Sunday, June 23, 2013

The View from the Solstice: Circuitous thoughts from the top of the year

The past eight months have been an ongoing street fight within me:  I've vacillated between thinking, "Oh, yes, this is a grand adventure" and "What the fuck."  And I'm guessing this vacillation will continue, but hopefully the swings between the two will narrow a bit in their extremes.  I keep showing up, though, even when I feel that I am as graceless as I've ever been.

Friday night I was reminded to look out at the view from the pinnacle of the longest day of the year:  an uphill climb with a descent to follow, and to note what is.  Many of us got to this point in the year by heading straight up with few obstacles, some of us got there on a meandering path, and others were fighting demons and destructive thought patterns along the way...or some combination thereof.  And I considered that these roles shift and change with every year, hell, every season, every solstice marking the way.  But in that moment?  For the moment?  I was able to look out at the view, to see and embrace the beauty.  I was afforded the luxury of leaning in and being exactly who and where I am.  How often do we take advantage of the luxury of presence? 

There are these fleeting moments in life where we can actually see the view, unobstructed by stories and piranhas of doubt.  I am convinced that these moments are closer to true than anything my monkey mind can conjure.  This is not a view of the future, nor is it a mourning of the past, but it is informed by both.

In my flying around in the past weeks, I found more wisdom in airplane reads... Liza Palmer, in her novel, Nowhere but Home wrote:  "Living in the past has its benefits.  Closing the door on this means I have to look to the future."  The present is somewhere in there, but is always obscured by the past if we continue to live there.  And per usual the nuggets I choose are centered around a protagonist's searching:  "I want chairs that don't match and a porch with a swing.  I want mason jars filled with wildflowers in the center of rustic wooden tables.  I want flickering candles and a fire in the fireplace.  I want mismatched dishes and old-timey silver... I want a place that feels like home.  A place where I belong." Thankfully, in a novel, the protagonist can suffer, return home, find love, and sift through a lifetime of experiences in less than 300 pages.  Life might be more like a trilogy:  Hope and justice in the first, pain and suffering in the second, intensity and resolution in the third.  Not sure which book I'm in.

I'm coming closer to finding home in me, but also coming closer to solidifying the vision of the "home" (writ large) that will surround me.   And I'm allowing myself the space to recognize that both of these factors are important.

This afternoon I found myself, not for first time, in the wiccan store down the block from my house, and found my eye drawn to a bracelet of fluorite ("for clear heart and mind to allow for clear action").  As I took the bracelet and a few polished stones to the counter, the gentleman chatting with the owner said, "you know, they make pills for that." I said, "Yes, that's my next step."  And we looked at each other knowingly.  And I asked the owner, "Good for making big decisions?"  She nodded and smiled.  I completed the purchase.  I think magic might just trump pharmaceuticals.  Or at least my belief in it will.