the mountain of health

I wrote the best post in my head the other day.

Really, it was good. I was hiking along the south plateau loop in Monte Sano State Park, and I wrote to you all, to tell you how much I love the woods, how I breathe better out there, and This World is Not Conclusion, etc. I even brought a notepad with me and stopped at an overlook to write it all down, but somewhere along the way I'd lost my pen. Alas. So I had no choice but to keep walking and thinking poetic thoughts.

It was going to be really good, I promise. But now that I'm back in the apartment, with the laundry going and a sleeping baby in the next room, I can't remember the transitions. I can only remember phrases. So here it is - a bullet list that could have been magic, had I not dropped my Bic.

* Wednesday night Brian said, "One day, let's be the guy who lives at the state park. Let's have that job sometime." We started talking about all of the other jobs that would be fun - guides for rafting or hiking always always make the short list. It used to be our dream, to raft in the summer and ski in the winter. In the past year, I'd forgotten that. I'd traded possibility for health insurance. I believed the lie that consistency always trumps risk. Where we are is exactly where we want to be, for now. But this world is not Conclusion, remember? Neither is this town.

* In the woods I remembered who I am. The woman who lives in an apartment and goes to the grocery store and spends naptime drinking coffee with friends - it's not that it's not true, it's just incomplete. It's an abbreviated version of me. How did I let that other part go? I don't know.

* Silence is more than a state of being. It is also an emotion and an experience. Like Hawthorne's happiness and Dickinson's hope, silence, too, must find me. I always run into it with the same white-knuckled intensity I apply to everything else (to my detriment, usually). But when I approach it that way, it always eludes me. I notice the gnats, the ant on my toe, and wonder, when can I talk again? But Silence, she's tricky that way. Because once I feel it I don't want it to end.

* White-knuckled intensity has been the topic of conversation lately. Last week Brian said I always seem tense. I was shocked. Tense? I'm not! I love my life, even the repetition of it most of the time. As we talked, I saw that the drive, a concentration bordering on obsession I inherited unapologetically from my mother, that has served me well so far, was deceiving my husband. I'm not tense. I'm focused. I used to be focused on lots of things - a caseload of children who need, need, need; the next assignment; the next meal; the next bill; the next appointment ... Only now I'm just that focused on our home. Again, while I am exactly where I want to be right now, if I put this much attention into my children and home for their entire formative years, I fear it will become oppressive. In short, some day I'm going to need a job, so that I don't drive my family into therapy. But for now, if you see me furrowing my brow over the kitchen sink, don't mind me. I'm actually enjoying myself immensely.