Piano

Piano

by | Jan 8, 2024 | Perspectives, Writings

I don’t know what made me do it.


It could have been my emotions running high from the difficult interaction I had at work that day. Maybe it was watching (really watching) my 6-year-old rehearse a piano piece from memory. 

I sat down at my 20-year-old electric keyboard and played a song in its entirety for the first time in nearly seven years.

I began taking piano lessons around age seven and continued them through college. In high school, I barely had time to practice because I was involved in so many other things, but I had a wonderful piano teacher, Mrs. Shannon, who allowed me to come to her once a month and practice on my own in between. We always worked on one classical piece and one fun piece, which kept me interested and playing. (Parents, if your older child wants to quit around this age, I highly suggest this as an alternative if you can swing it! Just. Keep. Playing.) In college, I was a music major for a year (Vocal Performance), and even after I changed majors, I still signed up for a piano course every semester just so I would keep up my skills. After college into my 20s and 30s, I had gone a year or two at most without playing, so this was by far the longest drought.

Over the last several years, I would get out the keyboard and set it up in a desperate attempt to give back to myself during some of the most challenging years of my life. Playing has always, always brought me joy. But rather than sit down to play, I would walk by it with a twinge of disgust as I noticed the dust settling onto the keys that never got played, resentful of its presence while I ran around taking care of small children and working multiple jobs teaching, tutoring, and copyediting while my spouse was working the longest hours of his career in medical residency.

This particular day, however, as if on autopilot, when I saw my son get up from the piano bench, I went to the coat closet and reached into the plastic bin that held my music. I hesitated for a second; What should I play? “Something easy,” a little voice told me. “Something you can play right here, right now.” So, I lifted the books of classical pieces and slipped out from under them a binder of pop music.

I braced myself for disappointment: What if it’s too hard now? What if I’ve lost it completely? I would be crushed.

I cautiously picked a simple, repetitive song with major chords and a pleasant tune. My fingertips rested delicately atop the glossy keys. I checked the song’s key and glanced at the sharps. My hands moved a bit clumsily through the piece, halting far too long between bars to find my place for the next phrase. But even as my transitions stumbled along, I felt my elbows drop, my body start to lean into and out of crescendos and pianissimos, my muscles and my soul recalling how good it felt to express themselves in this way.

I tried to sing the words as I played, but my throat kept catching. All I could think was, it’s still there, I’m still there.

I have no illusions that I’m going to begin playing every day, or that this will be the beginning of some remarkable musical revelation. (In fact, I’m sure the only reason I got through one whole song was because I had given all the kids an iPad.) But by playing the keyboard that day, I resurrected abilities that I thought had disappeared forever, rekindling a long-dormant spark of joy that comes from making music. My ability to play (not as well as I used to, but still!) and my love for music had indeed survived years of neglect amid phases of life where my own needs have often been last on the list.

I think this happens to many of us – after a certain age, we don’t think much about what brought us joy as kids because we are so focused on all the responsibilities of adulthood. We have to set aside hobbies and generally things we used to love to do, to build careers, serve as caregivers, or whatever else we have been called to do. It’s often accompanied by guilt and shame that we let that thing go, that we’ve never taken the time to restring that guitar, write that novel, practice that language, or play as much as we used to.

I have felt all these things. This is why I used to be so repulsed by the presence of the piano in the middle of a phase of life that did not allow me to sit at it because, by the time I could, I had absolutely nothing left to give. I imagined the critics: “You only have one life! Take the bull by the horns! You must MAKE the time!” And the often miss-contextualized “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” from Mary Oliver. 

And then, a wise friend said recently: “Resting is not quitting. I can take a nap and my God-given assignment will still be waiting for me when I wake up.”(Thank you, Morgan.) And that very day I decided I was not going to beat myself up for these pauses anymore. 

We are only human, and there are a finite number of hours in a day, and life just doesn’t often afford us the privilege of reviving an old pastime. This is part of the organic ebb and flow of life, where in our youth the focus is generally more on ourselves, and as we get older our focus grows outward to include our inner circle of family and friends, our circles of professional influence, our greater purpose on earth, even society as a whole. It is not a moral failure to have to put a hobby aside; it is natural. And just because we must take a hiatus from something that we love does not mean we have quit, as my friend so sagely ascertained; those sparks that God (or whomever you believe a higher power to be) places in our souls from the time they are formed are a part of our assignment, and it will not be rescinded; it will be waiting for us when we are ready to return to it. You cannot miss your boat. 

So what I’m trying to do now is to simply pay attention when I feel the tug at my soul to do something I miss and love. In my case, it’s usually playing music and writing. If I can do something, I start small so that I can be successful: a simple song, or some stream-of-conscious morning pages. I allow myself to celebrate the muscle memory that still hasn’t faded, or the one line I wrote that sounds just right. And if I can’t do anything right then, or for months, or even years, I’m trying to be gentle with my only-human self about it. The love, the ability, and the same old joy are all still there. When I can steal a few precious moments for myself, even if it’s been a while, I know where to find them – they will be waiting for me. 

 

 

The T-Shirt Drawer

The T-Shirt Drawer

by | May 13, 2023 | Perspectives, Writings

During the Kon Mari tidying craze, I went through the shirts in my T-shirt drawer and got rid of the ones I never wore, or didn’t like, or that didn’t “spark joy.” I re-folded and arranged the survivors of the great purge, so they were standing in the drawer in neat columns. I’ve actually kept them this way.

Let me assure you that these rows of vertically-filed shirts that I decided to keep are not the cute athleisure ones with matching leggings and workout-to-brunch opportunities; they are mostly cotton, screen-printed, well-worn, kind of holey T-shirts. I wear them around the house, to sleep in, and when I decide don’t care who may see me looking like a college student with forehead wrinkles in Target.

My family and I are about to move, and it’s time to clean out closets and shelves before we pack. I’ve tried to re-evaluate what’s in that drawer. There are a lot of T-shirts in that drawer that could (should?) be donated, recycled, or thrown out, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I have purged kids’ clothes and toys, kitchen items, and even other items of my own clothing, but I keep feeling emotionally attached to the entire drawer of T-shirts.

Some of them include:

Shirts from my undergraduate alma mater. The first T-shirt I ever bought on campus, for homecoming. Then there’s the one I bought when we went to a big bowl game, and the one I bought when I went back to teach there and needed something a little “nicer looking.”

One T-shirt from my Master’s alma mater. I have only one from those years, because I spent most of it abroad, where women don’t really wear these types of T-shirts. It represents the most transformative period of my life.

The Spanish National Team soccer jersey from 2008. It was the year they won the Eurocup and the year I left Spain to move back to the U.S.

A few T-shirts from the university where I spent five years getting my Ph.D. When I bought my first T-shirt after starting classes there, I remember being so proud to own it. How many hours did I spend reading, studying, and writing in those? Too many to count.

My husband’s college T-shirt. It’s been worn so soft and thin that it would probably tear down the side if you pulled it too hard. It has a hole near the bottom where he used to open beer bottles with it. Oh, college.

T-shirts from races. Some I ran while I was at the peak of my game, and some while I was trying to heal a broken heart.

A long-sleeved t-shirt from the place we honeymooned. A  slice of bliss before the real work of marriage.

Some shirts from each of the schools at which I’ve taught. There is at least one spirit shirt from each place, including one that I bought a few sizes up to accommodate my belly while pregnant with my second baby.

Shirts from my husband’s medical training institution. These were some of the most challenging years of our lives, and when we met some treasured friends.

The shirts, it turns out, are not just timeworn articles of clothing; they are artifacts of my adult life thus far. These garments have clothed me on long runs, while writing my dissertation, while teaching on spirit days, while breastfeeding babies, while packing and moving some twenty times, and in a million other moments both exceptional and ordinary. They are an opportunity to recall times and spaces long past, and pieces of myself that are still part of who I am today.

“Our things embody our sense of self-hood and identity still further, becoming external receptacles for our memories, relationships, and travels.”

— Christian Jarret

For thousands of years, possessions have been connected to personal identity, and scholars have been studying this phenomenon for over a century. If you’re into this kind of thing, see, for example, William James (1890), Eugene Rochberg-Halton (1984), Russell Belk (1988), and Cheryl Harris (1993). More recently, psychologist Christian Jarret produced a TED talk in 2016 called “Why are we so attached to our things?” in which he explores the connections we make between our possessions and our personal identity.

Basically, in spite of our best efforts not to assign deep meaning to material objects, our brains are wired otherwise. It begins in childhood, and as we grow into adulthood, “our things embody our sense of self-hood and identity still further, becoming external receptacles for our memories, relationships, and travels,” writes Jarret in “The Psychology of Stuff and Things” (2013). This is why we may see so much more than colorful fabrics when we open a closet or a dresser drawer; we see the patchwork of our lives and of ourselves.

Of course, people may not have such a strong attachment to clothing or possessions, depending on the million possible circumstances of their lives, the culture in which they live, the strength of their ego, and their assurance of their personal identity.  Jarrett explains: “How much we see our things as an extension of ourselves may depend in part on how confident we feel about who we are.” In my case, my life trajectory, values, and sense of self have been through so many iterations in the last twenty years that I do think the T-shirts in that drawer have greater meaning for me than if things had been more stagnant. These T-shirts are a literal record of my past, present, and future identities. Perhaps they are also a way to convey those identities to others, like a sports fan brandishing a jersey or a scarf to show their loyalty and right to belong.

Someday I’ll be dead and gone, and all my T-shirts and other possessions will eventually be gone, too. My existence will have been whittled down to a birth certificate, a death certificate, and the relationships I had with others. For right now, while I have to start detaching from one place to move to another, I’m letting these T-shirts and their other drawer-mates live out their twilight years to the fullest, holes and all. They remind me of who I am and where I’ve been. Who knows which ones may be added to the collection in years to come?

Yes, they are just T-shirts. But if you will excuse the pun, they are both holey and holy: holey, from clothing my body over many years of a lot of life; and holy, relics of the past, evidence of experiences and connections, vestments for a human body that lives and thinks and feels, and testaments of love given and received.

How to Live on an Island

How to Live on an Island

by | Oct 24, 2022 | Perspectives, Writings

For the last five years, I’ve lived on an island. 

It’s not the kind of island you might be imagining, with cerulean water, white sands, and resorts for miles; it’s a small barrier island off the upper Texas coast, with surf turned bluish-brown by the currents of the Mississippi and a more humble, unassuming character than the tropical places you see in magazines.

I was born here, and though I was raised primarily on the mainland, I spent summers playing on the island’s beaches, catching buckets of blue crabs and ice chests of speckled trout, and surfing its small, mushy swells. When I was a child I felt such a deep connection to the murky waves that I would say hello and goodbye to them each time I went to the beach, just to make sure they knew I loved them. 

My twenties took me as far away as Vermont, North Carolina, and Spain, and then came marriage and children and moves for careers that unexpectedly took us back to the same tiny Texas island where I had spent so much of my childhood. 

“Hello,” I couldn’t help but whisper to the water as I drove over the bridge to our new home. “I’ve come back.” 

So I’ve been living on an island, and I’ve learned that to live on one is quite different than spending a summer or stopping by for a visit. 

The island life is not so much one of traditional seasons, but rather one of endless summer interrupted briefly by hurricane season, tourist season, and a few weeks each of spring, fall, and winter. There are rolling waves of heat and humidity, ameliorated by daily breezes that awaken the palm fronds and blow ethereal clouds of sand across the roads. The most magical time of all is in late September and early October, when the tourists have gone home and the sun isn’t quite so harsh. The beaches suddenly seem endless, the air is buoyant, and we all breathe a collective sigh of relief at the time and space we seem to have regained.  

Though our seasons are non-traditional, they require a certain grit to endure. Tourist season calls for both the patience of a saint and deep gratitude for the economic boost. Hurricane season demands vigilance, preparedness, humility, and resolve. For over a hundred years, this resilient little island has been battered by storms that will make you or break you, and probably both. In what seems to me to be the most apropos metaphor for the spirit of the island’s inhabitants, a large cemetery that lines the main boulevard becomes enveloped in bright orange and yellow flowers each year; even the island’s departed souls create beauty out of ashes.

When you least expect it, the island will give you a glimpse of its richness; you just have to keep your eyes and heart open to it.

It took me a long time to figure out what exactly it is that bonds the island’s inhabitants so resolutely. I’d toyed with the notions of a shared history, the experience of surviving a natural disaster, or a love for the beach; but none of these seemed entirely fitting. I’ve concluded that we are bonded to each other here because, quite simply, we all live on a strip of sand that is surrounded by the sea. Mother nature gently cradles our being and periodically threatens to swallow us whole. We can’t help but feel both privileged by the exclusivity of life on an island and humbled by its precariousness. It’s as if we all share the same knowledge that we belong to the waves and the sand, for better or for worse. 

The island is dotted with buried treasure, from the legendary bounty of the pirate Jean Lafitte to endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle egg nests. There are unique birds that peek out from the brush of the nature preserves and gorgeous historic buildings that reside nonchalantly on otherwise nondescript streets. There are family-owned businesses whose guiding principles are still honesty and trustworthiness, where even in today’s world you can get a fair deal. Cemeteries full of famous figures, iconic surnames, and many of my own family members sit tucked behind businesses and grocery stores, a trove of quieted heartbeats that walked, built, and served the island. When you least expect it, the island will give you a glimpse of its richness; you just have to keep your eyes and heart open to it.

On seven brief miles of land, there are people from every corner of the globe, an homage to the city’s early-nineteenth-century role as a major immigration port second only to Ellis Island. Now, people come to live here for work in the hospitality industry, at the port, or for the cruise lines. They are here for medical treatment at a highly specialized medical center, or to research infectious diseases. They might be snowbirds or living out their retirement at the beach. Their families were among the first to settle the land, they were born here, they ended up here by fate, or they are just passing through. Like most places, the diversity of social classes and cultures will probably never blend enough to create an idyllic melting pot. Rather, the island hosts a mosaic of individual classes, races, and cultures that mostly manage to peacefully co-exist. While imperfect and messy up close, it does indeed create a beautiful piece of art.

A causeway connects the island to the mainland and all the amenities that come with the urban sprawl of a major city. Yet the longer you live here, the less appealing you find crossing the bridge. We really have almost everything we need, including the year-round entertainment of festivals, performances, quaint but vibrant nightlife, and of course, the beach. To an extent, living on the island makes it hard to relate to the fast-paced, keep-up-with-the-joneses culture so prevalent elsewhere.

If you do venture off the island, when you come home you are likely to experience “The Causeway Effect.” This locally-known phenomenon is the sensation that washes over you as you enter the incline of the southbound lanes over the bay. Your lungs instinctively fill with breath and then exhale with gusto; your shoulders and jaw relax; your heart does a barely-palpable skip, and your thoughts momentarily shift away from the awful complexities of the world. You can’t help but notice the way the sunlight looks like diamonds on the water, the azure sky, or the honor of having pelicans escort you home.

It’s been a privilege to live on this little island in the Gulf. As a local, sometimes I get caught up in the day-to-day hustle of work, children, and other responsibilities, and I forget about how unique my living situation is. I don’t go to the beach nearly as often as I should. But when I do, I always make sure to walk to where the sand is made soft by the sea, curl my toes into the shore, and tell the waves hello – so they know I still love them.

Carnival in the Time of Covid

Carnival in the Time of Covid

by | Feb 19, 2022 | Perspectives, Writings

The other day, I stood whooping for beads, arms waving, with a baby on my hip, as I watched one my town’s local Mardi Gras parades march past. I reached for a juice box for my youngest, and I looked up to see float riders passing by, dressed in plague doctor masks. These masks were first used as (ineffective) protection for physicians against the plagues of the 1500s and 1600s, and later morphed into an iconic carnival costume, meant to embody death and disease.

I turned to my husband, wrangling our other kids, pointed to the float and said, “Oh my God. THAT’S CARNIVAL.” 

I’m pretty sure he heard me and was like mmhmm, cool.

In the years I spent studying, reading, and writing about Early Modern Spanish literature while I completed a Ph.D., I learned about Mikhael Bakhtin (1895-1975), a literary theorist and philosopher. From the moment I saw the plague doctor masks, I couldn’t stop thinking of him and his theories. (Old habits die hard.)

Bakhtin was particularly interested in the carnivals of Medieval Europe, when traditional power structures of both church and state were inverted. Not only were revelers given a kind of sanctioned freedom for a period of time, but the established power hierarchies and the traditional order of things were open to ridicule and even re-examination. With the European Renaissance and the advent of capitalism, Bakhtin argues that the carnival spirit of society waned, but it was reborn as a literary tendency, most notably in Francois Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel. Like the carnivals themselves, carnivalesque literature fomented the deconstruction and re-imagination of established norms, making way for new ideas and alternate ways of seeing the world and existing in it.

Modern carnival is a time for extravagant celebrations, opulent costumes, gleeful parades, masquerade balls, and a glut of traditional food and drink that disrupt the monotonous predictability of our everyday lives. But historically, these few weeks a year of carnival are also a time for social and political parody; representations of overt sexuality, degrading acts, and vulgar language; grotesque depictions of the body and disease; and imagery of death as a joyful occasion. If you pay attention to even the quaintest of Mardi Gras parades, you are likely to catch allusions these more egregious iterations of the tradition – like I did. 

Carnival is, as Bakhtin would say, the world turned upside down. Everything that is normally prohibited is celebrated, and all that is virtuous is ridiculed. Even traditional hierarchies of power are temporarily, if only superficially, abandoned, and people of all classes momentarily live as equals in a rare instance of social unification. Masks that disguise the revelers’ identity not only afford them the anonymity to partake in the debauchery and disrespect of societal norms, but they also create a sea of humanity unbound by individual identities and power structures. During carnival, we are all the same fallen creatures, no one better than the next.

While the world is turned on its head for these few weeks, there is a collective release of social, political, religious, and sexual energy, which ironically serves to eventually reinforce the established order of things. After the chaos and indulgence of carnival, order, control, and structure are welcome respites. Society recalls why it does indeed prefer the norms by which it is traditionally controlled. And everything, more or less, goes back to normal.

When viewed in the context of the Covid years, I couldn’t help but see Mardi Gras in a new light. 

For one thing, Mardi Gras was cancelled in 2021, and we missed (and necessarily so) the opportunity for the brief escape and pressure release that carnival brings. 

For another, most of us have been living in what feels like a continually upside down world for more than two years, but without the gluttony, costumes, and merrymaking parts. Celebrations and gatherings of all kinds have been postponed over and over again. People have been dying who were too young and healthy to die; or who had survived any number of other illnesses and conditions only to finally succumb to Covid. Experts have been labeled as heretics and frauds. The information we have gotten from the top down has been sporadic, confusing, and often contradictory, leaving us floundering for how to make decisions. Healthcare professionals, first responders, teachers, and essential workers have been asked to do more than ever and risk their lives while doing it – for the same pay and half the respect. Conspiracy theories have been widely propagated and believed. Now, we watch in disbelief and horror as the world tiptoes around and away from Putin’s desire for World War III. And instead of the shared trauma creating societal unity, we are more unequal and clawing harder for our own power than ever before. 

Many people, long before Covid, lived and still live in a sort of perpetual upside down world, and as such the world we have now must not feel as foreign to them as it does to others who are fortunate enough to live more or less comfortably within the established order of things. 

I imagine, though, that for all of us, carnival hits a little differently this year. We get to pretend that even in the strangest and scariest of times, we can still flip our world inside out for these weeks of festivity before Lent, pretending that we still have some modicum of control over how things happen, even if we don’t. Maybe we remember for a few days that we are not that different from all the people we make out to be monstrous. We have the opportunity to connect with other humans over our fallenness. We find, I hope, some comfort in the recognizance of our shared vulnerability, our common primal needs and instincts, our sins (whatever we believe those to be), and yes, even our goodness. Maybe most of all, we are reminded that when everything is so upside down all the time, we can choose – as we do during carnival –  to face life with a tenacious determination to play, create, re-think, re-imagine, and find joy and connection, no matter our literal or metaphorical distance from one another.

Carnival is still for reveling, celebrating, releasing, losing yourself, forgetting the rules, indulging, feeling your feelings, and rediscovering your gut instincts. Maybe even for remembering why you love people. And when it’s over, the normal order returns, as it always does, even if little by little it gets modified or torn down in places – but it’s us who don’t have to come back the same.

Why I Started Writing

Why I Started Writing

by | Jan 17, 2022 | Perspectives, Writings

I’ve been writing since, well, I could write. In elementary school, I wrote a book of poems about everything from penguins, to why I hated school. They were cute and pithy and terrible and by God I made those verses rhyme.

In third grade, we got to write a story, illustrate it, and “publish” it in hardback form. I reveled in the process. I remember trying to write a super dramatic story that would make the reader cry. I was, as you might imagine, unsuccessful. I was nine.

In middle school and high school, the writing assignments were always my favorites. AP English was my happy place. I still remember the names of my favorite English teachers: Kahoutek, Marsh, Berner. To this day I am in awe of their ability to tell the story of a story, to make a bunch of hormonal teenagers believe literature had something to say to them, to cry while they watched The Outsiders or Braveheart for the millionth time to show us what symbolism meant, while also never, ever taking any shit.

In college, I loved my Great Texts and Spanish courses and was an editor and contributor to the school literary magazine. A master’s degree in Hispanic Linguistics and Literature led to more reading and writing, this time exclusively in Spanish. A Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature allowed me to spend five dirt-poor, glorious years teaching, reading, researching, and yes, writing. For my comprehensive exams, after passing the oral exam, I wrote more than 40 pages in 48 hours. It was exhilarating. A dissertation completion fellowship helped me write my dissertation in a little over a year because I was able to write full time without having to teach. I researched and wrote at home for anywhere from 2-14 hours a day for an entire year.

After leaving academia, I kind of stopped writing. Professionally, I began to focus more on teaching, tutoring, and editing, and writing my own ideas fell by the wayside. Coupled with the birth of three children and my husband’s medical training, I eventually stopped writing at all.

In 2018-2019, I made a decision to make time for things I enjoyed, which led me to think about writing again. It still felt kind of selfish, or silly, or both. I hadn’t written just for the sake of writing since I was a child – why should I start again now?

In an effort to “do it right,” I reached out to some English teacher colleagues of mine for advice. What books should I read? What advice did they have? One said to start writing every day, and the other suggested reading The Artist’s Way. Both suggestions turned out to be excellent advice.

Around the same time, my parents sold my childhood home and I found three documents from childhood that gave me the confidence boost I needed to write:

1. An entry in a first-grade classroom memory book that said “I want to be a teacher.” I had, indeed, always wanted to be a teacher. And I became one. And I loved it. Wow, I thought. Maybe I did know myself back then. 

2. A third grade “about me” page where I answered the prompt “When I grow up I plan to…” with “be an author who writes childrens [sic] books.” Hmm. I wanted to be an author too? 

3. A self-created Time magazine cover from some unknown date in elementary school with a self portrait, my first and last name, and the word “Writer” next to it. Ok, ok, I thought. I’ll start writing again. 

 

 

 

Ok, let’s be honest. I do not feel like a “real writer,” I may never be a published author, and I will most certainly never be on the cover of Time.

But finding these things did remind me of who I was, and who I have always been. So I decided I owed it to myself honor my true Self and, as Julia Cameron would say, my Inner Artist, and write.

So for more than a year, I wrote. Morning pages, journal entries, lists, emails, reflections, notes in my phone while rocking and breastfeeding babies, attempts at poetry in English and in Spanish. Some days I started to go back and edit, cleaning up language, syntax, redundancies, and more. This was the real work of writing, the returning to the draft to pick it apart, or polish it, or reimagine it.

For another year, when the Covid pandemic hit and began to drag on, I did a little less writing, and a little more revision and editing. And I bought myself a domain name, thinking that perhaps one day I would share my writing there. And for a year, I taught myself WordPress and Divi, and built myself a blog website.

Like most writers, I’ve been terrified to share my writing. It was difficult enough to get started and create something. Share it with the world? OH GOD NO. This stuff stays right here with me forever until I die.

 

So why did I decide to share, after two years of writing, beginning to revise, and building myself a website?

1. For motivation to keep writing and editing.

2. Because I read somewhere that writing was never meant to be one-sided; it is a conversation between the writer and the reader. Not everything you write needs a reader, but maybe some of it should have one.

3. To learn, grow, and improve as a writer and a creative being.

4. When I was lost and trying to figure out my life, reading other people’s stories on the internet, even if they didn’t look exactly like mine, helped me. So maybe something I write could help someone, too.

I am not going to post regularly, necessarily. Well, I might post about it when I have shared a new essay or recipe or something. But I am genuinely not interested in promoting this blog, or where I fall on Google hits, or getting followers, or anything of the sort. It’s simply a writing home. If you read something that speaks to you or that you hate and you think you could help me make it better, I would love to hear those things. Other than that, this is just me being brave and vulnerable and sharing my writing with friends, family, and maybe a poor unsuspecting stranger who trips over this site while searching for something else. Thanks for reading.

 

 

Feet in the Grass

Feet in the Grass

by | Oct 19, 2021 | Perspectives, Writings

When I feel as if the world might pull me under, I put my feet in the grass. And since I live on a barrier island on the Gulf Coast, I can do this pretty much year round. 

If I have shoes or socks on, I take them off. I find a green spot in the sun and I engage in full-on mountain pose right in that very spot. I wiggle my toes down so they can grip the earth, finding traction among the blades of grass. My efforts to ground myself never feel quite grippy enough – I wish the soles of my feet could sprout roots – but I do my best to dig my heels into the dirt below and find my place.

I don’t quite remember when I started this ritual as a way to keep from losing my ever-loving mind, but it has become one to which I cling tightly. I do recall as a child loving the feeling of cool grass on my bare feet, but the connection between the soles of my soul and the scalp of the earth began as an adult.

These past few years have been … hard. Even though I’m trying to stop doing this, I’ll qualify that “hard” with all the gratitude I have for everything and everyone in my life. I am in the throes of small children who need me and depend on me in a very physical and emotional way 24/7, my spouse is in medical training, and as a highly intellectual being living a decidedly un-intellectual life, my truest self seems to mostly float just out of reach.

So when I’m losing my shit, I go outside, to the ground, and the grass.

When I find my sunny patch and shimmy my toes as close as I can get to Mother Earth, I start to feel my soul awaken. I have literal solid ground on which to stand when everything around me whirls by, or else lands with a sharp thud on my mind or my heart.

In this position, sometimes my mind wanders to what chemicals my skin might be absorbing, or if I’m standing in ants, or if one of my children has left the yard entirely. But usually, for at least a few breaths, I am reminded that I am still here on the earth, my body is held by my feet, my shoulders are stacked on my hips, and my mind is balanced over my heart.

I’m whole. I’m here.

I belong on the earth, under the sun, in the dust from whence I rose, and to which at my death I shall return. And in the interim: a little earth, water, and sunlight empower me to love, breathe, grow, and live.

 

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