We Are This Place
Warm winds blow down the coast. The sun burns brightly giving her all before winter arrives at our doorstep. I am drawn outside. I throw open the back door beckoning the warmth inside. The sky is a bright blue, with the Cessna 172 plane engine roaring as it flies north. The sparrows chatter with each other above my head, sitting in the highest branches. Bam! Smacks the ball from the pickleball court across the creek. Little voices live urgently and innocently at the playground behind our fence. The bees hasten to fill up on the nectar of lilac shrubs.
I sit and think about the year behind me and the year ahead of me. My time feels more urgent to me. I have so many things I want to get out. I want an IV to drip from my heart to this page. So much is required of me, yet I feel this growing resistance within. Little tugs to sit down and write, although to who and for what? I wonder if someday my boys will read my words and better understand my inner world. They will have some sort of artifact from me that meant something, at least to me. They will realize that these words were written in the midst of their own imaginations transporting them in play. I wonder how my own motherhood is just like my mother’s, grandmother’s, and aunt’s before me or if they would even remember being so far removed from the beginnings.
For now, it seems enough that the same breeze caresses my childrens’ cheeks. We sit underneath the olive tree that blankets us in its shade. That shared experience is what we have.
Pema Chodron writes, “this very moment is the perfect teacher, and it’s always with us…Just seeing what’s going on- that’s the teaching right there. We can be with what’s happening and not dissociate. Awareness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.” Chodron challenges us to be in this moment, only as it is, not as we may wish it to be. This explanation anchors me in my tangled thoughts, requiring stillness to hear it all, meanwhile, busyness and tasks try to relentlessly distract me. I sit in my white lawn chair and pause. My body sinks down into the chair. I look at the edge of the porch where we blew out the candle on my son’s first birthday. I see the shaded corner where my Labrador used to take long afternoon naps. I see the rope swing my builder lobbed around a thirty-foot branch to launch our kids into the clouds. I see the wild and untended vegetable garden, independent and free. To write about it is to say yes to all of it: the gopher’s tunnels, the salty ocean breeze, the sticky spider web stretched across the door frame. This place is us and we are this place, there is no perimeter where one ends and the other begins.
Natalie Goldberg writes, “It is very hard to continue just on your own. I tell my students in a group to get to know each other, to share their work with other people. Don’t let it just pile up in notebooks. Let it out. Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. We suffer anyway as human beings. Don’t make it any harder on yourself.” Let it out. Ooooof. We’re together. We all share in this experience and there is room for every single one of us. Be together. The universe knows the way, the sun will rise and set tomorrow. Same as it always does.
Reading List
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones
Chodron, Pema. When Things Fall Apart