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The decision to walkaway from our house & O-town feels an awful lot like the decision to quit grad school. Agonizing, emotionally fraught, tangled feelings about our substantial time/financial investment and an unhealthy, unsustainable situation. Scariest choices I've made and the most freeing. In six months, I will pay off my grad student loans; 8 years to finally shrug that off.

Despite the tens of thousands of dollars that we've put into our property, we'll be relieving ourselves of a debt that would have hung over us until we retired. It feels like for the last few years, we've been treading water while it just kept rising. And now we've stopped treading and realized we could just stand up and stop drowning.

We'll be renters again and that requires an emotional/mental adjustment, but to be free of the cumbersome "joys" of home ownership is liberating. In two years, we could buy again, if we wanted.

It helps of course that my neighbor, former trusted boss, elder is buying our property fulfilling her family's dream of building a community retreat center founded on principles of compassion, justice and aspiration. It was not all for naught. We are contributing to a higher and better purpose...

We move out this weekend, to the burbs (though more diverse than burbs outside the Bay), to the edge of wildland, sienna hills. The opposite end from our urban existence. I look forward to being in a quiet place where my ears don't prick up with every loud bang, trying to decipher whether those were gunshots, and which street they must be coming from, was it a semi-automatic? Was anyone hurt?

A place where we can take long walks in the glimmering dusk, where my peripheral vision can ease up a little, where i have to fend off wildlife trying to survive not life gone wild trying to survive. Where my child can can play without being within arms reach. Where i can bike again, maybe even bike with my kid and not have my heart in my throat. A place wheere i can hear the wind, where the constant shushing roar in the ambience isn't the hum of traffic, but the rhythm of nature. I am perhaps idealizing and romanticizing. The burbs have no culture that cannot be conveniently sited in a mini mall with a Starbucks and Panera on the corners. An actress I like said, the suburbs are where bad things happen. She perhaps was overdramatizing, but I know as sleepy as O-town was, where we are headed is even more domestic and somnabulent.

I shall probably be the only mom in the PTA with tatts *and* a Masters degree. I shall try not to be a snob or an outcast. I've been plagued by a secret dread that something will happen before we leave. Something tragic. I know it is only anxiety and superstition. And i know that one of the neighborhood drug dealers was caught violating parole and is back in the clink, but still, i am tense. Reading the news everyday with its pornography of trauma doesn't help.

I've been looking forward to the fresh start, release of burden so much that I've almost forgotten about the important things I'm leaving behind as well, many of my friends. These last 5 years we've been so wrapped in our Household concerns that we've sometimes forgotten to appreciate our community. I've made efforts in these last few weeks to make time for my friends though the housing search and then move prep made it hard. And i promise to myself to make time to see them still. At least once a week, twice a month, i will try to stay later in oakland and hang out with a friend.

Where in the world is

Facebook has no soul, only soundbites. It is one's stream of consciousness distilled into a pithy fleeting haiku constrained by the disappointing affect of propriety to one's audience. Facebook is observation.

I long for engagement and connection. I long for soul.