Blue Mind

travel dispatch no. 1 : gulf shores, alabama

A guy named Mark told me about Blue Mind Theory in the back of some dive bar in Portland last spring. A year later, I can’t get the phrase out my head. Blue mind…

I’ve whisked myself away on a romantic getaway. A pal from college has been working in Gulf Shores for the last month, and when she invited me to join her at her Airbnb on the bay, I said a resounding yes, despite the Alabama of it all.

I arrived last night, road-ragged and reeking. We had one giddy night of catching up, talking shit, crying, eating brownies over the pan at midnight, and then she left for a work trip and I’m alone, trying to tune out the din of “Life is a Highway” blasting from a rental house down the street that I can only assume currently houses a fraternity spring break trip. There’s been a suspicious amount of Kesha drowning out the bullfrogs and the birds.

This morning I meditated on my green yoga mat in a blue room while the white light shone through my bedroom curtains and tried to orient my mind to the soft hoot of an owl nearby, and away from the shockingly similar wooh that came from the college kids. Lately, that’s been the best takeaway from my new meditation practice: tuning out in order to tune in—a framework from which to learn to control my own attention. What deserves it? What doesn’t?

Blue does. Blue deserves my attention.

(The number of times I’ve heard about the friend-of-a-friend up in New York who majored in the color blue at NYU. Is she my soulmate or my nemesis? Do I love her or hate her, this young stranger from a decade ago who somehow convinced Tisch to let her lean into the masturbatory in this way)…

Blue Mind Theory is intuitive. You already know what it means. By a body of water, the mind is tuned to a semi-meditative state and the involuntary attention that these settings demand coax us into heightened creativity, a deeper sense of calm, and a more compelling relationship to compassion.

Every time I’m in a beach town I think, goddamn, do I need to live in a beach town? It seems hard to find the right one, and obviously it ain’t Alabama, but I dream. Grant’s been talking me into a move to Italy lately (they’re actively wooing us metropolitan Millennials who can’t afford American homes), but I can’t stop bringing up Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Bali, Indonesia. Maybe it's because of Blue Mind.

I’m writing from a 3rd story balcony that overlooks an inlet of the Gulf of Mexico, watching folks walk their dogs beneath me, and children play on a small pier. In the distance, a fly fisher stands on a sand bank deep in the water. A sliver of pink sunset fades at the shore line as soft clouds the color of Cinderella’s ballgown shimmer overhead and stretch across the sunset like a veil. Despite the beauty of this moment, a drone just flew overhead, paused, and looked at me. I resent it, this infiltration of the natural world. It feels like an invasion of privacy, and I wish I were the pelican flying overhead, bizarre and free from modernity. Yet I know, in his own way, the pelican too is a victim of the times, struggling against a world that conspires to destroy him, just as I struggle against mine.

I have been traveling alone since I was six years old. The first time, I packed my few belongings in the basement with my childhood friend, Sarah. We tied small bandanas full of animal crackers and Lip Smacker, stuffed beanie babies in our pockets, and hit the road, where we walked several blocks away to hide in the back yard of a neighbor’s home. It’s one childhood memory I vividly recall: the itchiness brought on by crouching in tall, green grass, the delicate perfume of honeysuckle, the way I loved my friend Sarah. Her dark hair that framed her freckled face. The way she made me feel bold. I don’t know if we hid for hours or for minutes. I don’t know if our mothers knew where we were. I don’t know if we were found or if we walked back to the house of our own volition. What I do know is I felt invigorated. I loved to leave home.

I’ve done a lot of solo travel since that first expedition. I’ve Mega-Bussed my way across America from Richmond to Detroit, New Orleans to New York. I’ve taken a water taxi to an island treehouse in Maine at midnight. I’ve hitchhiked in Canada. I’ve wandered through The Louvre alone. It’s like a little magic trick that I forget I know how to do. Disappear. I love nothing more than the anonymity of a town where no one knows who I am. When I was young and living in New York, I’d set aside a whole day once a month for a strange journey. A friend and I would take the train to the Cloisters for the afternoon, or I’d trek from Bushwick all the way to the Upper West Side for a coffee and a croissant at The Hungarian Pastry Shop and a quiet stroll through St. John’s Cathedral.

When I am alone in the world, I come back to myself, like a lover who I have strayed from. It’s truly romantic. Today I danced on the beach alone, chased seagulls, kicked my feet through the salty tide. I felt immensely grateful for the season of life I am in, no matter how ungrounded I feel or how unsure of my next steps.

I don’t know what I want to happen, and I certainly don’t know what will happen. But what I do know is this: the universe/god/my higher self (call it what you will) keeps guiding me back to myself. And that’s all I need to experience to know that everything is going to be okay.