This move has nearly outdone me. If you want the opportunity to experience being thrown into a canyon, freefalling with no bottom in sight, move 1200 miles across the country, in your late sixties.
I had assumed that the hard part would be the move itself, packing and getting rid of things, selling a house, leaving stable, familiar places and people, the arduous physicality of the move. But the hard part came after we got here.
People say, ‘but you went back home, right? To your home state, where you grew up, where you have friends and family? To a familiar climate? A familiar culture?’ Yes and no.
Yes, there are beloved friends and family not too far away. And the climate is welcome and familiar. The scenery, the food, the atmosphere, all welcoming and loving. But in day to day existence, many of the things that gave me a sense of being grounded have either disappeared or feel difficult or impossible here.
Of course, it’s me. It’s the psychic challenge of starting everything over again without the familiar daily routine of place, smells, people, seasons. Without knowing where things are, how to find them, how to get there and then back home again. Even as there are many wonderful and familiar and nostalgic things here, there are equal numbers of them that are new and different and challenging.
With the onset of a quiet and lonely holiday season, I found myself flailing around clinging to whatever I could for stability. I started a new meditation app; revisited Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now; picked up books by St. Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart, medieval Christian mystics; read daily Christian and Buddhist messages; sought out Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way, and Mirabai Starr, a modern Jewish mystic; studied Maria Popova of the Marginalian making sure to follow all links lest I miss the perfect quote from Rilke or O’Donahue that would be the perfect answer to my angst; listened to podcasts, On Being with Krista Tippett and old radio talks of Alan Watts.
One morning in the middle of all this while trying to observe my consciousness, or separate from it, or have a vision of the Trinity, or feel the flow, I had a meltdown. All this and I still can’t figure it out! What is God? Who am I? What am I doing here? What matters and what doesn’t? I was driving myself crazy. Maybe it’s like being a hoarder, or addicted to social media, or to food or anything really. My brain was overloaded.
What I was searching for is here now, with me all the time, like the breath as some say, whatever it is, however you want to name it. It is not in all the books and philosophies and spiritual practices of others; it has to be mine. I thought of my mother, still teaching me from the beyond. I stopped reading and started doing things. I went into the sunny laundry room and ironed my pillowcases reveling in the smell of the hot iron, the hiss of the steam, the miracle of my hands and the warmth of the sun on my back. There is no reason for ironing pillowcases; they function just the same whether you iron them or not. As there is no reason for doing much of anything, except to do it. My cousin says that watching my mother move around our house taught her the joy of housework. It can be the joy of anything, or the pain of anything, it is simply the act of Being in the midst of all the other Being around us.
Alan Watts says each thing or creature has a game; I call it the Being game. There is the tree game, the ant game (fire ants here), the rock game, the Sharon game. I might choose a word other than game, maybe the Tree show or the Tree dance. Dance is good, it suggests something playful.
Mary Oliver also puts it well and I’ll end with this quote from her famous Wild Geese poem:
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves…Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
The camelias also help. The yard is filled with them, overflowing bushes of color and texture. An amazing December surprise.