On Dirt and Clay and Flux

By Catherine DiMercurio

It’s been a cold spring here so far, though things are starting to budge. Until recently, the daffodils surged about three inches above the soil and then stayed put. Usually, I’d see their lolling yellow blossoms by now, at least at the old house. It’s my first spring here and aside from the bulbs I planted in front of the house in the fall, everything else that might come up in the sandy soil in my new yard is a mystery.

I’m a haphazard gardener. I like to plant, and to nurture, and I love to be surrounded by flowers, but I’m not the most attentive in terms of what plants thrive where. I don’t want to drown in data, but I could be paying closer attention, and maybe with this yard, I finally will, instead of just plopping into the dirt whatever was on sale at the nursery, or whatever colorful bloom caught my eye. But it is also very likely that I will plant something that was on sale, in what I hope is a good spot, and cross my fingers.

At the old house, I prided myself for taming the overgrown yard I inherited when I moved in. In bringing back what had gone neglected. Here, there is much to do too, though I am pleased what is already on the property, a mature rhododendron, a forsythia deep in the back yard, the irises and hostas.

My gardening efforts represent slow processes of growth and discovery and labor. Moving into a new place, waiting to see what will bloom, deciding what to do next, then planting, but also pruning, tending, and doggedly removing invasive species that tend to take over neglected spaces. Already I’ve been yanking out the strangulating vines of an old honeysuckle. I go outside to play with the dog but suddenly my hands are in the dirt.

The slow rhythm of gardening appeals to me, and it’s similar to what I enjoy about pottery. There are many long steps in each process in ceramics, so many techniques to learn, skills to master. Sometimes I think all I can hope for is mild proficiency, not mastery, but I am pleased to be producing functional forms whose shapes and colors are appealing and often delightful. I’ve described pottery as a hobby but it’s really more of a practice. Like writing, it is something I need to do. Making something that is both artful and useful nourishes me, whether it’s a blog post, a poem, a story, a mug, a bowl. These all can be shared, held, used to connect. The haphazard gardening I do is a little different; the need is there but what I’m producing is more amorphous. I want my space to be both safe and pleasing, and the process is long and grubby (and in this way is much like pottery).

In all these things I find the slowness of the processes appealing and soothing; they complement another task I’ve been tackling. I feel like inside me are all these crumpled pieces of paper and I’m trying to find them and smooth them out and understand if what is written there is a riddle or a love note to myself or some secret key to understanding myself or life in general better. Maybe that’s why I’m often at peace in being alone these days, despite the periodic loneliness I wrote about in my last post. Deciphering myself for my own growth is one thing; doing that while interpreting myself for someone else is quite another. I guess that’s what everyone wants, in some fashion. To be known. Just to be known without translation or explanation.

The slowness I seem to be cultivating brings me the opportunity to understand. I try to remember who I was as a child, what delighted me, what made me laugh, what made me cry. I wonder when I began to feel the pressure to fit in, to behave differently, and why it was so hard. I recall that while fitting it in often eluded me, I could achieve a semblance of acceptance by being accommodating, by trying to be less intense, less sensitive, by hiding those things. Looking back, it is easy to see the ways in which whenever I slipped up, conflict brewed, or some other negative reaction surfaced. Now, I love laughing in the kitchen all alone with my dog at something one of us did, talking to myself, delighting in the moon, in my own kite-hearted joy every time I see the lake. I talk to the tree in the yard and make up silly songs. I have stretches of seemingly unsourced sadness that lingers until it has run its course, and then it dissipates. I allow it. I allow myself all the weird and plain and quirky and sensitive and everyday things about me to flourish, things that over the years one or another person has mocked or announced as strange or made me feel uncomfortable or ashamed about.

I am making up for lost time. I am making up for hiding from myself. I am making it up as I go along, how to live now, how to live well on my own terms. And, yes, it’s sometimes hard and sometimes lonely but it is a relief also to not be laughed at for my quirks and my foibles, to not be misunderstood or quieted or subdued by someone who found things easier if I carried myself through the world differently. I want to be around people who recognize my joy and want to share in it, or who see my periodic melancholy without assigning to it sources or blame; it’s just mine, and it will pass. Like anyone, I want to be accepted, respected. I don’t always expect to be understood, especially as I am still learning to understand myself. But it is always a relief when that happens.

I’m perpetually perplexed by people who seem to have themselves all figured out. Perhaps no one does but people carry themselves as if they do. Or maybe it’s not something most people think about. It has become plain to me over the years that the things that often trip me up offer no such obstacles to some other folks. I’ve been teased for being physically clumsy but I think that’s wrapped up in some other, internal clumsiness as well. Maybe that’s too pejorative of a term. There are things I want to make sense, but they never seem to, and they are hard to ignore. It could be something about a past event or a current situation, or something more, but I hate it when I can’t untangle it. Unsurprisingly, I’ve been called an overthinker.

I wonder what the trick is, to be confident in the midst of feeling that everything is in flux, in a state of change, or still being assessed, figured out. In pottery, there’s a type of glaze called a flux and it’s used in conjunction with other glazes. Its components work to bring about movement in the other glazes it is layered with. It’s gorgeous and tricky and fun. Maybe the secret to that confidence I envy in others is seeing the flux of life, of the own innerworkings of my head and heart, as gorgeous and tricky and fun, instead of an unsettled, clumsy thing that I won’t feel comfortable with until it is figured out.

Over the years, I’ve learned to accept some ambiguities that used to cause a lot of discomfort. I’m okay with not knowing how a piece of pottery will turn out; I’ve even grown to be okay with things not turning out well at all. But in life the stakes are higher than clay. We are often in situations for years before we’re aware of whether or not they are “turning out okay.” And typically, it is only after some time has passed can we evaluate what “okay” even meant in any situation.

I think one of the hardest things to do is find the peace within a moment when the larger situation is quite flux-y. Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to things that urge me to slow down, to ponder the incremental inching of the daffodil stalk, to stare at the lake endlessly and simply hear it and watch the waves undulate, to nurture a lump of clay through all the steps that turn it into the vessel I sip coffee from. If I can stretch out a moment, I can find reprieve from the churning of my brain and its efforts to figure it all out. But what I want to work toward is being able to hold it all, hold the slow, stretched out moment not as escape from the churn and flux but as part of it. I want to feel how it’s all connected, but maybe getting there is a slow, clumsy process too. And maybe I’ll finally accept that there are things that will never make sense, aren’t supposed to make sense, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have something to teach us.

Love, Cath

On Loneliness and Patience and Weather

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes I’m never lonely at all and sometimes it’s always winter. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about loneliness is that you don’t talk about it. Discussing it creates an awkwardness people don’t know what to do with, which leaves me with the feeling that I’m somehow obligated to feel shame about it, as if I have done something wrong by putting myself in this position.

The hard thing is that casual social interactions don’t assuage the type of loneliness that strikes me sometimes. It’s true that making new friends in a new place can be challenging, and I do feel the ache of that sometimes as I’m adjusting to life in my new town, but what is harder for me is the realization that none of the relationships I tried to build in the past ever blossomed into something with the kind of longevity I once hoped to be enjoying at this point in my life. There were recurring losses: of the possibility of various futures, of that close emotional intimacy with someone who really gets you.

Which is not to say these endings weren’t necessary. But also, I didn’t anticipate the way those accumulated losses would feel over time. What is astonishing is the way my own perceptions of loss and gain shift and morph. There’s a certain bliss I cherish, the peace that I have gained/earned that is the absence of the friction of being with the wrong person. [Obviously, friction happens, even with the right person, but with the right person, there’s enough underlying love and good will that occasional friction is simply something to work around.] There is also the absence of the anxiety I felt being with emotionally unavailable partners, an absence of the loneliness I felt upon recognizing when someone did not have the capacity to try to hold my pain as fully and as tenderly as I tried to hold theirs. And yet, sometimes the absence of not having someone to lean on, a shoulder to cry on, feels greater than those things. At times it seems I’ve traded one type of loneliness for another.

And then, the next day or the next week, I feel changed. Clear headed. When we’re in the depths of loneliness and the grief that comes with it, it’s easy to identify with it entirely. When it lifts it’s plain that it was not so much “just a feeling” but more like the weather, more like atmosphere, something we breathe in, something that impacts our daily living. But also, something that shifts, changes, improves. I wonder if in some language, the way we say I’m lonely is in my heart there is bad weather.

What I keep relearning is that so much of everyone’s lives involves the intricacies and negotiations of competing compensations: I lack this, but I have that, and this compensation is amenable to me. I have also found that winter whittles away at the balance that can be easier to find throughout the rest of the year. On a recent rare sunny day, I found that the gloomy internal cloud that made me feel so dark had dissipated and I wondered if all I’d really been missing was the sunlight on my face.

I’ve started pottery again. Waitlisted for a long while at a couple of studios, I decided to take matters into my own hands and set up a small studio in my basement. I found another potter who rents out kiln space. While this set up means I’m losing the social connections of a pottery studio community, it means I’m gaining the flexibility to be creative on my own schedule, rather than being tied to studio availability. There are other losses and other gains of this set up. It is amenable to me. It’s also been about as challenging as I expected it to be, reintroducing my hands to clay, to the wheel. I enjoy practicing. I love it when I easily center the clay and pull up nice even walls. It’s disappointing when I fail to do so. And I hate that I’m frustrated by such minor failures. I want to be a person who sees failure as part of the process, to respect it as such. I want to be in love with the whole process, not just the successes. Once again, pottery teaches me about life.

This winter has been a long process of slow growth and many frustrations, and little griefs that I mistakenly have counted as failures. But also it’s been a winter of little joys that don’t get celebrated enough, that I don’t celebrate enough.

I once had a pottery instructor tell me you’re really bad at being patient with yourself. She also admonished me on more than one occasion to not be so hard on myself. It’s not that I expect to make flawless art, but it is true that I’m constantly changing the rules for myself about what “good” and “enough” look like. I have learned that I often create a sense of urgency in situations where there really isn’t one, as if I have to get things “right” as quickly as possible. I’m trying to pause when that kicks in so I can discern if the urgency is real, so I can slow things down, let growth happen. So I can practice. So I can appreciate practice and process, all of it, in all kinds of weather.

It’s mid-February and winter isn’t over by a longshot, but you can sort of see spring out there, off in the distance. I feel a shift beginning, where I can recognize that while I’ve had some low points this winter in terms of my mental health, I can also give myself credit for the on-going process of getting through my first lakeside winter.

Sometimes you need to write about loneliness or grief or the failures so necessary for growth in order to explain it all to yourself. Concepts like loneliness become transmuted into something solid, into a noun, into a thing to be turned over in your hands like a stone worn smooth by water, instead of a verb that scrapes across your heart and leaves it feeling like a skinned knee.

I feel as though I’m losing a little of the hollow feeling that has plagued me on and off over the years. It used to be that I believed myself less hollow when I was in a relationship. But after I had a long stretch of solitude/solo-ness/single-hood [I don’t know which nomenclature I prefer] and the hollowness began to fill in, I thought, don’t ever lose this, don’t ever forget how full you can feel on your own. I hadn’t known truly, up until that point, that it was possible.

[When I did meet someone new, I was fearful of losing what I’d gained. I think part of me fought the relationship the whole time, and part of me fought for it because it did have many good qualities. I talked about the struggle with him, not wanting to fight this war alone. But I suppose once the other person knows there’s a war they don’t feel much like fighting with you, or for you.]

So now I’m in the process of filling the hollow back in with the marrow of my own living. It looks like beach sand in my pockets, driftwood and rocks all over the house, clay beneath my fingernails, notebooks with random thoughts and little poems. Sometimes, too, it looks like loneliness clutched to my chest, a ruined lump of clay I couldn’t center, a dog struggling with his own anxiety despite my efforts to help. But, weather shifts. Atmospheric patterns change. It’s true that some griefs don’t ever truly abate, and a little part of our heart might always be stormy, but a heart is a great big world and the clouds can clear in other territories within it. It’s just hard to be patient with the process sometimes, especially in winter. But there’s no shame in any of it.

Be well. Be patient.

Love, Cath

On Low Points, Letting Go, and Leaping

By Catherine DiMercurio

This year was not my best in terms of writing output. Too many BIG things happened, things that consumed my energy, the way whales swallow krill. Family medical issues, a break-up, selling a house, buying a house, and moving across the state, alone. And a kiddo starting grad school, which though more an event in their life than mine, was something I wanted to be present for to a greater degree than I was able to be.

Still, I managed to write a couple of small things, do some revising, and I’m ending the year submitting short new pieces, along with longer, older ones that have not yet found a home. I have pieces out at journals and small presses in the poetry, creative nonfiction, short story, novel, and short story collection categories. Not bad for a slow year. I’m eager to see what 2026 will bring, and like any writer, I’m hoping for some acceptances.

But more than anything, I’m eager to get back to creating. I’m on the waitlist at a pottery studio and I’m so missing the wheel, the feel of clay beneath my hands. I’m excited to delve back into ongoing writing projects and begin some new ones.

This year was not without other creative efforts, though. Turning a house that was someone else’s, and then vacant for two years, into my own home took a lot of creative energy. I’m loving the way things have come together in this small space. It has the cozy cottage vibe I hoped for. And I haven’t even started on the yard yet. So much fun—and hard work—ahead. It’s the type of hard work that feels especially good, digging in the dirt, creating something beautiful. Maybe I will finally plant a vegetable garden again after so many years of not being able to do so.

In many ways, this has been a year of letting go. I had a low, low point this year. I didn’t know if I was going to proceed with my plan to move toward the lake, and there were many things happening that made me feel frightened for myself and for people I love. In that moment, I turned to someone whom I thought had my back. I poured out my heart, overwhelmed and full of uncertainty. That person’s reply to me was brief, a single line of text saying that I’d get through it. It was the last thing I hoped for or expected to hear. I hadn’t felt so alone in a long time. I thought there would be a sentiment of being in it together, an offer of support, a show of love. At the time, I didn’t know how I’d get through it, and I just wanted to know I wasn’t going to have to figure it all out on my own. Again. Still. You get exhausted from doing that sometimes; I was. But they seemed to be telling me that alone was precisely what I was in for. Sometimes people are (intentionally or otherwise) clear about what it is they can and can’t offer.

I had to let go of a lot of expectations this year. They’re not that useful, as it turns out, expectations. I learned over the years that there is a line between how much you need and how much others think you should need, or how much they are okay with being needed. It’s a blurry line and it shifts and you don’t know when you’ve crossed it until people sort of pull away. You can’t begrudge them this; everyone has their own energy and resources to protect. There’s not a lot of communication about it though, so you’re left a bit fuzzy about the state of your relationships, romantic or otherwise. And then you stop asking for help because you realize that there is a mismatch between what is offered and what you need, so to protect the relationships that you have left, you do what you can on your own and try to tame the needs that go unmet. Tuck them away. Try to silence the voice in your head that shames you for needing too much, for not understanding what “too much” means.

We’re humans; our evolution as a species involves community as well as self-reliance. But the balance is always tough to achieve. Some people are drowning in the micro-communities of their own households. Or they feel like the krill, and their world is a whale. So many married people have confessed to me that they long for solitude more than anything else; they tell me how much they envy me. I cherish my solitude, and I’m attuned to the gifts it offers. As happy and satisfied as I often am, it doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes miss having my own micro-community larger than me and my canine housemate. But as I sit here in the cozy little house that I have created a home out of, and as I look at all I’ve managed to accomplish on my own, I know I’ve made good decisions.

Following that lowest of low moments earlier this year, I had little confidence in my decision-making abilities. It’s taken me many years to have any surety that I could trust my gut again. And in that moment, I struggled to make out what my gut was telling me. Luckily, I had some truly supportive voices that were able to amplify my own instinct to leap into the big new thing that I imagined for myself: life near the lake. My children and a few key family members and friends reminded me of the reasons why I had hatched the plan to move near Lake Michigan in the first place. They kept me going in ways they probably don’t even realize. And once I had been reminded, never wanting to forget about the importance of this leap again, I commemorated the decision with the leaping rabbit tattooed on my arm.

I feel as though it has taken me half a year to even start processing the spring break-up, not to mention everything else that happened. I’m grateful for the luxury of this downtime between Christmas and New Year’s Day, where I can write, paint, work on a puzzle, bake, rearrange furniture, exercise, look at the lake, and simply sit with a cup of coffee and think, feel. I can hurt and cry, laugh and dance, and watch my dog watching me figure myself out all over again. I am thankful for the constant he is in my life; a solid, loving, loyal soul who lets me be whomever I need to be, need however much I need to need.

And I’m thankful that each new day offers us all the chance to take leaps large and small, to trust our gut, to reinvent our lives, completely or incrementally at whatever pace feels good. In my case, that reinvention was about me meeting my own greatest need: to create the space and the conditions necessary so that the person I’ve always been has the room she needs to fully exist, to grow and thrive. Any creative effort is a leap into some unknown, and things usually don’t turn out the way you expect. Sometimes they’re even better.

May all your leaps be lucky.

Love, Cath

On Winter Gifts and Safe Harbors

By Catherine DiMercurio

As I walked along the snowy beach, the lake splashed against the frozen droplets of former waves at the shoreline. It was wondrous with the sun sparkling across the waves and the icy beach. I slid across frozen puddles, crunched across the ice that rippled like a memory over the windswept sand. I never expected to enjoy a wintry beach walk quite so much. I talked to the lake like an old friend, thanked it for being deep enough to receive my troubles and old griefs without finding me “too much,” without resentment or judgement.

It has been a year packed with some big transitions, which is why, when winter hit so suddenly and forcefully a couple of weekends ago, I didn’t feel prepared. It was a big snowfall, followed by another heavy round a couple of days later. And since, we seem to get another few inches every couple of days to add to the two feet of snow already on the ground.

I remember my father taking my sisters and I sledding when we were little, ice skating once or twice too. I wanted to like it. I did enjoy playing in the snow, building snow men and snow forts and making snow angels. But I remember being at the top of the sledding hill and feeling a sense of apprehension, a worry that we’d collide into the other children sledding down the hill. I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if it had been just us. Skating never made sense to me. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was going to get the hang of on the first time out and since we only went a couple of times, there was not really a chance to improve, but I also didn’t enjoy the slipperiness, the falling. I felt clumsier than usual, and I was already a kid that got called klutzy. Despite growing up in a state known for its winter wonderland, I have always had complicated feelings about the season.

One Christmas Eve when I was still quite young, we were returning home after visiting my grandparents’ house. Our car spun and skidded off the snowy road and when it stopped, we were facing the Saginaw River. I don’t know how close we were to the river, but in my memory, I have this sense that we had narrowly escaped careening into the water. Maybe that’s why, years later, after I learned to drive, I would become extremely fearful of driving in snowy conditions. Of course I adapted, as you do when you have places to go. You do what you have to do. But possibly this early memory is at play when my driving-in-bad-conditions apprehension surfaces. Perhaps I also just have a strong survival instinct. That, and I don’t really trust other drivers who seem to have no sense of caution.

Combine all this with the anniversaries of some Bad Things happening in early December many years ago, along with the short days and lack of sunlight, and you get a very tricky time. Yet, there is a kind of unexpected vibrancy in this community I’ve landed in, a recognition of and appreciation for the natural beauty we’re surrounded by. People get out there and enjoy the lake and the woods and the fresh air in all kinds of conditions. It’s a bit contagious, even if, especially in winter, I have to work a little harder to get motivated to spend lots of time outside.

I’ve been doing okay though—snowy hikes, walks or drives to the lake, icy beach strolls, sunsets. Some days though I get hit with melancholy, or fatigue, or some other cocktail of emotions that seem to rise to the surface more readily in darker, cold months. Like many people, I walk a fine line between knowing when to let those feelings in, acknowledge them, feel them, deal with them, and knowing when to get out of the house and out of my head. I’m still learning what it means to feel the heavy feelings without falling into ruminating, stewing, spiraling.

At the worst time in my life, I felt as though I was constantly at risk of falling into a deep darkness that I would not be able to climb out of. In retrospect, I think I did fall in sometimes, though, at the time, I believed I was pulling myself up and out just in the nick of time. So when things seem heavy, I occasionally get a feeling of dread, as in, please don’t let this be that. But it has never been that again, thankfully. I have a lot more tools now, and I’ve had a lot fewer reasons to ever feel quite like that again. I don’t often give myself enough credit for the navigating I’ve done, away from dark places.

But here, where I’ve landed, I often look around at the beauty of my surroundings and thank myself for captaining myself to this shoreline city. Sometimes there are two selfs, the one who doubts and is often fearful, and the one who sees the path and makes the necessary choices and journeys. Do you believe me now? I’ve asked myself. Do I believe now that I can make the decisions that land me in the right places at the right time? Do you trust me now? We made it here, after all.

At the end of my street is a marina. The joy those docked sailboats bring me, when I see their masts jutting into the sky as I stride down the hill, is both reliable and exhilarating. Reliable joy? What a gift! A sign reads “A SAFE HARBOR MARINA.” Safe harbor. How wonderful to discover that this is what we can be for ourselves, and what an actual place can feel like. Finding that feeling after a period of drifting and searching, of looking for belonging and not quite getting there, is as magical as the icy beach, or the gathered boats snug in their harbor. I hope this winter finds you in a safe and wondrous place.

Love, Cath

On Crescent Moons, Kaleidoscope Progress, and Feeling Move-able

By Catherine DiMercurio

The moon was so pretty the other night I cried a little. It was a tiny little sliver of a moon and just glimpsed between the oak leaves and the pine boughs. I don’t know what moved me so much but to feel move-able is wonderous. I thought, well, that was strange. I mean, I always love glimpsing the moon, but it doesn’t usually bring me to tears. I figured maybe that’s what happens after a long period of stress when things are kind of calming down, relatively speaking. Moving felt like a year-long obstacle course and while there are still post-move things happening at the house, the bulk of that particular effort is over. Talk about a heavy lift.

But now my attention is shifting, away from the chaotic multidimensional problem solving and navigation of moving, to where I am, what I’m doing now, what is next on the horizon, so I guess I have a little space for feeling actual emotions again. I guess that looks like crying at the moon. I thought it was maybe a one-time thing but I also teared up at the stars the next morning. I can see so many of them here. While I can’t see the lake from my property, the sky looks bigger and more open in that direction. Undoubtedly there is less light pollution so maybe that’s why the star gazing is kind of spectacular here.

It’s a beautiful fall here and I’m exploring the trails at the closest state park. The landscape is gorgeous and hilly, featuring marshy wetlands as well as steep, sandy dunes. I started out on a trail I’d been on the week before with my sister, except this time, I ventured out onto the spurs and loops that could be accessed from the main trail. One of the loops was labeled “challenging.” Given that the trails designated as “moderate” were fairly easy, I thought I’d give this challenging loop a go. It was definitely more challenging for me – more hills, and steeper ones. Rooty, narrow paths. But manageable. At one point, I peered out over a section of trail that went sharply downhill, all sand. The trail I was on went past that section and I marveled that anyone could get up or down it. And I went on my merry way, deciding at one point that instead of just skirting out and back to check out the trail, I would do the full loop. I was feeling pretty good about things until, after a bit of a downhill section, I found myself at the base of the big dune I’d spied earlier, and now I was going to have to go up it, or turn around and go all the way back. I stared at it for a while, dumbfounded, and then decided to give it a go. There were a few trees at the edges, so I figured if it got tough, I’d have some branches or roots to grab on to (which I only needed to do a little bit). I made it up, and while it was difficult, I was about halfway up when I realized I could do it, and that I wasn’t going to keep back sliding in the loose sand.

While this was a challenge for me, I’m sure for people who grew up around this terrain it was more moderate. I’ve never been athletic, though I had a chunk of time in my 30s and 40s where I was running regularly and completed a few half marathons. Once I stopped freelancing and went back to work in the office full-time, my running tapered off. Between working and commuting and single mom-ing, I struggled to find the time to go consistently, but I managed to feel like I was still in it. In the midst of the pandemic, I moved, and that process was extremely taxing, especially since both the old place and new place needed a lot of work. After I was settled in, I was so exhausted that I stopped even trying to run, and before I knew it, it was winter. By spring, I was starting from square one with running, and I feel like I have been doing the same for the past 5 years. Throw menopause into the mix of major life changes along with moving and empty nesting and breaking up, and there I was, starting from square one, and barely making it to square two, and then getting derailed, taking a break, and starting from square one again. Which is where I am now. Post-move again, and now trying to get back into running, but also trying to mix in weights, yoga, hiking.

It’s harder than ever to push myself. For the longest while, I kept telling myself that I needed to work on consistency first, and then I could work on building from there, longer runs, heavier weights. The lines are blurry. When have I been consistent enough to start building? How much is too much too soon? Can’t I just work on consistency a little longer? But even when I’ve been working on that, a lot of workouts feel harder than they ought to, which is frustrating. It used to be easier to stop and start up again, to make progress and build on it. That’s something that I’m still getting used to as I get older. Trying harder used to work, or, it used to work faster. Now, I feel as though the best I can do is to keep nibbling away at things, and so far, I can’t really measure progress in terms of a longer run, or one that felt easier, I can only say I keep trying. Maybe farther down the line something will feel like strength or speed again, but for now I am pleased that I challenged my brain to navigating new trails, and my body to steeper climbs up sandy slopes, and that I’m still trying with running and lifting.

At the end of that particular hike, I returned to my car and drove a little further on to the beach. It was deserted, except for the gulls, and I strolled barefoot in the cold sand, played a little tag with the waves. I wanted the feeling of running on the beach so I started out at a jog, and the Rocky theme came into my head, the training montage where Rocky and Apollo are racing on the beach and I pushed myself into a short sprint, which felt amazing. It felt like playing. It felt silly and joyful, full-body laughter. In a way, it was the same feeling as crying at the moon, my body releasing the stress of the last year in little doses, trying, starting over. A different kind of progress, like a kaleidoscope instead of a straight, solid line.

I don’t know what any of this means except that I’m definitely in a new chapter and my body knows it and my heart knows it, and I’m sure my soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it has known it for a while, that this is where we have been heading. It’s all good even though it doesn’t make sense in the strictest sense of the word. I’m just here and floating in it.

I feel quite positive about it all in general but there are things that weigh on me, things that need to be addressed now that I’m feeling settled in. And the missing of my people is something that’s always nearby, an awareness I have of the physical distance between us. I love the ways we stay connected in spite of that distance, but I do miss hugs. I have some trepidation as “the dark season” approaches; I know the things I struggle with in the winter. We all have heavy things to carry. But I’m also curious, about what the lake will be like in the winter, how life is lived in this particular place each season. It’s a gift to be able to keep figuring it out, to move across the state and across the sand and through the woods and feel moved by the sight of the moon.

Love, Cath

On Be-ing, Figuring, and Breathing

By Catherine DiMercurio

I don’t recall a time when part of my long walk entailed two miles barefoot at the water’s edge. Where Lake Michigan splashed at my ankles as I strode south. I don’t recall ever being able to go to the beach four times in one week. These are some lovely benefits to completely reshuffling your life.

It’s still a bit surreal, the move. There is so much that I’m still processing with the way this year has unfolded so far. I’m trying to pause more. Throughout this whole process, with a million little and huge steps along the way, I have felt catapulted from one thing to the next. Have barely been able to take a moment to enjoy a sense of accomplishment at meeting various milestones, because the process doesn’t let you rest. Even on the day of the move, an enormous, choreographed event, I was barely able to take a moment to consider the enormity of it, to congratulate myself for choreographing it. There was a brief period of time where I sat with my sister at the picnic table out back while the movers unloaded the trucks when I tried to catch my breath, tried to let the big truth of the moment sink in. I had done it. Moved to a lakeside town. Gotten myself as close as possible to the lake. I had, against the backdrop of some heavy personal turmoil, gotten my old house ready to sell, endured the ups and downs of all the showings and waiting for an offer, accomplished all the work to prepare the new house for my occupancy. Shepherded my anxious, reactive dog through it all. And I had moved farther from my children, from most of my family, from all of my friends, too. All of these things swirled through my mind—the work, the pros, the cons, the hopes, the fears—for a few overwhelming moments before I was pulled back to the reality of a house so chocked full of boxes I could barely make my way through it.

And then I faced the next enormous task. Unpacking. The tiny home was barely navigable. A narrow path led through a maze of boxes. I slept on the couch, unsure how I would even move things around in order to put my bed frame back together. But in two days I created some sense of order out of the chaos, and then I worked for two days in the office I’d managed to set up, and then spent most of the weekend unpacking the rest of the boxes. I can breathe a bit again and am no longer surrounded by cardboard. The basement is still a disaster and will likely remain so for some time. I want to take a few days and just feel normal, want to immerse myself in my regular routines, but my brain is already worrying about organizing the basement, and finding a new vet and dentist and doctor, and calculating when I’ll upgrade the electrical panel and replace the aging appliances.

There is always The Next Thing. There is never a clear deck with no items waiting for our attention. I’ve known this for a long time. It’s a lesson everyone learns at some point. It makes no sense to scramble and scramble trying to get all the Things attended to for the foreseeable future so that you can relax and be happy. It just is not reasonable to postpone feeling okay until all of the worrisome items are attended to. We have to keep figuring out how to find peace and joy in the middle of it all.

But knowing this doesn’t make the mindset adjustment any easier. If there are simple ways for moving the Things to Worry About to the edges so there’s some clear space to breathe, I don’t know them. The ways I know are about conscious, deliberate efforts. Maybe this work is easy for some. For me, it’s a huge mental challenge, a heavy lift. Some of it is self-protective. There is a part of me that is convinced that the only reason I get things done and avoid having important things fall through the cracks is because I do worry. It’s as if I need to worry because that’s the only way things will be ok.

It might seem like a whole lot of exhaustive nonsense if this is not the way your brain works. I think one of the things I love so much about being at the lake is that it is capable of taking me out of that mindset. The water is a live, physical presence; the experience of being there is multisensory. It diffuses worry, calms the loud thinking and overthinking. It’s the only shortcut I know. This past weekend, I took a long walk, some of which was barefoot along the shoreline. At one point, the absence of racing thoughts became apparent. It was shockingly peaceful. For a moment, I felt like Winnie the Pooh, just strolling along, with a hum-de-dum sort of song in my head. “Pooh just is” is a line I remember from Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh. And striving for that state of just be-ing feels impossible sometimes.

Part of the problem isn’t just a brain that is wired (by so many things, some of it innate, for sure, but some of it experiential) for worry. Part of the problem is a world that’s all digital and hurry up and loud and bright and urgent and in so many ways frightening and terrible. Of course we want to remain in a cozy bubble, try to feel good and safe and separate. To eliminate as many of the things to worry about as possible until there’s nothing to worry about anymore so we can just be.

I want to believe that while there is no end to worry (do you ever worry that there is something you forgot to worry about?), that the opposite is true, that there’s no end to peace, as in, isn’t there a well of peace within us, a transcendent and universal peace? And if so, how do we get there, how do we find it when we’re lost in all the other stuff. I don’t expect to stay there, I don’t know how people could do that with life being what it is but finding a path there, an easy path, a good path, a clear one, would be nice. I’m trying meditation but it’s quite a challenge.

Maybe I have found a path, maybe that’s why I moved here. It’s surely different for everyone and probably not everyone wants to go looking for that kind of peace. Maybe we’re not supposed to because don’t we need to stay worried so that we can fix little parts of the brokenness in the world? Or do we do that by finding and being peaceful within ourselves, and bringing that energy to everything we do?

Yesterday after work I attended a program at a beautiful historic library. It was a book discussion led by a professor from a nearby university, for a book I really loved, about a man who sails Lake Superior in a dystopic, near-future Midwest. The framework of the talk was “dystopia and hope.” I contributed a lot to the conversation. It felt good. And then I drove the few minutes to the lake, strolled on the beach, watched the sun start to set behind the churning waves. I didn’t worry about finding a vet or a dog trainer or a dentist, or work, or what I’ll do with Zero if I want to go visit my people on the other side of the state. I didn’t think about the boxes in the basement, and the logistics of that space. These are things I have to figure out. But for a brief window of time, I was exploring my new community, interacting, living outside of my own thoughts, and getting soothed by the lake. I felt a greater sense of belonging than I have in a while.

I probably won’t ever stop being a worrier, but here there seem to be more opportunities to take breaks from it, and that’ll be good for me. I don’t worry that I will fail to figure out the things I need to. I just don’t always want to go through the figuring out process. It gets tiring dealing with the obstacles that come along with so many decisions. And obviously I feel a bit drained from having navigated a major life change, and that’s okay, is what I remind myself. We get decision fatigue, along with plain old regular fatigue.

But, I do know that I’ll figure out a lot of it. Maybe not all of it, and not at the same time, and often not elegantly. But I’ll do my best, as we all do, and maybe it’ll be a little easier now, here, to stay even-keel through it most of the time.

Be well. Love, Cath

On Moving through This Particular Time and Space

By Catherine DiMercurio

These past several months I have felt as if keeping my head above water takes most of my energy. Each moving-related milestone felt less like a hurdle overcome and more like a wave crashing down on me, until it is over, and I can float a little, catch my breath a little, until the next wave hits. In the midst of all the painting I was doing this past week at the new house, I was fighting to do just that, catch my breath. The task felt overwhelming, the number of walls, the trim to either paint or tape off, the cutting in, the multiple coats, the clean-up, the way the plaster was so thirsty and gulped up all the paint, the cove ceilings and their delicate curves, the yucky and ancient vinyl floorboard molding in the kitchen, the ruined window frame in the living room.

It’s been over a year since I got it in my head that I was going to move. I took my time with the process, knowing how much I loathe how urgency makes me feel. Winter and early spring were focused on clearing out the basement and making plans, and then in April and May I began to ramp things up with house repairs. Then things really sped up in June when I listed my house for sale and began searching for a new home in earnest. Now, I’ve closed on both houses. I spent a long weekend at the new house organizing some initial improvements—tearing out carpet and having a fence built—and cleaning. This past week, I went back to paint. It’s a task I always enjoy in the beginning, but by the end, I’m ready to be done. And this time the end didn’t come until the fourth room was painted on the fourth day. It was a big job, and like any home improvement task, it came with unexpected obstacles.

But, this isn’t going to be a boring home improvement post. I thought I wanted it to be about how good it felt to let this new-to-me but old house breathe and feel cared for again after a couple of years of vacancy. I thought I wanted to write about how I was trying to make this random place feel like my home. And I thought it was going to be about what a long, sometimes scary journey it has been.

Yet what is hitting me most right now, as a sit in my cozy current home now that I’ve returned from the painting week, is how confusing and chaotic prolonged transitions feel. Many people are in the midst of them now, with grown children off on new adventures or otherwise finding their footing in adult life. People are ending relationships, or starting them, or moving, or grieving, or changing jobs. Sometimes we go through big changes with others and sometimes we go through them alone. And we might have folks helping out where they can, but when we’re flying solo, the upheaval of big changes can hit especially hard.

Somewhere between wrapping up the painting of the bedroom and the office and the hallway and beginning the painting of the kitchen, I felt particularly wrung out and empty, and then I sort of remembered why I was where I was. Two miles west of me was one of the best stress-busters I’ve ever known: Lake Michigan. So that morning I made my coffee and loaded Zero in the car, and we drove the short five minutes to the lake to see the morning light play on the waves. We just stayed in the car, because we see off leash dogs all the time and that is not a great thing with a reactive dog whose training got derailed. I wanted this to be a moment of calm, so we stayed cozy, and watched the other early morning people go by, or do the same thing we were doing, viewing the lake from our cars as if we were at a drive-in theater. I’m looking forward to when I’m actually living at the new place, and I can go grab moments of lake-calm for myself whenever I need to. In this particular moment, I marveled at the way the light of the morning could be both bright and soft at the same time, and the way a gull sounds different when it’s swooping around the shoreline than a gull sounds in the old Kmart parking lot in the puddle of my childhood memories.

That moment was also a reminder to seek out calm wherever I am, lake or not. Because life can feel so big and so chaotic, whether or not we’re in periods of momentous transition. It’s not as if I forgot that I need to do that, or like I wasn’t trying all along to manage my stress with yoga and walks and early morning coffee in the yard with Zero and chats with family or friends. But sometimes we tell ourselves there’s no time, or that it won’t help anyway because there’s too much to do or our feelings of overwhelm are too great.

We tell ourselves a lot of things when we’re tired or drowning in all there is to do every day. We tell ourselves there’s not enough time to sit quietly in a safe place and catch our breath. Maybe we even tell ourselves there are no safe places, and it is tragic when that is true. But sometimes we’re still learning to be our own safe place and that takes time and practice. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we miss things that weren’t particularly good for us. Sometimes there were good parts to miss, but that doesn’t change things. We might ask ourselves why we ever thought we could handle the enormity of moving farther away than we’ve moved before and then we remind ourselves that we are, in fact, handling it. We’re almost there. We’re almost home.

And still, that doesn’t erase the hard parts. Holding two opposing truths within us at the same time can cause a bit of inevitable heartache. For reasons of financial and mental health, I need to go. To follow the dream of living near the lake, I need to go. Because I want to love where I live, I need to go, and at the same time, the fact that I’ll be almost three hours from my kids instead of half an hour hurts like hell. I haven’t made peace with that. I don’t know how to. And I guess, I don’t really want to make peace with it. I want that angst to keep motivating me to find ways to make it easier for us to see each other. I don’t want to slip in to “but it’s so far and everyone is so busy.” I want to remain highly motivated to find someone who can watch my sweet but challenging pup so I can take off for a long drive and a short visit, or to take a weekend here and there to see friends and family. People figure this stuff out all the time and I will too. It’s just, in moments of high contrast, the difficult parts feel sharper. Having just had time to hang out with my kids, the prospect of missing them is looming large.

It’s as if we have to keep finding ways to be bigger on the inside than we are on the outside, so we can hold all that life seems to ask us to hold. And sometimes there is no more room, and we have to become willing and able to put something else down so we can hold on to what we want to hold on to. Maybe there are old griefs I can leave behind so that there’s space to manage this new challenge of geography and proximity to the people I love. Maybe the perplexing problems I have for so long felt gnawing at me are less about algebra (as in, how do I solve for all these variables) and more about physics (as in, this is about the realities of force, mass, and acceleration, as in, how can I move myself forward through this particular time and space). Maybe the math analogy is bad but what I’m saying is that maybe it’s time to get practical instead of theoretical.

We’re all moving—together and separately—through this particular time and space and I hope we all find ways to allow ourselves to lean on one another and to be strong when we can’t and to be strong when someone else needs to lean on us.

Love, Cath

On Pebbles, Fish, and Feathers

By Catherine DiMercurio

Hope and perseverance take various shapes these days. My house is up for sale, and there’s a hopeful contender on the west side of the state just waiting for me. I’m starting to picture where I’m going to land, how I’ll arrange the furniture. I’m trying to do two things at once: fan the flames of my hopefulness to keep it alive, and also, maintain it at only a steady low burn so I’m not overly disappointed if things don’t go my way. That’s not an easy balancing act.

Still, when I recently visited the town I’m moving to and spent some time by the lake, I had that feeling, the one where my heart wakes up, fluttering and thundering in my chest. There is a simultaneous tug of calm peace and wild joy that tells me this is it, I belong here. I once thought love was supposed to feel that way, and maybe sometimes it has, here and there, and maybe that’s asking a lot of love.

A lot has to happen before I can move, and I’m often wondering if I’m doing it right. I don’t know the rules. I think that’s because there aren’t any. I must have made that part up, that rules exist for How to Do Things. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that if I could a) learn the rules and b) follow them, then the result would be everything making sense and falling into place. I imagine the gentle way it will happen, the falling into place, like a gull feather softly floating from the sky, and sighing into the sand at the water’s edge. I think I’ll sit on the floor in my new house and I’ll say, I did it, I got us here. I know it won’t make the world make sense again, but it will feel better, it will feel right and good and like home. That’s what I hope. And then I’ll get to go to the lake whenever I want, and my heart will hop and dance and trip over itself on the way, clumsy and glad.

When I say that I made that part up, about those rules existing, that isn’t entirely true. I willingly bought into beliefs and norms and societal conventions and turned them into rules inside my head because on some level, rules make me feel safe. Knowing the boundaries makes me feel confident. As in, here is a closed system and once you know how it operates you can function in a predictable way and get predictable results.

Even though I learned quite some time ago that the world doesn’t work that way at all, there is a small part of me, a thin little shadow, that stomps her feet in disbelief and frustration when things happen in ways they’re not “supposed to.” And when life gets overwhelming and more variables enter the equation, that thin little shadow grows into something larger and more solid. It’s okay. It’s something you have to learn to live with. Something I learn to live with, the shadow to bargain with, that is really just a version of me that wants to feel safe and understood. I can give her that at least, even if the world can’t. I can try.

If none of this is making sense to you then maybe you were lucky enough to play by the rules whether you believed in them or not and things fell into place for you, so much so that you’re surprised when things don’t work out for other folks. Maybe you figure that they just didn’t work hard enough, like you did. Or they weren’t positive enough or whatever enough, whatever it is that you believe got you where you are.

But if this is making sense to you, then hey, nice to see you here, hope things are going okay.

It’s hard, isn’t it, to live in this liminal space with all this uncertainty unfolding in multiple directions? It almost forces you to be the calm center of it, as if there are so many forces pushing at you from the outside that all your chaotic, uncertain, wayward and worried energy is forced back toward you, and you have to learn to metabolize it all. Because if you don’t metabolize it, you start to feel like it is crushing you. I’ve felt that way recently, like I was getting smaller and smaller. Just a pebble, really. Though, pebble-sized, everything happens around you, not to you, so maybe that’s the right way. How else does one metabolize all that chaos? Maybe it passes through you, like water through fish gills, and we take in what we need to breathe and nothing else. There probably isn’t a right way. Maybe sometimes it is a pebble day and sometimes it is a fish day.

But we all have stuff coming at us all the time. Theoretically, we could reduce the amount of chaos coming at us if we could diffuse our own response, our worry and fear and what not, and only deal with the outside forces, the unpredictable things in our lives that make us feel like things are overwhelming or out of control. But that is easier said than done. Sometimes the only thing that shows us the way is our own exhaustion. When we have no more energy left to worry because we’ve been too busy coping with what life is throwing at us. There is some relief in that somehow, in being too spent to work up enough energy to thrash against uncertainty like a caught fish in a net. That’s when we get to the point of saying, I’ll just have to roll with whatever happens next. And maybe when we’ve done that enough times we won’t have to wait until we’re completely exhausted to adopt that mindset. It’ll be a choice instead of a consequence. Sometimes that’s where the growth is; some of us only learn lessons the hard way.

When I think about leaving this house, I think about all the work I put into it, and how I turned it into a safe place to land after all. It’s a cozy refuge that has served me well. I hope it will let me go, will work its charm on the right person who is ready to make an offer any moment now, so the next set of things can fall into place for everyone.

But for now, it’s wait-and-see mode. I have moments where I’m okay with that, with the not knowing, with the in-between-ness, and there’s a part of me that actually does feel confident that I’ll be able to adapt to however the situation evolves. It’s hard to hold on to that mindset, when part of me wants to lean in so badly the particular details of how I want things to happen. Hope is a funny creature to tend to, being wild and capricious and hungry and fragile all at once. That’s another thing there aren’t any rules for, the care and feeding of this creature called hope. Maybe we’ll all get it a little bit right today.

Love, Cath

On Spring, and Little Mysteries, and Soft Truths

By Catherine DiMercurio

It’s been a bizarre spring. The last time I wrote, it was just the beginning of it. Now we’re in the thick of it, the irises are blooming and the peonies are about to burst and the buckthorn is proving to be its annual nuisance. Last time I wrote, I was figuring out some paths forward and now they all look a little different.

When I began this blog about open-heartedness, I invited my readers to wander with me, to explore heartbreak and wholeness and everything in between. I think this blog has been around for about eight years, and one of the main things I have discovered in that time is that there is wholeness even in heartbreak, there is wholeness when we feel healed and wholeness when we feel broken. To be human is to be whole; the breadth and depth of our experience is encompassed by who we are in this life and nothing—not pain, loss, grief, fear—can deplete the full richness of our identity. We absorb it all, we metabolize it, transform it, re-emerge as new versions of ourselves over and over again.

The wholeness can feel elusive sometimes. In parsing out recent events, I tell myself I don’t have anything to prove, but my brain cycles through the discussions I’ve had with myself, formulating a defense for decisions I’ve made, paths I’ve taken, as if I have to account for them to anyone other than myself. She has a high threshold for what “makes sense,” this internal judge of mine, and hears arguments daily, usually when I’m in the shower and relitigating my past. I sense it is time to move past such habits, that my energy is needed elsewhere.

But still, I have a strong desire to be “fair” and “reasonable,” and to be perceived that way, so holding myself to account is habitual but sometimes excessive, often unnecessary, and occasionally, cruel. Looking back over my life, I see the ways in which my gut was right, but that it was also right to test its theories, as guts don’t always see nuance, or the need to have certain experiences anyway. But that gut has a good head on her shoulders. I’m learning to be mindful of what she’s instructing. I find that I’m often wary about going with my gut instinct right from the get-go because it is difficult to determine if something is actually and truly wrong when I get that “something feels off” kind of feeling, or if the discomfort I’m feeling is a natural and necessary part of a particular growth journey.

There is also some work to be done when I consider what I just said a few sentences ago, about my desire to be perceived as fair and reasonable. Who is my target audience and why should their perception matter to me so much? Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.” I remember reading that in college, being struck with the boldness of that statement. I feel as though I’ve internalized a lot of expectations about who I’m supposed to be and how I’m supposed to behave, and I get caught in the trap of overexplaining, even to myself, why I’ve chosen a particular course of action. Maybe to be regarded as fair and reasonable is so important because I’ve always been a sensitive person who was often told she was overreacting or misperceiving a situation. So I’ve grown accustomed to overcorrecting and interrogating myself, as if there is some value in making my life make sense to other people. There used to be value there. I craved the validation of others, people I trusted saying good thinking, and yes, that makes sense. It’s always nice to hear but in truth I haven’t needed it for some time, though part of me doesn’t entirely know that yet.

It is a strange thing to consider walking through this world and accepting mystery and to say, maybe I don’t need to understand that. Maybe I can stop trying to figure out why I feel better alone than when I’m in a relationship. When I knew myself less, the opposite was true. I thought I was a better me in partnership. But just as my understanding of myself has improved, so has my understanding of what does and doesn’t constitute a partnership. Maybe when we’ve done all the philosophizing and therapizing we can, all the studying and soul-searching, we can say, for now, I accept this as a mystery of life, a mystery of love, a mystery of the universe and of my own soul. Maybe my energy is needed elsewhere, maybe yours is. Possibly it will all make sense when we’re ready. Or, we are ready and it does make sense and we are slow to acclimate to the truths of our existences.

This morning I was preparing to go outside at dawn with my coffee and my dog. He usually sniffs around the yard and I fill the birdfeeder. I examine what’s blossoming: currently, irises, dahlias, snapdragons, impatiens, columbine. I usually hope to see cardinals and woodpeckers before the sparrows and grackles arrive, but lately that hasn’t been the case. Today, though, when I looked through the window before opening the door, I saw a fawn grazing near the overgrown herb bed. I looked past her and noticed two other deer nestled in the myrtle at the back of the yard. Soon, one rose, another fawn, who also began grazing in the yard. The larger doe who I assumed to be the mother remained reclined. She laid there so long after her offspring had risen and wandered that I began to wonder if she was hurt, or, perhaps even giving birth to another baby. I watched the three for a while through the window, feeling glad that they felt safe and nourished in my yard. I left them to their quiet morning routine, told my dog we’d go out in a little bit. I returned after about twenty minutes; they had gone. When I finally wandered out into the yard with my dog, I could see the indented places in the myrtle where they had lain and I wondered if they had cozily bedded down for the whole night in my yard. It gave me such a feeling of peace to cede my space to them for a little while. I imagined that the myrtle was still warm in the chilly morning from their soft brown bodies.

There has been some grief this spring, some loss of a sense of safety and well-being in my little circle. I know that this morning’s sighting of the white-tail deer in my yard was a chance occurrence but also I don’t know if it wasn’t a tiny little gift from the universe, a brief glimpse of a mother and her two youngsters feeling safe and fed and content and together. Maybe mornings like these are for embracing little mysteries as they come to us, and in them, we sense our own enough-ness.

Love, Cath

On Identity, Negative Space, and Sand

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes I feel as though this world has pinched whatever eloquence I might have once possessed, and all I can do is write earnestly about the twists and turns of my own journey. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how, in the face of such bizarre twists and turns of this current American reality, do we keep on keeping on, keep on living our lives and pursuing dreams to the extent that we are able. But at the same time, how do we do otherwise? One of the most meaningful things we can do is to keep on living meaningful lives, right?

Part of my own such quest has long focused on the pursuit of belonging and connection, and the way the natural world informs that journey. For many years, I’ve yearned to find a way to live closer to places that ground me, and that’s what I’m currently pursuing.

In line with that goal, I got to spend some time recently by Lake Michigan. It was a grey, rainy couple of days and I was there, in a little lakeside city, to do some research. At times, I am completely overwhelmed by the prospect of moving again. There’s no getting around how demanding, complex, and disruptive it is, no matter how much you’re looking forward to the destination. I’ve made a good home in my current location, but it wasn’t necessarily a place I was in love with. It was a practical decision and the right one at the time. In some ways, it will be hard to leave. I have good neighbors. I’m relatively close to family and friends. Within these walls, I remade myself, as we often must do during various transitions in life. There are plenty of times where I think it would be easier just to stay.

But, it’s always easier to stay, isn’t it? I have a low tolerance for chaos, always have, and moving is nothing if not chaotic. And easier isn’t always the point. Sometimes we need easy, we need to rest, and regroup, we need to feel settled and calm and peaceful, and then, we’re ready to unfold in a new direction. We all unfold and stretch and grow in different ways and at our own pace.

There are huge unknowns. Though, most of life is that way, so that should not really dissuade anyone (myself included) from exploring new possibilities. Will I be able to find and build some sense of community there? Will I feel like I belong? Will it be a good place for my dog? Will I be able to find a pottery studio? Will I find a way I can contribute to my new community?

One of the many perplexing things about life is that it is short, and therefore we should leap into our dreams but also, we have bonds with people who we find ourselves leaping away from, and we don’t want to lose those either, the dreams or the bonds, and how is all that supposed to fit together? And all those people have their own dreams and bonds, their own journeys, and we can’t anticipate all the ways and reasons people move around in their lives.

After a weekend near the lake, I have sand in my car. I like that. I like what it represents. I like the idea of living someplace with street names like Seaway and Lakeshore Drive and Beach Street. I love the frequent calls of gulls mixed in with house sparrows and robins. It sounds like a place I could call home.

I think a real sense of connection to place is hard to come by, at least it has been for me in the last several years, and I don’t know if I will have it there, in a new place, where I have no history at all, no people. I’m craving the feeling of having something fall into place and hoping to accomplish it by having me be the something falling into a new place.

Five years ago, I was preparing to move from the home I’d lived in for 20 years, where I raised my kids, and in many ways, where they raised me. I wrote a lot about the meaning and nature of home, and here I am again. At the time, I remember feeling as though the emotional work of the next part of my life needed to focus on learning to be at home with myself, wherever I was. In these last five years, I’ve tried very hard to do just that; it is an ongoing journey.

Here, in this house, I weathered the bulk of the pandemic. Here, I became an empty nester. Here, I ended a relationship. Said goodbye to the sweetest, most beloved dog, said hello, to another sweet, rambunctious furry soul. Spent a couple of years in relative solitude, on my own in all these new and different ways. At times the most lonely I’ve ever felt, at times the most free I’ve ever felt. Here, I started a new relationship.

People talk about finding yourself as if it is something you’re supposed to do when you’re young, or something people crash into doing at middle age because they never did it when they were young, but all of that is wrong. At least, we should acknowledge that it is something that can and should be ongoing our whole lives. More than anything, it is a mindset, rather than something that always requires big actions. It’s about looking, about cultivating an awareness of how we experience the world and who we want to be in it, who we are in it.

Shouldn’t we be out there looking for ourselves every day, in each little action, getting truer and truer as we go along, and finding our way back to ourselves if we get lost? We probably have to get a little lost here and there. Sometimes it is the accumulation of wrongs that points the way to what’s right for us.

My first-born is an artist, among many other things, and right now I am looking at a linocut print they made of a snail, and marveling at the way such a beautiful image is built line by line, the way with linocut, the image is revealed as a result of what is removed, the way the negative space that is created allows what remains to receive the ink.

It’s the same with the continuing process of learning who we are, and relearning that as we change and grow. What is removed from us through loss or through getting lost, or whatever life takes out of us, keeps revealing a new image of who we are now and who we are becoming.

I didn’t think I’d have sadness about leaving this place; when I moved in I did have the sense that it would be transitional. It was what I needed at the time. Things are different now. Things are always different now.

As I’m getting this house ready to sell, I think of all the ways it has held me, and all that I have put into it. All the living it has contained. And how I don’t really have to leave if I don’t want to. But just because it is hard, and just because there’s sadness, and just because I could stay if wanted to, doesn’t mean it’s not time to go.

I go over it all in my head, crunch the numbers, crunch the reasons, trust my gut, find the way. On the one hand, what’s the big deal, right? I’m just moving across the state. On the other, it’s another leap, farther than the last one. I’ll no longer be 30 minutes from where I used to live. In some ways, this feels more akin to moving away from home for the first time than it does to any of the other moves I’ve made in the past.

When I was at the lake two weeks ago, I plunged my feet in the icy water, ran barefoot along the beach, drew hearts in the sand with my toes. I felt the way the lake unlocks something in my chest, allowing me to breathe deeply and feel a big sense of centeredness I can’t seem to feel too often anywhere else. Later, I brought my dog down to the water. I know how much people like to let their dogs run on the beach, and Zero and off-leash dogs don’t mix, so I was hesitant, went early on a rainy Sunday morning. The waves were loud, but not overly large. We were only by the water a few moments, because I could see people with a dog further down the beach and didn’t want to take the chance that the dog might give chase. Zero wasn’t keen on getting too close to the water. He’d take a couple of steps toward it while the waves receded, and then dart away when the waves rushed in. I don’t know if he’ll ever be a beach dog and that’s okay. I’ve probably got enough beach dog in me for the both of us.

I observed Zero’s hesitancy as he surveyed the unknown terrain, the way he looks at me sometimes with both trust and concern. It’s as if he’s embodying what’s in my head, the part of me that’s not so sure and the part of me that trusts that I’ll get this right. Sometimes I wonder if he and I are extensions of one another, and then I wonder if we all are. It’s easy to feel that connection, to everything and everyone, even when I’m alone at the lake with my dog who kind of isn’t sure he wants to be there; he just wants to be with me.

Stay connected, and keep looking for yourself.

Love, Cath