life

way.

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I weigh 160 pounds. I want to weigh 155. There is not a day that passes that I don’t think about the equation of what I wish to weigh and what I do. Not a day that I don’t wonder if I go to bed a little hungrier can I wake up a little thinner, less burdened by the ounces I hold on this frame that I wish was a smaller ratio of body, a larger ratio of soul.

I don’t think there has been a time that what I weigh has changed how I live, that in a quiet, lovely conversation with another soul seeker, they say, that would have been so much more lovely if she weighed 5 pounds less. I cannot see how a square box on the floor of a room I don’t stay in, decides what space I stay in this magnificent and interesting world.

A few days ago I was in a meeting, my mind wandering while my video settings stayed on, the passive stare we have all managed to capture while following other thoughts, and I heard by name. I came back fully to the meeting and listened for real, and realized it was not my name, it was what I have done in this lifetime; carry.

All these years I didn’t make the connection between the noun of me, and the verb. Keri=Carry.

The question now, at this life pace and style, over 50 and somewhat more taken with the mystery of this universe, it made me pause, made me realize it isn’t just digital numbers on a scale in a bathroom of the house I live in. I carry those extra 5 pounds with me all day, every day. And maybe it isn’t even that I carry it, it is that I think of carrying it.

One pound for what others are thinking when I am making my way through a day, sometimes confused with the pull and push of working and living in a stimulating simulation.

One pound for how I didn’t do what I intended to do, a few words, taken wrong, offense in a room I entered, and not fixed by the time I left.

One pound for who I miss, who I left, who I leave. For the undone past that I cannot undo, the choices I made fixed in memory and unchanged by time.

One pound for the shadow side I wish I hid better, the times I show the fear I try to cover in words.

One pound for those words. Too many of them, too loud, too often.

The verb of my name changes how I see the noun of me–who I am and who I have been, what I have done and what I can do balancing on a bigger, cosmic scale of my weight in this world. The space I take up not tied to any number on any square box, in any room I stay in.

A new choice is showing up, it is me that steps on the scale, and it is me that can walk past it. To think about something else each day, like the larger ratio of loving outward, the smaller ratio of checking for love coming in. The equation of who I am, who I was born to be, undivided.

That is the way; already balanced.

all.

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I sat in a bar, inside a restaurant once, with a drink in front of her and none in front of me, because I was driving us back and forth from the nearby hotel where we both got the federal rate because we both worked for a federal program. She had driven here from a neighboring state, to visit one of the sites of a program I was in charge of at the time, and still am. We talked about what had been happening in the site, in the program, and a little bit in our lives. She asked me how I was because before that visit I told her of the troubles we were having, the way the people she would visit that day may not be getting along, the place she was going may not be in the shape I tried for it to be, but I was trying.

We stayed in the bar long after our meal was done, she described to the waiter what she wanted, something colorful, something sweet, something surprising. We talked, her relaxing with the orange/yellow drink in her hand, me still sitting up straight, being visited. I heard somewhere since if you eat orange/yellow food for two days you will feel better. I wonder if that’s true.

I answered her question about how I was, sitting in the small, dim room—I am doing the best I can.

No, no, Keri, she said, looking at me in my eye with the orange/yellow drink between us, no—you are not doing the best you can, you are doing all you can.

She told me a story or two then, about family members who said they did their best, and she explained how that isn’t true, they didn’t. She saw them do everything, all things, all.

And she saw me too, she saw me trying to figure it out, she said when she thought of me that’s the phrase I always said, ‘I’ll figure this out’. But the figuring out wasn’t working, and the trying wasn’t working, and the drink I couldn’t have because I was driving wasn’t working because I couldn’t have it. I could not have what I wanted in any way, that night, and the many nights after.

But something was a little different after that day when she was the visitor and I was the visited. I knew I couldn’t have what I wanted; the solution, the thing figured out, the endless learning to do something better that wasn’t getting better, at that site, in that program that I kept finding myself in charge of. But it wasn’t that I wasn’t doing my best, it was that all I was doing wasn’t working, yet.

That colorful truth was sweet, it was surprising. And it did make me feel better.

paved.

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I lived on county roads when I was young, dusted in the summer from farmered pickup trucks hauling hay to cows over the next hill. I rode a faded blue bike with no gears down our graveled lane way, leaning at the end into tree lit back roads, no lines, no lights, waving past black eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace. In rain it was muddy, in winter the skid of back tires kept us home, and in spring the runoff made miniature buttes and canyons in the narrow rutted lanes. The road changed and slipped its sides over the years, gravel and wildflowers mixed up and sliding down into fields of hay.

It was never made uniform or fixed, maybe some new gravel spilling out of a dump truck and maybe dark, heavy oil in the summer to keep the dirt down, maybe plowed in those old scowling winter storms, but never paved.

And every day it brought me home.

Home on a bright, loud bus filled with noise and competition, voices slipping out of open windows scattering crows from corn stalks. Home on that faded blue bike with no gears at the beginning of the school year when that bus was too full and I was too shy to risk being watched finding a seat. Home on long walks in the dark and rain, staying late in high school halls to be with friends and boys, catching up on homework I never did. Home in a small red car that stalled at stoplights, and taught me how to shift gears on hills.

All those years, I was never made uniform or fixed.

Maybe I studied, read and prayed to stop feeling so mixed up and scattered. Maybe I learned religion and then unlearned it, competing ever and always against myself to be more, to be better, to have lines and lights and to be unchanged by rain. To be paved.

But the best roads are not paved. They change on different days, they wind and veer a little for no reason, they dip down where water pools and they stay a little rough, a little messy and are left unfixed. Paving a road is fine, and I have tried that—but for me, I am always going to find that back road to walk alone in the dark, singing.

All this time, all these ways, this old, lovely dusty road brought me home.

her.

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To be loved be her. To hear her say ‘my love’, ‘my dear’— is a thread that weaves us then and still, my middle aged heart warmed as well as if I was a child.

I look like my mother, young pictures of her sitting on docks and by pine trees, I see myself there, in those places I haven’t been. She is smiling, surrounded by friends and soaked in the adventure of someone who knows where she is headed, to places she hasn’t been.

This morning in our weekly call, I asked her if the reason she is so healthy and strong is because of the way she lives, unbeholden to anyone else’s whims or worries, her path each day not charted by stars or planets, horoscopes or how-tos, but one foot in front of the other of where she chooses to walk.

She knows she loves flowers, longer spring days and snowdrops under melting snow, she does not question that she likes tea in the afternoons, cross stitch and ladies lunches. She has long lost the unhelpful habit of trying too hard, reaching too far and questioning why she loves what she loves.

A couple of weeks ago my mother told me that this time of year, there is two and half more minutes of sunlight each day, that adds up each week, the shifting of this planet toward lighter days more palpable, more seen, pointing toward more snowdrops under faster melting snow.

This time of life for me is two and half more minutes of light each day, and it is adding up toward lighter days, the trying less is more palpable, the reaching less is more seen, and it is all pointing toward a life of loving what I love, wherever I choose to walk.

To be loved by her is to say back to her, ‘my love, my dear, thank you.’

flight.

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I accidentally felt happy. For days and weeks after the visceral, physical breaking out of the cocoon I was bound up in, a feeling kept flitting in my side view. Brief and effervescent, blue and bright and entertaining. What was this? It was familiar and fleeting and then swooped back up and out and I laughed, a lot. Smiling in my kitchen alone, at the sun in the window I realized this was happy.

It was so long since I felt something similar to this—so many shedding skins ago, that I kept quiet. I didn’t want to shoot back into a caterpillar skin or reincarnate into trying and testing again if I spoke it out loud.

A few weeks ago I went to D.C. on a work trip, flying into air I used to be afraid of, settled in with a movie and few hours of silent shuttling sky, sitting in tandem quiet with a kind-souled fellow traveler. I wish I could explain what happened then, maybe someday there will be words for what it is when two people who have both found themselves as butterflies find the same draft of air. For now it is enough to know that while the cocoon may feel lonely, newly winged flight is not.

I spent the next five days waiting on couches in hotel libraries, trying on hats and wandering new streets, running to keep warm and crying from the cold. I came home and talked on the phone, met people in stores and smiled, sipped soup and felt full, bought bread and coffee creamer and wore warm socks on frigid nights.

I lived. And until then I thought what I was doing before was living, but it wasn’t. It was leaning toward what I thought would feel more, look better, seem easier somehow. I was waiting to live until living felt nicer. If I could go back and try it again, faster, better, would I? No. I had moments of great through every minute of my life as a caterpillar and cocoon. I had family and love and friends and a life that held me while I found my way to this. I hold it in my hands like a cup of warm tea, look across the steam and see sugared sunlight fall through leaves, see the shadow cast of light in an afternoon room, and I know that this life is magnificent.

It is magnificent.

transformation. part three.

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Is the end of the cocoon like the falling off of a scab? Wanting to be healed, pulling off a scab before the skin underneath is strong re-injures, re-reddens the skin underneath, flaming it back into the need for another growing temporary tough covering. Does the cocoon fall away when the butterfly becomes bigger than the place that holds her?

When I was teaching young children, back in the days of gathering sticks and leaves into small hands, bandaids keeping small hurts together, I purchased a butterfly kit, a small caterpillar that would morph before our eyes.

The caterpillar ate the leaves we gave it, moving in little circles in the sphere it was kept in. The cocoon was woven in slow time lapse, shifting without us noticing, coming back from being in our own homes, there would be another layer of change we hadn’t noticed the day before. The time came for the butterfly to emerge, we saw its wings inch out toward the light coming in from hand-printed windows, and then, nothing. It stopped partway out from the dim interior of its den, and died.

I didn’t know what stopped the final push into new, higher territory, what ceased the struggle to break out of the mummified, turning chamber that held its dissolution into wings I could see, wings never used.

I wonder if the closed plastic case was part of the reason, if reaching out past the caterpillar life into more of the same stopped whatever alchemy was happening. I wonder if I would have opened that closed jar in a nearby shaded tree, with fruit and wind and spiraling seeds, would the new life have burst out easier, the forward joy reason enough to break out, fully formed?

Or did it happen too soon, the wings underneath the scabbed cocoon not strong enough, injured in its trying to be free of the very house that was growing it strong enough to leave?

Healing is a process, unhurried, methodical and painful in its slowness. There is a trust built in, once you have been through this transformation a time or two, that life folds and unfolds like a clean sheet pulled from a sun-warm line. You will know when the time comes to leave what you have been healing under, because it will fall off when it is no longer needed.

When the sky is its own shade of blue, and the nearby leaves dance in a wind made just to carry you, you will reach up and realize you have shifted without noticing.