All These Piles!
on the move
My life is back to farms and it is so good. I don’t like leases I don’t like suburbia I wasn’t made to stay in one place for too long. I’ve been bouncing this past year. And when you’re bouncing and also missing people, it’s hard to feeling like anything you’re doing is “right”.
I’ve been stuck in a place and ironically enough that place is my head. I haven’t been able to get out of it. This is what it’s like: what are you doing here?, how do you go through so much peanut butter?, when is the Big One going to happen?, how safe am I at any moment if the Big One happens now?, how far away am I from the ocean? blah blah blah blah
It’s like a kid is stuck inside of me and I, the “big grown up adult”, am trying to child rear it into being responsible. I control “it” and everything around “it” until ultimately it blows up into a bunch of pieces and I don’t have arms strong enough to pick it all up.
The work is realizing that “it” is not separate from I. It is I who is that child and it is I who chaotically tries to frantically clean up the messes I leave behind. Here’s my idea, my new hope. Leaving the mess. Working on one thing at a time. Not worrying about the other messes while I am already have my arms full.
A few months ago I started writing a character. I love this character and they tend to follow me around throughout the day. (Childhood dream come true.) The thing I realized is that the character (and hint: myself) leaves heaps of piles wherever he goes. It’s the way the energy of human connected to earth—even loosely, just the mere footsteps at a dreadful mall—has been built. You go somewhere, and you take a little bit of who you are with you, but you can’t take everything the next time you get up and go. That pile is there. The friendship you began, the apple core you tossed into the field, the cat hair that got caught in the wind because of a few seconds when you stopped and some lovely creature stopped right there too. The magic of two dotted lines crossing billions of acres and inches and depth and height just to somehow nuzzle against each other someday and somewhere.
My central Oregon pile is getting pretty big. I won’t be able to take it all with me when I leave. Not the sweaters and books I decided to part with, certainly not Kudzu the guard dog, not the jar of honey. I guess this makes it all happy and all sad. There are so many more piles. Ones that haven’t been started yet and ones that are sitting and waiting. That is the energy of a place. The piles that strangers—dotted lines coming and going—have left behind.
