Monday I turn in my last writing for the semester. I am ready. So, so ready. Because I have loved this work. I do love this work. But I need some time off, away. To tend to the restlessness inside me, this volcano inside me heat building as I have locked myself in my office, worked late into the night, given everything I have. It starts to turn in on me, and I need air, space to stretch out, because there is so much there, waiting to be released. So Foxy, I hear you, I feel you.
I am exhausted, but I also feel like there is something in me that wants out, wants voice, expression, to not just be held but lived. And wants to spill out, rush out, breathe out, bleed out, and then come back in, transformed, embodied. It is that flash of a second when I feel a rush, a quickening of pulse, a movement, like I just heard something, some truth, and it was calling out to me, speaking right to me, and so my soul sheltered inside my body wants to connect with it, to be with it. And I don’t even know what to do with it most of the time. Because sometimes it feels like there are so many lifetimes coming towards me and pounding inside me, and I don’t think I will ever get to live them all, at least this go around. That tightness in my chest that reminds me there are choices, and some of them I have already made, and so they closed other doors. And yet, when does this become my self inflicted confinement and easy answer, shielding me from everything unlived inside of me that is wanting attention.
I want to move Hawaii or Mexico, to live by the ocean and let my hair turn to dreads and cover my body in permanent ink and do magic in my kitchen, where others somehow come and find me and we dance and I make them drinks and together we find their own heartbeat that has always been telling them who they are and what they must do.
I want to go walk the halls of hospitals, find those people lost and wandering. The ones who have just heard bad news, their family member still in surgery, and they don’t know what to do and the medical jargon is overwhelming and they can’t even find the fucking bathroom. The ones who are there for tests and they don’t speak the language and so they can’t even find the right floor, the wing of the hospital they have been sent to, and no one will help them understand the insurance paper work. The ones who lie in hospital beds and are sick or dying or healing, and sometimes all at once, and yet they don’t have a formal religion, meaning there is no priest to come and pray with them, offer them communion, and yet they possess a spirit that longs to be seen and I want to be there, seeing it, them, going into the unknown unmade space of god.
I want to can my own tomatoes and swim naked in waterfalls and know the sound of my voice as my own. I want to live in a tree house, a luxurious one of course, with an espresso machine and real beds complete with an crisp cotton sheets and mosquito netting and light weight cashmere blankets. I want to come home and find my apartment filled with orchids. I want to dive into the interior wilderness of my own psyche and the jungle of my human heart. I even of late had wanted to give birth to another baby. Which is not mine to do, but still, I want. I want to know that this life is mine, and no one else will come and live it for me. So what then? What will I do?
I want to be a dancer. Or a painter. Or a movie screenwriter. Or a cellist. Or a tattoo artist. Or a mountain climber. I want to have that thing that I do, that I give myself to. That I am willing to sacrifice for and bleed for, commit to and feed. And, its not about prestige. It’s about knowing that their was a calling inside me and I listened to it and followed where it lead me. But what if I hear so many things call out my name? I want integration, to not feel like I have to be any one thing. And I want the fierceness of passion that is willing to follow one thing. And I do not know how to have both. So it is this then that I want. To know, as Emily Bronte, “I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading.” Wherever that leads.
And right now, as summer feels to finally have come and it humid hot outside, even at night as I write this. Right now, as I am close to finishing another semester, knowing that there is only more left and then maybe more school, maybe a rest, maybe something I cannot yet even imagine. But that I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading. Walk into the world, this life, as to a waiting lover.
Zita, yes, I’m with you, ready, waiting, needing to all come together again.
I love you all.
