proteanme

I have been reflecting back on this summer, which for the most part was quiet and solitary to see if I can reconstruct how I got to here, which on the inside feels like a different place from where I was in May. Different place is maybe too dramatic. Maybe more a shift to reveal a place that was always there. A flurry of meaningful stuff happened at the start of the summer. RU moved to the Bay area and I went home and  saw lots of people I love from different parts of my life – family, camp, Bloomington and through Dad. And I went to LA and saw other people I love and then I had my 50th birthday. There’s was such a sweet turn out. And RU surprised me and Adele came out from Chicago and my friends gave me a gift in support of my writing that made me cry. I felt soooooooooooooooo lucky.

Including “RU moved to the Bay area” in that above list does not at all capture the earthquake like significance of the event. Everything changed.

After that it felt like a lot of chill time and I think maybe I needed a lot of stillness. I’m a big believer in neutral space, in not going from a to z. Radical personal change is typically not “my jam” (as my friend Colleen would say). Also, I am way into in-betweenness and in-between space. Probably in large part, because that I have so much in-betweeness in me, being queer and butch. So for a big chunk of time I think I was just hanging out and being with myself.

Thinking about that time now I can see that I did a handful of things that started turning the iceberg around. One, I fixed up my Bridgestone RB2, which is a road bike and it was such a pleasure to ride it. There were times I felt downright joyful pedaling around. I know I’ve blogged about it a bunch so I won’t keep going on here. Second, I brought my amps up from the basement and set up some dedicated practice space and then started playing here and there. Ditto blogging about this too. Third, I went camping with AM and BDF and I let myself be myself in the woods. I made bad jokes. I made up songs and also sang whatever popped into my head, which at that point was like a radio station from the 70s + 80s (please don’t call these oldies). We saw whales. We meandered our way back to town and had adventures. Fourth, that reading in July that AM and I kind of threw together. It was so heartfelt and open and it felt like everyone was personally projecting some special part of summer, like everyone had special super summer powers. And because of the reading, I started writing poetry again. I think of all these as milestones in my own un-numbing. There were other things too, hanging out more with Remy, turning off talk radio, my neighbors tearing their fence down, hanging out with Lowen, meeting Olive and Gus for the first time, falling in love with the projects my fellow writing group writers are working on.

So there it is. Documented in one entry. I’m sure I’ve written about all of it over the summer, but I think I needed to pull it together for myself. And its all stuff to reflect on especially in light of thinking about nurturing and how to nurture and what to nurture.