How to Love a Wolf: September's first storm, September 1, 2019

How to Love a Wolf: September's first storm, September 1, 2019

I'm celebrating the end of a beautiful intensive week's process with Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak—and the beginning of a new job—by sitting like a civilized person in my quite luxe new 'real' living room, in a too-large charming inn-like house: my new digs. This pastoral domesticity is a surreal adventure in place-making, adapting; I feel transitions of skin running ahead of transitions of fascia, blood, viscera, and the microscopic space in the quantum reaches of bone marrow.

A storm is rolling through and this is my cause for celebration. I light candle after candle; burn sage; wipe the salt sweats from candleholders too real for this pretense of normalcy. Cracks of thunder startle my quick-to-startle body; but I smile with the memory of my loved ones here just hours ago. The icy bright of a late-day sky tells me it's not finished shedding tears.

Truthfully: I reveal and hide, hide and reveal; and I slowly learn to see what is hidden—all its truth and unease, release and constriction—with compassion. I fake-til-I-make befriending myself in the micro-moments and movements that suspend the threat of reveal in the possibilities of revelation.

I'm ambivalent, but less so, over time, in my willingness to flow with change—a true constant—but especially with the mundane, weird, tired, driven, obsessive, soft joy that perforates my perfectionism, cynicism, and doubt.

I have a new job. It's a loaded experience; I will not resort to saccharin assurances of 'fine,' skin-so-soft newness, or paths cleared to show a 'way.' The present unfolds: the pavers of its paths are filled with both the good and the hard, both shiny newness and tangled past, ebullience and my sober grip on the reins.

I grieve for my Philadelphia home, gratefully, longingly sometimes; I sing the blessings of my Chicago-Great Lakes creative and chosen family; it will always be my artistic home where a cozy room in the home of beloveds awaits my increasing returns: chaos and water and realness. Still, I walk with renewed grounding in this old and disarmingly preserved Midwest terrain of Ohio, tilling it to jibe with the present and with a future whose restraints are, I humbly ask, those that are chosen with care, as if from an apothecary's creaky, wooden shelves, and not those asserted by a force that was never deserving of my devotion in the first place.