Finding the Green: What happens When You Trap a Triple Pisces in the City

Back in 2009.. I was a hopeful-hearted 22-year old. I'd just moved to San Francisco for art school and a dream.

Within a year of living right downtown in the civic center.. a singular realization began to overshadow my life.

I hated the city.

Hated it.

I hated being trapped in a labyrinth of steel, glass, and grey. Vertical lines, dreary fog, and dead concrete threatened to take away every delicate, organic thing within my soul. I hated the swelling, suffocating forces of chaotic energy.. the calling card of hungry spirits and ghoulish addicts. Filling me with fear and depression. I hated that anything real or natural was asphyxiated by an overwhelming ambitious force.. punctuated by the dead-eyed financial achievers rushing around me in the streets. What was an exciting world of synthetic stimulation to others was a dead, stinking, ugly place to me. I hated the feeling of drowning, drowning, drowning.. unable to find a way out. Unable to come up for air. 

I was a dolphin in the desert. I was a macaw in the tundra. I was completely where I didn't belong. And I couldn't achieve enough, do enough, or ignore it enough to get past the pain in my soul.

Frankly.. with a Sun, Moon, and Mercury in Pisces.. I should have known that my sensitivity levels were too high to thrive in the middle of the downtown chaos. So much Neptunian energy NEEDS natural, organic resting places.

A couple years in.. the depression got so bad that I knew something had to change.  

So, as a small way of reconnecting to nature.. I decided to commit to a Golden Gate Park visit every week. 

I told myself that I'd spend as much time as possible being as lost as possible, in that narrow strip of green.. until I felt whole again. 

And so I did.

The contrast was dramatic. Very dramatic. I'd often melt into tears underneath my sunglasses on the bus, as I headed down the final stretch of Fulton street. Towards those twirling Australian teatrees and rising ancient redwoods. Knowing that in a few moments.. my soul was going to be able to breathe. That I would feel normal again. Whole again. That the deepest, most connected "knowing" in me would be able to feel it's place.. to feel like it had organic, green room around it. 

During this time.. I took lots of photos of my relationship to this little, green world.

These are all very special moments to me.

Because they were so rare.. and I cared so much about them. 

I decided to post them all here today as a reminder of one of the hardest emotional times I have come through in my life, which created a far deeper meaning of beauty for my life.