I walk into the cold and pull it into my lungs. It’s a Wednesday morning. Brooklyn is hurrying per usual. I skip my train and walk North, away from home. I have residual glitter on my face from a party last night and a messed up last-minute pedicure from dancing barefoot, but it’s winter so all those mistakes are hidden by layers.
The party was just what I needed. Sure I danced too hard and drank the wine too fast. Maybe that’s what kept me up all night. That and remembering. The girls in the car asked me where I went when I last left the city. “Providence for 8 months and Europe for 6,” I said, reciting my usual comeback. Stories rolled off my tongue like honey as our Lyft driver carried us down Atlantic Avenue.
The stories almost hurt to tell now because they make me remember. Remember falling onto couches that belonged to strangers who became friends. Remember counting out final Euros at the grocery store, for oranges and baguettes and cheese. Remember what it was like to step into early mornings in foreign places, pulling my breath in sharp and feeling that foreign air settle every bone in my body.
This time last year, that was me. I had bad skin, horrible headaches, no money and five outfits jammed into one bag. But everything was alright. I was thousands of miles from home, standing on a porch in Montenegro, staring out at a blue-green sea and filling the days with silence, with trying to write it all down, with wondering where do I belong and where do I go from here?
I didn’t know it would be back to Brooklyn. I didn’t know I’d find a room and three jobs; that I would pay rent and bills; that I would hammer away at a dream that wouldn’t stop hammering away at me. But I came and that became my life. And now here I was, sipping a chai latte that I technically can’t afford, but it’s winter, and I was feeling sad, so I gave in.
I thought I had tamed that restless energy; let it run its course. I thought I had traded my wilder days for something steadier. But it’s here now, on this Wednesday morning. I can feel it churning in the bottom of my belly. It comes like clockwork, every six months, pacing up and down the hallway of my mind, looking for something to upturn.
I finish my chai and find my way home, walking the familiar route back to my house where I start breakfast. The energy hovers around every bone in my body. She’s like a wild horse, stamping her feet, sending dust into my face. I try to calm myself by reciting a list of things that are going well. Small things that I have scattered like seeds in this city, hoping they’ll bloom into roots: new friends, new church, great home, jobs that aren’t terrible, health.
My vision is cloudy but I’m trying to see the ground where I’m standing. I’m trying to call it good and holy. Because holy is wherever the Spirit is and I know He is here. He is in the routine, in the same walk down the same avenues to pick up the child I carry home at 3p.m. every day. He is in the Trader Joe’s runs, in the coffee shop shifts, in the new friends I hug at church, in the wrestling and the crying, in the dancing and glittery eyes, in the tumult and the longing.
I have to believe that these seeds have landed on good soil. So I throw my two hands around the neck of this wild horse and speak gently. We cannot run, not today. Today, I must learn how to stand calmly in this settled place. I must remember the seeds I have planted, even if that means lying face down in the dirt all winter, waiting for spring’s first bloom. I must take all that energy and bend it with patience into something that does not destroy or shatter; into something that is kind to the ordinary work of living, into something that watches and waits with hope for seeds to bloom in their time.
Riike (via Alyssa):
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything.
THIS FIERCE COURAGE 