Current whereabouts...O'ahu

This is a side blog for my current whereabouts.  I will continue to finish up my NZ and Australia travels in succeeding blogs.  

I've been feeling a bit BLAH for awhile, but it's off and on.  Sort of stiff-necked and occasionally lightheaded.  Been going to the chiropractor, which has really been helping.  I'm pretty sure I messed something up while in NZ, doing lord knows what.  I was also carrying around 80 lbs in baggage, so that could add to the tension.  We all know travel is not light, especially over time.  I've acquired things that at least I'll use, so that's a plus. Pepper grinders and bone necklaces that I've carved.  I guess somehow I'm a little lighter as well (not just in weight, but in emotional baggage).  In the last year I'd really been holding a lot of crap, which I've let go of (some of it).  I still have issues with my family, but what I've realized while I've been away is that it really doesn't matter anymore.  I'd made some kind of goal in which I said I'd smooth things out with my family and talk to them more.  It's not that I'd stopped loving them, I just put those emotions associated with cynicism and negativity on the back burner for a bit.  My family can be draining, always caught up in their things, hardly keeping contact with me, forgetting my birthday.  Over the years it seemed as though it was my job to keep up with them, for some reason.  But I'm getting older, and now I just want to move forward and let things go.  My life hasn't ever been easy, so I'm trying to figure out how to simplify it now.  Aren't things always easier when simple?  I learned that the happiest people live the simplest lives.  We are complicated creatures, but we don't have to live chaotic.  

I've been back in Hawaii for two weeks now.  It's been really strange.  The first week was post-travel funk.  I spent a lot of time walking around a city I knew, only to feel like a stranger.  I also had moments of unexpected sobbing.  I was alone around flocks of people.  I don't know why, but this time after traveling has been the hardest to get over.  I think it's because I made great connections and felt a lot of home-sweet-home emotion.  This trip really has been a journey, and I've realized that in the past couple of weeks during this wind-down.  I'd realized what direction I want in my life.  I've discovered how much I missed the island and it's beautiful water, but also how it's still the same, never-changing place.  That's why I left in the first place.  I'm too big for the island right now, and I don't want it to capsize.  Coming back to this place in the future is always a possibility, but right now I have more of a community in Portland that is actually begging me to come back.  Hawaii hasn't made it's entrance that great.  With all of it's light and beauty it still lacks something, which is why it's such a transient place (and why I'm moving forward).  I'm glad to be over my "funk" and back into a more fluid thought process.