A Fine Sifting

Usually I will google first before writing about something I just thought of to see if someone has already said it like this. But I decided to just type it all out and see what I get. I don't care if it's already been figured out. This is me figuring it out. 

I was walking Penny in the dark night of 6:40 PM. Our Friday night routine. I get off work at 5 but then I gotta do dinner, and every other weekend Ivy goes to her dad's at 6 so there's that, like tonight, and we try to cuddle on the couch before she has to leave. Then our dog Penny is next up ready for full attention. Eventually I get to be "off". Here I am. 

I decided to designate a spot in the corner of the living room for my writing. I wrote and then backspaced these words: Our house is so tiny. It's fact but not what I mean or want to say right now. It's just that I was considering all my writing spaces of past... and how we've always had both a living room and a family room and an office where one could find quiet time. But as I felt the sting of thinking about that, what I used to have, going from more to less (and feeling responsible for that no matter how it came to be so), a glimpse of what we do have appeared. We've managed to live in this small rental for almost 6 years now. (I just realized I think today is my divorciversary and I completely forgot about that all day until right now.) So six years we've made this work. We have one bathroom with a shower. We all have to get ready for work or school and somehow it happens! And no one yells or gets pissy. How!? And I wonder the ways it would be different if we still lived in the big house, where everyone was gone to their own spots far away from each other. Once I had five bathrooms to clean. And how now we are closer —physically and relationally. And would I want it any other way? Especially these years? 

So yes our house is tiny but I'm only saying that right now because I was thinking about how much I appreciate the cozy nook I do have, right here in the corner of the living room on a comfy chair and my feet out on the soft ottoman. With my art and things that feel like me all around. I was walking Penny and thinking about the past year, as we tend to do in January, and how it feels like I've been sifted of the final remnants. And was feeling like not much was left, of friends, family, money. But what is left, I felt so warm and shiny and golden. The less I have the easier it is to see what I do have. And what is left is a heck of a lot of good parts. I'm a miner for a heart of gold.* 

Sometimes it feels like I went missing in 2017. But who went missing is the person I was pretending and or was trained to think I was supposed to be for so long. So long that I did actually think that was me. And that the "me" since then is something I should feel sad or guilty or victim-y about. In 2017 I didn't go missing when I upended my entire life and identity and ground beneath my feet. I left on my own terms to search for the real me. I went deep sea diving into the abyss of two, three? decades. A whole life.

Ivy and I took the stunning tree-saturated one hour drive over the mountain to the coast on New Years Day. Here we are. 

We got this.

*Neil Young, Heart of Gold