On laying dormant
The prevailing wisdom says that you have to step out of your comfort zone if you want to make changes, any change, all change. I know this to be true firsthand because I’ve done it before. But why is it so hard right now? What is holding me back?
I’m standing at the living room window in my pajamas, wrapped in my favorite blanket-style poncho, looking out. It’s early Friday morning and the house is cold, foreboding winter.
A tangle of vines that abut our neighbors’ white fence have grown to epic proportions all summer and now they’re starting to turn golden from the sun, dropping their leaves and berries on the ground. “You sure you don’t want me to cut this back some?” said one of the workmen last year. “No, I actually like it this way,” I said. “I like it untamed and messy like this.”
I’ve been paying people to do the essential yard work for me since my sons left home and my friend’s brother has been here to work for us twice. Yesterday, he found a nest when he was cleaning out the shed and he gently placed it off to the side under the brush. I went over to find it later in the evening, crouching down, with my head under the vines, and my ear close to the linty mass of dog hair, paper and leaves. I could hear an almost imperceptible squealing coming from inside.
“Do you think that could be a red squirrel’s nest and not a mouse nest?” I say to my spouse Janyce.
I’m still looking out the window, watching the red squirrel dart out from under the shed into the pile of brush and back out again, as if trying to locate something she lost.
“I looked at it when I was out with the dog,” says Janyce. “I think it’s a mouse nest. I poked around with a stick even, but there is nothing in it this morning.”
The thicket of vines by the fence starts shaking and spitting out tiny, powder-gray birds one at a time. The birds pop around on the leaves that blanket the ground, burst up, and fly to the other side. I turn away from the window and sit on the couch with my computer.
“I’m going to look it up on google” I say. “You think maybe she came back to get them?”
“It’s possible,” she says.
“I bet they were murdered by the Jays,” I say to Janyce, who is walking by me with her headphones on her head wearing her work-out clothes and making her way toward the basement door.
“Well, nature is going to do what it does,” she says.
There’s a small square print in my bathroom that I look at every day— many times a day actually, because I hung it on the wall directly across from the toilet. It’s the face of a woman with large eyes and sunken cheekbones. Half her face is shrouded in shadow, the dark and light parts of the composition balanced on either side. Her face is also evenly split by a triptych-like background of three horizontal bands patterned to resemble tree bark, or maybe water-stained attic wallpaper faded over time. I like to imagine they represent three seasons of her life and it’s not readily apparent what one she is in, what fourth one is yet to come. She holds an expression on her face that I can’t quite place, even though I stare back at her many times a day. She’s the Mona Lisa of the bathroom wall. Sad. Resolute. Defiant.
A few mornings ago, I sat at the kitchen table across from Janyce holding my coffee cup between my hands while ranting out a steady stream of everything that is wrong with the world, my job, my writing, even the yard. Janyce listened quietly, not daring to interrupt or offer any advice, until finally she took a breath and said, “Promise you won’t get mad at me if I say something?”
“Just say it,” I said.
“After you quit everything,” she said, “It will be still be you. What are you going to do then?”
I’ve left a pile of mulch on a tarp in the middle of the driveway all fall, my shovel leaning against it, the wheelbarrow parked and ready. I dig into it every so often and spread a little bit more on the patch of ground I paid to have cleared of old leaves and stubborn weeds months ago. It’s the same patch of earth beneath the tree canopy that holds Janyce’s prized epimediums, those tenacious flowering shade plants that bloom delicate flowers at the first hint of spring. All five plants have doubled in size since May. They are thriving. Janyce is thriving. Many of my friends are thriving.
I tell myself the yard work will get done eventually. I’ll get to it before winter. But truthfully, there is something comforting about leaving it unfinished like this.
The prevailing wisdom says that you have to step out of your comfort zone if you want to make changes, any change, and all change. I know this to be true firsthand because I’ve done it many times before. But why is it so hard right now? What is holding me back?
I stare daily into the face of the woman behind the glass frame searching for answers, but she is not talking.
“I won’t do anything rash without a plan first, you know that, right?” I said to Janyce.
“I do,” she said.
Still, I have no plan. It’s been months and I have no real understanding of my present inertia and what it’s trying to tell me. I think that this may be the other side of what it means to write, or do anything creative for that matter. Sometimes you have to get very quiet and very comfortable with the not knowing. You have to stay in your comfort zone and wait. I’ve decided to believe that it might not yet be my season and that’s okay. Maybe things are beginning to change ever so slightly underground, holding out for the right time to crack open and emerge out of the earth above.