Unsettled

In our first official meeting as a group, Core director Mark Boyd described spring at Penland as "an unsettled time." After a few weeks here, I've begun to appreciate the truth of his observation. The weather changes so quickly here, and, if I may be so pretentious, with it my heart.
Yesterday was gray and cold; I could see my breath but not the stars on my walk to work. One of the work-studies in the kitchen asked me to watch the windows and call her out to see the sunrise. I didn't bother; the sun was invisible behind the clouds. She was disappointed when I told her this. "I get up so early," she said, "but I never see the sun rise." I promised to watch the horizon for her on Thursday morning if the sky was more favorable.
This morning I woke to mist in the trees outside my window, and left the house to find that what I thought was frost on the windows of my housemates' cars was, in fact, drizzle. A foggy, chilly type of damp that I will always associate with the east coast of Scotland dominated the morning, until a fierce wind and rain storm overtook us just before lunch, hiding the mountains in deep blue murk as it approached. Rain soaked the afternoon; I was glad I had brought my umbrella (also I have received a lot of complements on it today, because it matches my new neckerchief). When I left dinner, the sky had cleared, bright evening sun illuminated the campus with a nearly colorless light, and a warm breeze blew up across the knoll. (Dinner was clam chowder. I'm beginning to think the kitchen can sense my mood.) Now as I write, dark clouds are rolling in again and the light is going out of the sky.
When I was preparing to leave Minneapolis and come here, I noticed a change in my emotional background noise. The dull and vague dread that had come to characterize the last year began to be replaced by a sort of terror that I remember from childhood and, more recently, from art school. It's a terror associated with motion, like the sensation in the stomach when you go over the top of the big hill on a roller coaster and feel the center of gravity pass the tipping point. Fear of that sensation kept me off of roller coasters for years, until I suddenly discovered that I loved them, and from then it was the bigger the better, and so as I packed and trained my replacements and had goodbye lunches I kept reminding myself of the possibility that what I was feeling was not danger but renewed motion, unfamiliar after some time of losing a battle with my own inertia.
It can be intensely quiet here at Penland, and I have quieted down inside as well, but in the background I can still hear the terror at times, though it has changed form (I suppose for now I'm not on a roller coaster anymore, but something more like "It's a Small World,
After All.") and sounds not so much like metal moving through on rails (though I do hear trains moving through the valley all the time) as like waves. It's a strange metaphor, but I've been visualizing the feeling something like this:
I'm standing on a beach. It's dark, and everything reads in black-and-white; all I can see is the white of the sand and the white of the breakers and foam atop the black waves. I hear the surf, and it's a familiar and comforting sound, because I remember the sea, but I can't shake the impression that the ocean is shallow and only goes out about 20 feet, only as far as I can see it moving. Beyond that is the real ocean, which I can't see or hear, and do not know. I imagine it as an emptiness, deep and black, and it makes my heart go cold.
This is not always in my mind. It goes away when I am melting wax, sanding plaster, winding colored thread around the handle of a spoon, or drinking a selection from the Twining's "Teas of India" collection (that box of tea has treated me right today!). Just constructing the metaphor above has made the feeling lose some of its power, which is nice but also a little sad, because it is frightening but deep, and I don't like to be scared, but I do like depth.
If asked, I would say that I am very happy here. But what I am most often asked is if everything is "all settled in." I don't have a good answer for that.