notes from the edge of a year
I'll be 33 tomorrow
A year ago, I was in California. I woke up in the guest house at my friend’s place, nestled at the foggy feet of redwoods, and I found a perfect wild turkey wing feather on the walk down to the main house for coffee. It seemed very clearly a gift. A pragmatist at heart, it was fun to ask people what they thought it meant. Abundance, someone told me. Someone else reminded me what the abundance comes from, which is sacrifice.
It’s been a long year, since then. I had to let a lot of things fall apart. That was something I learned this year: when I find myself feeling like everything’s going to fall apart unless I do more than I am willing to without feeling resentful, made servant, made a resource out of, then it is best to simply allow it to fall apart. If I’m the only thing keeping something together it was not structurally sound to begin with. Drop back to what you’re actually willing to do, without feeling put out, and you will see what your life actually looks like. Can you live with it?
I’m trying to take some of the advice of the professors I had in school and allow myself to make some moves in private. For much of my career, I had no faith in my ability to get things done unless I had some kind of massive looming deadline and a bunch of eyes on me and the risk of letting down my pride. My pride has been a good friend to me: it has protected me, sheltered me, stopped me from doing things I would struggle to live down. I wrote about my big brother last year — how incredibly present he still feels, how I feel like our relationship has only gotten better since he died. That’s one of the times I can hear him best. When I’m proud. When If I have to talk you into loving me, then you’re too dumb for me to love in the first place. When that’s just your opinion, man. When I don’t let people talk to her — to me — like that.
I don’t miss my twenties. I love being a little older. I’m much better suited for it: it’s kind of amazing how much of the issues I had with myself — with my body, my gender, my social life — have gone away since I was relieved of the burden of having to be a very, very, very young woman. If there was one way my child-self was impossibly wise, it was in the way she always insisted on being the age she was. When my pre-teen peers seemed anxious to grow up, for parties and drugs and adult attention, she went through the motions of her age like she was drilling verbs, running arithmetic, like it was knowledge she knew was good for her, like it was something she knew she had to do, and do like this, so she could do other things later. She did this even though there was a real way she always felt more like an adult than like a little girl & she did it even though there were consequences — but I won’t get into that. I don’t like to dwell on my childhood. Seems undignified. Children deserve privacy. I want to protect that girl, like my brother taught me.
Today, I am eight years older than he ever was. I continue to age for both of us.
A few days ago, my dog gave me a gift. I found him pawing at the earth, scattered with old feathers. He dislodged a small clod of earth, and there he was:
Except for the dirt, he was perfectly clean. A few bones in the back of his eyes a little broken, the tip of his top beak crushed at the end. I wanted to be gracious for the gift, so I buried the rest of him: Goose and I dug a hole in the earth. We gathered his feathers and the rest of his bones up. Later, I went back with my husband to make sure he was safe. Then I soaked him in water, brushed the dirt off of him. I asked the people I ask these kinds of things what it means. End of a cycle. Wisdom. Death — but the kind that’s a gift.
I guess I’ll find out.