I get caught up in the pursuit of money. Putting in the hours, the minutes, and sometimes the excruciating seconds in order to do one more task, one more meeting, to finish out one more week, to make one more dollar. Trying to take advantage of the project and the pay while they’re still there. It’s exciting at times. Fulfilling. Dreadful at others. The paycheck every week brings out the most dragonish nature within me. Talons scraping gold closer into a pile, working hard to make it into a hoard.
Dog sitting for friends in Colorado, I sneak in a hike here and there. I read before I go to bed. I edit some stories in stolen morning moments and have to tear myself away from them when I feel it’s time to be monetarily productive. In between work, I take moments to go stand outside with my face turned upwards toward the sun. I throw a toy for the eager dog to fetch over and over again. I watch a bird sketch a line across the sky. But it’s not enough. Balls of static electricity spark within my blood. My body and mind feel taut. I find that, suddenly, I want to sit and do nothing. To have long stretches of time to stare off into space, to think or not to think, to lie on my back in the grass. To stretch out fully on some floor and just be.
Lying on the floor is on my mind because recently I ran across an online clip where Jimmy Fallon got up from his place behind his desk and stretched himself out flat on the studio floor. I guess because there’d been some recent thing in the news (or wherever things appear these days) (it could also have been an old clip) that said that lying on the floor can have a calming effect on the body and mind and he was trying it out in front of his live audience. I remember how when I had my own little place I would often lie on the floor and just stare up at the ceiling. Sometimes I’d put on a record and lie there while it played. Sometimes not. All the while, thinking that I was weird to be lying on the floor doing nothing. I didn’t know that I was soothing myself in that way, I just knew I liked to do it.
With that reminder near, I find myself craving this now. Craving time on the ground. Craving grass and tree and air and birdsong and the wind weaving through the leaves and silence. Craving nothingness. My friends have come back for a few days in between their summer trips and the chaos levels are high. This on top of the past handful of weeks which I’d let be frantic with work, stress, and striving. I’m not feeling one hundred percent on more than one level. Inching my work hours up as I have lately, I’ve found myself wondering how people do this every day, every week, every month, through the years. How they can live going at full speed all the time. When do they breathe? When do they stop? When do they reflect? When do they do the things that fill their souls?
As the days start early and go on, when I notice the tightness in my veins, I find myself performing the helpful, physiological sigh to restore a sense of ease to my body and my mind. But I need more than that. I know myself. For so long, I’ve been extremely lucky to have been able to tap so deeply into that place of rest, imagination, inspiration, thoughtfulness, slowness that helps me stay whole and connected to myself and to the living parts of the earth.
I’m lucky to know
what is good for me and what is not. What I need and don’t need. What I can do
for long periods of time and what I can’t.
A handful of hours before my friends hit the road again, I’m sitting at the outside table where I’ve put some distance between me and the noise. I’ve got a book on my knee. The day isn’t too hot yet. Coming to sit next to me, my friends’ youngest daughter asks me what I’d been doing the day before when I’d had to close my door while she watched a movie in a nearby room.
“I was working,” I
said.
“Work!” she exclaims. “You’re here on vacation.”
Which is true and not true. Because I always have the option to make my life a vacation. I always have the option to take what work I want to do with me. I have the option to do both.
But now that I’m
feeling this low-grade disquiet buzzing under my skin, I know I need to pay
attention to that centermost part of me that needs the chance to breathe inspiration
in and the chance to hear.
As Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for everything.
My friends drive
off. I tidy up the spaces I use when I have their house to myself. I pat the
dogs on their heads. Silence descends.
I leave the computer and go stretch out on the floor.
