Making Space

Over Christmas I met up with my friend Tana who was back in town from New York City to visit family. There are words people will say that you take into your heart and hold onto, lines that stick to your ribs. One such line that stayed with me during our time was in regards to the intensity of Tana's adopted city--how the energy is so all-encompassing that sometimes when she gets home to her apartment she can "feel the city in [her] joints" and it is hard to decompress. Here in Des Moines I live on a small acreage of hills and trees. And yet even on this tract of wild where deer cross and critters crawl and poison ivy grows thick as tree limbs, you can hear the steady thrum of cars on the interstate. Sometimes I wish for a long stretch of quiet, to hear nothing but wind. But I've realized lately that to truly be at peace is to let go of the sense that space can ever be boxed in and kept, that it can ever truly be controlled, that it is ever ours alone. So we must have a heart that is fluid and without edge. Because nothing in this world in untouched--wherever you go you are faced with the comings and goings and markings of weather and animals and people and bugs. Swarms of mosquitos on your get-away camping trip, the long lines at the DMV, winter storms that squelch your road trip, the cacophony of voices--even now the kids are awake and have said "hey mom" a hundred times. Nothing is untouched--it lives, it all lives. To be free is to be and let be.

Stuck On a Hill

Our house has the perfect sledding hill smack dab in front. Yesterday Phoenix and I spent a good space of time going up and down until I tired of the up and down and went to sit on a sunlit expanse of land cross legged and with palms open to absorb the winter light and clear my mind like the bare branches of trees and the all-blue sky. It was perfectly still and quiet except for the swooshing of the sled and the little feet trudging through snow. And then after one down hill ride she lay sprawled atop the sled and hollered "Mom, I'm stuck." I answered "no you're not, you just haven't tried to get up." And so it was, she rolled to the side and got right up and continued on climbing and sledding, up and down while I kept on breathing, in and out. It struck me then how that's what it means to be stuck--in our thoughts, in a rut, in our habits--it is all a matter of not moving and not even trying to move. We get stuck because it is easy, when really all we have to do is choose to get up--inch by inch or in long leaping measures, it doesn't matter. It only matters that we give ourselves that nudge, that we try.