Another ides of March has come and nearly gone. Another transition is in full swing.
I wrote about the ides of March for an assignment about spring break and my ecological self during the spring semester of my first year in the Prescott PhD program. On the ides of March that very year, 2010, I was offered my first permanent position with the National Park Service. Come to think of it, it was my first permanent position of any kind. The first tangible permanence I had experienced in many years of nomadic living and seasonal work.
I wrote about transition and change. I wrote about leaving the comfort and companionship of home for life in a foreign land. I wrote freely for the first time. With the onset of permanence, I allowed impermanence and the unknown to take hold in the written word. From the experience of writing and uprooting myself from home was born a desire to stretch, to challenge, to create. While the seeming permanence of Alaska turned out to be of a more transient nature, the impermanence and uncertainty of my own dance with the universe began to take hold/had unwittingly taken hold.
March 15, 2010, I was living in Rockport, Washington. On this ides of March, I type while perched atop a cozy, albeit creaky, futon in a cherished room of an old, well loved and well lived in home in Rockport, Maine—part of my recent west to east backward manifest destiny journey. I am with friends who are family. I am alive. I feel alive.
A person quite dear to me recently told me that the universe bestows upon us myriad offers of paths to follow. We can focus on what is missing from these offerings, of futures we imagined and that cannot or will not be realized. We can dig our heels into the ground in a modern dance rendition of Stravinski’s Rite of Spring. Or we can choose to dance with these offerings. To rock and bow, sashay and sway in a rhythm reminiscent of Alvin Ailey’s soulful, grounded Rock-a my soul in the bosom of Abraham.
I have a choice.
The future may be uncertain, but then hasn’t it always been so? I am simply choosing to waltz with a secret admirer for a time.
life of m 