Days are mostly the same as they have been for seemingly forever around here. Getting longer, yes, but the content is still in its day in day out interminability. On clear days the sunrise still shines pink on the mountain and reminds me of both the sweet simplicity and closeness of these days, but also of the long loneliness of a long and lonely year. The kids’ activities have been tentatively taking a few steps forward, often to be quickly followed by a few steps back as new cases pop up here and there. We were planning on being off to a swim meet today in White River Junction, but Stowe High School had to go remote again last week and so, we are home instead of sitting in a car all day and cheering our girl on via some hopeful Livestream. Chris just had a nice cry about it all over our waffles this morning. Good and tender papa.
I told my family this week that they better brace themselves for all of the storytimes/ kinder music/ and toddler tumbling that Wilfred and I are going to be hitting up once we get the green light. Maybe it is sooner than it feels, I think that Chris and I can register for vaccines on April 5… so, not long. And still forever. It’s so immense y’all. I know I don’t need to mention any of that to you. In it. All of us.
Here or there, now or then, I will probably remain in consideration of the same old tropes as ever: Time and Identity. There continues to be fuel- infinite it would seem- for the fires of contemplation in both regards. I have said forever it would seem that time is a tricky bitch and it remains the same. Identity perhaps a little more ephemeral as different aspects ebb and flow, but I have been feeling this low and steady song of a parts return these past months and it has most of me in its grasp, like a reclamation. Me of it or it of me or some combination of the two. But I am had. And as I had for a long time perhaps supposed that this particular part of me had atrophied and died, I am taking it slow and noticing what I notice and doing my best to keep the whole of things alive in mind and heart.
Shortly after our 2012 move from the Coules of SW Wisconsin to another hilly but completely suburban pocket of the state, I remember driving on the beltline bypass around the capital with Chris and saying something along the lines of: it’s like we hover up above the earth here. Where we used to live nestled deeply in her rhythms and pulses, we are now rootless and separate in a new and unfamiliar way. When one of my closest friends from our Viroqua years visited for the first time, she said something along the lines of: eep! wrong habitat meg! She was not wrong. It was such a hard move for me, on so many levels. I could have never really anticipated the parts of myself that I was leaving behind and it took me so long to identify the parts of me that I was moving toward. I think compounded in some ways by the particular ages of Maple and Eider, more independent of me suddenly than they had been in our early childhood home. I was lost. And a central part of me felt, and in many ways was, profoundly severed.
I lost that farm mama part of myself. The one that tended more than a couple of kids and a funny Basset Hound. The part of me that was a part of a piece of land as well as a region and culture unified by a similar ethic to love the world slow enough to see its new growth as well as its timely decay. To make songs and art and food during her long and restful winters, and to work and play and work hard some more when the land is warm and green and the sun shines and the rain pours into all of her possibility.
As much as my intentions were good, and I set out to tend our family and our own personal postage stamp of a property, I was young and naive and didn’t yet understand the way in which the parts that live inside of us need their own tending in order to maintain their purchase within our psyche. So as I set out to care for everyone else, I lost her. I couldn’t bridge the space that had severed her from within me then to where I was now.
And of course, it wasn’t any one way and not another. It was an incredibly difficult and painful first two years in our new home. I lost a lot. We all did. Yet slowly but surely, I found my footing and reclaimed my agency as the author of my life and began to build up an aspect of myself that as of yet had gone mostly undetected. I began to teach in earnest. I had for years already at that point but not in any way that found me much identified. First in the yoga room, and then in my own home to my own kids. I taught in small and obvious ways to begin with and then bigger and wider ways as time moved on. In my own work to reclaim myself and nurture my own wholeness, I began to see the ways in which I could hold space for others called to do the same. I built up a part of myself that has become essential and in many ways central to the whole. And I am so grateful now for what was born out of what had been laid bare by that move.
When Chris and I were discussing another, even bigger, move to our new place in Vermont, he was scared that it would be hard on me in all of the familiar and painful ways of that first relocation. I assured him that it would not. Hard, yes. But in different ways that were less dangerous and threatening. And ones made much more manageable by the inner work of the past near-decade. Plus, I knew that I was moving toward something that had been, for the most part, asleep in me those many years.
It has been slow. So many changes all at once from the moment we decided to make the move, after years of deliberating, to the arrival of Wilfred, and then all of the other new place pieces and, of course, on top of it all, COVID. The pieces that once felt so tenuously placed inside me are now rooted and alive and even when they are not at the forefront of my attention and care, are nonetheless accounted for. As we settle more on this beautiful piece of land in Northern Vermont, I can feel that long slumbering farm mama - yet now maybe more accurately ‘farm and woods mama’ - standing up inside of me. I am taking deep and steady breaths of the mountain air and the confiners and the northern hardwoods that make up much of my new home. Behaviors and perspectives and rhythms long resting in me are blinking open into fresh hope and reclaimed purpose. Once again Chris and I are unified not just in a shared vision for our children, but also for the whole of us, as we live in a place that requires our shared tending.
And even as I write this, I see that it is time for me to get to it. The day is warm and bright and the sap is running and we have brand new to us evaporators to put to use today. We will clear some dead stand from the woods to build some long-burning fires and see what we can do with it all. The chickens are laying like crazy and ready for a bigger and more robust coop. The seeds for this summer’s garden have arrived and will soon be ready to set to start indoors with the help of some lights- so much later than I am used to even in the upper midwest.
We all take tending. Some parts and sometimes more than others but each in turn and often together. We are this beautiful and complex intricate weaving of trial and error, self-study and adjustment, attunement and forgiveness. It is never perfect. But may we each strive to tend it into as much wholeness and heart as we can muster. Through all of the ebbs and flows and long springs of becoming.