dancerjodi

25 years ago (wow that is obscene) Cris made me a mix cd for my birthday that included a song by Sigur Ros on it and I was transfixed. It was like nothing I’d ever heard. I remember sitting in my tiny bedroom in Medford while it was snowing, just being overwhelmed by life, listening to it on repeat thinking that music came as close to creating magic as anything I’d ever heard before, it even stands out in fairly stark contrast to the rest of their catalogue. Many years later I’d buy a boxed set celebrating the album it was on; in the extensive liner notes they wrote about each song on the album and for that one it was basically, “yeah so we kind of hate that song it sucks”. WELL THEN.

8 years ago, Sigur Ros held a festival in Iceland, norður og niður, and it was sick. Overall big festivals don’t appeal to me much, which is gonna be a problem living in Europe, but this one was a no brainer. Ethan and I giddily bought tickets, planning to meet up with friends in Reykjavik and London. The festival was great, but it was freezing, which sounds ridiculous when you’re talking about Iceland in January, but it was truthfully remarkably cold, everyone including the Icelanders were put off by the cold, because it was inescapable, even indoors was cold. Between that and my being more interested in exploring the frozen hellscape that was the countryside, we skipped out on some festival day activities, but Ethan was adamant that we do the sound bath.

It was in a big auditorium at Harpa, and everyone was given a shot of Brennivín, I think I handed mine off to Ethan. Then we all laid on the floor under a giant light and glass sculpture that pulsated along while Alex Somers and Paul Corley created live remixes of the instrumentals of Sigur Ros or band adjacent projects while Jonsi sang live. It was transcendent, everything fell away, the cold, the unserious stress of trying to sort out what artists we wanted to see during the rest of the festival, the serious stress of the incoming administration, my anxiety about turning 40, it was just calm and beautiful. They did the sound bath again a year later in LA, this time we all got cannabis gummies that were made from a collaboration between the band and some dispensary, and again laid on the floor of some auditorium, no glass art, more beautiful music, more letting the stress of the world fall away.

Getting my brain to calm down has been a lifelong battle, these were two striking moments where I did it with relative ease. Later I’d learn transcendental meditation which was a great tool, and I’d explore ketamine assisted therapy to get deeper into that. TM is great for calm, I loved the “listen to music and have some ego death” aspect of ketamine, I really loved the listening to music element because it felt like such a different and primal way to experience it. However I struggled with the whole being on drugs part of it as I didn’t entirely trust that it wouldn’t lead down a path of dependency so I dipped after a while, I still feel like I got some invaluable lessons or experiences out of it.

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One of the reasons I fell in love with our apartment building before we had signed a lease was that the building had what appeared to be a great gym in it. Prior to the pandemic I was seriously into lifting weights, and in a “post” Covid living in the suburbs world, getting to the gym was more of a hassle, especially finding more quiet hours where I didn’t feel like a pariah wearing a mask. Also most the gyms near my house kind of sucked. So the idea of a nice apartment with a nice gym in the building seemed like a big win. Most of the buildings we looked at had gyms but this one seemed really nice. That would be because turned out to be this bougie boutique gym that is apparently bonkers expensive, however membership is included in our rent. So of course we’re going to take advantage of that as much as possible.

Everything is fancy, the equipment is all smart and tracks all your workouts, the classes so far have been engaging and positive and fun and difficult, there’s a sauna where they do Aufguss rituals which I want to roll my eyes at but actually are amazing. They play music and use ice infused with various essential oils and it’s almost overwhelming between that and the heat, but it pulls you back every time you think you’re gonna need to tap out. They also have a weekly 45 minute evening sound bath. We’ve done this twice and while it’s not necessarily on the same level as listening to Jonsi singing live, it’s still quite special. The room is all set up with little fake candles and this really charming guy plays all sorts of instruments while you lay on the floor wrapped up like a cocoon (if you choose to, there are no rules other than being quiet) and it’s so centering and calming. For the rest of the evening after I feel all floaty and relaxed.

I have been struggling with how posh this is, because posh is typically things that other people do, not me. It’s like sometime in the last year I fell into someone else’s story or something. Just in terms of how things are going so smoothly for the first time in literally years, it feels like all these opportunities are opening up, I feel like I’m going to wake up from all of this any minute or something. I will just continue to be incredibly grateful for every moment and hope it lasts.

When we moved to Los Angeles we lived all over the place, moving basically every year (once we moved twice in a year) and it was exhausting because the city is so large that your life in Santa Monica would be radically different than your life in DTLA would be radically different from your life in Hollywood etc. When we lived on the west side I used to go bicycling pretty much every day on the bike path on the ocean. I had a big clunky steel bubblegum pink cruiser that was really only good for that one thing, but it was great and novel and I don’t know why I didn’t take more pictures. It was a nice routine.

When we moved to Hollywood, biking while possible would’ve been terrifying and dangerous, especially with the cruiser. Also I’d hurt my foot and had surgery a month prior so I was out of commission in general.
Our apartment was at the foot of Runyon Canyon and predictably Ethan got super into hiking. I did not, I had gone hiking a handful of times, the last big one was an 5 or 6 hour trek that involved a cliff where an active volcano met the sea late at night, and while that was beyond stunning, the actual walk was beyond miserable. While it was all brutal, the first half held the promise of seeing something phenomenal, getting to watch the landscape change before our eyes, something that would exist in that moment, impossible to repeat because even by the next night the coast would be different. It was stunning watching the lava pour into the ocean mere feet away, illuminating the night while big clouds of steam billowed overhead and the ocean roiled below us. However after seeing the volcano there no exotic promise left to fuel the walk back, just work, cold and wet and inky black, both the midnight starless sky and the ground (there’s no poetry there, the ground was literally obsidian, slick and dangerous on its own before adding in the pouring rain and the night) It was so miserable and we were all so tired and focused on the task at hand of getting back to camp that it felt l isolating, we couldn’t expend the energy to talk to each other and we couldn’t afford to get distracted from paying attention to the treacherous almost invisible landscape. Once in a while we’d find alarmingly hot pockets of lava and had to move quickly because our shoes would start to melt and we needed to be fast and careful not to fall. So it was just a mess of foreboding and rain and exhaustion and a totally alien terrain. Toward the end, I wrenched my foot in a little crevice and fell, trying to brace myself with my hands, failing at that and cutting them up on the glasslike cold lava. I’d wrenched my foot badly enough that the trauma sprouted a ganglion cyst which was wrapped around a nerve and demanded surgery because I was basically hobbled. Foot surgery is not fun and it took a while for me to even get feeling back, healing feet takes forever, so hiking wasn’t something I was remotely interested in. After that experience I don’t entirely blame me.

But really the dry and brittle landscape of Southern California didn’t speak to me, the idea of trudging through dusty trails while avoiding rattlesnakes to get to a vantage point to look down at the heavily polluted urban sprawl of Los Angeles that also often involved distant and not so distant smoke since it was fire season, and it didn’t interest me at all. Throw me in the middle of a city and I’d walk for miles, quite the opposite of my Los Angeles compatriots who didn’t walk anywhere unless it involved hiking. I felt like my dislike of hiking illustrated some deeper disconnect with LA and it made me sad.

Every weekend in this new year we’ve gone hiking or at least attempted to and it’s always been my idea. We visited the Hellfire Club on New Year’s Day, the following weekend we walked some cliff walk on the sea, and on Monday we ended up doing some walking around but not in Ballinastoe Woods. Being it was a Monday and the weather wasn’t remotely cooperating, our adventure was truncated but it was the kind of beauty that makes your heart sing. Watching the clouds and fog pour in around the tops of fir trees while the rain pattered all around was just perfect, lush and dreamlike. I’ve spent the time since daydreaming about waterproof hiking boots and trekking sticks. The latter are annoyingly practical but with my bones being how they are I can’t fuck around. I’ve been book marking various trails around Dublin and making lists based on difficulty levels. I’ve started running on a treadmill on the gym downstairs to get my lungs which are not in great shape in better shape. Wearing a mask while doing that kinda sucks but the end rewards will be worth it. Everything is so beautiful and so green and it’s all just out there waiting to be explored.

Obviously we are in the honeymoon phase of this Irish adventure. We have a lovely of pricey apartment, we’ve had the money and time to access great concerts, the newness of everything is entirely romantic. But I love it. Comparing this to how it was when we landed in Los Angeles is like night and day and I hope we’re able to maintain this momentum. Right now I just feel hopeful and peaceful, my mind has slowed down and the typical omnipresent din has quieted considerably.

Tomorrow is my birthday. In the afternoon we’re taking a class where we will make claddagh rings and after we’re going to London because it is a ridiculously quick and cheap flight, and I want to go lose my mind at the opulence of the perfume hall in Harrods. Then we’re going to some very affordable Michelin starred pub for fish and chips. It’s kind of stunning that this is life and that we can decide fairly last minute to go to England like it’s nothing. I kind of need to pinch myself.