The First Monday in November
I want this life as a simple existence. I want to wake up in the morning only to curl up with a book. I want to say, “yes,” often, without too much thought. I want to transport myself into the worlds of others and enjoy my morning picking cherries in northern Michigan. I want to sob as the doors open to my best friend in her wedding dress, and write my own parents a letter, sent with the confidence that only comes with being alone in your bedroom at one thirty in the morning. I want to get out of my own way enough to let what is meant to be come to me. Slow, not shallow.
I equally resent and revel in the fact that there is no other deciding factor in my life other than myself. I walk forward constantly aware of the burden of choice. I would have it no other way. I choose to be here, but I will not take away my right to accurately portray my experience. Expression of pain is not a complaint- it is a truth. Expression of joy speaks in no way to the morality of an action- it the solely the sum of the moment. The sum of all conditioned layers and contributing factors, conscious or subconscious, combining to form my current subjective reality.
I have recently begun to understand what it means to rest. To allow the space of thought without mental or physical action. What I have been practicing for months is attaching my thoughts to a ballon and watching as they float from the forefront. Or feeling my roots extend through each layer below and asking the earth if she may hold the narrative within my mind for just a moment- until I am ready and able. But it’s been just that, a practice, an exercise, an additional thought to tie. This morning, for the first time, is when it clicked. And how or why or what I even mean by this, that it “clicked,” I do not know. Just that I felt it. That I could allow my mind to wake up before my body. That just because my thoughts began to flow did not mean I needed to force movement into my body. Physical exhaustion and mental exhaustion being simultaneously twins and strangers. Intertwined in their shared DNA and/or with no relation at all.
I feed myself when I am hungry. I sit when I am tired. I tell shame she is no longer welcomed in the meeting, but I thank her for her efforts. The ways in which she knew how to show up. And I feel better, but the same, knowing, but unsure. I am sitting still while my eyes dart around the room. Like there is something I am forgetting, or something that I am reaching for just out of my grasp. I feel turned in the right direction but walking on the wrong floor.
I feel like there is something I am supposed to do, but I am ok with not doing it. I feel different, always, than who I was before, than who I will be soon, than all those around me. I feel curious of who I am supposed to meet, curious of how little it really takes to change your life- I am excited, but not rushing, to get to the portion of my life where I can look back with understanding, with awe, with pain, with acceptance. Acceptance, that’s the word of the hour- or maybe the year- or maybe a lifetime.
I look to my right and notice the lilies blooming on the counter brought over last Friday evening by a friend I hadn’t met 10 weeks ago. His life continuing before and after me, with or without me. How lucky are we to be on the side of the withs. I look in the mirror to find a version of myself I have never been before. I want all of this and peace and life filled with others who share this sentiment.
I look at the world burning around me. The death and killing and greed and power and all the parts I am so familiar with (that we all are scarily desensitized to) and struggle to understand how responses can vary. I feel my reaction so viscerally, so surely, it is heartbreaking to understand how the recognition of shared humanity is not the only answer. Every moment of this life is heartbreaking, high and low alike. And I feel as if I say this four hundred times a day and at least three times each paragraph and still don’t know how to express how it is felt. That I’ll never know how to string the correct words together to showcase the cherishing of my blushed cheeks in the last warm breeze of fall or the way the first tear feels, unexpected, before you even realize you’ve begun to cry. I notice the drop bounce upwards off the ground beneath the pew before the air has even left my chest. We laugh when we cry, we cry when we laugh- is this not the most holy proof that heartbreak is joyful and joy is heartbreaking. To see the way a mother holds her son for the first time, fiercely. Sobbing both for relief and in fear. You do not step towards the cub in fear of the mother.
I think of who I was when I left Montana, I think of the way in which I loved others- the way in which I feel it still. How different or the same will this nostalgia feel in forty years? How will its meaning change in relation to the pieces I could never possibly know yet. I sit in my living room and wish to bury this moment inside myself. I remind myself to not hold on so tightly.
