A Weekend with Soul Sisters {bliss}

You know when real life barfs all over your blog?  Like, how.  People fight in your comments section, your mom calls you with family drama ignited by your posts, or old boyfriends are rumored to have visited and suddenly you have writer's cramp.

Well, this past weekend, my blog barfed on my life.  It was awesome.  Here is what it looks like when four blogs collide (literally: toys on the floor, and mimosas for breakfast):

little Zoralee, myself, Lautariet Bohemiet, Owl Rain Feathers (currently private), and Still Walking and Waking holding tiny Zia

So here's the deal.  I know Tamie (ORF) through a mutual friend, Rob (Caryn's brother in law; this could get confusing but it is really a brilliant piece of Buddhist Life Force at work).  Both Tamie and I were going through a rough spot and confiding in (the most non judgmental man on the planet) Rob at the same time and he was all, I think you might get along.  Abracadabra, meet each other.  Typically, Tamie was standoffish.  Dude, I'm quite certain you're not my type of person.  I was, typically, emotionally slutty and all, Just try me on for size.  I won that one (*high five!*) because persistence is my most annoying trait.  Plus Rob was right.  Tamie and I speak the same langwidge.

Tamie knew Lori (SWaW) from a semester they overlapped in Flagstaff (Tamie was chaplain and Lori was a student) and hit it off rather instantly.  Rachel (LB) is Lori's awesome and oh so fantastic hippie younger sister.  We all blog.  We all speak the same langwidge.  And the rest is pretty cool history.  We are among each other's most faithful readers, email and facebook (except Tamie, who recently discovered she's Too Cool for Facebook).  Tamie and I met face to face in real life back in October 2009 when she and her boyfriend came to our house for Thanksgiving.  She wrote about it on her bloggity blog but I can't link to that.  You'll have to trust me that she did better justice to it than I did.  With photographs.

I met Rachel in August when we did our epic Oregon Coast camping trip (I haven't gotten to posting the final leg of the trip, which includes our meeting and sleeping at her house and her feeding us amazing salsa that I have not forgotten).  She has dreads that smell like lavendar and sandalwood.  She has a baby who was born at home and speaks in a sweet two year old lisp, as articulately as a kindergartener.  She's also ass wuppingly HYlarious, especially in person.

Lori I had not met in real life.  We had discussed the theoretical possibility of all of us meeting someday, but SOMEDAY CAME TO PASS this past weekend, man!  Lori flew from North Dakota to visit Rach in Portland, Tamie got wind of that and flew up from Berkeley, California, and I caught wind of it and Brent pulled his best husband move yet and send me away, alone, on a train, to Portland for four days of bliss with my friends.  Boo.  Frickin.  Ya.

Rach, Yours Truly, Lor, Tam

Really, most of our photos are some version of THIS

I will be grateful for the rest of my life, for this trip.  I had a bit of an early morning hussle and rush and some worry about catching my train on time but once I got settled with my Ipod and a comfy seat on the train?  I actually got some tears in my eyes from the silent, sweet, solitary bliss of six hours on the train BY MYSELF.  I could PEE WHEN MY BLADDER WAS FULL.  This is so profound.  I could eat when I was hungry.  I could rest when I was tired.  Friends, my body, heart, and soul are weary from running the neverending marathon that is my life.  I love my life.  And it is very, very exhausting.  To rest on a train on the way to visit three girlfriends was the in real life version of "charging..." on your ipod.  [insert cute little apple here].  I read a book.  I knitted.  I listened to music.  I peed.  I peed again, because I'm indulgent.  I got food from the food car.  I snacked.  I read some more.  I watched the ocean out the window.  I listened to The National's Bloodbuzz Ohio as many times as I wanted to.  And then I arrived.

Rachel: "I'm in the silver nissan with the squeaky brakes."  I squealed myself, dude.  I got in and it started to rain so Rach turned on the windshield wiper (just one.  The passenger side doesn't work).  I passed out I laughed so hard.  And it commenced.

We laughed all weekend, we cried, we talked, we hashed out loves and hatred and mental darknesses and parenting and abortion and addiction and ate really good food.  Each day, Rach and Lor's brother Dave took the kids for a few hours and we took off for coffee, or to Powell's, or for Ethiopian food (I'm not a virgin anymore.  It was fantastic), and we stayed up late and slept in (well, Tamie and I did: we were childless and sharing a king sized bed with a tempurapedic memory foam mattress.  We cannot be blamed for any oversleeping which was perhaps done).  I brought my breast pump and dutifully woosh wooshed away twice a day and left lots of milk in Rachel's freezer for a friend of hers who supplements.  And I slept all night long without interruptions.  It was awesome pants.  These girls are so REAL.  They get me.  They know me.  I know them.  I get them.  We're very different, but there's a common heart in all four of us.

At the end of the four days when we said goodbye I missed them instantly.  I wanted to tear chunks off them like communion bread and take them home with me.

My trip home was supposed to be an evening version of my blissful trip down, but Mother Nature had arrived in a big way in Washington State so I had to take the bus.  There were mudslides near the train tracks so we were stuck on the [effing] bus.  I had forgotten all my fish oil and other supplements at home, so after 4 days without them, a last minute change in transportation plans, horrible weather, and the contamination-phobic's horror shop which is The Greyhound, I was wrestling some pretty vivid intrusive thoughts.  I won, but.
Also, this week has been resounding with some symptoms of unbalanced mental equilibrium as my body recovers.  But its a blip in the radar, preceeded by a weekend that was flamboyantly good for my soul.

Thanks for shoring me up, ladies.  Love you.

Oh, and my favourite part of the weekend?  When Tamie danced Gangam style in the tube.  Just sayin'.