i listen and give shape to what i hear

The way I move through a day still feels strange. Three months of them have been filled with the cloudy murk of things I can’t put into neat 8-hour chunks of time I used to spend in the box of a cubicle. Where my office supplies were tucked into rectangle drawers and word documents dragged and disappeared into tan-colored folder icons on the square screen in front of me. When I friend asks, how was your week? I pause and wonder if I am being asked to recount the things I did in it, if that is the measure of how my week was, because there is no such list and even if there were, it would surely come up shorter than my waking hours.

There is the work of sustaining a life in transition, which isn’t given the job title it deserves. One potential employer asked what I did during the two months between leaving my old job and arriving in Nairobi, and the most true answer I could have given her was move my life to a different continent. Even that isn’t the best answer, because there was also the work of preserving my life here for when I returned. I think now of all those films depicting Victorian-era England and the furniture that was covered in white cloths, the silverware and china locked up, the fields laid to rest. It takes time to arrange a life that will welcome you back.

And now, the coming back. The hours I sleep, willing my body to catch up with my heart that has been racing from the thrill of it all. (Just yesterday, a nurse-friend told me that for infants, breast-feeding is as taxing on the heart as running a marathon. No wonder they sleep so much, and so deeply.) The excavating of memories and words that went underground in the aftershocks of returning, this in conversations with friends whose patience goes deep, and whose eyes are trained to spot the glimmering of gold underneath all that dirt and rubble. The steps forward, by which I mean resumes and interviews and thank you notes and wondering and discerning, along with the careful threading of the old with the new. When it is finished, I want it to speak a story of love and faithfulness, and I want it to be beautiful. 

If life before was a race, as many people describe what we Americans do, living now is more like a dance. There is no beginning or end, only moving from one position to another. Some are drawn out more slowly, others repeated over and over, all of them coordinated to some beautiful song that plays from somewhere. I listen and give shape to what I hear.

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(photo: petals carried by water)