On creatures and discomfort
spring may be here, but I'm still carrying around the last of winter
But if I watch her closely, she is happiest if we do the same thing in the same way every day. Maybe embracing routine and repetition is one way out of the mind and into the body?
When I pull up into the driveway of the Cape house, I see the ramshackle wooden birdhouse wedged into the crook of an oak sapling. I found it in the basement on my last visit here and I remember haphazardly shoving it into the brush that is adjacent to our driveway before I got in the car to drive away. I liked the folksy way it looked as a decoration, but I didn’t think it would get any bird interest because I set it so low and close to the driveway.
“We’ll go in soon,” I say to my dog, sitting upright in the backseat. We’re back from the morning rail trail loop walk we’ve taken every morning this past week and we’re still sitting in the idling car.
I’m watching the house wrens working in tandem, taking turns flying up into a small crack in the bottom of the boards, each carrying a twig, and then pausing to sit on a branch, singing their hearts out.
It’s spring on Cape Cod and the forsythia and lilacs have only just opened, even though they have already come and gone most everywhere else. It’s also eerily empty this close to Memorial Day weekend. I can’t find an open coffee shop, and many of my favorite restaurants still have the “see you next season” signs in the windows. This is also the longest my spouse Janyce and I have been apart since we met and I’m thinking that may be contributing a little to my overall malaise. She’s been working in Florida for almost two weeks taking care of my parents’ old dog while they are away. Our daily check-in phone calls have all been small talk about creatures because not much is going on for either of us:
“I had a lizard jump onto my arm from the lanai this morning,” she said.
“I took the dog to the Marconi Beach and we watched all the seals poke their heads up out of the water,” I said.
“There’s an alligator in the puddle of water that I pass every morning on my way to the gym,” she said.
“Selene woke me up in the night alerting me to the coyote slinking across the backyard,” I said.
“Look who came to visit,” she said, texting me a photo of a heron or a crane standing spindly legged on the backyard grass.
I took only two books with me when I packed up the car on Monday. A 600-word hardcover novel I was hoping I could sink into and be transported to another place and time. “Epic and emotional,” said the inside cover flap comments. I read a page and decided it was too much mental work to continue. And the other book was a new paperback I ordered from Amazon to arrive within a day. I was eager to read it right away and be transformed by it’s wisdom. Halfway through, I shut the book and decided not to open it again for the rest of the week. It is a book on embodiment, a catch phrase I’ve been hearing bandied about for some weeks now.
I often think that I live too much in my head and this was one of the reasons I planned to simplify my life with a week away from everything —to unwind, relax, and disconnect in silence. To actually practice a form of embodiment. Only it occurred to me as I was thinking and reading about “dropping into my body” that maybe I was going about this all wrong. I’ve been watching my dog. She’s very willing to embrace whatever comes: jump in the car and drive to a new destination, wait patiently in the backseat for me to come out with a bag of groceries from a random store, walk on a new trail, find a new scent in the long grasses (and unfortunately a bunch of ticks to take home), curl up in a swath of sun on the couch. But if I watch her closely, she is happiest if we do the same thing in the same way every day. Maybe embracing routine and repetition is one way out of the mind and into the body?
My week is fast coming to a close and now I wonder if I had another week like this, maybe I might actually figure a few things out. I’ve spent the past six days mostly in a state of generalized anxiety and resistance and just as I’m starting to feel like I can pull myself out of this glum, it’s time to pack everything up again and drive home.
Instructions on Not Giving Up Ada Limón More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.