I am hiding out in a make-shift coffee shop in my hometown in eastern Kansas. I am trying to collect the colors and tastes of these last several months – the way you can feel something different once there is conclusion. I have lead 50-some days of whitewater rafting, backpacking, sea kayaking, hiking, in five states and two regions. I have cared for teenagers and laughed so hard that I fell on the ground. I have smiled so big it hurts in the beginning creases of my eyes. I have made amazing new friends and stayed up late drinking cheap beer, spinning fire poi, and skinny dipping in ponds. I sang every song I know into the sweet morning, noon, and night air. I have slept in a bed only ten nights in the last three months. I finished a five-year course and created a performance with friends and colleagues that I will not soon forget; and I pray not to neglect them, through our new unpredictable distance. I went to New York City for the first time and watched the sunset from the Empire State Building in the arms of dear and distant friend. I failed at giving up coffee. I experienced the passing of my grandmother and celebrated her life with my mother and sister through late night beer-drinking talks on the back porch in summer Kansas heat. I was a witness to the birth of my best friend’s daughter. I am full of life, with skin full of sun. I am invigorated and ready for more, and simultaneously lost in a life of so many happenings. I am packed full of landscapes, from Blue Ridge Mountains to the Pacific Northwest Coast to the cityscape of New York City to the imgination of those golden Big Sur summer hillsides. My senses are buzzing, honed, and in moments of rest, a bit on the fritz.
The following vignettes are brief moments of quiet, just long enough to sort experiences, if not long enough to feel into their complexities.
Hometown Glory
My parents are both working. It is a Friday. My father is stressing about the weather, the need to pump water from the ground in order to continue digging. He carries the world on his strong and aging shoulders. The memory of my mother’s displeasure of his long hours from sun-up to sun-down rings eerily as he hears the same displeasure from his now-wife. I do not want to hear his bitching, but I deeply wish him happiness and rest.
I am like a celebrity at my mother’s work-place. I stand confident in her gleaming pride. I wish this lunch date was a weekly affair so she would miss me less. I wonder at the distance in the world, where families live so far from each other, where I have been on ten flights in the past three months, and am readying myself to drive some 800 more miles to another temporary home.
I have lost my appetite (though apparently not for fossil fuels). I feel thrown back into a life of air-conditioning, of being inside, of a cell phone always turned on. I am heavy with correspondence – reconnecting with people and things that make up my “real life” – an idea that is, of course, an illusion.
My step-father and I walked the dogs to the vet this morning. We waved at all the old men in button-up shirts on their way to or from a cup of coffee. After the visit with the vet, we sat on a bench outside the neighborhood grocery, drinking coffee with powdered creamer out of Styrofoam cups and having the same repeated cordial conversations with these elderly wavers in wranglers.
If anything, I have learned to embrace the moments where I find myself, secretly giving a turned-up smile, thinking that it will all pass too soon.
We're Gonna Make It Yet to the End of the Road 
"Ever since I was a little kid I didn't want to run away,
but it scared me half to death to think that I might have to stay...
had a hundred scarecrow certainties, built a wooden draw bridge for my brain...
but they all burn up, when I see your face against the window pane..."
- Don Chaffer, Waterdeep
This morning I awoke early, in a bed that is as much home as anywhere. As I lay there, eyes fuzzy from newly waking, peering at the little bits of early morning light through the basement windows covered in thin curtains, I am savoring moments of collapse. Most are moments of restfulness, and few of tightness...the kind of tight-chestedness before jumping from boulders high above a flowing river. The kind of feeling that doesn't necessarily get you anywhere except a stronger claim that you are human, a momentary consciousness of risk that makes the exhilaration of falling more meaningful by its consideration, as if jumping is truly throwing your life into some pool of possibility with an unknown outcome. I think to myself in my own moments of tight-chestedness, "Thank you for arriving."
I am living with an unpredictable feeling of home. It is a feeling that seemed to weasel its way back to life from some six-feet underground, however newly laid to rest. I found it with my hand in another’s, with my head on a man’s chest, his heart beating against my cheek. I did not fight it, even if I did not give my permission for home to reside in such a place as another’s chest. His eyes looked at me, deep and long, with love and fear, and the sort of clarity that is too unbelievable to be clear. I looked back at him, kissed his mouth, saying hello and goodbye in the same breath.
Now, I am watching the chain-link gate swing open in the breeze, to the tune of old mid-western trees rustling leaves above me. I am boulder-hopping, having surpassed tight-chestedness for the time being. The world is wide and I am headed east. As my feeling of home heads further west, it is clearer and clearer that I am calm in its possesion, whether it is possessing me or I am its keeper. It is no matter. It is coming and going, like affection and laughter, tears and summer itself. My brow is without worry and my heart is without trouble. It is the thick Midwestern air's turn to speak to me of home. Then, it will be something, somewhere, someone elses' turn.
It has been years of circling, spiraling out to the edges of old landscapes and new, and somehow my head on his chest is home with each point of return, with or without a welcome mat.
Here Comes the Comeback
Although Big Sur is all the way across the country, and several months of movement and travel exist between all those months of quiet...the coastal walks and long nights sleep in the coop continues to fuel my soul. Autumn is on the horizon, full of outdoor work in the Blue Ridge Mountains, turning 30, and 20-some days of rafting through the Grand Canyon. Gratitude remains fresh on my lips, with hope as bright as a mid-summer sunrise.
So. Here's to another month of summer and a whole life of moments of "just when you think you know nothing can happen."
So. Here's to another month of summer and a whole life of moments of "just when you think you know nothing can happen."
