Week 2: “Let it be when it might be beautiful”
I started walking again this week in a new place. I started teaching again this week in a new place. It still feels surreal and sometimes really hard: we’re solidly in the Mandatory 30-day Suck Period of any big change. And yet, as you’ll see, there were moments. Here are the highlights from three walks this week, along with a few songs that kept my feet going:
Walk 1
Today’s walk: about 3.5 miles. Hot. My body remembers how to do this humidity, how to sweat and be enveloped inside a heat bag, just held all over with hot breath. It actually felt good sometimes. And then the moments I found my way underneath a canopy of trees. I could finally take a breath. Laura’s wedding song came on:
Found a green swallow of a park, a hidden staircase so you can just fall inside that green shade. But as I climbed out of it, a realization hit me that Omaha has no true, wild spaces in the city. And a panic rose in me, a certainty that I can’t do this, that I can’t find what I need here. Something interfered — I’m honestly not sure what. The “Black Lives Matter” signs in the windows around me? More unexpected shade? People waving? Friendly music? I don’t know. There was just an easing. This makes me think of my therapist, Greg, who’s always talking about sticking with a hard feeling to see where it leads. In this instance, the breath came back.
The breath came back, and so did my ability to notice. I stopped to look and snap a picture of a house that had one set of windows completely covered by “Black Lives Matter” signs. The owners gave up their light to say something to all of us, which is, “This is light.”
Walk 2
My “walks” on this day comprised stepping out my door, three times. Once to say goodbye to Laura over a raw chocolate truffle cake, us crying into our masks in the hot sun, strange insects gnawing at my ankles. She flew back to Eugene the next morning.
And then to talk to Niece 1 and her friend who lives on our street. They came to visit me when teaching was done for the day. It was a little cleansing breath, a bit of okay, shooting the shit with two tweens. Niece 1 wore what I at first thought was a long, velvety cape but was actually a vibrant pink towel captured at her throat by a clothespin.
And then I walked down the street later to share strong, bright Oregon pinot gris with Brother and Sister-in-Law, at first sitting on their stoop while children on scooters circled like a small, benign, cheerful school of sharks you wouldn’t mind hanging with of an evening.
On my way back, after wine, I ran into Hilda the cat, who is far more diminutive than her name suggests, neatly divided into orange tabby and calico, small and chirpy and lonely, I think, and I thought, “me too, girl,” and we flirted with each other for a bit.
I walked home, which is still mostly where my stuff is rather than anything more. I know where home is, which is mobile, which is where Laura and Sallie and Bill and Sarah and Sarah and Logan and Willow and my walks are. I don’t know that this place can be that. But I’ll try. Try to keep taking steps, that is. All I can promise, for now.
Walk 3
Strange heat walk that felt bigger — felt like the biggest walk so far. I climbed what felt like dunes that surrounded and loped around the tangle of interstates just East of my neighborhood. Gusts of desert wind. I followed a ridge back down to the main roads. Each step sent an advanced guard of grasshoppers leaping forth, like a weird, living carpet unfurled. For a moment while I was climbing, before I saw the interstate, it looked like I could just keep walking on green for miles, like the landscape saw me there and, with a wink, arranged itself to suit me. Felt witchy and powerful. Felt unconcerned. Felt confident.
What emerged, even after I picked my way down from the hill tops, was this sense that any place can feel epic and expansive. That we carry the bigness with us. I walked up 30th street, past lanes of traffic, and it was still with me. The lines flowing out from my feet. For a moment, I felt it: that I am here, that I can still be her here, even missing Oregon and Laura and Sarah and Kate and everyone. Even though I feel lost and scared sometimes. Even though: I can feel all of it, and there’s still an “and yet.”
I don’t know exactly what to write about it, but I feel that I need to acknowledge that in addition to me adjusting to a new home and a new job, a lot of infuriating, frightening, and terrible things happened this week. This week the Republican Convention rolled out lie after lie to stoke fear. This week a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin shot Jacob Blake in the back in front of his kids. This week a white gunman killed two people and wounded a third — people who were protesting Blake’s shooting and trying to advocate for justice. This week coronavirus continued to take loved ones from us while our government continued to fail us in so many unending and exhausting ways. This week it was nearly 100 degrees every day in Omaha, NE.
I think the project of trying to be here as much as possible is intimately connected with the project of being part of what’s going on in the world. Fighting to show up so we can show up for each other. I’m not doing enough of the latter right now. One of my goals for this upcoming week is to actively reach out to learn how I can join in from here. It’s time.
Standout gratitudes and joys for the week
So much thanks for:
- Letters, postcards, and packages from friends all over the country. Seriously, thank you.
- Energy and health enough to do long walks in the heat
- My team of instructors, life coaches, and peer mentors for being honest with me and for being constant sources of support
- Garden bounty: apples, pears, basil, tomatoes
- Continuing to settle into my home with my three roommates (1 human, 1 dog, and 1 cat)
- Garden cocktails with an old, dear friend
Felt joy from:
- After saying goodbye to Laura, the utterly-inadequate-but-true realization: “There’s still cake.”
- Winston the cat eats when he sees me eating — we have breakfast together most mornings
- Taking an exercise break with Luna the dog — we run up and down the hall together
- Niece 2 sending me Marco Polo videos wearing the creepy eye mask I gave her and telling me, “Hello. I come from faaar faaar awaaaaaaay”
- The smell of sun-dried laundry bursting up at me — clean
- This song by John Forte, Talib Kweli, and Ben Taylor:
Until next week…
