January 4, 2009
What lifts me up
Well, I think I figured out why the idea of hush was so particularly attractive, considering that last night in shrine I suddenly realized just how perilously close to burnout I am right now. I’ve been running nonstop on two tight writing deadlines, one personal, one freelance, and today I had to take a little break from the personal project, at least. So I got out into the air — went for a walk, down to the stream in the local nature preserve, enjoying the chuckle of the water, the flood-flattened grasses underfoot and the clumps of dead, dry plant stems reaching high above my head, the tangles of thorns, and the beads of ice catching light, dangling from the branches that reach almost down into the river.
And I was thinking, standing at last on the small, rocky beach, about a series of elemental exercises that I was doing not too long ago. In particular, I was thinking about water, and I went back to it again, asking myself, “What do I love? What lifts me up?” And the immediate answer was, This.
Sometimes I have fits where I want to run away from this place — just run anywhere, really. And for a long time I thought that maybe that was the call of my soul, a longing to go on a quest to find my true self. But times like this I recognize that my true self is here, if it’s anywhere — in the everyday and the extraordinary, in the stress and the relief of stress, in this place that’s so familiar and yet still holds so much that I love and that I want and need to discover. I’ve lived here for almost all of my life, and today was another reminder this land and the river live in me, too, and that they can still amaze me.