Colorado, my heart—!

the point in the journey

 

After seven days, four involving train travel (with an extra nine hours and sixty dollars added to the sum total consumed by the eastbound journey) and three involving a laid back fling with the soulmate I only see in passing every six to twenty months, I'm closer now to home than I have been--which is to say, here on a train, cold and tired and very much in discomfort, I'm twelve hours away from a warm bed and nourishing food, but also to say that the whole reason I bought the tickets back in February and the whole reason I made that week-long trip to South Carolina at the text of a friend just prior to leaving for LA is just a little bit clearer. 

I'm not good at the important things in life. I'm not good at patience, or grace, or humility, or gentleness, or faith. I'm not good at vulnerability. All along the way I'm too hasty, or too careless, or too something, and rough around the edges besides. The wear and tear shows. 

When I told one of my girls that I'd be on a train for four days, she said (and this of itself is a testament of what I love so much about her), "That is either going to be one hell of a ride or a very interestingly spent four days aboard the train. Start writing a book?" Partly because of that, and partly for the sheer need of an alone space in these crowded little cubicles of sweating, cramped humanity, I've scribbled plenty in these past four days. In fact, I've probably written more in these past four days than in the three and a half months this year has to call its own. And that, in itself, is a sort of grace. That these rough edges and this ill-timed, perfectly fated trip are coming together in a scrawling of letters into words into whole sentences, and sentences into paragraphs (because isn't that what sentences are for? community?).

At least, that is what I've been telling myself for the past several days. And I've kept putting fingers to keyboard and writing, through California, through Nevada, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, New York. The scenery has become familiar again, but I'm still peeking out the window at intervals, looking for the perfect scene of which to snap the perfect photo. And I'm looking, anxiously, for those signs that will tell me we're in familiar territory again, and that in my bones I can feel that this small leg of the journey is fulfilled, and that it's time to move to something slightly different, but always building on the last thing. 

Because this is the thing that I look forward to most, always, whenever I've bolted and wound my way in a sidetracked circle back towards the people I love most: that even when the days are hard and I'm snagging myself on my rough edges, that there's always enough light and enough beauty in the world to make the whole of the journey worthwhile, even when I don't have enough of anything to measure up.

Which is why I'm always curiously settled, at the end of the day, with the empty pockets and pressing deadlines that hit hard after I've detoured a new road on my way home, even though numbers don't always add up and sometimes I panic. What I remember on the way around is nothing a balanced account can teach me.

And then there's always that delightful feeling in the pit of the stomach that comes from having nine people in this world who can make me smile like no one else can, and every time I leave them I know where home lies. I love how the journey brings me back to them every. single. time.

a moment of sushi

There are morning birds outside.

My laptop clock reads four nineteen, and I have to double check my phone to catch up with realtime: one twenty a.m. This isn't Pennsylvania, this is flipping California. This is the city of angels. My body's still working on an East Coast time clock, and somehow, just like stepping into South Carolina, this feels a little bit like snagging a piece of home. Except this time it's less about the people welcoming me and more about the landscape, the ocean, the exploding campus that lost me in its bowels because I couldn't quite figure out the directions to the library and kept making circuits around the university's well-manicured and well-populated lawns.

Someone told me today that it's abnormal to feel that people who hurt me are not to be blamed, are not to be disparaged, are not at fault; that human nature in it's instinctive form is to lash out in response to pain and decide that the person causing the pain is a terrible person. "Especially when it has to do with someone of the opposite gender." But it's how I see it, I said, because someone is not innately at fault for wounding me. Wounding happens, as a result of all kinds of choices, but it's not so much the wounding as it is the intention that is grievous. The person who raised a hand against me with the motive of seeing me suffer is cruel, and I blame that person. The person who didn't feel for me what I felt for him is no more to blame for not feeling than I am for feeling. Yes, it hurts; it's a sorry fact of life, and I wish it weren't so. But Madeleine L'Engle said it so well:

It's a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them—and they simply don't need you. That's all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they'll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you, and it goes on and on—this desperate need—and only once in a rare million do the two same people need each other.

So there are times like that, and conversations like that, and they are unfortunate but more people need to be having them. Because heartbreak is going to keep on happening, and when it does it feels like the death of part of what made you you. But in no world, in no age, is grief over a loss enough to make trashing another person okay. Someone can be good and still break you. Someone can break you and still be kind.
 
We all fail. ...... I think it has to be that way, so we could empathize with each other, and so we wouldn't put absolute and justified faith in fellow humans who would then inadvertently commit the worst betrayal of all by dying...

And then Madeleine again:

If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we'd tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.

I'm grasping for straws in the dark with that, but perhaps it suggests something of a gilding to the breaking: that the fact that everyone fails, that everyone hurts (and is hurt), that no hand is always gentle...perhaps that means we value all the more, and keep nurturing, the people we love, because love is never a guarantee of being able to live in the expression of it.

Come daylight I'll peel open the quiet with some music and put on a kettle for tea, and after that, perhaps make a trip to the market for one of those shopping sprees that results in a magical whirlwind of cooking and—hopefully—a delicious dinner. These past two nights, late as they've been, have been laden every second with enough conversation and gritty humour and good food to supply material with which to seed five books, and I feel a serious working frenzy coming on, hopefully one that will last into May instead of fizzling upon my return home. But first, the important things, like making the most of the rest of this simultaneously lowkey and accelerated trip, and after that all of these words in my heart can wallow in ink and crawl onto paper.

we whispered yes, there on the intricate
balconies of breath, overlooking
the rest of our lives.

Throwback Thursday, anyone?

...to a time when I had quite a bit more hair...

The Morning After

It's raining. 

The back yard has fairly exploded with springtime. Every tree bar two is covered in pale pastel flowers and equally soft leaves, and against the house an eruption of yellow takes the shape of low-sitting bushes. Autumn's brown hovers around the edges still, providing a natural frame for all of the new season's colour and verve. 

Driving back from South Carolina I could only think of how much I didn't want to leave, and how little I wanted to come back to Pennsylvania despite being eager for so much here. There will always be something of the escapist in me. I love new, dynamic, unsettled. I love going and coming back to change, and I love going again, never staying in one place long enough for heartbreak or discontent or loneliness to take hold. If there's one lesson I've learned it's that drifting lets no one stop for too long to see inside your soul, and never putting down any lasting roots means that nothing can be severed and tossed to the wind.

The season more than makes up for it, though. If I can't bolt, the world around me will at least change and bring with it something of the notion of a fresh start, and that will be enough.

There is a pair of cardinals at the feeder in the back yard, and a red-headed sparrow.

My heart warmed when I found an unopened container of old-fashioned oats in the cupboard this morning. I do like roaming, but there's something beautiful about being remembered in the shopping list when I'm not around.

Making Summer

 

Something about the expansiveness that is this new season (winter collapsed straight into summer; this is no spring, despite the calendar's persistence) is making me eager in a way that I haven't been for a very long time, and in that sense at least the dashing of expectations I didn't even know I had is priceless, for whatever hand it had in that. I'm off running again, since that's still the only thing I know to do when dealing with too much unmanageable emotion. But the funny thing about running is that, when you take yourself with you, you can't ever really go too far. If you're wildly broken, your path will be too. If you're wildly broken, you'll leave a trail of bloodied crumbled glass wherever you go.


"Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know." It has been my watchword in this pain, even in the blind moments [hours, days, months]. My goal in all of this--the nebulous nightmare-dream that is life--is not to dodge being hurt or somehow sidestep the bruising. Do I believe that there is some good in all of the anguish in the world? Inherently, no. Do I believe that something good can be made of it? Enough that I'm willing to stake myself on it; enough that I'm willing to sit through the grief and the emotional turbulence and the physical pain and the mental agony and work to fashion something halfway worthwhile out of all of the wrong.


On the wall beside the bunk I used in my mother's home, I taped a paper, by now long lost to diligent trash burning, and scrawled along the top was an old, oft-repeated prayer: "May this suffering bring compassion." Beneath it, in much tinier letters, something else:

"What we don't realise is that you can have a life-changing encounter, travel to a place that causes a shift in your heart, can meet someone who changes you, you can go, do, read, see, watch, something, anything, that makes it just a little harder to breathe. And you think, yes! Here I go, from now on, life will be different. But the thing is, that experience isn't full-grown, it's just the seed. It's the beginning, not the road itself. That's the map that you use as a roadmark, not the trail you'll walk. And it's up to you to decide to continue or retreat into routine and wonder why things didn't change. Too often we go through something revolutionary, good or bad, and then slip back into the normalcy of our day to day lives instead of choosing to do the hard work and tend to that seed. Then we finally take a step back and start asking ourselves why our life doesn't line up with our vision. How could that moment —the experience that mattered so intensely—seem not to have changed anything at all? That's the thing. You can have as many seeds but until you plant them, until you continually water them, until you die to self, choose to go through the process of growing...it's going to be a seed. What matters is what you do with it." (Hannah Nicole)

 
Every day I'm left to come back to that. Because I believe in pain—it exists—but I believe in other things, stronger things, too. I believe in joy. I believe in happiness. I believe in the warmth of relationship and the sustenance of beauty and the undergirding of a genuine love.  And these seeds, these tiny splinters of wonder and delight and understanding and...care...they need nurturing. That steady trickle of hurting, on multiple levels, is  part of what waters those seeds. There's an easy sort of oblivion in being perpetually happy that doesn't allow for compassion, for entering into someone else's space of pain (and in entering bring the presence of something beyond pain). Paul had something there in his letter to the Corinthian church, when he spoke of being able to give comfort because of having received comfort. The greater the comfort given, the greater the ability to give...the implication being that the greater the comfort, the greater the wound. 

And yet—and yet—when I anticipate this summer I'm thinking less of weighing out pain and more of collecting seeds, more of picnics by the lake and the cool of the shade and hysterical laughter over crazy inside jokes and sweet tea in mason jars and splinters and suntans and spontaneous adventures into familiar strange places and stories read aloud with the children sprawled around on the cool basement floor and romping with the dog and hugs hugs hugs. My mad jaunts into the sunset are scheduled, and now I'm looking past those to the quotidian moments that I want to turn around and see at the end of this summer, no matter what shape the season takes (because one never really does truly know). And not only do I want to collect seeds, but I want to plant them. Because time is short and people are so much. Because this time, running away, I turned around and confronted myself and realized anew that I can't scatter the pain, but I can allow it to be used for something else, both for me and for the people that I love. And I choose life. Oh, I choose life. Let these seeds grow.

Sometimes just being is enough.

"I'm not a good enough ma."

"But you're Ma." 

[You were afraid of living] without creating anything or giving anything to anyone.....but what you carved into my heart is still here.