And I’m already exhausted, between the tremendous internal pressure I’m feeling (increasing as the days go by) and the strenous efforts I’m making for hours every day to brainstorm possibilities and contact possible allies and research possible leads. Now that I’m finally open to anything and everything, opportunities don’t seem to be just magically appearing, the way the rah-rah intention people promise they will. It’s stressing me out.

I’m trying to just walk through it, breathe through it.

**

Although I’ve resolved to blow this cow town, I’m still looking for short-term work (doing things I would never have considered in the past, like cold-call fundraising) in an effort to ease my mounting financial worries. I will be completely cleaned out of every last dime in my existing bank accounts if I stay here through the month of June without working, and that’s barring any and all unforseen or emergency expenses. As it is, I hope to be here only through May. Then, perhaps (in the least desirable case scenario), I’ll have to load my pared-down belongings into someone else’s car (obtained through one of those companies that lets you drive cars cross-country for other people) and roadtrip back to my kinfolk’s state on the East coast, hopefully with enough money left in my pocket for gas, food, and cheap motel lodging.

There was a time when such a prospect would have driven me to leap out of a tenth story window. Now, however, being in this curious place of having released just about everything to which I was formerly so attached — including my beloved 1973 VW Beetle — dying along with my former life seems redundant and unnecessary.

My best friend back “home,” bless her heart, is busy trying to line up a place for me to stay other than at my fundamentalist parents’ house, but I really would rather avoid that eventuality altogether. Today a longtime friend called to tell me that an always cheerful and caring former co-worker of ours, only a few years my senior, had collapsed at work with a massive blood clot to the heart. (She’s currently in intensive care and in need of a heart transplant. Visitors and calls are being discouraged.)

**

I haven’t seen Rachel in years, but this couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. Or to a man sweeter than her husband, who lost his younger sister to suicide many years ago. Talk about devastating loss…

Suddenly it’s thrown into even sharper relief, how fragile these bodies of ours are, and how little time we have on this mad, whirling planet to do what we will.

When I feel pangs in my legs (I’m a prime candidate for clots myself) and the odd palpitations from my idiosyncratic little heart murmur, I have weird intimations of my own demise. Nate Fisher of Six Feet Under may have been a fictional character, but he was a kindred spirit: I always appreciated and identified with the way he grappled with his own mortality, ultimately to be dispatched by AVM (yet another circulatory disorder) at the age of forty. I honestly don’t think I have the constitution for longevity, either, and like our friend Russ, half expect not to complete another decade. So I’m no longer unconcerned about wasting time.

Going back to where I came from smacks of wasting time. As does staying here. I’ve been treading water in this place for a long, long while, feeling like I don’t quite belong…but waiting, hoping, for years, for certain outcomes that never turned out.

All of a sudden — with my growing discontent egged on by online self-helpers and coaches who essentially contradict the laissez-faire spiritual teachings (about non-striving and such) I tried for so long to embrace — I find that certain long-suppressed (not necessarily “reasonable” or feasible) wishes and longings of mine have re-emerged, clamoring at maximum volume, with an urgency that won’t allow me a day’s rest or a minute’s peace. I’m casting my nets wildly in every direction, driven to tears by internalized drill sergeants who hammer and hammer and don’t care that I’m doing the best I can with no fucking clue of what I’m doing. As if my life were riding on my ability to spin gold from straw alone and overnight. Where’s that fool Rumplestiltskin when you need him?

I’m looking for a way, and I needed it yesterday.

**

Today I heard back from the American University of Paris. They won’t accept applications from foreign workers who don’t have their work papers in order. Yesterday I was on the phone for forty-five minutes with my aforementioned friend Talia, who is an associate professor there and would be happy to put me up in her spare room, but she was as discouraging as the University about coming over without the proper work visa (which is apparently a bureaucratic nightmare to obtain). France is tough. Italy, from what I’ve been able to find out, is equally tough. Apparently the entire EU has tightened up its immigration laws a lot in the past few years. You used to be able to cross over to Switzerland for a couple of hours after your 90-day no-visa visit to Italy was up, and then come back for another 90 days. No more.

There are still some shortcuts available. If you’re a student, you can obtain a student visa and work up to 20 hours a week legally (of course there are also some under-the-table cash jobs around, like au pair). If you’re an entrepreneur planning on starting a business over there, they make it much easier for you to get your working papers. If you’re in a highly skilled, high-demand field like IT and get hired by a European employer, they also pretty much wave you through. I’ve read on blogs that Ireland’s immigration authorities don’t care that much about illegal Americans, so some employers (particularly in the tourism and food and beverage industries) don’t care that much, either.

I’m definitely leaning toward Ireland, but then again, I was already. Surprised? I thought not. Every time I listen to Damo now I feel this deep if irrational conviction that I need to go over there, with an inexplicable certainty that “soul-honoring,” mythically inclined authors like David Whyte and John O’Donohue and Thomas Moore would encourage me to trust. (Are any of you readers in Ireland? Need somebody to tutor your kids or hoe your garden? Wash your car? Write your dissertation? My email is right there on the sidebar. Seriously. Help me out.)

My highly skeptical friend Karl, probably the biggest pessimist I have ever met, tried to dissuade me from my mad notions by reminding me of the global recession and how difficult it is to find jobs anywhere — but I still managed to find out that he has a good friend in Dublin, and got him to agree to put us in touch. I didn’t try to enroll him in my crazy scheme, I just asked him for a favor. (You have to choose your battles.)

There are some volunteer opportunities over there with Simon Communities for the homeless, as well as with an international Catholic group assisting the disabled…they give you room and board for your troubles, and a tiny spending allowance of 50-65 euros per week. Frankly, I’m not so keen on going that route. I was a VISTA volunteer when I first came out here, so I’ve been there and done that. And twenty years of living on a shoestring has gotten pretty dang old. A girl needs non-holey socks and underwear, for crying out loud. Besides which, keeping basic cell phone service could eat up at least one-quarter of a month’s stipend.

Yahoo has a decent-paying Web editor job over there (and I bet they help Yanks get their legal ducks in a row), but you have to be fluent in at least one European language besides English, and even my strongest secondary language, Spanish, isn’t very good. I don’t think I could fake it. Should I apply anyway? Lord knows, I’ve been searching everywhere for jobs for which I might be qualified, through international recruiters and international job sites and even EU government sites. I spent five hours Saturday updating my profile on Monster.com (making very clear my desire to relocate) and doing just this kind of research. Today I was online for at least another four, clicking around and brainstorming, while also lining up possible buyers for what’s left of my poor VW and setting up a job interview at Telefund (ugh).

I’m effing wiped. And I’ll wake up tomorrow in a cold sweat and do it all over again.

**

Last Friday I started reading through my 2006 Italy diaries again. And I thought, damn, these are pretty good. I had the time of my life, really, living those singular experiences and then translating them to the page to share with my closest friends. In many ways, I felt like I was doing what I was meant to do. I loved it. Sonny even said to me (and I forget this, but it makes me pause and wonder whether he loved me more unselfishly than I loved him) that I should remind myself of that more expansive time, and try to get back to the feeling of what it was like.

So bittersweet: both being with him and being over there were wonderful, but mutually exclusive, dreams come true. He told me he was happy I found someone to laugh and love with — meaning that ultimately rejecting English s.o.b. — the memory of which makes me want to cry my eyes out for another hundred years or so.

(Cough.) Moving on…

Anyway, this is one case where internet research quickly became demoralizing. My coach recommended that I look into travel writing, so I started doing some searching, and turned up innumerable articles and blogs that basically all conclude “Don’t expect to be Rick Steves” or “Don’t expect to make a living at this.” My scarcity prejudices were heartily and repeatedly reinforced. The world and the Web are overflowing with wannabe travel writers, and there’s no demand and no market for all of you. The best thing to do, apparently, is to write those little 200-400 word “shorts” for magazines and Web sites at $25-50 a pop, and hope for the best, but keep your day job.

So fuck me, I guess.

**

But speaking of fucking me — on a lighter note — a quite young man (23, to be exact) I’ve known for several months seemed to be pitching me totally unexpected vibes the other day. I found myself perspiring a little, and feeling very Anne Bancroft. He’s an attractively geeky, bespectacled vegan philosophy student with a self-deprecating sense of humor who (now that I recall) once tried to buy me a drink at the coffeehouse/bar where we both sometimes hang out. I was on my way out at the time, but now I’m sorry I didn’t take him up on it. Damn.

Given that I could have a stroke tomorrow, and that I may wind up moving back to my birthplace or a whole other country within the next couple of months, maybe a little carpe diem is in order. Or should I say carpe vegan? Seize the vegan! (I just put a really filthy joke about eating meat here and then thought better of it. You can make up your own.) I haven’t laid a hand on anybody since you-know-who. I haven’t really wanted anybody, other than that impossible Brit. But Dexter (I’ll call him that, it seems to fit) really is pretty hot, in his skinny, brainy hipster sort of way. And he’s so fricking young! I’m absolutely floored, if that was actual electricity I felt crackling in the air. I don’t know that he’s not spoken for, but he was complaining that women don’t exactly flock to philosophy majors. (He should have gone to my college.) Holy crap, how many more years do I expect to be able to attract snackable young things like that? What am I waiting for?

What do you think? Shall I invite him over for some quinoa pasta and fill him up with organic wine? Steal up behind him as he’s looking around my apartment and nuzzle his slender neck, murmuring Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

**

Looking around this apartment myself, I imagine I’ll start my possession eliminations with things like the television, which is all but useless without a digital converter box. The hardest thing to let go will be books and CDs, but they’ve got to be scaled back if I’m going to ship them cross-country or stuff them in a car. Scanning the kitchen, it makes me vaguely anxious to think about having to start over from scratch after how long it took to build up a decent stock of spices and secondhand dishes and utensils…but that’s assuming I’ll always be as poor as I have been.

It’s strange to consider that just six months ago I was still trying to acquire things for this apartment, to turn it into an inviting place where I would hopefully entertain a certain more-than-friend, eventually. I got art for the walls, and a desk, and a baker’s rack for the kitchen, and a new comforter and duvet (all, I should add, with a little help from my friends). I do love this space, it’s one of the nicest and brightest I’ve ever lived in on my tiny budget. If I were going to spend my life in one room, like Emily Dickinson, I might stay here. But I also know I can’t stay here forever, and it seems like Big Change Time is now or never.

The voices of pessimism start in, and tell me that things will get worse rather than better…that I’ll be lonely…that I’ll miss my friends…that I’ll be sorry. And I can’t tell those voices that I know they’re wrong. But I’ve let them hold me in suspended animation for far too long.

**

This evening I waved from the steps as the pleasant young couple who had just given me three hundred dollars for my rusty and problem-ridden Beetle pulled out into the street: he driving, having just gotten the motor running again, and she following in their battered pickup. They crossed the intersection, and I watched as they disappeared up the hill, the unmistakable put-put-put-put of the VW engine fading away for good.

I have had a recurring dream that I’ve somehow wound up somewhere very, very far away with that car — usually my state of origin — and I start to panic about not being able to get it back home (here) in its dilapidated condition. One time it rolled down an incline into a lake, and I was trying to pull it out of the mud even as it sank! Such symbol-laden dreams, telling of anxious, encumbering attachments to things that don’t last, and the lifelong horror I’ve had of getting stuck back in New England with my fervently religious family. I would wake up depressed and fearful every time.

Now my most dreaded relinquishings are becoming easy. After the job, after the community, after the man, the car is a piece of cake. Nonattachment will be forced upon you, whether you like it or not, and when it comes…

Well, maybe you’ll sleep better, after all.

In short, I just plain violated myself. I went right back to the early belief that I needed serious fixing, and that forcible change was indeed warranted — no matter how bad it might feel to me. As if I were an out-of-control teenager about to be sent to one of those dubious military-style “boot camps.” Kicking and screaming.

If you read my last post, which was actually inspired by an entirely different situation, you know how susceptible I am to this sort of thinking. Especially when the message seems to be coming from a highly esteemed source.

I was feeling particularly miserable one day in particular when nothing could shake me out of my funk — not an hour of meditation, not a yoga class with a fun instructor, not a pleasant chat with a friend. Everything felt like a losing struggle. I found out, through a person in the know, that I’d gotten someone important an inferior gift thanks to my own cluelessness. I felt like crying over that. Soon afterward, my dinner companion called to say that she couldn’t pick me up, and I had been counting on the ride, as my old beetle wasn’t running well. This just added to my growing feeling of defeat. Once I decided to ride my bike to our rendezvous, thunderheads moved in, seemingly out of nowhere, and it started to pour. Literally pour. I stood looking at the sheets of rain coming down hard, and I gave up. And then I started to laugh. Who can argue with the rain? A crazy person, maybe?

But wasn’t that what I had been doing? Fighting with the is-ness of things, including my very own state of being?

**

After my conversation with my mentor, I had picked up a book by Esther and Jerry Hicks, or Abraham, if that’s what their disembodied friends want to be called. (They’re sort of the grandparents of the popular manifestation movement, which was more or less appropriated by everyone else.) I was seeking some sort of radical faith injection, or at least some relief from my suffering, and headed straight for the woo-wooiest section of the library to browse. I felt too wounded to be proud. The book’s title, The Astonishing Power of Emotions, caught my eye. What would these folk have to say, I wondered, about my feeling so completely shitty?

A lot, as it turned out.

The authors introduce the metaphor of the natural flow of our (timeless, inner) beings as a river and our (finite, physical) selves as being in a boat on that river. Our thoughts may be either upstream thoughts or downstream thoughts, paddling our boats furiously against the current or letting it carry us where our true selves want to go. Our feelings function as indicators of which way we’re headed. “Upstream” thoughts are stressful, and create greater unhappiness; “downstream” thoughts bring a sense of peace and well-being. “Nothing you want is upstream,” they write.

All of which struck this skeptical sculler as brilliant.

“So we beat on,” ends a book widely considered to be the Great American Novel, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Such poetic and melancholy words, penned by an alcoholic after a devastating world war. Fitzgerald’s tragic hero seeks to gain control of the present in order to recreate the past. Given our national myths about hard work and struggle, and our quest for global control, perhaps it’s only American to row against the natural flow of things — and make ourselves unhappy.

The one teaching of Eckhart Tolle that got my attention more than any other was what he had to say about resistance and allowing. In a nutshell: in saying no to what already is, we only create greater unhappiness for ourselves, and act, or more accurately react, from a place of negativity. If we can embrace whatever the present moment brings, we allow ourselves greater peace of mind and are able to act more effectively. I thought of Tolle again recently when I reached the end of Herman Hesse’s classic Siddhartha, where the restless protagonist finally learns exactly this sort of allowing and presence from his close association with a river.

So now here were Esther and Jerry, and all their invisible playmates, advocating relaxing into our natural state of well-being by “letting go of the oars” and being carried by the current of our being. According to them, everything that feels bad indicates resistance, or paddling against the current, including my own raging frustration, impatience, anger and hopelessness. “The belief that there is something to overcome points you upstream,” they say. Any sort of urgency, the feeling of needing to get “there” right now indicates some kind of pushing-against, is a red flag for an “upstream thought.”

My forced attempts to entertain an entirely different vision for myself upon (what I experienced as) someone else’s prodding were giving me a case of rower’s hernia. I was going strenuously against the flow of my own inner current. What was needed here, as the authors advised, was surrender — even though I was impatient to get somewhere. (In retrospect, it was perhaps this impatience that infected my friend and prompted his frustrated response on my behalf.) “I am where I am, and it’s okay,” to borrow a mantra from the end of the book. If I could just quit struggling, my boat would naturally turn around and float downstream, and I’d wind up somewhere — somewhere, if you take the authors’ word for it, I’d want to be.

You must find a way to feel good now, where you are, they reminded me. You can’t wait for a change in circumstances or other people to make you happy. (So basic, yes, but how do I keep missing it?) Decide how you want to feel and then figure out a way to feel that way regardless of what’s happening. Improvements occur externally when your internal landscape changes for the better. (Tolle said as much, too.)

**

The sudden downpour that day made things very easy, and very clear, in a way that other circumstances often don’t. Here was the rain; what now? I’m sure I could have remained resentful and resistant about the day’s unexpected twists and my crappy mood for hours, and made a pretty abysmal dinner companion for my poor friend. As it was, I laughed, and quit wishing for different weather, and took the g-damn car anyway.

By the time I got to our meeting place, the sun was coming back out.