Really though, how strange that the highest the temperature could get today is 35 degrees. My age arrived there today too. The beginning of my 36th rotation around the sun. Actually doesn't seem like a lot, when put that way. Perhaps putting it into days would feel different . . . 12,775 . . . definitely seems like more. How do you quantify 'a lot'?
A different kind of 'a lot' is the amount of gratitude I feel today. The thanks I'm giving. Last year (yeah, it took me way too long, I think), it occurred to me that one's birthday really is about giving thanks for the time you've had on this earth so far. Even in a pandemic-induced quarantine and with snow on the ground (usually a rarity on my birthday, besides last year . . . and the year before, when there was a fucking blizzard!), I feel so fortunate for my lease on life.
Beyond the big things - a pretty sweet earth, beautiful family and friends, and a partner and work I'm really in love with - the small things are a HUGE part of what make up this feeling today, and always. For example, I love how my neighborhood always smells like hashbrowns in the morning. Even when I get as far away from Key's Cafe as Como Lake. Makes me wonder if it's really just Key's, or if one of my corner's of the universe is just kind enough to me to help me always feel at home.
This morning, the smell of hashbrowns in the air, I gazed out over the lake from the dock, my breath frosting into the air and drifting over the reflection of the sun. I felt so content, which sent me pondering the continuum between that and . . . not discontent. I think the other end of that spectrum, for me, is curiosity. I love the oscillation between contentment and curiosity, between feeling happy and comfortable within what is and feeling propelled to uncover something different, beyond.
I feel very grateful that I'm privileged enough and have worked hard enough to find methods that help me uncover my own differents and beyonds, in hopes that doing so will help me connect to other humans just trying to do the same in this life. I've got words. The things that begin to form in my mind while out on my morning walks, by the end of them nearly desperate to be poured onto a page (or screen, as it were). I love and turn to words when my brain is turning ideas inside-out.
Sometimes I worry my love for stringing together words to illuminate my mind's insides eclipses my love of movement. Clearly, I'm skilled at inventing things that don't actually need to be worried about! This morning, I got thinking a little more clearly about it. I think stringing together words is one of my brain's best mechanisms for sifting through all that's happening up there. Their immediacy, I believe, is actually what propels me toward movement.
It's so default for me to turn things around in my brain so much that it drives me into my body. I think I love dance SO MUCH because it's my escape from my brain. Don't get me wrong: I love my brain too. And I don't believe in that Cartesian split bullshit, like my body is just a vessel for carrying my brain around. But I DO think it's very easy for our human brains to take over the navigation of our whole being in steering us through our lives, and the rest of the body deserves some time in the driver's seat.
Those lungs, that draw in precious air, stingingly cold and sultrily humid. Those legs, that flex and extend to travel us through the beautiful spaces we traverse. That heart, pumping the life-blood that allows feeling into the rest of us. That nose, detecting olfactory delights (and less pleasant wiffs - they are a part of our experiences too). I could go on. I think I just mean to say that I feel so fortunate to have forged such a close relationship with the whole of my body, as it reaps such great benefits in a more complex and holistic experience of being a human on this complicated and beautiful world.
Within my words to movements continuum, I think words are the concrete to movements abstract. In this, I find great joy in realizing that this though process just solidifies what I already know innately - that I have little to no interest in trying to get my movements to really mean anything concrete. If I wanted to offer the world more concrete thoughts with my work, I probably would have tried to be a writer by profession. I've come to find that I think I serve the world better by offering movement to do and to view that inspires feeling. Presence in the body. Joy in the moment, connecting to self, music, others. That's my kind of abstract.
Wrapping up this post of gratitude, I'll say that I set out from my home this morning in hopes of flying my kite. While I'd say it's ironic that the last couple days have been windy and today still, I don't think it's irony. I think it was just another chance to shift my plan to respond to the moment, stoking my curiosity about contentment.
Alright sun. I'm runnin' around you again!
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