I set the alarm for 6:00 am CA time, forced my husband and I out of bed and into our running clothes. My logic was that we could stay on east coast time, and that running would help with the jet lag. Ha. We jogged around the Capital building, ate some breakfast, and headed over to the conference center to register for the American Art Therapy Conference.
Oooh, I hummed with anticipation as we checked out the rooms and began searching through my conference booklet. So glad I did this. More about that tomorrow.
Today was all about Napa Valley.
Napa Valley is about a one and a half hour drive from Sacramento. Sacramento is flat, flat, flat.
But as you drive from the city, the view quickly changes into rolling mountains and sprawling farms.
There was a glowing quality of light that made everything richly golden, like if you touched the air it would reverberate, sending concentric ripples across the sky. The air smelled like earth, mature grapes and drying vines.
I thrust my head out of the window and breathed in, catching a hint of smoke from a nearby fire and staring into the liquidity of a twilight that seemed to stretch on forever. Time ceased to move. My senses began to grow confused. The air seemed tangible, as if you could scoop it up and pour it from your hands like sand.
We stopped in the town of Napa, where I wandered into a yarn store - like a real live only-sells-yarn yarn store. The owner asked me if I was looking for something in particular, and I realized that I had my hands out in front of me to touch the yarn, my palms sensing the soft before they even made contact. I had almost ceased seeing, having already taken in all the colors and commanding my brain to 'touch'. All of my senses felt cranked up and yet useless, and I began to feel disconnected, like what I was seeing was not real.
It was about lunch time that we started to feel really strange. The sun was supposed to be moving lower in the sky, and yet it was straight above and bright. The light didn't seem right, and we felt hungry and weak, and lightheaded. This is jet lag, and it feels crazy. You tell yourself that you should be okay, but you are most definitely not. My brain began to feel like it was taking in incorrect information and began growing confused. It felt like I was hallucinating.
In our off-state, we felt that the natural response to our situation was to find the oddest tourist spots we could find and enjoy their absurd ridiculousness. And also take in some natural wonders, of course.
These gems are completely trapped in the seventies, with signs still sporting their old school fantastic fonts. Displays haven't been changed for years, featuring articles written in 1969 and black and white photographs with women wearing gloves and cat eye glasses and men still in suits.
This one is the Old Faithful Geyser of California. It erupted faithfully every fourteen minutes. I was feeling really strange about here. My brain was so confused by the concept of time that it couldn't possibly comprehend a geyser, a rainbow, mountains and palm trees. And llamas. Llamas. I felt like I was walking through air thick as water, my body heavy and cumbersome, and I felt disrupted by the constant eruptions.
Next stop was the Petrified Forest. These trees are now rocks, felled by a tremendous volcanic explosion and steadily replaced by silt many moons ago.
The petrified trees lay where they were found and exposed, along a loop reaching up a hill and back around to the main lodge. It felt good to walk, and the air here smelled rich with pine and sunshine. My addled brain struggled with the concept of time - this seemed so long ago, and my life seemed so small and short in comparison. I felt insignificant and replaceable. And feeling untethered, I felt okay with that. I began to surrender to California, and jet lag, and leaving work behind. I also felt mournful and euphoric, with this odd sensation of wanting to eat my experience, taste it like a baby who puts everything it needs to learn about in its mouth.
And with this, you may be wondering if we stopped at any wineries. The truth is, not really. My designated driver doesn't drink and I was so loopy, I didn't need anything else to make my head spin. Hopefully you are reading this, and shaking your head in firm, firm agreement. The bummer is, we would have loved to take a tour but it costs a bit of money to do because it includes tastings. We stopped at one place and everyone was sloshed. It was all so discombobulating. So we kept on keeping on.
We began driving back towards Sacramento with the setting sun, eating honey crisp apples and cheese sticks, sticky sweet crisp on lips and soft yielding milky on tongue. The fields glowed in a way that we felt in our bodies, and tried desperately to breathe in and be connected to. I couldn't take it all in fast enough. I couldn't take enough pictures, I couldn't set them up correctly. All I could do was breathe and be, but I itched inside because this was not enough.
The day felt dosed by synesthesia, where because our ability to perceive time was completely disturbed, our other senses grew confused and crossed into one another, creating this odd sensation of being connected and unconnected, one and not-one. We could no longer trust our bodies and yet, we realized that this was all we had to trust. Our phenomenological experience was disrupted and perceived all at once.
Our simple perception of time, our awareness of where the sun is in the sky, our body's knowledge of when food should come were all lost. An odd feeling of imperfect surrender, of flowing along and then wading through quicksand, flawed and perfection. The single strangest experiment is to remove oneself from one's environment, one's elemental anchor and to then experience adjusting to it.
And finally, the stability of our hotel bed, fluffy and white, with heavy down comforters and merciful sleep.
