California

I'm sitting in my room, looking outside at a redwood tree. Perched on top of a mountain, there is a tumble of houses below me, intermingled with so much greenery I forget that my friends in Minneapolis are freezing.

I'm here to study craniosacral therapy and let me tell you, my chi is all gone rooted in the ground and I am one centered motherfucker.

I love this work, this learning. Yesterday, I sat with a 1,000 year old skull in my hands and noticed how, while smaller than most 1 year old skulls, it's still the same. The same sutures, the same holes where the cranial nerves go through, the same small bulges where the brain lobes rest, the same bones. All we've been doing for the last three days is anatomy: bones, nerves, blood, soft tissue of the brain/spine organ. Today is a day off and then tomorrow- Thursday - we start with the major hands on work. We've done a small amount already -hence being the centered motherfucker - but I swear, after eight more days of this, I'm going to be some new kind of Susan.

It's interesting to be in California. I haven't spent significant time here, aside from at conferences where you're surrounded by folks who aren't Californians either, since 1987. My focus is always East rather than West - East is where my friends and family are, it's where I lean when I have some free time, it's where I understand the streets and how people move.

California is different. Yeah, I know, thousands of late night bad California comedy jokes. Everyone knows California is different - but I've never quite felt it before.

The best way I can describe it is that there's a woman in the class who's from New York. The first time she opened her mouth and made a cheesy joke, the ground felt more solid under my feet and I knew where I was in the room. If you believe in things like earth/air/fire/water energies, then the East is way more earth and California is way more air. And so I'm floating around in it, not always sure of where I am in conversations with people, not used to the number of silences and the way responses are made, not quite sure.

I feel very midwestern here tinged with some East coast. Blunt, direct answers. I'm used to being the witchy-whoo-whoo one in my home community. Ha. Here, I feel like a four square barn, which is hysterical because I'm a city girl.