I heard that Google was shutting down unused accounts... and so I decided that I'd better check in here so it's not unused anymore! I've been thinking about picking up blogging again...
Is anybody still out there? Hello? It's been an age!
Let me know if you want to catch up! <3
Love, PollyAnna
Sometimes I feel like my entire life up until now has just been a warmup.
A 54 year warmup.
The early years were spent just trying to figure things out - up from down, right from wrong. I got conflicting messages in those early years: I thought I knew right from wrong, and I was trying to do right, but I kept hearing how wrong I was. I don't have the clearest memories of that time: it was a time of confusion, and my confusion colors the memories, swirling and fading and glowing with bright light and sudden darkness and misty gray and the discordant sensation of spinning upside down without gravity to tell me which way to go.
Somewhere in my teen years I started to figure a few things out. I keep swirling and tipping over but sometimes I could glimpse sky or ground and think "ah so that's up and down" but then darkness and light and noise and flashing and silence, and so I kept holding on to those glimpses of stars and earth and trying to remember them so that I could affix myself into my space.
This looked like noticing when people were making things up. This looked like identifying my own desires, and stubbornly adhering to my longings, even when people in my life told me that my longings were strange and not for the likes of me. This looked like deciding that I was someone who wanted an education, that I wanted freedom - wings to fly the world, filled with ideas and dreams and possibilities. This looked like seeking independence. Sometimes it sounded like me telling my parents that I couldn't be them; sometimes it looked like refusing to take help. It looked like sex, and saying no, and experimenting with my power as a young woman. It also looked like shrinking from that power, so untested and strange, and hearing voices tell me that I would be burned by it, that it was imaginary, doomed.
A brief flash of time in my 20s that looked like travel. Graduation. Living alone - with houseplants and a cat and easy access to city amenities on the weekdays - delicious dinners and funny movies and on the really good days a play or a concert - and weekends spent in the woods, calling out "on your left!" and passing people the entire way before lounging at the lake, occassionally slapping a mosquito or diving in to glacial melt, feeling alive deep in my bones.
And then: marriage. A house. The deep call within myself to have a child - a girl, please let it be a girl, because if it is a boy how can I worship him and still love myself? A daughter, my very own, delivered into my arms. to teach me what love should look like and how much it hurts and all that is possible. To teach me all of my failures, to build my strength, to help me to dream again - first for her, then for me.
The failures, fast and furious. Mistakes were made. The wrong partner, the wrong life, the old messages creeping in and creating a swamp around my brain telling me that my dreams were too big, too free, too much. Staying small to make a small person feel better. Watching my own tiny small person become bigger and bigger, fighting to keep pace with her, always one step ahead, so that I wouldn't be too small to love her in the big ways she needed.
The failing of body. Of hope. Of my day to day routines, once taken up with playdates and grocery stores and Target runs and an infinite number of snacks and bedtime stories about princesses and elephants and cowboys and dinosaurs and orphaned girls who found their bliss and a girl on a prairie and a mouse who could dance but didn't understand that you're supposed to let the boys catch you (and wondering why not). My days now doctor's appointments and reading "Sammy's Mommy Has Cancer" so much we memorized it, finding strange comfort that it was not only us.
Years of this. Years of lonely and pretending. And then... the hope that the old dreams weren't wrong. Saying no to all of it, yes to career (faltering, failing, flying). Back to alpine lakes. Watching my girl child struggle, deep in her own sorrows, the childhood of cancer and divorce permeating her bones in a way I could not reach.
Grief, that old companion, whispering that it would never get better.
A year trapped in our homes, doors slammed, our deepest experience a trip to the grocery store to restock. Missed opportunities: there were no creative outbursts, no new fitness peaks, no home projects completed. Only holding on, the sensation of loss of gravity returning with force, nausea returning.
Sudden leaps. The daughter departs, finding her own wings, looking back over her shoulder and calling "I'll be back... sometime." Spinning, flailing, wondering. Grasping straws - pouring love into my students, grateful when they give it back. Finding my own way. Books, paddling, countless picnics with a basket near a tree by the sea and falling into someone else's stories. Imagining the fairy princess ending, spinning in a blue -then pink- then blue - dress in the arms of a prince.
No prince.
A trip to Italy better than a prince. Standing on an ancient bridge with my beloved child, swimming in a champagne prosecco sea, bathwater warm, effervescent. Astounded. This is - still possible? Are we really here?
Setbacks. Disneyland is an imaginary place, the rough and interesting edges smoothed off, dollars flying out of my pockets in return for - what ? For pretend experiences with pretend characters in a pretend town. Effervescent sliding back, the water gone still.
Out of stillness, something new again.
What if... what if, there is still more? If it was always Italy and a warm sea and my daughter's laughter in her blue bikini, healthy and strong and uncaring about anything except what we care about?
What if, right here, right now, on my walking treadmill, facing my backyard with the small brown rabbit who lives under a bush and the pink dogwood that is in stick season and teh grass that always needs mowing and the foxglove that plants itself whereever it pleases and the moss on the garage roof; what if here, with birds on the wires and houseplants everywhere and pictures of the women who believed I could and a pocket thesauras (so old fashioined) and candles and crystals and a notebook with a fox and a tin of pens and soft music playing from my phone and sweat on my skin and my mind seeing stars above and earth below, what if... what then?
The story writes itself. The girl inside me could not imagine the house with space for a treadmill ordered impulsively, hopefully, or the candles or the plants or the music. The young woman dreamed of it, determined. The young mother had it, but lost it, over and over in succession. The middle aged divorcee survivor begged for it, spinning again.
And here I am. The witchy woman with infinite power not yet controlled, the gifts unfurling at their own pace - the intuition that doesn't lie, the figures of speech that spring to mind, the glimpses of stars, the gripping of ground to try not to fall. All the rest has just been a warmup what is next.
My skin is warm, the treadmill still unfamiliar. The words are the right words but not there yet, not at all.
I didn't choose the childhood, the adulthood, the fall, or the rise. They revealed themselves to me in the ordinary ways, but I grabbed them by the shoulders, calling, "Why? Why? WHY?" until, on the good days, they gave the answers.
I know the answers. I know the hopes. I know that I have a path in front of me, if I'll only take it. That there are grizzlies, and treatment centers, and Gilmore girls, and houseplants, and a bunny, and a girl who is hours away trying to find her stars and earth. I know which path will lead me to where I want to be, and which will not.
Sweat on my skin, plastic keys at my fingertips. If I just keep walking, the stories reveal themselves.
I've been on a round the world trip that has always looped back to this spot, and the exhaustion is real. And now I'm in the right place to do my real warm up, for the new training regimen. I know where the stars are, and I know how to hug the forest to ground myself, and that I am made of saltwater. I know. So I am warming up my body, steadying myself, and deciding to go.
For real this time. Because one day it will be too late, but it isn't too late yet.
54 years is long enough for a warmup. Actually, it's the right amount of time, of this I am sure. I've been looking for signs, and the signs are getting tired of showing up for me, their frequent visits wearying them. My pocket is full of four leaf clovers, magic mushrooms, dorsal fins and seal faces and eclipses and foxglove that plants itself and visions that come true and knowing that knows.
Yes. Now then. Now. Yes.
