Awake

 It's 11pm and I'm awake.  It's 11pm and I am a single mother of two small children, either of whom will definitely crawl into my bed in the next few hours, and I'm awake. 

 If my oldest comes in first, she will wrap her arms around my neck as I lift her over me and into the space on my right.  She has to be in that space so I can be on the left edge when my youngest requires the same  feat of 3am strength.  If it's my oldest, she will wrap her arms around my neck and she won't let go for a short while.  She will silently fall back asleep.  She isn't there for anything except to be where I am.  She doesn't need conversation, she won't ask me for water, she's not going to insist upon a snack of pickles at an absurd time of day the way she used to.  She used to, and it drove me mad when all I wanted was some time to myself, and now those words dig a pit of sadness.  She used to.  Now, she creates warmth where there was none.  She used to do that, too.  She was born into that.  She creates warmth where there was none, and nestles her knees into my middle, and she sleeps as if muscle memory has told her where she should go.  She'll sleep there until I move.  She won't move first. 

If it's my youngest, she will wrap her arms around any part of me that is available and climb herself over the mountain of her mother's hips squarely into the middle of the bed.  She will say, "Hi, mommy."  She'll tell me she loves me.  She'll tell me she loves Cinderella, too, and her Aunt Alley and Grandpa Jim.  She'll say she wants blueberries in her cereal, and that she's sure the sun is awake enough for us to tell it good morning.  She will be wrong.  I'll spend 45 minutes telling her so.  I will wish that she would believe me because we are in the RightThisSecond and not yet in the She Used To.  She will eventually fall asleep so close to me that her tiny body seems to forget that it exists separately from mine.  Right then, it does not.  Right then, she is just as much a part of me as she has ever been, and she doesn't know herself without me.  I don't know myself without them.  

I was terrified to do this alone.  I sat at a dinner table sobbing over my sleeping three week old while my toddler played in the living room and their dad said that he was sorry, but he was out.  I couldn't imagine worse.  I lost my vision in that moment and moved forward trusting that my parents and my sister and everyone else I loved wouldn't let go of my hands until I could see again.  They didn't.  You know who else didn't let go?  My kids. 

It's been three years now, almost to the day.  The parts that I was scared of aren't scary.  It turns out that you can feed and bathe and dress and read stories to and get out the door with and teach and learn from two children by yourself.  You can do all that on startlingly little sleep.  Some days are easier than others.  Some days, I cry.  Some days, I cry in front of them and my youngest grabs a bandaid, because that's how she knows to fix crying.  She affixes it to the same spot on my ankle every time.  She hears it crack on occasion, and hasn't yet met the version of her mother who broke that ankle in a feral Caribbean tent village.  Some days, I cry in front of them and my oldest holds my hand, creating warmth where there was, actually, plenty.  But most minutes of most days are bliss, when I am smart enough to notice it.  They are mine, and I barely have to share them. 

 At first, I missed having someone to share side glances with.  Inside jokes, mispronunciations, reports of unsubstantial tantrums.  I have grieved for the loss of shared experiences that the parents of small children have together.  First steps.  Parent/teacher conferences.  Swim lessons.  The first time my oldest came home from school and declared, "Mommy!  You are a NOUN!"  But in the end, how lucky am I that those moments are mine?  When they think of time with their mom, it won't be shiny ski vacations and fancy restaurants.  It'll be help with homework, hot chocolate on a cold Tuesday, dance parties in the living room, and the smell of coffee in the morning.  It'll be crawling into a warm bed, open arms waiting to lift them up. Just us.  

 This time in my children's lives is like a firefly that I get to catch a glimpse of just before it moves on.  I will do what I can to keep the light trails in a mason jar so I don't forget when They Used To.  It is 12am, and I am a single mother of two small children, either of whom will definitely crawl into my bed in the next few hours.  And I am awake.  

A Mom Saves Herself

 The magic of this life. 

My dining table is a mess. Most of the surfaces in this place would make you think they're gasping for air.  Maybe you would say that about me, too.  We hold a lot; there is a lot of space that used to see light, and now does not.  But every toy unicorn and book of nursery rhymes sends a beam straight up towards the sky.  Each one, the recent memory of a tiny voice asking for time, which is attention, which is love, which they brought into my life like oxygen.  

This house is the northern lights with moving, living beams suspended above every inch that reads, "mess."

So no, I'm not gasping for air.  I am swimming in air.  But, on occasion, I do find that I need to hold my breath for  moment.  I need to remember when the lights in my life glowed from the city, or from an island sky, or from the boats in Menemsha.  I've decided to forgive myself for needing to hold my breath.  I've decided that loving what my life is and sometimes needing to live in a different one are not mutually exclusive.  What a strange, unexpected gift to have room for both. 

And so I sit here on Sunday mornings with my coffee and a crossword puzzle, and with the silence that evades me every other day of the week.  Grateful for the quiet, and for the noise.  Grateful for the lives I've led that landed me inside this one.  Grateful for light beams dancing above surfaces that should, in a life other than mine, be empty of color.  

New Life, Old Me

 Hello from my teenage bedroom.  I am here alone, except for my cat, Goose.  Goose, who won't get an inch away from me, and thank God for that tonight.   My babies are with their dad.  My babies are with their dad and I am not with their dad in all of the ways that you can imagine that statement to exist.  So, I am under a patchwork constellation of glow in the dark stars that I pasted to my ceiling when I was 14.  Before I knew what a manic-pixie-dream-girl was.  Before I wanted to be one.  Before I tried to become one, which was before I decided that a steady family life might actually be ok, which was before I landed here, in my teenage bedroom, under these glow in the dark stars, alone.  

Things end.  Good things.  Real things.  Things you thought you would never forget the shape of become soft and rounded in their edges until they come to have no edges at all.  And you are left wondering if faded is kinder than sharp, and you are unsure. 

Most nights, I will have my babies.  I will yawn through 5am after having been up at various hours for various reasons and I will make breakfast for two of us, and for three when the bottles run their last round.  But only three.  It will always stop at three.   Five nights a week, my girls and I will sing in the kitchen and battle through bath time and bedtime, just us.  Five nights a week, I get to be the mom I want to be without the ankle weights.  Five nights a week, I will do my best to pretend that everything has gone according to plan. Most nights, he will not have his babies.  I am not sure what his 5ams will look like.  That is no longer mine to know.   But I don't breathe very well without him, and it's difficult to tell if that is because he is oxygen or if it is just because his lungs are so tangled into my own that the removal of one set from the other is life threatening.  I suppose you can't know the answer until you try to separate.  I suppose the answer is not love, but a desperate grab for breath. 

I have no idea how to do this.  I have plenty of practice leaving things I knew to be temporary, but this is the first time in my life that something was supposed to be permanent and, actually, was not.  I don't know how to be a single mom.  I can't scream loud enough with my inside voice to expel the acid of being left like this.  Even the catharsis of writing it down is hot like a campfire ember, burning my fingers as they fly across the keyboard, searing the skin of them any time I stop to feel.  

So, here I am. Under these stars.  Staring at an empty bedside bassinet, and sleeping with the teddy bear that my toddler left behind.  I moved things from one home to another this afternoon.  I drove southbound on the highway alone.  Trunk full of boxes, car full of breakup songs.  

New life.  Old me.  Time to find my own breath. 

Meditate for three minutes, write for two.

I tried to meditate today.  For three minutes, I closed my eyes.  I sat on my bed with my arms softly crossed in front of my chest, and I listened to myself breathe.  If my phone had buzzed, there would have been trouble.  But it didn't, thank goodness, and so I was able to disappear for a moment.  I don't remember the last time I listened to myself breathe.  The Caribbean can be meditative without effort, and I remember floating on my back in the salty sea, water so calm that I didn't move, and allowing my ears to sink just below the surface.  The sun warm on my face, the sea cool on my fingertips, the water like two hands covering my ears, asking me to hear only me. 

It is hard to focus lately.  As a mom, most of my mental (and physical) (and emotional) (and all other kinds of) energy is absorbed into one tiny human, who doesn't allow for anything other than being the sun in my heliocentric world.  It's fine.  If one day, she told me she was the moon, I would move to revolve during the nighttime so that she could glow.  That is the truth of motherhood.  And it is cliche to remind moms to take care of  themselves, and it is not totally understood that "self care" has become another part of the job. 

My phone has become a crutch.  I lean on it when I'm bored.  I lean on it when I think I'm bored.  I lean on it for far longer than I need to, because I have somehow become convinced that without it, I am crippled.  My god, what a waste that is, huh?  There was a time when losing a phone was a joy (this happened often, for the Caribbean Sea, while meditative, is not particularly friendly to electronics.  Perhaps it is meditative because of this).  I find myself envying that girl, and wondering if she has blocked my number or if I could dial her up for coffee.  If she even has a phone right now.

So today, I tried to meditate.  I realized in those gentle few moments that I need to remember to put it all down.  That taking care of myself is less a bubble bath and more permission to truly disappear, even from myself.  And, on occasion, from the sun.  (While she's napping or with her dad or something, I'm not crazy) 

Now and Ladybugs

In time, I will get used to the lawn mowers.  That sound, a weekend sound, a nostalgic sound of days off under the blue sky, will fade from the front of my mind into the back.  In time, these suburb summer sounds will soothe me like they did in my childhood, and I won't need speakers in my ears to drown them out. 

But it is fall, and it is not time yet, and I must admit that these soothing suburb sounds make me long for the white-noise quiet of a busy city.

I am on my front porch, battling a bee who thinks he wants my drink.  I used to speak his language a little more fluently, but I now must resort to asking him less politely to be on his way. 

 Why does autumn make us ache?  What are we missing that causes fallen leaves to smell like a cracked heart?  Summer is leaving, and fighting its exit as always.  This is her second summer (a new, but immediately effective measure of time).  I look back at my summers often, both happy and sad to leave them in whichever ocean holds them.  It is a thick photo album.  I have tried to glue it shut on several occasions (even a decade of summers has some cold moments), but the seams don't hold and a song or a smell or a drop of rum on my tongue busts the thing open like a book with too worn a binding.  But this is my summer now.  Tidy and wrapped with a bow.  A beginning and an end.  Less insta-epic, surely, but so much more real.

I have been thinking about what is really is to have a kid.  I'm sure that sounds silly, or late, or obvious, but I've sat deep in it lately, nonetheless.  And as her second summer ends, all I can think of is how fortunate we are to be able to pay youth forward.  What a responsibility, and what an absolute gift.  Every sprinkler I ran through, I can give to her.  Every pile of leaves.  Every snowflake on my nose, every ladybug, every marshmallowy hot chocolate.  Every dandelion summer and every shimmering winter and every Narnia wardrobe or pillow fort or backyard campout.  All of the magic of my childhood is mine.  I hold it in my pocket, and carefully unfold it when I wish on 11:11 or hang Christmas lights, and then I re-crease the soft edges, and put it back where it is safe.  But in truth, all of the magic of my childhood is an heirloom.  It was always meant to be watched after and then given away

I won't have her for as many days as I think I will.  The agony of motherhood is that if you do it right, they come to need you less.  You give your whole life to teaching them magic; how to speak to the bees, how to catch snowflakes, how to fold it all very carefully so they can give it away later.  And you hold their hands until you don't, and you hope that what you gave them was enough.

 I'm not quite sure how to grapple with the juxtaposition of pain and pride that parenthood brings, and so I won't.  Not yet. 

And all the while, I sit on this porch in rare moments alone, and quietly, shamefully, and gradually less often pine for my life of summers and city noise.  In time, I will sit here and pine for the toddler who is asleep in her crib, soothed by the lawn mowers, dreaming only of now and maybe the magic of a few ladybugs. 

Time Traveling

  Sometimes, if the oscillating fan in my room shifts and squares and rusts a little and sends wind into my face like the Caribbean air, I can time travel.  When the light is perfect.  When I leave the window in my shower open and close my eyes and use a very specific shampoo, I can hear outdated dryers clanging, staining someone's clothes with rust, and I can hear friends collecting the recycling from Swoop.  I stay there as long as I can.
 
 I try to start from the top.  From the road behind my tent and the gate that leads down into the neighborhood of treehouses that still feels like home even though it's no longer standing.  I step flat-footed and cautious, knowing as all of us did that boardwalks are either splintered or slippery and nothing in between, and one must walk like an elephant to avoid injury.  I let my front door slam behind me.  I was one of the fortunate few who had a door which would actually close on its own, and so the slam feels a bit like privilege. I walk [flat-footed] down my own staircase, saying a quiet hello to the doorknob that had been bolted to our front railing by a ghost of Maho past, probably long before I had ever even heard of the magical place.  The 802 is to my left, and a boardwalk the leads to Bonnie's tent which was Joe Junk's tent, which was who knows tent before that is to my right.  If it's a little rainy on my time-trip, the Swoop showers are running, housing someone who is willing to risk a special terror for a chance at hot water.

Once, I got stuck in a swoop shower with a hummingbird.  Another time, with a tarantula.  Another time still, with an unidentifiable slime slicking the floor.  Against all odds, the hummingbird was the scariest.

If it's rainy or if it's not, the washers and dryers are running, the library is packed with books that no one will read, the closet is packed with clothes that someone will end up wearing as a costume some tipsy boat trip afternoon, and there is a shelf which holds up a past staff member's decor as if it might make sense to anyone else, asking to be placed in another random space in another random tent until season ends, and it lands back here.

Through Swoop, I am back on uncovered boardwalk with the Fishbowl to my left, and the Bamboo to my right.  Someone is watching a TV, wasting a perfect day because you forget that the days are perfect and you occasionally wish instead for them to just be normal.  There is a trail which follows some line or another down to Circuit City, which is really just Jared's tent.  The living room of the Fishbowl is to my right, open for the world to see, earning its name even in the daylight.  Further to the right is Where the Sidewalk Ends, which is really Marty's tent.  I walk and walk along the long, central boardwalk in staff.  Under the shoe tree.  Watching ahead through the gate that leads to E-section, where you don't go, where only guests and 4-hours go, where you are proud to not belong.  I try to walk slowly here.  This boardwalk is the resting place of a number of heavy conversations, and it deserves the respect of time taken.

Eventually, the Kingdom is to my left.

(I have to stop for a moment, sweet reader, as I realize that I have gotten lost in Staff section.  The Quite Please is farther up, but I cannot recall how to get there.  Flanked by Skull and Bones and the Compound, it was twice a home of mine.  For reasons I won't share here, I think my memory is probably doing me a favor by blurring that path, and so I suppose I will leave it where it is)

I lived in the Kingdom.  I painted its floor from black and white to green and lived in its tiniest room and loved its dining table and the year and roommate I had there.  I knew its occupants before more, and I knew its occupants after and I will love that fallen tent forever.

Down a few stairs, and the Barefoot Mansion, which has always been the Barefoot Mansion is on my right.  Bits and Pieces is on my left, another tent I called home, another floor I painted, another life I lived.  I survived my first heartbreak inside those screened walls, and learned who I could be when I thought I was gone.

A tent called Betty Ford is a bit down and to the right.  The last of Staff.  It's actually Karen and Mike's tent to me, and though it certainly deserved reinvention, I'm not sure that Betty Ford was fair or just.

If I've planned this poorly, I let that latticed staff gate close behind me and find myself nose to nose with the Donkey room.  I smell humid trash and bacon.  I smell crappy coffee that I'll dress with the cream that they let me steal from the kitchen.  I drink it from a blue cup as I check out the breakfast specials drawn on a whiteboard, and the friend whom I sell wine and Panna water and pretzels to will take my order.


My less and less tiny daughter has just woken up. Nothing wakes you from the past like a baby crying in the present, and so here I go.  The staff will eat breakfast without me.  The rest of that boardwalk will wait there for another daydream.

Dear Clara

    Dear Clara,
   
        I just put you down for a nap.  You had already been asleep for a little while, but you woke up early as you are wont to do, and I needed to sit in your overpriced nursery rocker and push your hair back so I could kiss your forehead until you fell back in.  You like my breath on your forehead.  You like to hold my finger in your hands.  You don't particularly like to rock, ironically, but you seem to like how the arm of that chair cradles you on one side so I can cradle you on the other.  You fell asleep fairly quickly, and so I stayed longer than I needed to.  I stared at your face and marveled at your little mouth and your little nose and your little ears.  I don't usually do this, I'm afraid.  Part of staying home with you is the home bit, and I've got things to do while you sleep.  But sometimes, I allow myself the respite of looking at you.  You've got soul-healing properties, I swear.  They tell you that you've never known love until you've had a baby.  They say that you never understand what it is to stop mattering to yourself and to know that that's actually ok.  They tell you about the chaos, the sleeplessness, the baby-proofing, the diaper pails, the overwhelming sense that you will forever be overwhelmed.  They tell you so much, but come to think of it, I don't recall hearing about the calm of holding a heart that you made.  The peace that comes with loving someone more than you love yourself.   More than that, I don't remember actually feeling the calm until recently.

   As I held you just now, kissing your tiny forehead, I cried.  You just turned one this last Saturday, and I cried for how all of this felt a year ago and the calm I didn't feel.  A year ago, I held you much the same way.  I cradled you to my chest and touched my lips to your forehead and all I felt, aside from terror that any movement I made would wake you, was like I was under water.  Not drowning, but not breathing.  Floating some, sinking a little, hoping that filling my lungs with air would bring me to the surface that I could see clearly, but somehow not quite reach.  I was supposed to know you, and I didn't.  It was all so fast and so strange, and it felt like I knew you better when you were still a physical part of me.  Before I could see your face or watch you sleep.  One six-inch incision, and nine months of learning you was slashed like a tire. I was deflated.  The sense that you were supposed to be my oxygen was there, but that hardly seemed like a fair thing to expect from someone so new.  I loved you deeply, but I did not understand you and I did not understand myself as your mother.  Wasn't something supposed to change?   Wasn't I supposed to close my eyes one moment and wake up the next and feel different?  I felt as inept as ever, counting the rises and falls of your chest, hoping that I was good enough, feeling like you were too perfect to have chosen me as your mom and that someone somewhere made a huge mistake. 

There are so many things in life that you don't realize you are learning until you look back at where you were.  A year later, the calm is here.  The magnitude of the chaos is, as well, and I still feel inept more often than not.  But a year later, I hold you and cry because I needed you to be my oxygen and you were.  You are. We save each other every day.  A year later, I understand that face.  A year later, you smile and you hug back and I know that any movement I make is just fine even if it does wake you because you like my breath on your forehead, and my finger in your hand, and the way the chair cradles your right side. 

Dear Clara,
   Thank you being so patient with me.   A year from now, I will write you again, certainly shocked by how little I knew and how far we've come, and still the luckiest person alive because I get to be your mom. 

Right Now

To be fair, I'm sure that no one really knows how to do this, especially the first time.  You would have to understand time enough to split a moment open and peer inside.  You would have to have already wrangled your wild self.  Broken it in.  Made it soft and pliable and you would have to have armor enough to guard against every breeze that threatened to harden it back to feral.

  There are women who have wanted this forever.  This thing that I have.  This thing that I am.  But the universe has a sense of humor, and though I fancied myself a great number of things, I never did think that housewife would be among them.  It's not among them.  Despite the fact that this is what I'm doing, this is not who I am.  And if I take the narcissism out of it, I would have to assume that this isn't who most of us really are.

  How do we hold onto ourselves?  How, when we don't own a single one of our own minutes, do we find the time to look in a mirror and remember why we have scars?

When you're a stay at home mom, it can be quite easy to stop existing entirely.  If you're not careful, you melt into whatever wall you're next to, or whatever chair you're sitting in.  You match the hum of the refrigerator like breath and you become what you are doing and lose track of what size jeans you wear, and the city you loved grows like tall grass and you get lost where you once felt at home.  Home becomes a life that would have bewildered you not even that long ago.

It is a cliche to say that none of it matters, but I don't need to qualify any of this.  I understand my privilege here.  I won't cave to the itch at the base of my skull telling me to gush and scream and flood that I love my daughter and I am lucky to have this life (though I suppose I just did, didn't I?).  No.  I need for this to be mine.  Something has to be mine without the nearly Catholic guilt that accompanies being a mother and still, shamefully, being a human being.

When I look back at this time in my life, it will shimmer like soap bubbles.  It is magic, all of it.  I will remember the first time I heard her giggle.  I will remember what it was like the moment we found out she was ticklish, and the moment I made the grave, trust-crushing mistake of giving her spinach.  I will remember crying when we began giving her formula, and crying as I packed up the clothes that she managed to outgrow in what felt like a day, and crying when she got a bump on her head because I turned my back for thirty seconds.  I've got videos and pictures of these events just in case my memory ever takes on sepia tones.  I will not forget her.  But there is only space for so much there, and the bare truth is that when I look back on this time in my life, I will only remember being her mother.  Right now, I am only her mother.

The First Motherhood One (is barely about motherhood)

It's September 10th.  Clara, my beautiful, perfect speck of a daughter is sleeping now, though God only knows how long that will last.  In eight days, she will be 4 months old.  Babies are time machine magicians, somehow turning your longest days into your shortest weeks.  I'll have to ask her when she's older how she manages to do that.

  I am in Denver now, house and dog sitting for a friend until we close on our own house.  The sun is out today, and it means business.  An early September heat wave is here, taking its toll on the green bits still holding onto their Spring youth.

 Yeah, well, me, too.  Not much to be helped there, I'm afraid.

  I've given myself permission to sit in the sun until she wakes up.  It's been a long time since I've sat in the sun.  That would be unusual for pre-baby Jamie, but seems to be par for the course now.  Some things in life change every other thing.
 
    I miss the sun- that has not changed.  But nothing puts into perspective how reckless we are with our own bodies like being tasked with the well-being of someone else's brand new one.  I check my blind spot twice now, and chasing those tan lines is far less important than making sure she doesn't have any.

Motherhood, man.  You lose yourself if you're careful and if you're not.

A few years ago, I wrote about ambition.  I'd have to read it again to get the details straight, but if I was being truthful, I probably outlined how little ambition I actually had.  I had been climbing the ladder but pining for the ground, and didn't know what that could amount to, really.  How do you win a rat race that you'd be happier losing?  Regardless, there I was.  Successful by most people's definitions.  Even by my own, though I felt lost in it.  All the while, wondering if the top had a good view of the versions of myself that I had loved better.

  And now.

I'll spare the details of this progression, though it should be noted that plenty details exist.  But give me two years in the Pacific, and I'll show you how to turn into someone no one recognizes.  What a magic trick to place a round-peg girl into a square-hole life and see upon her removal how her shape has changed.

    There is more to be said, here.  Pages to be written about the abrupt loss of freedom- financial and otherwise- that accompanies a quick-change into the privileged title of “Stay at home mom.” Pages about the struggle of holding onto yourself when your world is no longer about you.  Pages about how I have been under-qualified for every job I've ever had, this one included (maybe most of all).  And, to be obvious, there are chapters and volumes and libraries to be written about motherhood.  What it is.  What it isn't.  How it changes you, and how it doesn't.  The mind bend of knowing what's coming, and still being entirely unprepared. The gravity of being this in love with someone, even if she is biologically obligated to love me back. 

  But today, the best way to end this aimless ramble might be just the way I started it.  It is now September 14th.  My beautiful, perfect speck of a daughter is asleep upstairs.  In four days, she will be four months old.  And I am in the sun.

i listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul.

I can close my eyes here and breathe until everything disappears into itself.  So deceptive, the softness of sea foam.  As if the ocean didn´t have the power of everything this Earth has ever been pulsing with each swell.  It is no wonder that the sirens are island creatures- the sea itself is a siren and a liar, its flower petal shore break making promises it doesn't even know it can't keep.  We know not to turn our backs, but do we really want to see?

     I've never had a God, really.  I've never prayed to anything but The Universe, and even that has always been born more of hope than belief that anything was listening.  I suppose I could be convinced, though, sitting here like this, the dragon whisper of the Pacific breaking me down until I am as granular as the sand.  Not convinced that there is a God, exactly.  To be honest, I do not think I could find value in one diety who decided the then and will decide the next and who chooses the now.  I've never been one to worship, and I can't imagine breaking that rule for such a control freak.  Nor do I think that our souls and spirits will be carried on the wind into whatever our perception of heaven is, where we are greeted by long lost grandparents and family pets, where ice cream doesn't have calories and we are forgiven our every earthly misstep.


    Rather,  in a very literal sense, I think we are the wind.  We were the wind before birth, and we will be the wind after death.  We speak of life cycles as if they are archways, with a beginning and an end through which we might be able to spy the shine of something bigger.  Something with more purpose than we could possess on our own.  I'm not sure why we don't give ourselves more credit.  The nature of a cycle is circular.  Beginnings and endings fade into one another just as we can close our eyes and feel that maybe the ocean is a part of us.   Like we belong to it.  Truly, it is, and we do.  We are made of the same things, rearranged.  We are the same thing.

     When my grandfather died, I did not know what to pray to.  His God?  The God of my childhood? The God my friends know, and speak to, and love, and trust?  Even on the off chance that those are all three the same, I wouldn't know that God's face if he was staring straight at me.

    Instead, I went to the beach.  I sat facing a little North and a lot east, towards the last place where  our feet were firmly on the same ground, his and mine, and I said goodbye.  And then I said hello as the sea lied about its gentleness the same way hearts do, and as the wind played with my hair the way it does the wild grass and the wild waves.



   

The Trouble with Plants

     I can't really keep plants alive.  I bring them into my home with the promise of light and water, cool from the faucet, and an easy place to shine.  I have visions of green geranium leaves crawling like sunbeams, and cushiony aloes, plump with medicine, and red pots teeming with herbs whose aromas battle one another for space in the air.

But I can't really keep plants alive.

     I smother them at first.  A helicopter mom, hovering and feeding and anxious.  I fear they will suffer thirst, and so I make them drink.  I am proud because they don't have to ask.  It works for the cats- they love me most in the moments before they feel a meow might be necessary.  But if anything is more fickle than a cat, it's cilantro, and I can't really keep plants alive.

     I move from over-attention to near neglect, wounded from rejection.  I avert my eyes when I walk by them.  They have asked me for space.  But if there is anything more fickle than a cat, it is cilantro, and they are wounded as well.  Like a girl who just broke up with a boy so he might care more, their heads hang low and moping.  Their fingers curl into delicate fists, for sadness and not for fighting.  I bet they'd weep if they had water enough for tears.

  Tough love does not work for plants, however.  And I can't really keep plants alive.

When I Left

     On May 24th, 2005, I left everything for everything.  I did not do it responsibly, or with kindness.  I left a wake.  I told everyone I knew and loved that I would see them in August, and then boarded a big plane to a tiny island.  I didn´t know it was a lie at the time, but I think I´d hoped it was.  August came and went, humid and on fire.  It would be November, and November would be a round trip back to the islands.  I had been on the ground in Colorado for just long enough to pack a Goodwill suitcase with all the home I thought I would need, and that was not even enough to fill it.
   
My sister moved me out of my college house.  It was up to my roommates to find a replacement.  I would not see my friends and a family until the following August- a full year later than I had promised.  Even then, I would never really return.

I traipsed around the Caribbean, carefree and tanned, and my friends graduated.  And my friends got married.  And my friends had children.  And my mother missed me the whole time.

It wasn't romantic, what I did.  Nor daring, nor brave, nor particularly interesting at its core.  It wasn´t about being a wild girl who needed to chase the wind, and it wasn´t about some Eat Pray Love journey to self discovery.  It was selfish, and reckless, and cruel.  With no regard for the hearts I left behind, it was abandonment.

I needed to leave.  That became obvious the second I realized I could.  But the callousness with which I left has plagued me in the decade since, skewing my perception of home, hitting a reset button on many of the people and places that had been sacred.

The first time I ever checked to see if the grass was greener, it was.  I´m not sure you can ever recover from that.  Instead, you wonder and wander, only recognizing anything that felt like home after you´ve left it, constantly imagining that it might be better somewhere else.

Being on the Narnia side of the wardrobe has served me well for the most part.  I stretched my arms to fit the whole wide world inside, and they were almost big enough.  I have found wanderlust to be a dressed up way to assume that the best part of that wide world is the part you have not yet seen.

And I´m not sure that´s true.

Conditional Truths

     This will be a very brief love affair, I know.  It's quite strange to know that.  To live in a place- to call a house a home at the end of a long day, to accept that the sun sets in Princeville and that avocados are more expensive at the farmers' markets because the vendors buy them at CostCo, and that the swell belongs to the North in wintertime- these are truths of my life.  But only my current life.  Only right now.  Geographically conditional truths.

      I am at a beach today.  Anahola, a place of locals, which I will never be.  The sand gives easily under my feet, and the sun and clouds are holding hands to create that perfect, pot of island gold beach day.  The ocean does not need to roar here, and so it whispers, softening driftwood and coastline, making question marks out of edges.  I am mostly alone.  In my periphery I can see a few tanned, black-haired boys with spear guns slung over their shoulders, an octopus who melted into the saltwater an hour ago hanging limp from a holster.
 
     The sand crabs are my favorite companions.  I watch them, and they me, each half carefully respectful of the other's space and quiet and reverence for the Pacific.  We say hello and politely move on when we find ourselves too close to one another.  I like the way their clean their homes, climbing to the surface handful by handful, a careful assessment followed by a spray of sand.  They leave the soft beach pocked with two-dimensional archways; grand entrances to hard-fought abodes. Sand crabs have no reason to run from the ocean.  They understand it.  I have seen them predict to the quarter of an inch where the surf will draw its line and sit calmly at the end of their world, winning their games of chicken.  I wonder if they sleep well in their tiny homes.  If they notice the constant, guttural groans of the sea in their ears.
   
     This is a truly beautiful place.  A siren island, entirely aware of its own appeal and peril.  Green mountains thrust out of the ocean like spires of a church where the structure is the deity.  You are meant to worship what you sit inside.  It stands tall, and alone.  The oldest of its brothers and sisters, Kauai does not need us.
 
    When you are here, you sit in the very center of the earth.  Everything else is a satellite- less blue, less green, less fierce, less gentle, less kind, less cruel, and so much smaller.

It is a little known fact that most of the Earth's gravity is generated by a 550 square mile island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  (The rest is generated by my grandmother, whom we can all thank for Denver's population boom.)
 
      I have yet to see a Kauai spring, but I imagine an atmospheric rush of warm-color flowers and sweet mangoes and seafoam spray from the whales as they say their yearly goodbyes.  Spring in a place without winter has to try harder, be louder.  Without the swell of torch gingers, or the purple orchids, would we take notice?   The desperation of Christmas lights in a tropical place is easy to spot.  We feel it like we feel how far away everything is.  But spring?

     We are not quite friends yet, this island and I.  It seems to [correctly] suspect that my allegiance lies elsewhere, and is unwilling to pester for new congregants.  As much as that is the case, our fondness for each other grows every day. I am clearly the more difficult half to love in this scenario, Hawaiian islands being paradise and all, and so I do what I can to earn my keep and stay in its good graces.  And while I may not pray to its spires, I can certainly understand those who do.

     I will be sad when I leave here.  Devastated, I would think.  I will mourn the sunsets, their shades of pink folding into more shades of blue than there are words for colors.  I will miss Kapaa Town. This strange, tiny place.  This slow-moving mobius strip of palm trees and blue sky, and shops custom-made to mirror the aloha shirts that wander in and out, shave ice in hand.
     I will close my eyes occasionally and wish that I was back here under the thick canopy, listening to birds sing to each other about how the sun springs from the sea in the mornings and sets the clouds aflame.
 
     There is so very much to love, and so little time to love it the way it deserves.  Inevitably, our exit from this pretty, green place will rush on us like a riptide, will grab us without apology and without permission, will happen so quickly that we might forget to breathe deep the eucalyptus that one.last.time.

   The best any of us can hope for the ability to look straight ahead, even with the blinders off.  To decide to be where we are.  To love everything there is to love with ferocity and intention. To notice.

   For me, I will live happily inside my geographically conditional truths for a few years.  I have time to get sticky with mango juice in the springtime, and sing with the birdsong choir in a place of worship that is not my own, but madly beautiful just the same.  And when it is time, I will have a squeeze of lime over velvet papaya, wake up with the curtsy of a sunrise, and find my way back to my grandmother.

The Feeling of Feeling

     I could have driven home with the windows closed last night.  The sky was lavender and the air was brisk and sharp with the teeth of a December Pacific.  It was windy.  One hand rested on the steering wheel.  The other seemed unable to stay still, instead caught in a cycle of surfing the breeze outside the window and pushing unruly hair back behind my left ear.  My toes had adopted a layer of sand as their own.  I could have let them stay dry.  I could have packed my beach day things and driven away, skipping the barefoot run back to the shoreline, alone, watching the Hawaii clouds blush as they shed their daytime sun.
     At some strange point in my beloved busy-bee city life, I stopped splashing in rain puddles, opting to watch from a window until the weather passed.  Safe and dry. Grumbling with the rest of them about the inconvenience of a cool spring shower.  Worried about my shoes.

     I am not sure that we are aware of losing ourselves as it happens.  I suppose we call it "Growing Up."
    You let go of island loves.  You trade the treehouse for an expensive vintage apartment downtown (It's quirky!  I'll buy a yellow couch! I'm still whimsical!). You start painting your nails all one color and you begin to care what people think of you.  You stop writing.
   
     But mostly, I think, you decide that it is less important to feel.  Or I did.  When I say feel, I mean touch.  Taste.  Smell.  Feel.  With your heart, sure.  But also with everything else. As we leave whimsy behind, we tend to neglect our senses.  We neglect our human need to have some understanding of the piece of Earth we wake up with every morning.

     I could tell you what Denver smells like right before snowfall.  I could point to which stars you should follow to Vail in September, and then in May, and which to follow home.  I could walk you to the most fragrant roses on Ogden Street (they're at 10th, across from The Kensington Apartments).  I could show you the most picturesque block of 16th St at Christmastime, and where to get roasted poblanos, with their desert smoke which fuses with the air the sting your eyes and fill your breath with earth and pepper.  And I know where to find the softest grass at Cheesman Park because ever so occasionally, I would kick off my shoes and remember to be a part of the world around me.  I would remember how important that is.

     When you lose bits of yourself, the collect like charms on a shining bracelet.  They clink together, and you can see them, each one, glinting in the light every time you give them movement.  They tend to be confused for memories and they cant hurt to look at, like the slow ache of old pictures.

  But they live and they wait, hoping to some day catch the light.  Hoping that you will move back to an island.  Hoping that you will play in the rain. Hoping that you will run barefoot through fallen palm fronds and stop to inhale the ribbons of jasmine and stare at the marshmallow sunset.
     Hoping that you will drive under the lavender sky, push wild-wind hair behind your left ear, sing too loudly with Billy Bragg about California stars and welcome back the feeling of feeling.

This is Hard

I want you to know something.  I want you to know something, and I want to be the one to say it to you and probably to myself.  I want to say something.

This, friends, is hard.  This instagram life, ripe with mangoes and the tan lines I have spent so many years chasing, with its crash-wave soundtrack and sea foam lightness and the grip a green coastline has on your eyes, this is hard.

Except for a single handsome gentleman, gray in the hair and occasionally long in the face at the discovery that perfection is not made with handles for holding, even when framed in palm trees and scented like plumeria, I am a literal ocean away from every person I have ever loved.  I am a literal ocean away from every person I have even just barely liked.  After living in a beautiful spiderweb of acquaintances and friends and family and even those who defy labels, I am spending my days sanding away the city shine so I do not stand out as a stranger in a web that is not my own.   I was granted a fresh start in a beautiful place, which is a thing I did not ask for.  It's a thing I have asked for before, and so I know its colors and I know its curves.  I know how to navigate wishes granted, but I find myself in a world of left turns now, unable to distinguish the edges from the center.

So this is hard.

I line the walls with happy using seawater paste.  I am grateful for the wide-eyed geckos who keep me company in moments that I wait for him, my only human, to get home from a job more difficult than either of us was prepared for because when you sell paradise to people who wait their entire lives for it, there are no second chances and there is no room for mistakes.  I worship birdsong in the mornings, an altar familiar to me.  I touch leaves and smell petals and work to love this place as a place that will certainly end up becoming part of me, a task easier for most than it has been for me so far.  I inhale ginger lily wind and thank the island for reminding me of the things in life I hold sacred.

But I am alone in this.
   
Apartment lights twinkle like stars on the hillside, but they do not know me and I am not yet welcome.

So this is hard.

I am learning two new people.  I am learning him, and the way he leaves his shoes in front of the door and the way he loads the dishwasher and the way he breathes in and then out when he sees open arms after a difficult day.  I am learning myself.  The way I resent giving up my yellow couch for two black ones and the way I miss the selfishness of a life lived alone, and the way I need him to melt into when the sky falls down.

We are learning all of those things you think you already know about a person.  We are doing it without training wheels in a life we are careful to project as enviable in a place is that is supposed to be perfect.

So this is hard.

I am sitting on a beach now.  The waves are using their inside voices, and I am barely out of the reach of a palm frond shadow, playing its fingers to play with the breeze.  I took a picture of this, which I will not need to edit.  I will use my seawater paste and buff it to a shine with gentle white sand.  Tonight, I will make dinner with him.  A kind man.  Patient and sweet, with edges just rough enough to hold onto.  A man I am still desperately in love with, who leaves his shoes in front of the door.  I will wish that we could meet friends for a drink and be a little sad and watch a Hawaiian sunset to numb the pain.  I will feel ridiculous for being in any sort of pain at all.

I will live this mystery island until I understand it, and I will go to work selling paradise as if it is made of magic.

And it is magic.  But it's also real life.  And this is hard.

Morning Number One

Back in a place with morning rain.  I am looking at a rainbow, and at hibiscus petals leaden and sulking with the wet dawn.

Tropical mornings.  I remember this.  I worshipped this more than any God I have ever been introduced to.
 
   Strange how the city falls off your shoulders.  No room for it with all the new freckles, and it gives up quickly in the light of who it knows you to really be.  All of the things I have been gripping onto are all of the things I do not actually need.

We convince ourselves of so much.  That we need our noise-cancelling headphones.  That our heartbeats don't count if they're not racing.  We buy blackout curtains so the city doesn't get to tell us when to wake up.  All at once reveling in overstimulation, and desperately trying to escape it.

And yet here I sit, awake with the Pacific sun, with my noise-cancelling headphones hung carelessly around my neck.

Happily Moving Backwards

These thoughts are unfinished, and I am going to leave them unfinished as that is how they came to me and also how they left.  A progression in paragraphs, spanning the mind splatter of the last two months.

-Sometime in May:
So, I'm looking around my apartment.  I have lived alone in this tiny piece of the city for three years now.  Ok, that's untrue.  It has not been three years uninterrupted, and I can see the cats side-eye me, insulted, and so I have not lived alone for three years, but I will run this sentence ragged and say that I have lived here alone for three years.
     I love these walls.  I have studied them.  I have asked them about their cracks and I have shown them mine and we have laughed together at the impermanence of it all.  Walls like this- the walls which have held me together in moments when I have not been sure that my skin could do it alone-walls like this are friends.
     The walls are wearing their boxing gloves, and the tattered, bargain gift box which holds my future it wearing its own.  This is over now.  How are we ever ready?

Some Other Time in May:
 Oh, I feel those words with claws out.  The page is scratched with wine fingers, the words cut into shanks as if the life I'm living is a prison from which I'm not sure I even want to escape.  Stockholm Syndrome, I suppose.
    When I wrote that, as I so sharply pointed out, I was alone in my tiny apartment.  My tiny, pretty, messy apartment.  My first, actually.  These three years have been my first three alone.  In relationships and rather cruelly back out of them, sure, but alone.  Getting to know who I am inside the world most people live in, and most of the time totally unconvinced of the merit of it all.  And when I cried at the loss of my tree frogs, this apartment tried to soothe me with the night sounds of a city.  When I grappled with buying a hammock stand instead of a couch, this apartment cradled my question marks as the furniture was delivered and I was lurched into a life that could not be packed into flat rate boxes.  This apartment has forgiven me for every time I have added my own cracks to the walls.

I do not know how to write about this.  I have been sitting on my bed for 5 hours doing everything but writing about this because I do not know how to write about this.  This life that I have built is over.  This life right now, with the scarred walls of my heartbeat apartment and my creaky hardwood floors, loud with the heaviness of 87 years of footsteps and the dishes piled in the sink because my cats do not require me to answer for them.  This is over.  And when I walk out of this door for the last time, I will cut out a piece of my heart and pull up a floorboard to place it in and I will thank these walls for keeping it safe in years past and in years coming.  If I could fold this room up and put it in my pocket, then I would take it with me wherever I went.  I would open it in private moments and let it stretch its arms.  And then I would take each tile and gingerly put it back into my pocket and grin as I hear them clink together, because they are my home and I am theirs.


Sometime in June:

Go, girl.  You can stop now.  You decided to be a city soul in a concrete life and it never really worked, did it?  You found happiness here, but it was hollow and it has worn through like the soles of your busy shoes, and this life will make shadows of people who were solid once.

Sometime later in June:

The lilacs are helping, but lilacs are captive and I need something wild like a mangrove or a blackberry bramble.  I appreciate lilacs.  I do not identify with lilacs.

I feel like I need to escape my own skin.  It is covered in city soot and I am just not sure that city water can get rid of it.  This has not been a dark tunnel, so I am not looking for a light at the end.  But I suppose that I am looking for the end just the same.


Annnnd even later in June:
     I walked through this life happy and proud, eyes squinting in the sun.  I wanted to learn it.  I wanted, after years of sweet lulling, to run hard on painted ground.  To live under neon.  To leave the slow stars behind me and climb to the top of a steel ladder so I could breathe at a faster pace.  I wanted to live with intention.  With ferocity.  I wanted to know that I could be more than a sand-comber, solemn with dreams of everything else the earth had to offer.  So much more than these beaches.  These tired beaches with their whisper tides and ghost crabs and bad-posture palm trees.
   Paradise, yes.
  But so.  Very. Slow.
And I did it.  I ran hard and I ran fast and I scraped off the mermaid scales and lost my voice so I could walk.


It seems that I have not quite finished with June:

The Gods of ocean and hills are jealous siblings, getting possessive when you spend more time speaking with only one.  The mountain God, she is gentle.  She soothes with birdsong and birch trees and low-growing flowers which breathe scent into the air like dandelion fluff.  She is subtle and she whispers into your ear, "Stay.  Stay here with me.  The birds will wake you in the morning for tea and the columbine wind will sing you to sleep."
     She is drowned by her brother.  Who can ignore the pull of the sea?  He shouts and he causes a scene and he plays no games.  "I am here," he says, "I am here and you know I am here and I need you more."
So it is.

I would like to refuse, as a creature of the earth, to live in any place where one can sleep in and not miss a thing.  How pitiful the sun is in a cityscape.  A lion in a cage.  What injustice.
     We should love feeling small and unworthy.  We should open our eyes and marvel at the stars that would be here even if we were not.  Men did not do this.  This green expanse..  These aspen trees with leaves like tambourine bells.  These creatures playing tag in the air.  All of this is better than we are, and more.  We are meant to be a part of it.  And to marvel.
   And I love to wake up this way, at 5am when birds chirp more urgently than the alarm on my smartphone, feeling like we all waste the sun when it is held captive by gray buildings.
     I think we all ache to wake up like this.  We come to these places to escape.  To vacation.  To get away.  And though I have managed  to stifle it, I hold true and sacred that we should not live a life we feel we need to escape from.
        It has been years since I said that.  Hello, old friend.
     I don't mean to sound snobbish.  Maybe for some, the siren song of the morning is an actual siren. Maybe for some, God is in the city and he inhales and exhales with the traffic lights and the sun is not in a cage, but uses skyscraper mirrors to shine so you can see it even if you are standing in a shadow.
Maybe.
But I've been hanging out with the city sun for a while now, and even the whisper of the mountains speaks to me more loudly.



There it is.  The brain scatter of a life changed quickly from one thing to another, and then back.  Hopefully spending some quality time in an island hammock will help to seal thoughts.




*This is a long post.  It is not particularly cohesive.  The writing is not sensible.  It meanders.  I haven't had one story to tell lately, so I have been trying to grind them all together.  Apologies.*

Words About No Words

I haven't been writing lately.  And I blame time, or lack thereof.  I blame this city, with apartments lit up like pretend stars and the quick-move pace of a life where I can't quite catch my breath.  I blame work.  The career that I am still inside of, and how I feel like the room I thought was a trap had a treadmill installed so I will feel like I'm moving.  If only I had windows so  I could tell the difference....
     I also blame something a little more concerning.  Sandwiched by excuses of the Earth simply revolving too quickly is this small itch that my nails are too manicured to scratch.

"I have nothing to say."

       i have nothing to say.

     About a week ago, I read a quote about writing.  Forgive me for not being able to recite this exactly, and I don't remember who wrote it, but it is something like this: "All writers are desperate.  When you stop being desperate, you stop being a writer."
     So what does that mean, then, when the ache in my fingers, born of heart-pressure pumping, seems to have subsided?  Am I not desperate enough to place pretty words all in a row?  Am I not sad enough?  Do I not pine enough, as the salt water has finally evaporated and allowed me to breathe?  Am I not writhing around enough, looking for a way to escape my own skin?



Do I need to be?

   What was I so desperate for before this?  The answer is a cloud, I suppose.  Floating high and just as solid.  And to say that the answer is something, that the answer is anything at all, means maybe I have dulled my senses and rounded my corners and have stopped needing pretty words.  That I have calmed the heart-pressure.  That I decided somewhere along the way not to be among the desperate.

Desperation, all of its negative connotations intact, is the inability to escape feeling. It is the total envelopment of a person into his or her own heart without permission.  And so desperation is the ache of captivity. Sometimes, it is the ache of a love swell, sweet and bursting.  Sometimes, desperation is the state of being so infatuated with this round world that shadows are just the light of negative film strips.  This breed splits seams with words jumping at the chance to live on paper.
    And sometimes, desperation is a sadness unable to hold itself together, so it gathers at the downturned corners of blue eyes and runs away, quickly, and without apology, falling into poems and creating crystals of prose.
    Or, scariest of all, it is the boulder weight of absolutely nothing.  It is the scarcity of pressure.  It is the need for a need to escape, or a want for sadness making its getaway,  The absence of feeling is as desperate as the most shattered of irreparable broken hearts.
    And that is the one which renders ink useless and forces hungry pages to stay starved.  A tree rowing into knots, getting in the way of its own sun.

  And I guess I will resign, for now, to that totally uninteresting state of being entirely unable to feed hungry pages.

And attempt to write about why I cannot seem to write.

for longer thoughts

The end of summer just comes, doesn't it?  Fall remembers being well-liked, so it doesn't bother to knock.  It dims the lights on the evenings that have been running marathons into the night.  Those sunny afternoons which only give way as they hand-deliver illumination to the stars. And the stars, they're not ready for summer to end.  So they hold on to that light in a tug of war until the late fall morning uses its considerable muscle to grant the sun its purpose, albeit later, because we all know how stubborn star strength can be.

     The end of summer is a battle between freckle-salted shoulders and red-apple cheeks, slightly stung by air they didn't realize would turn cold so quickly. 

  I'm not sure why a person would worship any deity other than the Earth.  Who knows us better than she does?  What God in whose sky knows that we need the slow wind to blow a little into our lungs after a busy bee season?  After a few months of too much movement?  The birds fly lower to the ground this time of year.  The pressure to soar slows, and the air curves into a downward slope.  Lazy saxophone dusk.  Meditating trees.  The last roses with their their desperate fingers splayed, grasping for the fading warmth.  They're not ready, either. 

  Oh, but the lovely pensiveness of fall!  What better a time is there to examine your own changes than those few months a year when the leaves understand you?  Summer is not a time for thought.  Since school, we have trained ourselves to keep our summers as hands-free as a beach cruiser ride on the Cape.  Summer is made of lemon zest.  Summer is made of mica flecks.  Summer is thin, and summer shimmers, 

  

  But the delicious fall demands depth, and care.  Fall does not have time to watch us shimmer.  Fall wants us to glow.  If you pay attention, you can feel it brush the salt hair out of your face so that you can see.  

  And I'm giving in.  It's time to turn in the cut-grass perfume and remember bath bubbles and long thoughts.  It's time to catch my breath and fly closer to the Earth with the September birds.  

  Thank you, summer, for freeing my skin and for wide-sky mornings and for thinning it all out.  But I suppose you can go now.  

Definitions of Ambition

  So, let's talk about ambition.  Just for fun.  Just for something new.  Just to breathe words into an idea which has never held much of my own air.

Ambition.

I don't talk much about my career on this little keyhole.  I talk about the past.  I talk about the gorgeous uncertainty of the future, sometimes I talk about love, and mostly I talk about beauty or the quest for beauty and the soul-fill of finding beauty where I have felt it lost.  This blog, being a fairly decent reflection of what I find to be my ultimate goal in this wrinkling life, is about beauty.

   And ambition is not often beautiful, is it?  Career goals are not sheathed in flower petals.  They are not soft.  Their edges are harsh, and their veins pump fast, and they do not care about the hammock you used to dream in when life had a very different focus.

Ambition.

I have had an interesting summer.  While I won't go into the nooks and crannies of it here, I have had a summer which has thrown like a fastball the word "ambition" dead at my face.  And this girl, usually so adept at dodging career questions, has been unable to duck.

"Where do you see yourself in five years?"  What an easy question.  It is one you sell yourself with in job interviews, and it's really just pretend, anyway, isn't it?  Where do I see myself in five years?  If you have asked me five years ago when my housing was not a house and my job was barely a job and that hammock was the goal of every long, sticky Caribbean day, I am more than certain that I would not have told you that in five years, I would be living a life bright with street lights and busy like a bee hive and falling heavy with the leaden question of, "ambition."

So the five year question doesn't count, isn't real, fades into city air like man hole steam venting from the exhausted underbelly of lives lived on the fast track.

But I have been asked very recently quite a different question.  I work for a movement company.  One that invests in its people, and one that wants from you what it will show you you are capable of.  It is an exciting place to be.  Truly, it is an enviable place to be.  And for me, and for those like me who show their faces slowly like flower-topped munchkins from Oz, it is a terrifying place to be.

  I was speaking with someone who means a great deal to me about this idea.  Ambition.  And he said, "James I don't care if you do not have goals, as long as you are happy."

As long as I'm happy.

But wait a minute.  Hold your quick-kiss tongue and wait a minute because don't you get it? (Side note here-- he does.)  Doesn't anyone get it?  Happiness is the goal.  That's the whole thing.  So what he said doesn't make sense.  It can't make sense.  Because the words he said move backwards, and happiness is not a backwards motion.

It is as bad a habit as nail-biting and white-lie-telling to live only inside one's own understanding of things.  And just as hard to break.  I am guilty of this, to be sure, and walk a constant trek to remedy it.

The whole stark-white truth of it all is that I spent my twenties enveloped in and, indeed, enveloping a life very much outside the normal progression of those absurd years that inhale between 20 and 30.  Ambition was a four letter word.  Ambition was spoken about in whispers and condescension as a neanderlithic concept, abandoned in past lives as futile.  Ambition?  Our ambition is to forget about that world and use our business cards as coasters and bike spoke adornments.  But thank you for asking.

The goal is just to be there.  To be grateful for every moment for exactly whatever the hell it is.  To know that sixty passing seconds are sixty chances to thank the universe for putting clouds in the sky and for the softness of sea glass and for red lipstick with a little black dress.

Everything is perfect.  All of the time.

All the sages of the Caribbean, dressed in sun skin and smelling of salt water have reached the simple nirvana of gratitude.  And THAT is ambition.

Explaining that to a movement population in a movement workplace in a movement city may well be a task I do not have the ability to conquer, and that's ok.  Who am I to judge someone for growing in a straight line, when that is the color of so many aspirations?  And who am I to feel like I need to defend myself for walking in the curves?



And I guess that if you were to ask me where I see myself in five years, this post would be your answer.