Changing
Since 2017 I haven't lived in one place for more than a year. Yes I was in the same state for most of that time but there was still a very transient nature to my life. Weekends on the road headed to regattas, six months in Colorado during the covid pandemic, moving from college back to my parents house each summer. My time in one place always had an expiration date, things never felt permanent. Luckily I love to pack. Gathering belongings, trying to guess what you’ll need on the next adventure of your life, the possibility always excites me. Now I’ve lived in the same place for a year and that scares me. Maybe I’ve been in flight for so long, flitting from one place to the next that my body and brain have expected me to move on by now. I’ve had to battle this feeling that staying, settling down, does not mean a loss of adventure or possibility.
I think that this sentiment most likely comes from watching other people's lives, from comparing theirs to mine. Feeling like I am too far ahead for wanting to settle in a single place and simultaneously too far behind because I’ve only just found that place. Call it a curse of your 20’s or life or of living in the age of social media but it feels as if there is so much else I should be doing. So much that I am missing out on because I’m not running in the French alps or a surf instructor in Costa Rica or rounding up cattle on a horse in Montana. But I think if I were living those lives I would still be day dreaming of a place like Maine with a small farm and a beautiful life there that needs living.
On the farm the other day Sue pointed out an enormous Oak. It’s probably more than 80 feet tall. It towers over the old red farm house that we are repairing.“We planted that,” she said. She goes on to tell the story of how they wanted the tree somewhere else but were out of town when the man they hired to plant it arrived and so he just put it where he saw fit. It still lives in its accidental home some 40 years later. That is a permanency I crave. The ability to look at a tree and remember the moment when sapling met soil. The ability to be that tree, to look down at the landscape and people you once looked up at.
I don’t know if there is one thing that will make me less scared to stay in one place. I don’t think that there is some grand piece of advice that will make my fears of missing out on a different life dissipate. I do know however, that when I spend time on the farm it feels like where I am supposed to be. That when I’m living life here, working and playing and resting, there is nowhere else I would rather be. That the majority of my life, no matter where I live, will be mine to decide how I live it. I know that there is much more adventure to be found here, a whole lifetime's worth, and I am excited to be here, in Maine, to experience it.
I’ve been reading and watching a lot of Andrea Gibson's spoken word and poetry recently. It is a strange thing to subscribe to a Youtube channel you know wont post anymore videos. Andrea passed this July. This has been on of my favorite pieces of their work:
Don't live in your head
Live in your heart
Live in the moment the climate activist tries to decide
Whether or no to leave the porchlight on all night long
So love can find its way home.
Live in the unknown
Where the answers aren't easy
Where the question marks shine like Victorian keys
Live in the curiosity that unlocks everything certainty cannot
Live in the yes im lost
Thank goodness for the proof
That I've not been walking in anyone else's footsteps
Live in search for one truth
That is nobody else's truth
Live in the courage that it takes to make art
That no one will love but you.
