Andy and I have been close friends for a few years now. We have seen each other at our best and our worst; and at times, he is more intimate with my short-comings than I would wish. At the end of October, I was back in Portland for a workshop that Andy was also a participant. We stayed up late one night in my summer camp-type room talking about what had been bubbling up for us in the last two months of not seeing each other.
In these two months, I had spent September riding my bike from Astoria, Oregon to San Francisco, California with a dear friend, and October beginning this next chapter on the ranch in Big Sur. It was a lot of movement, a lot of flashes of newness, a lot of sunshine. That night I spoke with Andy about how I missed my life in Portland more than I had anticipated. I told him how I had moments of missing my career, my work as a high school teacher, having a high-energy place to go to everyday. I missed my few family-like friends, with intensity. I felt grateful for my new sunshine-filled life in a heart-stopping-stunning place on the ocean, but I also felt lonely and found myself struggling with being dependent on others for things (in my adult life) I have always provided for myself. I felt caught between being deeply grateful and fighting my independent tendencies to take care of myself. However, I confessed to him that I am not in a position to say no to others’ kindness and offers of support. I winced, knowing that I was right where I wanted and needed to be.
I was in between tears and laughter in our conversation. Both erupting in that kind of surprised way, where they came out of nowhere and sideswiped me. I spoke of a few specific moments, instances of clarity, or of so much weight that it seemed I was left with few choices. At the end of our conversation he says to me, “Tonight, I have heard the three best things from you.”
“What are they?” I ask, hopeful that in his mirroring that I will feel my own experiences with a new perspective.
“That you don’t want to be alone. That sometimes you lie down on the ground wherever you are, and give up. That even though you are afraid, that you need people.”
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I am a month into being 29. I am five months into living a somewhat homeless life, from backpacking with teenagers in Northern California, to a Vermont lake cottage, to Portland, Oregon for packing the station wagon, to 850 miles of cycling the Pacific Coast, to this ranch in Big Sur where there is more sunlight on November 30th than I could have ever dreamed. I am slowly becoming less terrified of meeting my longings and staying put long enough to really feel them.
Life is all sunshine and rain it seems. Love and sorrow. In my life in Portland, I always thought of my deep love and deep sorrow as being situational – based on my surroundings and happenings. Here, in Big Sur, where all the busyness of career and urban life is absent, I am seeing that these are feelings that travel with me. They are not because of having a hard day at work. They are not because someone does or doesn’t love me. They just are. That is a new thing to meet, a new intersection of my soul that feels initially like a real crisis. If I can’t decide myself into or out of a situation to make things better, what on earth can I do? My greatest fear, and likely what will become my greatest comfort, is that I don’t control any of the switches, and all I can do is lie down and feel the hell out of it.
My sister, Shannon, said to me a few days ago, “I think that you meet so many moments by looking into the future of the thing, feeling like you have to make a decision about what will or won’t happen. It seems to me that this is your form of panic, a way to survive.”
I am afraid that she is correct. I have a lot of lying down and giving up to do. This is where it happened today.
Sometimes it happens in the middle of cow-pasture-grass-filled cliffsides. Sometimes it happens in a basement office. Sometimes it happens on a yoga mat or in the middle of a bike ride on the asphalt or in the dirt. Sometimes it happens in the back yard. Sometimes it happens walking down the sidewalk. Wherever it happens, I vow to go with it.
Shannon also said to me that same afternoon, how sometimes we have some sort of trauma that keeps us from desiring certain things, and once we finally open enough to desire them, it can still be a long road of getting comfortable with that desire before we are actually open to receiving the answer to it in our lives. Although I do not want to be alone, that is a newly articulated desire, one that will take my fiercely independent self awhile to reconcile. And there are several ways to not be alone. Sharing meals is a good place to start. Talking to the people around me about what I’m really feeling and experiencing is another one. Sharing the story with you is a new one I’m trying out. Of course, there is also the gift of loneliness that has its own purpose and countless things to teach us. I do not desire loneliness, but maybe it is the thing that has propelled me into this desire to not be alone. For that, through all that kicking and screaming, I am grateful.
Where did you lie down and give up today?
