To Go or Not to Go? Ask the Magician
The Magician.
With the sun’s glow like a palm on my back, I’m surprised when I feel the coldness in the gentle breeze that lifts my hair off my shoulder. It’s transformational—that warmth. Loneliness into a gentle longing. Sorrow’s depths into memory and wine.
I close my eyes and feel the music of chimes—a song so ephemeral it could be a dream.
This, I think, is the setting in which to face regret. Here, it can’t help but be merely gentle giant.
The white of winter’s paint is receding back up the mountainside in the wake of the alchemist’s touch. The green-brown illuminated in its wake is rich and hearty. For long months, it has held a heavy burden and is stronger for the challenge.
“When the fear gets you too, call me,” Geronimo says. “Or call me even if it doesn’t—like in a month or two. I want to hear what you’re doing.”
After years of plodding about on this earth to the beat of his passion, he was stopped cold by fear’s grip. Work is his calling now. Back when drumming was life, in the middle of a set, you could close your eyes and become one, the pounding indiscernible from your throbbing heartbeat, like traveling inside the organ that pumped life through the universe, in tune with the whispers of its anguishes and the thumping pulse of its ecstasy.
For eight years, he’d played on the streets, drawing crowds, working them for more tips in between ten-minute sets of nonstop rhythm—now murmuring, now thundering. It was just such a set that had first drawn me to him.
“Where you working?” I asked him when he told me he was through with the drums now.
“Walmart,” he said. “They’re not so bad.” He defended quickly, taking my silence as a rebuke of the conglomerate. “They treat their employees good.”
Maybe the fear works a little different in each of us. A friend of mine says I run. I say, à la Alison Kraus, “I’ll stop moving whenever they stop making roads.” The quip works well for me—most of the time. The blood in my veins, though, knows I’d stop for love.
“Magic,” says Brazilian artist Vik Muñiz, “isn’t about making people believe something; it’s about showing them how much they want to believe.”
As I close my eyes and listen to the fluttering of a bird’s wings, the bay of a hound, the whoosh of tires moving over concrete, a faraway exchange among children, the distant song of dreams, I find myself wanting to believe I will stop. I raise my glass to the sun, grinning.
“The Magician” is one from the unpublished archives (aka recently unearthed notebooks in a black box with a silver ribbon). Penned, April 11, 2008.
To Go or Not To Go?
To go or not to go? For a long time, that question plagued me. Bouts of staying were interspersed with stretches roaming.
The tension in that question? I’ll take it. It speaks to the multi-prongedness of my desires and appetites. To be a citizen of the world. To dig my roots deep into the soil of community, be part of shaping our tiny corner of the globe. To engulf and be engulfed by all and sundry. To intimately know a path so worn it becomes an etching on your soul.
The self-doubt and all its questions? What would have been on the trek not taken? What does it say about me that I can’t just … fill in the blank with whatever narrative about what we, women, people are supposed to just do? Am I running from? To? Blindly? To outpace regrets or harms taken or given, which is to say, to outpace me? That I can largely do without. I’m glad it’s being left in both the dust of roads oft traveled and the nooks and crannies of homes nested into.
It seems a good time to revisit my relationship with this question. Tomorrow’s my birthday, a time I like to take stock of where I am and where I’m going. And I’m on the precipice of a winter/spring stay in a viewsome, woodsy house-sit in central Oregon, where, for five months, I’ll be chopping firewood, feeding chickens, and sleeping in a house without wheels regularly for the first time in four years. Ruby the van will come, too, of course. There will be weekend jaunts. But it will be a time of staying. And of writing.
What a pleasure that now the answer to what was once a question fraught with angst and rebuke comes with ease and simplicity. To go or not to go? Oh, yes.
I’m looking forward to a span of deepening my living from the “cave of the heart”
talked about in her post on the seasons of writing earlier in the week. discussed writing seasons here, too, from a different angle, along with the importance of awe. Shout-out to , whose take on the mind-blowing beauty of Alaska inspired me to dig through my own photos from the Last Frontier, and to , whose post on cutting her hair reminded how fluidity can be prodded by symbolic changes. in prodding the possibility we might not need answers prompted me to consider the question(s) I’m living. reminded me of how deeply I care about writing to prod traditional narratives and expand possibilities. reminded me how watching birds enriches the days. And ’s exploration of the ecology of ideas stoked my fire for creating in community. And thanks to for recommending I come back here and tag those mentioned here.Thank you all for being here and musing and creating with me.
I would love to know (in comments or by email): What in your life plays tug of war with you, two opposites seemingly begging your exclusive attention? Have you leaned one way or the other? Have the two found a way to merge? What serves as a magician, alchemizing what ails you into what fills you up? Guiding you to what’s next?
Thank you for lovely story, mention, and prompt. I always feel torn between the stable chaos of my family life and the pull of the open road. I long for solitude but can't help but feel antsy on the rare occasions when I have it. I fantasize about living a more nomadic existence, but I hate packing and thrive on the routine and consistency of my day-to-day life. In the end, for me, home and travel work together to make me appreciate both!
I’m so loving all your writings. Thanks.