To the pace of my body

There was green glitter all over my forehead when the popping noise sounded off and Laura started yelling for Clay.  I was trying on St. Patick's Day adornments for class tomorrow, sparkle hat and glasses to match, and the cornbeef and cabage had overflown and was running a thin stream in to the front burner.  Laura's stove is the original from 1950.  There were yellow flashes of electricity when I got to the kitchen.  And so I short circuited the oven's electrical wiring in my new house.  Because already I love my students so damn much.

It's been a long, full day and now I am up waiting for the corn beef to slow cook in the crock. I feel bad about the oven but Laura's boyfriend, who lives with us and dotes on her in a way that makes me want to be taken care of, assured me it's "not a biggie."  I still feel like a doof.  The good news is the food will flavor nicely in the crock, though my body wishes I was crawling in to bed right now.  Monday night I slept fine as a light wine that scents the side of the glass it's so rich, finer than I have in years.  I mean years.  I was asleep by 9:45, hours earlier than I usually turn the lights out, and didn't even blink until my alarm went the next day at 7.  It felt amazing.  And since then, since Sunday really when I refused to get out of my pajamas for the day, my life has been slowing down.

Slowing down to the pace of my body.  I lost my keys in plain sight Friday night, this was divined, my hike started and I had to cancel on attending because I didn't find my keys until in the meantime a ghost from the past called, I was meant for this call and we talked a two hour talk me and the ghost of me and him and the ghost of him, a talk writ by the fates, the accordance of my heart since then...since then and when I found out about Brandon...well.  I am three weeks in to my life in California and for the first time since I left Anngar Farm in November 2008--I am not walking away from something.

I am instead still, planted.  Hand-choosing.  Picking what I want for my life, plucking it like the sparkled jeweled fruit it's meant to be, right and clean out of the air. Except it's not from the air, it's fruit ripe from three years of growing strong and growing long underground.  And I watch as the swirls of land and dirt and funk and past in which this lovely orchard so painstakingly hibernated and grew, I see it backwash and swirl and swish away...I feel it loosen and fall.  Departing, I let the hulls go, I let the seeds break from me as the ground I am, the ground I was, the ground I can be.  Who I am meant to and still able to become mere mini blossoms now, soon to drip with fragrance fat with celebrated juices hung low on this thick and dusky and also taught and new ground.

It all falls away, it all is one.  Present as I've ever intended to be, my body asking me slow, still, quiet, rest.  My dreams dancing from me NOW NOW NOW .  I read yesterday the first pages of a novel from Aunt Sharon by Jed Rubenfeld.  He said "happiness" is living in the moment--overcoming the haunts that command us from the past, while "meaning" exacts something entirely different.  It is reinhabiting the past in order to live for our future.

I have both.  I am not lucky.  I chose this route.  Popping sounds and green glitter forehead, ghosts once inhabited swirling away, fruit and sleeplessness, seeds and all.  I will let my body be my lead, trust her as the deeper source of me, my body not so much stuck in the center but the actual center, taken for granted as it is.  Loyal always as I've moved through every stage and especially all the many times I do so only half-awake.  I will trust the timing of this body, as pure memory of the timing of all these seconds of this one little life that have led me to right here.  Dreams quaking and fruit-juicy as a birds chest in spring, surely breathing in and out doing in this moment the exact right thing.