What Will Be, Will Be
I spent the weekend on homework lockdown, skipping the Halloween parties, skipping the excuses to leave town, skipping the made up errands, and sticking to the plan of rejuvenation. Yoga to open and close each day; likewise, meditation. Writing tasks broken up by bursts of cleaning and household chores, the occasional phone call from a friend.
Monday begins in azure, a sky-full of muted color upon waking, black, black mountains frosted beneath the dawning horizon, and all the world as I can see it waits to be warmed. Within the hour, the view from this mountain home will be all butter and sunlight, brilliant riots of yellow close enough to touch from the porch and visible even at a distance, across the rows of mountains that make up the view.
So of course the morning felt as calm as a glassy lake on a windless day. Of course I sat alone on the couch, one lamp lit and the rest of the house still dark, plowing through eighty pages of Tobias Wolff. This is the lovely fruition of taking care, of tuning in, of listening well. The trick is maintaining this as equilibrium, holding fast to the belief that when I take care of myself in the best possible ways, I can write my very best words. [Although, there is something to be said for the delightful strokes of genius found at the midnight hour or in our grand and sleep-deprived or tear-stricken states.]
Sometimes, mornings like this can inflate themselves, blossom full into the day and blanket us into warm, solid sleep at night. Sometimes, mornings like this are precious if for no other reason than the fact that we know they are rare and fragile as a bog candle orchid, here and gone and uncountable.
By nightfall, I grow flushed with worries. There are tanks to fill—propane, kerosene—and no one to share the bills with. The water heater is electric (ugh!) and under the house (ugh!) therefore, costs are manageable only to a certain degree. My mind jumps back to the summer, where I lost about $2,000 in wages and tips and lost $800 in medical bills from the combination of missed work for the residency and ankle injury. I do the math in my mind and fret about heating a house with gases, rather than wood—the former being a method I’m simply not accustomed to but that I must take on as a part of where I have chosen to live. This morning it was 52 degrees in the house, fog on the windows, frost spreading its tentacles across the porch and walkways.
A call from DD ought to ease the mind, right? And it does, for the twenty minutes that we have. But we hadn’t caught up since the party, hadn’t reconnected, had only touched base for a few minutes once on the phone to confirm that a last minute get together wasn’t going to work out. My mind leaps again, and oh heart be weary of this jumping ahead, but damn if I’m not already worried about an imbalance—how I work with my friends and write solo and therefore, when those two tasks are tended to, the first thing I want to do is get right down to the business of investing in a new relationship. I’m not sure DD’s priorities are the same, and whether or not they have to be to make this a successful relationship remains to be seen.
Sigh and sigh and sigh. Life is unpredictable, as the colors of the sunrise burst anew each morning, whose to say that one day that muted azure won’t up and change, offer burnt sienna or lime green instead? It sounds batty, I know, but something must be said for taking one day at a time.
The creative writing goes into the MFA, where requirements and right-on assignments abound. The audience and market driven writing goes into the freelance. Hence, the blog has shifted into an emotional corral, a check-in, if you will. I know I don’t write those lovely anecdotes anymore, those life-is-precious glimpses that so inspired. But don’t be fooled! I’m still grateful to have a venue for these thoughts, the matters of the heart, the everyday mutterings and putterings of the unknown seeking definition, trying to make its mark on the world, trying, dare I say, to find that solid ground beneath the rising sun as it blesses each day again and again.
