It’s a heavy-weather time in my life. Not that All is Badness, but rather that I feel the weight of many gathered things, the way a storm front puts pressure on your skin. Even clouds are heavy. Even the smallest things have weight.
Nineteen years ago tomorrow, Nicola moved to Atlanta so we could live together. It’s all romantical and stuff until you consider the enormous pain of leaving one’s family and friends and country; until you consider the state change from complete (some would say ruthless) autonomy to sudden couple-ness with the equally sudden sense of responsibility to not make it any harder on the person who has just left everything she knew. It was a long time ago, but the anniversary still resonates. Even the oldest choices, even the best ones, still have weight.
I’m working on what I believe will be my final major screenplay revision. That’s no featherweight cloud — it’s huge and heavy and often uncooperative, like trying to wrestle a closet’s worth of clothes into a small suitcase. And it’s also so much fun. There have been a lot of setbacks on the movie front, but it’s still alive and inching forward. I don’t know whether to feel lucky or scream. Both, I guess. It gets confusing.
And I’m promoting my new business, looking to teach my program to people, or consult, or find contract work. Or perhaps a j-o-b. I’m excited about getting my ideas out into the world — I think they are needed now more than ever. And I’m deeply ambivalent about searching for work after the gift of this writing life that I’ve had for so many years.
Heavy weather. Lots of pressure, shifting currents, a wild metal taste in the wind.
That’s all. No deep thoughts today, but a lot of deep thinking.
Someone reminded me Sunday that in Japan the Buddha’s enlightenment is celebrated on Dec. 8th. This has made me thoughtful about how one might mark and remember passages into wisdom in one’s own life. The story of a being sitting down and vowing not to get up until awakened to the truth is one I quite like. And how one is teased and tormented by demons to take less-than-truth as the truth: yes, I’ve felt that. And then to open one’s eyes to the evening star and KNOW. That’s worth celebrating, I do think, even if it is not my faith tradition, and even if ordinary insights gained along the way are not the same as enlightenment. Maybe I’m oversimplifying my small–but treasured–understandings about Buddhism, but I do think living a patient determination to observe all that arises is powerful practice. Your willingness to look at the truth of the currents through your days is like that. Shall we call today, Dearly Deep Day? And toast it with a sigh and a merlot the color of monk’s robes.
I really like this post, probably because the tone of it fits in with how I’ve been feeling and thinking. And, oddly, of my favorite song right now. What you said at the end there about ‘heavy weather, lots of pressure, shifting currents and a wild metal taste in the wind’ . . . it feels like Pink singing “Waiting for Love”. Something wild’s waiting to happen . . .
There’s also immense courage in all of it Kelley . . .
While you are dealing with “heavy weather”, it does seem that in your case there will definitely be sunny days in the future.
Well, thank you all for being so nice. I appreciate it. Right back atcha.
There’s a book by Alan McGlashan called Gravity and Levity: weight and lightness, seriousness and laughter, earth and air and a lot of other metaphors. As Rosamond Pilcher has it, in what is almost a cliche, if it wasn’t true, love is another country. So Nicola has at least two other countries. She must love you very much.
I feel the weight of weather, Kelley. I can imagine how your clouds, and Nicola’s, smell and taste of heavy choices. I want to say so many things about this post… I’ll try to manage a few.
When we talk about maximum fulfillment, my friend Miguel and I keep going back to one moment in our lives: when we spent time together in Mexico City. We felt grand, and our selves expanded with all the possibilities ahead of us: we were both single, but had people who wanted to marry their futures to ours; we didn’t have a lot of money, but we didn’t have financial responsibilities either; I was working with the video artist of my dreams, and Miguel with the theater director of his dreams; we could choose to stay in Mexico or move to Canada; we had each other and we had time—to be alone, to be together, to party, to learn, to travel, to stay put, to think, to cherish, to waste. We held a bouquet of open paths.
But our most precious moment was short lived; it only lasted a month because choices had to be made. Each step we decided to take in one direction felt heavy with the awareness of both the life we were going into and the many possibilities we were walking away from. And then we were sad, because the roads we believed would take us into our individual versions of happiness also lead us into physical separation; we chose different countries and professions that don’t intersect the way our old ones did.
As you so wisely say, even the best choices have weight. Perhaps they weigh even more than the wrong and careless ones, because we hold the memory of the instant when Everything Changed and we realized there was no turning back; we hold it as a mark close to our hearts, an irrevocable mark. We don’t even have the buffers of Woulda Coulda Shoulda to put between the choices and the self we have become as a result. Today, we dance in the turbulence of those clouds, we dance for who we are and we dance for the memory of who we were: a tug of war we blissfully ignore most of the time, until anniversaries or other triggers remind us of The High Cost of Living.
Yes, it’s a funny thing about those heavy choices. Things I know I would choose the same way even knowing now the full extent of the cost and the weight I still carry. That weight is not too heavy for me tho. And it serves as a reminder, it stays with me. Gold is heavy too. But thankfully, all of the choices do not involve the same weight. There’s always diamonds…
Kelley, I hope that you and Nicola are going to have a chance for a wonderful, light day today.
Kelley. Karina and Jennifer, I’ve always been a sucker for a love story.
Me too, Barbara.