Pacify me.
Earlier today, on a spur of the moment, I decided to make the trip home. Ostensibly to pick up an item or two, run some errands, as my availability will be closing up very shortly, what with the new job starting on Monday. But underneath that was the familiar impetus to change scenery, of the same genre that would infect me when turmoil in NYC would propel me away from law school for a weekend or a holiday and into my small hometown's welcoming embrace. Back then, it was any number of things that would jettison me from there to here, sometimes with ominous stormclouds chasing me out of The City, a metaphor rather too on-the-nose. Sometimes, it was academic pressure, sometimes the sheer difficulty of the material. Other times, professional worries or anxiety about the future would nip at my heels. Often, the City itself, teeming mass of sociopathy and psychic oppression that it was, after having ground me in its teeth, would spit me out onto I-84 or I-95 or I-91 speeding westward.
I no longer live in the City, though I will be working there regularly, so I can escape much of what weighed so heavily on my shoulders when I lived there and spent time among the food-insecure. But even here, troubles occasionally brew, and a recent desistance, bound up as it was in other things like professional anxieties and existential apprehensions of the future, has prompted the same sort of lung-cleansing. Chekhov periodically fleeing Moscow for the easy air of the countryside.
A new job awaits me on Monday. With BookExpo, I feel I've turned a corner in my career as a writer. In other aspects of life, disentanglements proceed. Bindings, some of them important and lovely and taxing and delicate and, simultaneously, adamantine, uncouple. Fog lifts.
There's the image of the stars in the sky mimicking the dazzling complexity of the mind, but I find perhaps the more stunning or, to me at this moment, meaningful reflection of nature in a person's interiority is the quiet. That such palpable, welcoming quiet outside can not only reflect but also inject itself into an otherwise troubled, preoccupied mind. That the wind rustling the leaves overhead can whisper you to sleep, that in the stars, even those whose luminescence persists through cloud cover a smile forms and in so forming gets you to do the same.
And when I sit out on the porch, especially this late at night, I can hear the crickets.
I no longer live in the City, though I will be working there regularly, so I can escape much of what weighed so heavily on my shoulders when I lived there and spent time among the food-insecure. But even here, troubles occasionally brew, and a recent desistance, bound up as it was in other things like professional anxieties and existential apprehensions of the future, has prompted the same sort of lung-cleansing. Chekhov periodically fleeing Moscow for the easy air of the countryside.
A new job awaits me on Monday. With BookExpo, I feel I've turned a corner in my career as a writer. In other aspects of life, disentanglements proceed. Bindings, some of them important and lovely and taxing and delicate and, simultaneously, adamantine, uncouple. Fog lifts.
There's the image of the stars in the sky mimicking the dazzling complexity of the mind, but I find perhaps the more stunning or, to me at this moment, meaningful reflection of nature in a person's interiority is the quiet. That such palpable, welcoming quiet outside can not only reflect but also inject itself into an otherwise troubled, preoccupied mind. That the wind rustling the leaves overhead can whisper you to sleep, that in the stars, even those whose luminescence persists through cloud cover a smile forms and in so forming gets you to do the same.
And when I sit out on the porch, especially this late at night, I can hear the crickets.