I fall into my life like a bird falling mid-flight, crashing through the branches of a tree. My life holds me like the ground holds the bird, as it rests, fallen, catching breath. This room that has been a temporary home for the past month, the family around, the dog, the routines and habits-- some my own, some to accommodate others-- show me their invisible strength to frame my life. How comforting an everyday existence is that is untouched by the ravages of uncertainty. The cups don't disappear or cease to exist, buildings don't get decimated by earthquakes, the fridge is always filled with food, the taps with water, and when darkness falls, there are enough lights around to make one forget it is even there. So different from my life in the village of Arambol. When alone the rooms became bigger and, sparsely filled, they echoed with the possibility and weight of giving into darkness and silence. And when electricity would go, as it often did, I would feel the depth of the darkness that had become so foreign in cities. I lived in a nice house without a contract opposite my landlord's worn-down, cemented hut. I lived in a state of uncertainty that any day they might ask me to leave-- as they eventually did-- and worried about my cups, my books, the keyboard that kept me and my love company in our lives. How would I move with these things? And where would I move to? What was the feeling of stability, of home that people seemed to find within houses that I just couldn't seem to manage? Whether I managed it through the day otherwise, once a day I certainly found the feeling of home when my love and I would talk. A transient moment of rest and hopefulness in an otherwise heavy life. But the nature of relationships, and of me, is coloured by unpredictability. Whatever doesn't work must change, and if it doesn't, I must. A hard tenet to live by, but not one that I force upon myself. It comes from within. I move-- from relationships, friendships, family, city, job when it seems time. I give everything I love the highest fire within but if it feels time to let go, I let the fire die. I fan it out myself. So it came to be this time too, but practice does not make difficult things easier. The love I felt, I still feel. But the day does not go as before. Mundane life holds its place through chores, the work I must do, the social necessities that come up, but the deeper part of life that mostly our closest relationships allow us to experience, suddenly disappears. It feels violent, the abrupt ending. Some meaning is lost as a part of me grapples to make sense of the loss and another feels like it all already does. Loving and living are both words that grow in meaning the longer I am here. What it meant to live when I was 7 is quite different from what it is at 29. There was a purity and innocence, unpolluted by definitions (my own or others') of what it meant to live. It was immediate, real-- I truly was a bird in flight. Now, I feel like I live my life only with a fraction of the immediacy of that 7 year old. My head is filled with thoughts and fears and my heart has to work much harder to open up to everything that life has to offer. Living has gotten covered with a weariness and the sorrows of the world have come to sediment themselves in me. It's what knocked me mid-flight and I careened to earth. In this metaphor, time moves through seasons not the clock. This bird lies resting as the earth stays in place and she gets up slowly, to look at the world in a new way, in a new light and live with a new understanding of what it means to be a bird. Not just something that flies and is free, but that falls mid-flight and must use its feet.
Someday, perhaps soon, it will be time to fly again.
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