I realize that all of us get rebooted in our lives, and usually more than once, catalyzed by a medical diagnosis, a big loss and plunge into grief, or an old dream dying or dead. But everything can and does change with seemingly happy things too: falling in love big-time, finding the job of our dreams, or moving to our seemingly forever home. What we thought was the life plan, the itinerary of our own invention, or the trajectory we were supposed to live turns out to be a dry husk of a once high-flying insect.
Just like when we reboot our computers, we have to shut down the old ways, wait for a new start, and enter some kind of password or otherwise invoke magic words or deeds to begin again. Unlike the computer, when the screen comes online again, it doesn’t often have all the same icons staring at us.
For me, the reboot started April 28 when the ophthalmologist told me I definitely had a tumor in my eye. It continues and will likely still keep unfolding over the coming months as the radiation treatment plays out its tumor-dissolving magic. Late spring and summer have become something else indeed.
Instead of going swimming two or three times each week, driving to meet friends for lunch or wander through Kohls to see what cool shirts are on sale, and going here and for gigs and meetings, I’m home, watching what is usually high summer move through me like the wind through the trees, also rooted here. The gains are more abundant than the pain (just about all gone), fear, and anxiety. Each night, we make time to sit on the porch, and in the dark, listen. We can usually make out at least four different kinds of katydids interrupted by the the tender and mournful call of the barred owl. Daytime, like right now, I’m also on the porch, hearing swirls of wind topple through the osage orange trees while a bird I cannot see pierces the waves of cicada humming (or roars). The soundscape continues to open up.
My work in the world — and I don’t just mean how I make a living — opens up too. For the last year, I’ve been considering ways to make a living without leaving the house as often, and boy, is that coming true with a vengeance. Some of my coaching client are coming here now, and over watermelon on the porch, we talk through new essays, website copy, and what a poem truly wants to be. The urgency that has driven the rambling hippie school bus of my livelihood for years is no longer onboard, and that bus is parked somewhere in the back 40. Instead, I’m letting come to me more than ever what my best ways are and could be to grow Transformative Language Arts — the ways we can use writing, storytelling, theater and more to enhance our lives and world (yup, and the Patreon campaign is part of this).
But there’s another closer-to-the-skin layer of my work: to listen more, be stiller, and trust more deeply that what’s mine to do will make itself evident (while resisting what’s not mine). Every chance we’re given to see our storyline — what we thought we were living, who we thought we were — fall away is a gift.
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