tmbt: everywhere you go…

We carry it with us. The doubts, the faith, the habits, the tendencies, the skin, the smiles, the aches in our backs, the preference for organic curly kale which one cannot find in Santiago de Chile but really really wants and…

A good friend in Boulder reminded me (a few times) before I left my job about the old adage “Everywhere you go, there you are” by saying something to the affect of “You can’t run from your troubles”. To which I pursed my lips and squinted my personally-coined response: If everywhere you go, there you are; then why not be somewhere else?

And so I left. To reset. To seek out. To discard. To remember. To forget. To forage. To flail. To land, hopefully softly somewhere, and maybe even with someone. And I have. And here. I. Am. Bright and shiny. Easily moved (to tears or anger). Eager to help/fix/solve. Passionate and clear some of the times, nice and muddled others. It’s me. The vacation facade has worn thin and here I am. Gone, but here nonetheless.

And recently, I started thinking that maybe, just maybe it was time to head back, that I’d had enough, that I should go on ahead and get my whole self to higher ground and back to a more understandable language. Then I was reminded by a different friend, a friend I admire so much, that the fantasy of life sticks with us, too – that the ideas we have about what could be are part of us, even if we have what looks like what we wanted… still the fantasy. Green pastures, I think it’s called… er, yep. But also, the possibility that greener pastures are right here… in the wanting, and the having, and the building and the being the same.

So, I am here. Still here, and as far as I can see, staying. Because I am here… with all my over-achieving pieces of flair and flailing limbs of resistance through and through, up, down and sideways. But so too is the possibility… that everything I hold dear is within my reach and indeed within me every step of the way… every leg of the journey… every port of call – the possibility that everything I’m looking for is already here in every brilliantly flawed moment.

And so, in truth, it was already there, too. But if it took uprooting and dropping my little house of cards flat on top of a (very fast) Castellano-speaking witch of the south to find it, well then I’ll take that cost, and the stakes and… the love *blush*… and the uncertainty of every last minute alrighty, yabetcha. It’s sort of a bit part of who I am… this big blubbery wild innocent flying heart open to whatever the hell happens.

Yep. Everywhere I go, here she is. The most beautiful open heart… (yay!).

 

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Art by Vincent A. Manalo.

~ by HeatherArtLife on June 2, 2011.