Muscles that are strong enough

The rain of course, which is a million different creatures depending on who you are relative to the space you inhabit.  This morning it is skeleton fingers on the sky light six feet above my head in the little loft where I sleep--reminding without it we are dust but with too much this canyon could wash away.  As life, a terror or a blessing as well as the washing fluid dance of every nuance in between…

So the rain wakes me at 3:30 on a morning when I need to rise at 5 to leave for school.  And it is peculiar, how the body remembers.  I lay here and for no seeming reason recall December in 2004.  I'd been asleep in my old bed at Ocean Pines.  My boyfriend at the time was in the twin bed beside me, we'd pushed them together to sleep close.  We were living in Oregon on the coast to make money after traveling for five months and had made a harried, stressful trip home for the holidays.

I remember waking up from the most saturated sleep and sighing and thinking, ohh, it was all a dream.

Then waking came, and reminded me that no, I had a return ticket waiting and the rainy season in the mossy Suislaw and the tides of the Alsea rushing in and out to the Pacific were where I would return.  I didn't have a job and neither did he.  We were in that in-between space that feels like life at any minute will bottom out, that panicky place of potential free-fall.

It was just on the other side of following through with everything we'd set out to do--travel North America and live on her land, sleep in the forests, honor nature as our host and our home.  We were faced next with Now What~and it didn't feel good.

Of course, as life does, it moved on and we did with it.  I got a job, so did he, it was hard to cut heart strings when the time came and we travelled on.  But that body memory.

The oh it's not a dream…I got to do this now and don't really know if I can, march all the way through.

How muscles that are strong enough to do the marching actually come from the journey, the steps you take one by one, to get you to move.

Movement itself is the conditioning, what makes you strong.

That's what the rain brought today.  Makes me wonder what's yet and about to come...