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 Works-in-Progress

By Catherine DiMercurio

For most of my life, home has looked like backyards sutured together with chain link. Neighborhoods comprised of various parts, various wholes, my yard, shared fence, our block. As I was growing up, summertime smelled like charcoal smoldering on grills. We stuck our toes into the gooey tar that mended fissures in the street in front of our house.

gray metal chain link fence close up photo — Photo by Kendall Hoopes on Pexels.com

One of the days I was working at the new house, before I moved, I smelled a neighbor’s charcoal grill and thought of my dad, tending ours when I was little, and I had the sense of returning, as if I’d just peddled home as fast as I could because the street lights were coming on and I heard my father’s distinctive get your asses home now whistle. I’ve chatted with new neighbors across old fencing, and have had thought about how easy it is to feel both at home and out of place amidst the almost familiar.

This morning I arose after waking too early and trying futilely to get back to sleep. There are still boxes to unpack, things I can’t find. At times, when fatigued or overwhelmed, I get unreasonably melancholy. I fret over the fact that I cannot fix things to their proper places here so far. Is this where the coffee cups should go? Why is it so difficult to buy a couch? The kitchen table seems right though, so that’s a beginning.

Sometimes, though I’ve only just begun sleeping here several nights ago, it feels as though I’m only borrowing the place for a little while, though we have put in so many hours and dollars to make it feel new, mine. I hope she likes it when she gets here.

I sort of thought the house would let me know what it wanted somehow. But it’s still making me do all of the work.

This sense of almost being home is perhaps exacerbated by that looming birthday, though I don’t place a lot of stock in fifty as a milestone, despite the countless ways the world says I should. I’m expected to know by now exactly if I’m going to keep coloring my greys or not, and I’m supposed to know why. I’m supposed to not care what people think, and know precisely what I think about this or that or everything. I’m supposed to know more, know me, or, I’m supposed to know how much I don’t know and embrace that.

Perhaps I’m as much almost home as I am almost me.

I do know a few things. I know that possibly I might never stop being at least a little afraid that the good things will slip away if I don’t pay close enough attention. Vigilance and worry aren’t the same as spells of protection, but I whisper incantations nonetheless. Things weren’t always so, and though I can pinpoint the exact moment when this circuit in my brain was tripped, it doesn’t seem to mean that I can access an easy remedy for it. It does mean that there is work to do, and that’s okay. Everyone has their own work to do, and it changes as we go, and as with homes, the work is never quite done, and timelines are a bit unnecessary and perhaps even unhelpful. We must be both patient and diligent, with ourselves and with each other.

I know also how the extent to which love makes so much of this so much easier, possible, fulfilling. Though I sometimes struggle with my shortcomings, though we all do, having those we love supporting us, while we offer the same loving support in return, is what stitches together our little communities of you, me, us. So much of the world around us is mended and bound together and I love the way we mend each other and bind ourselves to one another through kindness and gestures, glances, kisses, effort, words, all of it, all of us.

I don’t always know the best way to tackle the work that needs to be done, and it seems all too easy sometimes to see task after task piling up, to get overwhelmed and undone about it all. I’m trying, in this new almost-home place to give myself the space to figure it out, to get closer to where and how I want to be, to have a little more patience with myself with regard to work in progress. It’s the kindest thing we can do for ourselves, and each other.

Love, Cath

A Brief Note on the Liminal and Limitless

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes you have to take a moment to float.

When I woke this morning after the first decent night of sleep in over a week, I had a moment of being amazed that it can get so cool at night during this intense heat wave. It was like a breath of clarity in the midst of confusion and chaos. Life has been confusing and chaotic lately. My one-month furlough began several days ago, and it has been a month since I closed on my new house. In that time there has been a tremendous amount of intense effort and endeavoring to ready the new house to be lived in, and I’ve been both guided by and partnered with my love, who can see things that I cannot, who can sense what can be, what shouldn’t be, what might be. Walls have been removed and every surface cared for. We’re getting there.

white clouds and blue sky — Photo by Swapnil Sharma on Pexels.com

I’ve always told myself I’m bad at transitions. From the simplest goodbye, see you later, to the larger-scale move from city to city. Liminal spaces, no matter how big or how small are filled with unknowns, and while unknowns are not necessarily frightening in and of themselves, I’ve always been keenly aware of them. Of their numbers, of their depths. I can feel myself searching sometimes, the way your toes reach for the sandy bottom of the lake bed when swimming. I am awestruck by the limitless, by everything that seems without boundary or border, the night sky, love, deep water, work, forests, fire, joy. It is not fear that strikes me when I contemplate the unknown, though I fear it is taken as such. It is the unbounded nature of the possibilities – good, bad, or otherwise – that yawn open upon a kiss goodbye, the soft thump of the screen door, the boxing up of books and dishes, the zipping of a backpack. It is simply that there is so much.

There is an unbounded universe of next and sometimes I feel as though I am somehow trying to take it all in at once, like a vista glimpsed too quickly from a moving car, like breathing in the ocean, like seeing what the clouds taste like. I like the hug that lingers, that offers me one more breath of this, of now, of known.

As I plot out the next few days of work at the house, and packing at the old, and consider all that is enjambed within those phrases, I take a moment to float in this morning of transition, instead of reaching toward the sandy bottom. To appreciate how thoughtfully and thoroughly I’ve been buoyed by love through all of this.

There is more to say, and/but much work to do. Taste the clouds and/but enjoy that hug for one breath longer.

Love, Cath