Lola is coming today!!!! She and her friend Julia are visiting for a week, and I'm so excited to see her! It hit me suddenly last night that our last wave of planned visitors until December is here right now. Jeanie's dad and step mom arrived last Saturday, so they will overlap with Lola (and my parents, too!). It's so much fun having so many people from MN here. We had dinner with our parents last weekend, which was awesome!
And then Jeanie's mom is hoping to come visit again at Christmas. I will be in Portland, the only time I'm planning to leave Maui before I LEAVE Maui in the summer 2010. We've been here almost six months! So our time is a third of the way over? It seems like it's going fast, but SO much can still happen in a year....
I think I'm going through a quarter-life crisis, where I'm far more uncertain and afraid of the future than I was when I graduated from college. OK, grad school is a concrete and straightforward plan, but what does it actually look like? Moving to a new place alone. And what about after that? Trying to find a JOB? Or, more likely, taking off on a series of wanderings that, while fulfilling, require me to leave behind people and places every time, losing almost as much as I'm gaining. It's incredible how closely pain and joy are related, if you truly allow yourself to experience the depth of life. Life is rough.
Changing the subject, our friend Isaac took us on this insane hike the other day. It's one of those that's definitely off the map. All the water systems in Maui are privately owned, and there are miles and miles of weird irrigation and dam systems that are off-limits but in gorgeous places. On this hike, you climb over a turnstyle, walk up a road past all these cows, then turn off and scramble up a river bed, weaving through vines and branches. Suddenly the river narrows and you brace yourself between rock walls and climb up a small waterfall. But the BEST part is after this, when you realize you are entering a cave, a long one-way series of channels, pools, and waterfalls. It gradually gets pitch black and you have to blindly hang on to any handholds you can find and plunge into pools that are, for all you know, infinitely deep. The very end of the cave opens into a lake that you swim across, following the sound of a 20-foot waterfall at the end. Which of course you have to climb up. At the top you come to a retaining wall and squeeze through a drain/grate thing and are back at the river. Beyond that, there are huge beautiful waterfalls and lakes to explore. SO surreal.
It's things like this hike that keep me grounded and remind me how overwhelmingly blessed I am. Maui has got to be the best place to go through a crisis. Try getting your heart broken or freaking out about the future in the frigid uncaring doom of Minnesota. I've also found that I prefer being around people when I'm depressed--interacting with customers and coworkers at SBC provides relief and sanity rather than being draining. There are four friends in particular--Isaac, Micah, Sarah, and Holly--who've been hanging out there a lot recently and who I really appreciate.
I just found out Lola's flight is delayed until tomorrow :( She's stuck in Seattle :( :( :(
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