CHANGE, intention edition.

by Lisa

I am untethered and unwound, wounded. Alone in a new way while I try to scoop up good people with invitations I used to refuse out of habit not so long ago. Offering up apologies and explanations for being gone from those good people not so long ago. I will remember that being alone and lonely are different things, even while I am both for a while.

I rearranged, from the future to the furniture. More to come, predictably. I made messes that I am cleaning up. I made mistakes that I am inspecting for details, with hope that I will not make them in the same ways in the same places in my inner and outer worlds with different people-places-things.

While I inspect, I’m practicing. Does this feel genuinely right and true? Should this stay or go? Should I stay or go? The open-mind windows let in part of the bigger world and I patch screens to keep out the buzzing of mosquitos that sting self-doubt.

I am practicing first survival, then other, more complex things. Right and true things.

When I started to write this blog, I’d just landed sideways after a big change. Another big change, not by choice, left me flat on my back and blind, helpless for a time. And yet another big change that felt like a safe haven where sometimes things were gloriously right and sometimes not okay but that were a dramatic improvement over what had happened when long ago I chose not to close the windows, maybe forgot to deadbolt the door.

I raged at each other change with my click click typed words that I hoped no one read immediately after I hit “publish”, after a few breaths taken to let me notice that the practice of writing and editing in a vacuum had freed me from the confusion that comes with rage. Some got to stay, and I’m sorry they did.

That’s changed, too. I will write with joy and I will refuse regret.

And soon, I will have the chance to change things just because my soul might shout “NOT THIS” and I will be free to listen and respond. I will allow my soul to say, quietly, this.

• This is a vegetable garden out front. A tidy busy art installation of a living room with as much dust as I care to notice or not. A fridge with all the mustards and pickles and hot sauces. A jar of instant coffee on the windowsill in the kitchen to remind me of a place where coffee pots and electricity are not reliably present. A plan to return there and to go everywhere else I’ve never been again and again. A cabinet stocked with rows of pint glasses and champagne flutes in proper ratios, 12:4, according to my habits and not just hopes. A paint cabinet as a cocktail table and the easel always in view. A big batch of something cooked for the people who share this house with no expectation of obeying the clock to eat or of eating what I cooked. An invitation to stay over on this couch and the joy of tucking someone in. All things I’ve put in place, over and over, and forgotten to feed and water while I attended to not-this.

The power to say get the fuck out, to myself or to anyone else. The chance to say please stay, to myself or anyone else.

This, with intention.