Staggered Stance

There was lightning in the night. No sound, just bright sparks that pierced the blackness of the room and for an instant illuminated the sky. The room will be our home for the next month, a high-ceilinged space with a large bed that faces out onto oak-studded hills and a winding road. We brought along the clothes and personal items we think will suffice for a month, but I can already see I sold myself short. Everything else is in a storage unit.

Our home of thirty years sits vacant now, awaiting its new owners, and the house we are buying is still occupied, and so this room is a kind of bridge from our old life to the new, and it seems fitting somehow that our first night here would be punctuated by lightning. It’s the energy of anticipation, creation, change. My general mood is one of weariness rather than excitement, and we are basically still in transit, but wide-eyed in the night, watching the lightning, I felt a sense of wonder and newness. My anxiety faded for a few minutes, and I was electric and free, just riding the currents.

We have deconstructed our lives and left behind a place we loved, and we knew it would be challenging, but it was time to move forward into a simpler way of being, and I have never doubted that we made the right decision. The bizarre ongoing nightmare into which our nation has been thrust makes everything feel scary and uncertain, and I will miss the comforting sanctuary that was the Ranch, but there is beauty here, too. Fog snuggled up closely in the morning, hushing the landscape, and I walked along a dirt path that led to a barn whose wood had faded to sea green, and there was the flutter of an owl, and trees, gnarled and noble, and a scent of earth and hay and maybe horses, and the earth was warm and breathing, beautiful and alive in a not-the-Ranch way, but beautiful and alive.

And all along this bridge from our old life to the new, the hands of dear friends have steadied us. I shall never forget that.

Earlier today I bravely went to see the woman who is my now-and-then personal trainer. (I know: that sounds pretentious, but it’s more casual than you think.) I am completely out of my comfort zone in this context, but she had a cancellation and it seemed like a wise and proactive step to give exercise a try. I’ve been working hard, but lifting boxes is not the same as a good targeted workout, and I’m stiff and weak and achey. So I went, and she directed me to place my feet in a “staggered stance” for a particular exercise, and the phrase has remained with me. I am in a staggered stance and have been for a month or so. There’s something surprisingly stable about it, a preemptive stumble, footing that respects the possibility of losing one’s balance. 

That’s how I stand, in a staggered stance, and in my wobbly way, I have remained mobile. And although I have had moments of feeling unmoored and discouraged, that old defiant belief in the chance of better outcomes has not yet abandoned me, and I intend to stay the course.

And even in my lowest moments lately, I found that the earth could still entice me with its radiance, winking at me now and then just as it did when I was a child.

Also…music. Last week we went to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, an incongruous little getaway, with Yo Yo Ma and Angelique Kidjo, and it made my heart soar. In one song, its melody based upon a Bach cantata, Angelique sings to a girl named Aisha, child of tomorrow, “don’t cry, your life is in front of you, child…everyone is looking for the truth.”

It was comforting and heartbreaking, an expression of the yearning of humankind. I let go of the ugliness then and I felt my soul float upward.

Some of that hope has stayed with me, and some of that strength.