While the Sheets are Drying on the Line

I have finally stopped being completely dumbfounded by the weather. Apparently, it is just 70-degrees and sunny on the central coast of California in January. It’s just what is. I might marvel at the weather like any homegrown Midwesterner should, but there is no sense to be kept captive by its being surreal.

No matter how lovely or how warm, it is still winter. I can tell by the way my soul feels when I try to fall asleep at night. I can tell by the location of the sun in the morning and the way the light has more of a haze at dawn. The way the full moon is bright in the thin, cool night air.

Today I woke with ideas of becoming a bike mechanic. I looked up bike mechanic school and jotted down the information in the Great Idea Book of Career Ambitions. Then I sat on my heels and wondered at the day. What should I do first? What should I do next? What do I want to end the day having done?

I feel myself be born, live, and die each day, with waking and sleeping, with the light and the sun, and the darkness of night. I do have a memory, but in being here, it seems shorter than ever before. Some days are filled with questions and uncertainties and homesickness -- where I am running forward after my juggling balls, not wanting them to drop, and wanting so badly to give them a place to land. Most days though, are just full of this being born, this living, and dying. Waking with no memory, into whatever it is that will make this day the experience, the life, the god that it is.

Monday was an anxious sort of day, the kind where I chase the juggling balls and am heavy with missing and question. I wandered through the morning, unable to let myself engage anything with a semblance of satisfaction. Frustrated, I got in my car and drove up the coast for no physical reason. There were no provisions I was in need of in town, no errand to run. As I drove on the marvel of highway that spans this coastline, curving down to the base of canyons and back up the other side, the vast Pacific on my left, it appeared that I left Big Sur just so I could re-enter it. As if it was a lover that I wanted to meet again, fresh and new. Asking, will you take me like the first time? Will you melt my soul and every piece of the past like that first time I drove into you well over a year ago?

Once in town, I bought a tube of red paint from the art store and found my way to a decent cup of coffee. I walked around, as if stunned by a life of too many possibilities. I held the paper cup in my hand.

On my return trip, I stopped at the Garrapata pull-out, looking ahead at the coming hills, curves, and rocky coastline that is Big Sur. Fog was being blown in by fierce wind coming across the sea, creating clouds that swirled up as the air met the warmth of the hills. I sat. I stared at the wind-blown waves, hopelessly blue. I cried for the ways I cannot escape time – afraid of what time can do and also what it cannot. I watched the wintered green and grayish-gold hillsides, with steep grades and grazing cattle. I felt myself as a great unfinisher, an unaccomplished monster who is terrified of growing older and never finding something I can devote myself to.

I am a series of fireworks that burn out before they finish falling from the sky.

But if I am honest, and scientific, that is the nature of fireworks – to explode, fill the sky with color, and disappear before they touch the ground. Maybe too, this is just my nature.

I tried to explain this feeling to Andy, late that night, over the phone. It had been weeks since we had last spoken. I was lying in bed, unable to sleep, and I sent him a message that said, “Do you have the time to tell me that I’ve made good choices and I’m right where I should be?”

He called me minutes later. He was laughing – which is something I have learned to love about him, because being frustrated with it takes too much energy. I began to peel back the layers of this feeling, this wondering at this time in my life. “It is hard to stay in a place that I do not know what it is for. Why does it seem like I am farther from having my shit together than when I was 21?”

He laughed again and replied, “Well, that’s certainly not true. And maybe this time is just so you could get homesick.”

It is sunny, warm, and clear in mid-January. I am sleeping with my windows open, in underwear and a t-shirt, under a bright full moon, on the cliffs of the sea. I do not even need a flashlight to go to the bath house. Is it even possible to be homesick for rain and gray? For a soggy, cold life? Of course it is, though I have to twist my own arm to believe it.

As our conversation continued, I spoke more clearly with each layer of bull shit that came off the top. He said something to me that I cannot remember the precise words, but I will tell you what I recall:

I have talked with people recently about spiritual life, and it has reminded me of the term spiritual materialism – an idea of spirituality that is not-grounded in experience, but rather in books or language. It is full of generated experiences, but not true experiences.

You are not this way.

Every day is your spiritual activity – and every activity is a true experience in your world. You do not need an explanation in a book, or an adopted philosophy of God or the world, or time. Every experience is of a spiritual quality.

I sat, holding the phone to my ear, fourteen hours South, biting my lip and crying – because it is good to be seen, and to be overcome with the kind of sorrow and passion one feels when you had forgotten what it is to really miss someone.

We sat in silence. Maybe I thought that if I let it sink in, that I could believe him – that I could believe that about myself – that I could stop long enough to believe that this daily activity of being born, and living, and dying, is all there really is. I do not remember who spoke first, but eventually I spoke from the bottom layer, the core of the big fleshy peach that is all I know of the world, saying, “Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like if I could just let it all go – all these ideas of accomplishment or this need to finish. I wonder what it would feel like to just let myself devour the world, like I am so inclined to do, and to not feel like I have to make it into anything else.”

I want to go to bed full and let myself die, each night, as the sun sets low into the sea.

Maybe life is just about what it is – I mean, what it actually is. All the tastes and colors and sensations that make up a day.

The sheets are drying on the line, and I am calm. The moon has been bright in the winter sky -- a moon I have missed in such brightness and clarity for too many years now. Earlier this week, Heather and I were walking back from the beach after the sunset. As we curved up the hillside, finally high enough to see the full moon lifting into the sky, I said out loud how I have missed the winter moon for so long. Heather just put her arm in mine and we continued walking.