Here is what I wrote to Jens Lekman tonight for his October smalltalk, the theme of the month being "self portrait"

I took this on the edges of California and Arizona, back in February or March. I was homesick for Seattle but had also finally fallen in love with Flagstaff, where I go to school. It is beautiful, blanketed in snow from December to March (which no one thinks of when they think of Arizona), nestled at the bottom of a stratovolcano that blew the top 3000 or 4000 feet of itself to bits some thousands of years ago. Just like Mt. St. Helens did in 1980. It's comforting to have that element of home in place here so far away.

I want to live a lot of places -- I'm moving to Alaska for six months this summer, I want to move to somewhere inside the Arctic Circle at some point, I want to live on a coast, perhaps Washington again, maybe Oregon or central California. I want to go to grad school in Chile and learn to be a volcanologist amongst the tallest volcanoes in the world. I want to do research in the Rift Valley in Africa. Mountains are my constant, I don't want to be away from them ever. But, being from Seattle, water is also important to me. I basically grew up at the beach, I lived three blocks away from it. The ghost of water is everywhere here in the high desert -- the washes, the canyons eroded away over time inconceivable, the rocks and tops of mesas with little shallow pools etched into them, a puddle kept in a fold of earth that's always shaded. It took me a long time but I have grown to love these things, and like the old volcanoes that surround my town I connect the reminders of water to home.

I suppose to tie all of this into a self portrait I'll tell you that I'm a geology major now, and for good reason, which I'm sure you can glean from the above paragraph. In my songs I constantly reference the topography of where I'm living, the weather, the histories of how things came to be formed. I think those are some of the things that shape me the most. I take strength from landscapes.

That said, the most important and beautiful mountains to me will always be the Cascades, and gazing across the Puget Sound at the Olympic Mountains will never ever ever fail to take my breath away. I will always long for the months and months of grey and drizzle back home.

When we met at Easy Street Records a few years back, I don't know if you remember me or that meeting, but I didn't have much to say. I'm sorry about that. I was 16 and very heart broken. In that time I learned to never settle for someone who is second best, and I haven't, and I will wait however long it takes to find an equal. Preferably a boy who likes music and math and books and can chop wood and will hold hands while gazing up at the aurora borealis, but who knows.

Love,

Sarah