letters from a healing jouney

letters from a healing jouney

Friday, December 11, 2009

the in between

hours after work and still hours until the party. no reason to start getting dressed, yet no reason to start on another project, knowing that Staying Out Late is a big expenditure of energy. it's like the space between breathing in and breathing out. when we're full and ready to move on in a moment. content, and also excited.

Monday, December 7, 2009

my other car is a bike

I get frustrated when I drive a car around Los Angeles. I feel simultaneously blessed to have such a useful resource to move me and my belongings around. I want access to the car in this freeway culture. I want to log a much higher percentage of my miles by bike.

I am wasting time thinking up scenarios where I don't have to drive so often anymore. They usually involve moving closer to my job or finding a job closer to home. Either possibility is frightening, and foolish since I know I will do neither in the immediate future. I still turn my wheels, spending energy dreaming up a reality that doesn't exist. (My house magically moves itself out west! My job miraculously moves 5 miles inland after 15 years in the same location!)

Then I dream about carpools with bike racks and other more plausible plans, but those, too, are hard for me in a city where I don't know a huge amount of people like I did in my old Home. Resource sharing takes community building takes time. I am not a patient lady. I want what I want now! Change! I would probably be the perfect revolutionary: constantly sloughing off the present in hopes for a more functional future. I know though that there are certain things I am not willing to risk, certain comforts I don't want to put through the process of change. I want to hold on to certain things: my husband! a home! a laptop! Take away everything else and leave me these. ...and maybe our cat and some cute clothes and good books and my old diaries and photographs... Once I really look deep I wonder how much I will gamble to really have it all.

And all the time I dream away, maintaining status quo at home. Dreaming of short, easy commutes by bicycle as I drive my minivan into the sunrise.