I need to go to the park and spin on the merry-go-round. I need to play on the swings. I need to slide down the sliding board. I need to walk through the deep leaves in a long patchwork skirt.
I need to rollerblade and juggle at the same time, as bubbles are blown towards me.
I need to drive around for no reason. With my knees. I need to open the window so that when I cry, my tears are blown away. I need to do this whilst listening to Birdsong, and think the moment is deep. I need to not use the word whilst; I would not have used it then. I also would not have used a semicolon correctly.
I need to carry band equipment back and forth on a cold tuesday night, after everyone else has gone to sleep. I need to stop and appreciate that moment. I know that it won’t happen again. I need to hop into a stranger’s van and ask them their name. They will answer me. It is pouring.
I need to hold hands with hundreds of people in an open field. I need to walk two miles in the rain and stop to watch a deer cross my path. I need to laugh near an open fire.
I need to sleep on the hard ground, next to a different fire, with different drums in the distance.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Saturday, November 7, 2009
She's Leaving Home
Driving home from happy hour last night, I looked at the already-darkening sky and thought about leaving. Not leaving anywhere in particular, just the idea of leaving; doing this, I realized something about myself--I’m really good at it. Leaving, that is. I’ve left lots of places.
I left a music festival once--The Gathering of the Vibes. It was a terrible, terrible place, so overcrowded that people began to resort to things that I won’t even mention on here...let’s just say there were issues with the facilities and leave it at that. It was almost a hundred degrees out and tens of thousands of people were camped in an open field. I was supposed to be working, but everything was so out of control I realized no one was going to bother to try to find me. A brief but violent thunderstorm put the sound system out of commission for a good long time and turned the already befouled field into a mud pit. I was out of there.
I left a pagan gathering once--Womongathering. I still have the little clay woman used as an ID badge--I was supposed to be working there, too--hanging from my rearview mirror. I left Kripalu, a yoga center in Western Massachusetts, after only four of the seven days I was supposed to be there--yep, you guessed it, working. I never knew there could be such sensory deprivation in a place like that, and it drove my 22 year-old self mad. And then there’s my most recent leaving incident this past summer, which I never would have predicted.
I left all of these places for the same reason--because I was unhappy. There was always a different reason for my unhappiness--trust me, the ‘facilities’ at Kripalu were so far superior to those at The Vibes it isn’t even fair to call them by the same name--but unhappiness is what it always boils down to. I left because I was unhappy. And--I left because, well, I could.
But what happens when I can’t leave? This is where my thoughts took me last night, on the way home from happy hour, looking at the sky not at the road. What happens when the thing making me unhappy isn’t even a thing that is leave-able? What about when the thing that is making me unhappy isn’t even a THING? What then? Where do I go now?
I left a music festival once--The Gathering of the Vibes. It was a terrible, terrible place, so overcrowded that people began to resort to things that I won’t even mention on here...let’s just say there were issues with the facilities and leave it at that. It was almost a hundred degrees out and tens of thousands of people were camped in an open field. I was supposed to be working, but everything was so out of control I realized no one was going to bother to try to find me. A brief but violent thunderstorm put the sound system out of commission for a good long time and turned the already befouled field into a mud pit. I was out of there.
I left a pagan gathering once--Womongathering. I still have the little clay woman used as an ID badge--I was supposed to be working there, too--hanging from my rearview mirror. I left Kripalu, a yoga center in Western Massachusetts, after only four of the seven days I was supposed to be there--yep, you guessed it, working. I never knew there could be such sensory deprivation in a place like that, and it drove my 22 year-old self mad. And then there’s my most recent leaving incident this past summer, which I never would have predicted.
I left all of these places for the same reason--because I was unhappy. There was always a different reason for my unhappiness--trust me, the ‘facilities’ at Kripalu were so far superior to those at The Vibes it isn’t even fair to call them by the same name--but unhappiness is what it always boils down to. I left because I was unhappy. And--I left because, well, I could.
But what happens when I can’t leave? This is where my thoughts took me last night, on the way home from happy hour, looking at the sky not at the road. What happens when the thing making me unhappy isn’t even a thing that is leave-able? What about when the thing that is making me unhappy isn’t even a THING? What then? Where do I go now?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
