking “Watch what you want!” because you might just go and get it. Of course, it also might be true “Watch what you DON'T want” because…sigh…you just might get it too! God's sense of humor is legendary. And it will be fun to watch and see where your heart's home settles…
~ Dear Crudebliss, I am so glad you liked this blog! You have lived in many places, haven't you? It will be interesting to see how you like Rwanda. I am sponsoring a woman in Rwanda right now, helping her get back on her feet after the war. Love the part of how we're all part of a divine tree. Isn't that true! Look at our branches and leaves blow in the breeze!
~ Gael, yes, that is it. I had to learn to love this place. And yet it happened. And the gift of it was amazing… P.S. good to see you back 'round Gaia!
~ Ruth, interesting about choosing (even when we don't think we're choosing.) I feel like God or the universe or awareness is perhaps choosing FOR us when our conscious thinking mind is set in perhaps preconceived or preconditioned ways of thinking or feeling. If I hadn't been here, I would have stayed even more asleep than I am now. My love/excitement with people would probably have stayed at the forefront and that which exists around it may have been missed altogether. Maybe not though. But this has been the right place to have been chosen, whoever chose it. Thank you for sharing your story. I would like to know more about it some day.
grrreat story Kathy, made me laugh at the inherent paradoxities that comes with living, not only where we choose, but also how we choose to live. Our circumstances & locations need not change one bit for our world to change entirely within a blink of the eye. Do we resist or accept? all a matter of perception. It's wonderful how you embraced living in a place you didn't initially want to be, and sensing it did take you a long time to do so, yes? I'm still at it, having been living 'back home' for a lot longer than the bohemian spirit in me intended. Another part of me can't help but ask with a smirk, well, tara, if you'd really rather be somewhere else, why is it that you are still here? tsk.
Hey tara girl! Glad to hear I'm not the only person who has struggled with choosing where to live. Or being chosen where one is to live. You see, I could have kept movin'…but then there's the “problem” of that husband. He thinks he's also married to this land. It took me a long time to come to terms with being here. Having kids helped. Got so busy with the chillin's that I forgot to whine as much. Yeah, and that's the thing. How to resolve the bohemian spirit with other considerations. Yep. Know your pain, girl. BIG hugs!
it is a delight right now dearest, following my heart's own…
Your journey to find love and contentment in the U.P. sounds almost like you could make a novel out of it. It's as if you never felt it was you until you discovered that for at least a part of you, it was.
I have lived in Chicago, Western New York, large town and small town Arizona, Boston and both sides of the hill in Los Angeles. I think what amazes me is that each place that I have lived has somehow become a permanent part of who I am.
I lived the longest in Arizona, and it makes up the biggest part of me, I know.
I had no part in the decisions of where to live until Boston, and then L.A. I wanted to be somewhere where there was something going on. I guess I learned that there's something going on everywhere. You just have to be willing to see it, hear it, feel it.
Yes, place is big with me.
Hey there, Andrea, hello! Sounds like you've lived in many places and now I'm sort of getting an image of a person and place as married, as containing each other. Is that what you mean? That the place becomes part of who you are, almost viscerally? Oooh, am going to ponder this some more today. I like that! There are specific hills and shocking leaves and wild lakes oozing out of and through our pores…Yes. Thank you for this today!