Where the work is - #28

A homecoming.

It was just after 9pm Mountain Time when we pulled into the snowy driveway. I turned to Ben, “I don’t want to bring anything in.” Behind me and around me in the car was everything: skis, bikes, helmets, boots, coffee mugs, car snacks, water shoes, sun hats, hydropacks, bathing suits, winter jackets, covid tests, and crumpled government papers from a government that had sent me on my way. 

Driving into this abandoned mining town turned hideaway-alpine-paradise felt fantastical, but I knew the curves. I knew the tracks and the slides. I knew who had one more car in their driveway than usual. I knew this place, yet something about the big flakes kissing the windshield in the night, the massive snow piles looming over the road, it felt as far away as I had been. It felt like arriving somewhere new that exceeds all the expectations you’d been trying not to have.

It was my first time away from this home. Two whole weeks — a vacation long enough to forget what you do, but not who you are. I opened the door to the garage to find a wall to my left where there had not previously been one, a reminder that my in-laws had been here the whole time toiling away to make this place even more ours. Snoots was waiting on the other side of the door, Cooper came running next, and Finn waited on the steps, eyes as big as they get, half-fluffed, as nervous as he was hopeful before collapsing into my arms with a purr that would put a subwoofer to shame. I carried him up the stairs from the basement hallway to the main floor and couldn’t believe it. This was home?

Ten years ago, my loose definition of home was a defining trait. My friend Claire pointed it out to me. We were out, somewhere, and I was staying at a friend’s place, somewhere, and I said I was ready to go home for the night, to that somewhere. But I called it home because for that night it was, and Claire noticed. “You’re not going home, though?” Her confusion was matched by mine. “That’s literally not what home means,” she probably said. “That’s what it means to me,” I probably replied. Home was transient. It came with me — in headphones and favorite shoes and toothbrushes, unencumbered by roommates and landlords. Home was wherever I would be safe that night.

But we all have lies we tell ourselves when we need to believe them. 

In therapy, a few years ago, my therapist wanted to talk about why I moved so much. “I like to,” I absolutely said. “But why?”

What she could see that I could not was that I wasn’t running to the good stuff, I was running from the hard stuff. Committing, learning, failing and resting with it. I wasn’t interested in renovating anything. If I didn’t like it, it was easier to abandon it than dig into it. She helped me change that in Topanga, in my relationship, and in myself, though that last one is still...you know.

In 2014, I went to a retreat when I needed transformation. The purpose of a retreat is, in many ways, renewal. You step back from what’s happening to reassess. You’re getting beaten, and you need to go back to the drawing board and look at your approach. Come back stronger, smarter, calmer, cooler. I had been running for years and the mess still brewed wherever I went, as it does when the mold is not in the walls, but in you. I knew I needed to change almost everything: my love life, my job, my living situation, my health. And that retreat did change everything. I look back at it with reverence, hoping to find what I found there: clarity, conviction, a way through. 

So much main character energy we had to call them series regulars.

This past week, after leaving Nicaragua, I didn’t leave with direction — I left with life-long friends and a little vitamin D, but I still felt like the map to what’s next was crumpled and woven between my vertebrae, right where I couldn't reach it. So I pulled out the old map, the one that got me here, to see what clues might be left.

The last retreat was to Lake Atitlan, Guatemala in November 2014. My heart condensed the history of what happened because to it, the events that followed were one cataclysmic reaction, but change is a slow mover. She brokers only in time. I dumped the boyfriend in December. I found a new job in April. I got a therapist in June. I moved in October. Memory is a storyteller and over every cocktail she says, “oh it happened all at once, like magic!” 

And there she was next to me, on a flight from San Salvador to Los Angeles, weaving her tall tales all these years later. “Remember, it happened all at once,” she proclaimed, leaving me impatient and greedy for revelation. Where was my big change? Where was my path? I chose easy targets. 

Make kundalini breathwork a regular part of my routine.

My experiments with breathing in February culminated in an incredible release at the retreat. Through holotropic breathwork, I felt like I could feel the colors of my future. And listen, that also sounds insane to me! But if lying on the floor and breathing differently is all it takes to feel motivated and powerful and like a conduit for art, then how can I not? 

Embrace my femininity more, get my nails done.

At the retreat, I was surrounded by what I can only call creatures — women so in tune with their essence and power that I felt like I fell out of the sky and landed in a Kohl’s parking lot and just bought the first thing I saw. “Hello, I was told there would be other mortals here?” 

Start my day with morning pages, blowing the clouds away so clarity might bask in the sun long enough for me to catch her.

What drifts are blown in over night must be shoveled away. This couldn’t be that hard to incorporate, could it?

But of course it could. 

One, there are no studios offering kundalini anywhere near here. They mention it on their websites, but it turns out this is for SEO — website growth — not for deep growth. I was ready to drive the 30 minutes to get a real yoga class, but they’re all movement classes. Fine, so I wouldn’t have the connective tissue of a class. I could do it online and try to calm my pets when they inevitably panic that I am dying or howl to the heavens, just as the dogs did in Nicaragua when we were deepest in our practice, howling ourselves.

Two, I did get my nails done in LA. Oh I did indeed. I relaxed with my eyes closed, letting the old massage chair punch me repeatedly in the back, feeling absolutely smug at following through with my intention to allow my feminine divine to shine, until I looked down to see I had been attacked by the late 80s. “Do you like it? I did something special.” She smiled and I smiled and I said I liked it because she liked it and because I could feel the universe laughing at me. I would get it fixed later. But it turns out that is not true. Because there is not a salon within an hour and a half drive that removes gel manicures. This is simply what my nails look like now. 

And then I noticed something.

Deep sigh.

Son of a bitch. In August, I ordered a rug from Etsy. When it was woven in September, the gentleman behind the account sent me a photo to make sure I liked it before he shipped it. I didn’t. It was, somehow, 100% different colors than the ones I picked. Of all the things I told him in the nicest email I could ever write, feeling the depths of embarrassment and shame for someone else’s error, the most explicit was that bright orange and black could not be a part of the rug. He was so gracious about it, promising to work quickly to resolve the issue. No black, no bright orange. Three months later, this rug showed up. 

Am I meant to have these colors in my life? Is there something I don’t yet know? 

So obviously, three, I tried to explore this frustration in morning pages but there are people with questions and animals with needs and wood that needs chopping and a slew of emails from people wondering why emails are not being answered and morning pages aren’t meant to be task lists as much as I attempt to contort them into such beasts. The notebook is where I left it on the coffee table when I stopped doing morning pages and started doing my morning. 

But getting my nails done and writing in a journal and adding a new class to the schedule are all just tasks. They’re great additions to the to-do list because they’re achievable, no matter how many obstacles I or this town or an 80s-nostalgic nail technician put in my way. And if you’re reading between the lines, they are obstacles all on their own — things to do when you don’t want to do what needs to be done.

When I walked up the basement steps, one darling in my arms and the others at my heels, into this beautiful space I love so dearly, overcome with disbelief that it was mine, clarity lassoed me from behind, tickling the map I cannot reach. What I was hunting for hunted me down, waiting for me to return. And she told me, there is nothing to change here. You changed all that you could to get you here. Here, where the air is thin and the quiet is deep. Here, where the pets sleep soundly and the logs hold you tight. Here, where you are happy, where you are safe. 

At the retreat, we tossed around the artist’s question over dinner: what would you do if money were no object? If money didn’t matter, if your needs were met, what would fill your time? 

I would learn to cook, I would take French immersion classes, I would learn to do that 360 on skis this season instead of next, I would become a professional downhill mountain biker, I would write my first album, and a novel, and a musical! I would turn the story of my parents into a screenplay with a healthy dose of embellishment, I would adopt many more animals and volunteer to build houses, I would join a band and learn to read the stars and spend at least five nights a month camping. I would do so many things I do so little of now, which is why I prefer to ask this myself this question:

Imagine that for a year, starting tomorrow, your responsibilities are on hold. Your world comes to a stillness. And everything you had today will be there for you just as it was when the year is up. No real time will have passed. But this one year is the only chance you get to build the life you want. You can design the building that dwarfs the rest. You can write the novel that changes history. You can paint galleries worth of art. You can become a world-class archer. You can do whatever you want, but you have one year to do it, and if you do not do it, you cannot do it later. 

What then would you do? 

I put Finn down, turning to take in the whole room, this place I called home, that really was home. There is no use in running when what you’re running from comes with you. I went back down the stairs, out into the garage, and out to the car. 

We have to bring everything in. Unpack it. Put it on the hooks and in the drawers. Everything is where it should be now. No changes left to make. The workspace is clean, the town is quiet, the snow is falling, the transformation long complete. 

“Why do you move so much?” She asked me, her on her chair, me on the couch.
“I like to.” 
“But why,” she asked. 
“Because moving is easy. You make a list, you pack the car, you find an apartment, you find a job, you start over.”
“From the beginning,” she said. I nodded. “Do you think the beginning is the best part of a story?”
I hesitated, seeing I’d been cornered.
“No,” I said quietly, privately.
“Then maybe it’s time to start writing the next part.”

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A special thank you to Trust and Travel — sometimes it is not what you find, but who.

I wrote this week’s piece listening to Villanelle by Jo Blankenburg, mostly on repeat.

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