renewal – Mama the Reader

I’ve had a few days alone as the kids are on spring break and on a trip with their dad. Truthfully, I’ve got neither the cash nor the time for a trip right now, and I am always a little anxious with them away, but I’m so happy they get the chance to go. I am in full swing at work with only about 4 weeks left of class this semester. Student meetings and a visiting poet today and papers pouring in and reports to complete for administrative purposes. I’m almost drowning, but I don’t mind since I’ve come to associate this frantic April pace with a long rest that is coming soon enough. Summer is around the corner.

Yesterday my friend indulged me in a belated birthday treat that we’ve had on the calendar for weeks. I went to a traditional Korean sauna, and it was outside of my comfort zone in ways (gender segregated nude areas), but it always feels so good to push myself to do something new. I don’t do it enough. I ended up getting a “body shampoo” which actually means someone scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed every dead skin particle off my body and left me feeling like a baby. It was a perfect ritual to mark spring and newness. I need to shed so many things, I think. And so often our bodies are the tools through which we can get to something else. I see that idea reflected more and more as I age.

After that, I spent five hours lounging in their various saunas – lined with anything from amethyst to charcoal to clay. As we walked out into the Atlanta spring sun, it felt like nothing was left in my skin that was there when I walked in. Newness is good.

Life has evened out in a way that, to be totally honest, makes me feel really strange. I spent the last two years shedding layer upon layer, and now what? I am just here and moving along at a usual pace and there are no scary surprises or catastrophes or major adjustments. I think yesterday’s experience felt so good because it has been too long since I jumped out of my comfort zone (after two solid years of living every single second outside of it). It’s easy to fall back into that human desire for complacency and consistency, isn’t it? Sometimes we need experiences – little or big – to shake us up again.

Two summers ago, I read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea at the recommendation of a friend. It resonated with me in a major way, and I like to revisit it every now and then. Lindbergh says, “It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.”

I think I am on the long uphill climb now. The part where I am out of the woods, but now I figure out what I want and how to get it and do the hard work of plowing ahead to get there. I want so many things — stability and comfort and solid ground but also persistent renewal and new challenges. I’m grateful for the wide open road in front of me, and the different sort of stability that I feel having spent two years on my own feet in some rocky waters. I don’t want those same kind of rocks again, but I do want some new terrain on this uphill climb. I want to see new places and have the faith to pursue what I know is coming for me. More.

Our back patio is overflowing with so much green – thanks to my grandad’s generosity and my inherited love for homegrown food. The kids help pick greens every night now – lettuces and chard and kale that make their way to the dinner table. We’ve created this place somehow with neighbors and friends and our own little village of sorts. I was making dinner one night last week to glance up and catch a glimpse out the back patio door of my two playing with a crowd of neighborhood kids with bare feet and short sleeves and late daylight. It was the simplest of moments but the one I scribbled on paper for my gratitude jar that night. Here we are in a home we love with predictable routines and a solid foundation.

I’ve heard that saying “what you take for granted someone else is praying for,” but now I see it in my own life in a different way. What I have now, this little life with all of its routine beauty, is what I so desperately prayed for years ago when I really couldn’t see my out to the other side yet. And here I am. But now I want more, and I can feel it just out of reach. That’s the secret perhaps – to always be reaching for more and pausing in between to listen to that voice that tells you what you really want.

I just got home from a quick trip with some of my favorite people, my very closest friends. And it always amazes me how little time it takes to renew yourself when you are surrounded by the right people.

We decided to book a suite at a winery and resort in north Georgia and pile in it together, and though it was incredibly close to home for most of us, it somehow feels far away when you unplug from your usual responsibilities and surroundings and go somewhere new.

A little wine and sunshine don’t hurt either.

I’ve thought a lot these past few weeks about the perfection masks we wear all the time, the “performance mode” I’ve written about here before. I’m so done with that and the loads of energy it entails, but it’s still scary to show the real face or any trace of vulnerability and pain when I’m with people who don’t know me well. But these women are the exception. I share things with them that I share with no one else in my life right now, and I think we lean on each other in a way that only becomes even more valuable as time marches on.

In short, I love them. And I love who I am when I am with them. I don’t know if there’s anything else better than that really. To make someone better and stronger and to say to that person’s real self, I see you and I hear you and I feel it, too.

I read recently that psychologists say if a friendship lasts seven years, it will likely last a lifetime. And by that rule, I have a number of people who knew me when and know me now and will know me in the distant future when I’ve evolved to something else, too. We are lucky – all of us – to have each other and to have weathered the storms together.

Their stories are not mine to tell, but they are in many ways much harder than the one I’ve weathered this year. I’m beginning to see that everyone is shaped by her own experiences and everyone is fighting her own battle most just never know about, and I feel lucky that this group just keeps fastening even closer together as we change shape with our own life experiences.

As we packed up today and began the ride home, I was thinking about how little of summer is left and how close the school year is. I have anxiousness a bit about Jude starting kindergarten. (Big changes are always a little scary.) But I think in a weird way, I’m ready to begin a new year with a new routine that will soon feel worn and comfortable.

People are always changing, always in a time of growth – if you are doing it right anyway. I don’t want to become complacent. That said, I feel like the intense period of transition is coming to a close for me. I’m something very different from what I was a year ago, but I’m feeling more settled now. I’m finally feeling ready for regular life to take hold again and excited to see what’s ahead.

This summer has been the perfect finish to all of it. Resting in the discomfort a bit, embracing it for what it is, and feeling my way around all of it. This trip was the perfect finale for it as well, resting and renewing my spirit with my favorite people. Onward and upward. I think I’m ready.

Tag: renewal

long uphill climb

renewed, ready to begin again {a quick post}