We used to dance and play, ribbons streaming through our hair and light dripping from our fingers.
Now we march in perfect lines, only black and white and sharp edges. The clunking of boots fills the silky silence.
Where does magic go when she’s on vacation and how long until her return?
Trust the word dj, little one. Let Broca’s Area rest for a moment, and know that the music will play again.
That I can be wild and safe.
That courage feels, sometimes, like nothing more than a big breath.
That the hearts worth waiting for are always in perfect time.
That detours, traffic jams, and u-turns are part of all great stories.
That it’s okay to need a reminder.
She brought me comfort immediately for a reason I can’t explain. As a general rule, I find the expected to be comforting and she was nothing like I was expecting. Goes to show what I know.
I am early that day and I sit with twitchy feet in the room where “Buddha Bar Radio” plays on an endless loop, a soundtrack of mockery. I take my third handful of lavender hand sanitizer and slide the thin rug back and forth across the hardwood floor when I hear her emerge from her office. I’m startled and I don’t imagine I hide it well.
She crosses the room to put her lunch bag back in the communal kitchen. We say hello and both chuckle awkwardly; this is not how we usually meet. She wasn’t expecting to see me yet and I most certainly was not expecting her to be the type of person who eats lunch. We’re both highly sensitive creatures, so we feel this disruption of rhythm and we feel the other’s noticing of the disruption as well. It’s hilarious and brutal, as most things are.
I watch her unpack the contents of her soft-sided Igloo. It’s probably all Vegan, definitely none of that processed shit.
Two minutes later, she calls me back in the way we had both planned. Thank you, God.
I follow her like a puppy dog finally being let indoors by the gentle, warm neighbors. I sit cross-legged on the couch like always. My feet don’t quite reach the floor and it’s the way I feel most myself anyway. That seems important here, so I’ve stopped apologizing for not keeping my shoes on the ground where they belong.
I watch her fingers go back and forth and focus intensely on my breath. “Where do you feel it in your body?” I’m drawn in by the movement, the intensity of the memories, noticing what comes up, “simply observing it as if we’re on a train and we’re watching it pass out the window.” Back and forth, back and forth. The breath, the noticing, the train, back and forth.
I’m in this supposedly meaningful trance when I hear it, that undeniable sound of stomach. It’s not mine, and for this reason specifically I make a mental note to write a gratitude list tonight and put this moment at the very very top. I return to my breath and watching her fingers, but then… it’s back “raaaaaaawwwwwrrrgggghhhhheeeeeeee”. It’s not hunger, it’s not a gastrointestinal emergency, but maybe that pre-gas sound? That’s my best guess. I’m grateful to be wearing a mask, my secret weapon that hides the side of my smile start to emerge, my oldest tell. I watch with fascination as she exists in this moment between apology, embarrassment, and ensuring that the show must go on. This is the best movie I’ve seen all year.
The show does, in fact, go on but it’s not quite the same. I’m not engrossed in the memory and the fingers are more like windshield wipers than the object of my laser focus. My breath is there and it matters, but I’m a sleepy passenger on the train. I’m captivated by something so much more important. I want to jump up and hug her but even I understand that this isn’t the way these things are done. I imagine myself bursting into hysterics, laughter or tears. Who can tell these days? I imagine myself as a modest elderly woman raising a tiny, shaky finger to my lips and saying “oopsies, honey, your humanity is showing.” Though it takes the strength of a million warriors, I do none of these things.
Instead, I play along in this skit to the best of my ability like a grown up person and the session ends. All the finger movement, all the memories, all the noticing – it’s supposed to make me feel shaken and raw, she warns me about this.
Instead, I leave lighter than I’ve felt in months, with a pep in my step. I have a new stamp in my passport and that always makes me feel like I can fly. Things are different now because this majestic creature and I, we’re the same.
It was the day I realized we’re all just rushing home to unload our dishwashers.
I saw the dreams in photo flashes last night. The shutter sound was clear and everything was slower. Every detail didn’t belong to me, but was available to me, prepared and open for peaceful coexistence.
I watched the blue smoke of your eyes, a color that would make Ray Charles swoon. The color that used to hold the whole mood of the world to me. I was looking too closely at first, you know how the story goes.
I zoomed out further, further, further until I was seeing the whole landscape, a beautiful and expansive abyss. I stayed here longer – studying closely, fully alive. I waited, listened, breathed through the tears, the waves of panic nausea – the pain of memories that still live in my cells.
I breathed more deeply again and again and again.
There it was, finally. The Immovable Truth.
This has been my circle around the sun that has gone the least like what I expected or even had the capacity to imagine. What a thing it is to be thoroughly surprised by a life.
I’m exactly 16 days late in posting this, but I’m feeling pretty confident that 2020 was the year time was cancelled anyway.
Here’s a random list of things I would have liked to tell myself 381 days ago, if I could hit rewind:
I focus my eye on that spot on my ankle that I somehow always miss when I’m shaving. I watch so intently I think I can see the pesky little hairs grow. I watch because it’s simple, still and unchanging. I know exactly what to expect.
I try to feel the wave of breath as inhale turns to exhale, exhale releases and becomes the inhale. Inhale pause exhale. I want to be in the wave.
But we all know that’s just a thing I use in moments of desperation, the thing I want to say works all the time – The thing that cured the fire that lives in my belly.
In reality, we all know my insides are hot lava, my head is stuck in a groove in the record that was never fixed. I meant to take it in and get that worked on, it’s just that it played fine for the whole summer, when the weather was better and the seas refused to be stormy.
So I find myself in the grass, with sweaty legs and sweaty palms and a sweaty brain, if thats possible.
My stomach is in my throat and I swear I’ll never need to eat again. I’ll starve out this beast in my chest that tells me that nothing that’s gold can stay.
I pray for peace, which is a thing to do when you’re about to throw up. But god and I both know it’s not my chosen form of spiritual practice.
So, I stand from my ass print in the grass with itchy, shaky legs and I find all the courage I’ve got and I ask you to grab my hand because I want to be home.
I squeeze tighter and I ask you to keep loving my imperfect self loudly, that I hope to someday be a less frazzled version of me. You tell me you don’t want that version at all, that you want the one that’s here. That version is home.
We throw a housewarming party, because home is always better with family and flowers and a strange tool with which you squeeze your lemons.
The days are simpler here in Quarantine Town. There are reading sessions on the patio and bare feet in the grass every day.
Friendships grow through all the time we have to talk and virtual happy hours we didn’t make the time for before all we had was more than enough. We wash our hands as often as we check our phones.
Longer sleeps, bigger laughs, more vulnerable cries, and better talks. We have the time and the presence to zoom out.
Hair is streaked with strips of blonde and I’m more concerned about going back to “real life” than living our suspended days…Or maybe this is it already?
Gratitude for health, the roof that protects us, for the big love that keeps us solvent. Also for a shameless nap routine I’ll be sad to see go.
I “vacuum” the floor with fingers through the carpet just because it’s so much more satisfying and where else do I have to be?
Q Town puts everything in the blender – swirly anxiety, freedom, and peace. Exhaustion and monotony with downtime, creative time, and exercise time. Alone time and together time. Work time and laundry time and lunch time.
Thankfully, I’ve always loved a good smoothie.
The world is new through this lens,
With distance and focus, intention, all the colors brought directly to the light.
Never not wondering ‘where could I have been more alive, more awake to the pain of my family in every shade?’
What did we ignorantly take for granted when others struggled to breathe?
How can I be better now, more in tune with the oneness of the suffering?
We strive to find a way to capture the brightness of this moment, exposure wide enough to speak only to the contrast in the days of sharp edges.
With a shutter speed fast enough to tell the story of a blissful revolution, let us remember the moments we all learned to see the world in perfect vision, every image in 20/20.
A few days ago, Jenna took my picture for my Wanderlings bio.
I don’t know the last time I’ve had a picture taken of me, just me, without a prop or an occasion to give context to the photograph.
I’ll be completely honest, it sent me to crazy-town for a moment. It was somehow too intimate – just me, standing alone with my face and my hair and and my acne and my crooked smile. My instant response was to jump back from all of this, to recoil from the show of me-ness in its unapologetic roar. I wanted to be embarrassed, I wanted to criticize. I wanted to call my mother and reprimand her for not putting me in a helmet to correct my asymmetrical infant head, which I would wager to bet was a pretty linear path to my asymmetrical adult head. I wanted to tell her that I know my teeth were straight enough as a pre-teen, but I’m sort of pissed that we didn’t look more closely into braces.
As soon as I looked more closely, though, I started to see and feel something else. That need to jump back from myself, to be embarrassed and critical of the things that will keep me off of magazine covers, was not erased, but joined by a question I couldn’t quite articulate yet.
Going back for another look with an awareness of my ranting internal voice, I noticed first how happy I look. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic and I’m in my sixth week of sheltering-in-place… and I look happy? Then, I noticed how peaceful I look with the trees all around; it looks so normal to have me sitting in the dirt at the base of my dear green friends.
I started to note the peculiarity of this notion that I can celebrate your attributes that make you you and on myself, they’re flaws. I know this isn’t my fault, that we’ve been cultured to seek our imperfections and obsess over them, chastise ourselves for having them, make ourselves small because of them. The hard truth of this is that I don’t get to start helping define a new normal in this realm by exclusively honoring my little sister, my future daughter, or my best friends. Those celebrations are important but the real work starts right here.
I took another look through a new lens with the compassion I’d have for a dear friend. I knew that if I was looking at a picture of a friend, I’d tell her that I like her wild hair, which has never been tidy a single day she’s been alive. I like that it refuses to stay one color that would make it easy to categorize. I’d remind her that, as a person who lives to be outside, why would her wild skin not have imperfections and blemishes from the sun, the change of season, and so much sunscreen? These are her trophies of her wild lifestyle. I’d remind her that her body is wild and strong enough to run up hills and carry a human in some sort of emergency. I’d remind her that her eye color is hard to see because her smile is big and goofy, tending to change the expression of her whole face, and that makes her feel wild too – wildly connected, wildly loved, and wildly lighthearted.
I’d remind her that the wildness of her imperfect physical attributes are just as they’re supposed to be, even if she wouldn’t have chosen them all.
She may as well learn to love them wild.
And finally, I heard the questions loud and clear – Doesn’t the picture look just like me? Isn’t that enough?
The majority of the world has hit pause.
For the first time in forever, we’re separated – together.
Our pause is a result of circumstances none of us would have chosen, the effects of which we can’t begin to know yet. Lives and security in more forms than one, have been lost. None of it is fair or sensical and yet, I believe that it is also an extraordinary moment for reflection.
I’m fascinated by the universe-governed detox that has been assigned to us. Like addicts, someone, somewhere in charge called for our intervention and we have to be still and sit back as we heard about all the ways we’ve been ignoring the life that has been waiting for us. We’ve been distracting ourselves from real life with so much busyness, so many shiny objects that keep us numb from sitting with our actual human experience.
It’s possible that we were so caught up in the daily race that we forgot to let ourselves imagine, to create, to dream of how big this life could be.
I’m intoxicated with the reverberations of this pause, this moment we’re in that’s forcing us to focus on the inside worlds right at home. For some of us, that means slowing down and watching the majestic horror of our kids growing up, really seeing them in ways we don’t ordinarily allow for in the swell of everyday chaos. For others, it’s returning to basics, priorities, self-care, sleep, natural rhythms. It’s stripping away all of the extra and coming home to ourselves. It’s breathing in stillness where there is normally so much extra noise. It’s marveling at the Earth starting to heal from the pause of extraneous waste we’ve created. It’s noticing what our habits look like when we want to numb the sharp loneliness that is sometimes there too. It’s treasuring the deliberate efforts made to reach out to the ones that matter most, watching how we show up for each other with humble hearts. It’s being physically separate and less alone than ever before.
I hope to never forget the way this pause has made me feel.
Firefly Enlightenment 