Something is shifting.
I've been feeling it for the last week or so.
A subtle change in direction.
In intention.
In purpose. In the way things work. In love, in life, in where we're headed.
Part of me wonders how much it has to do with the simple turns of the earth, with the coming spring and changes inevitable.
I took a look back at this time in years past.
That night, babysitting at Sara's, after Julia had finally gone to sleep and we'd zipped Sam into his sleeping sack and put him in his crib, we went back downstairs to the kitchen and Greg put his arms around me and we stood there for a long time, neither of us having to say anything. We're embarking on the biggest adventure of our lives...and I can't imagine anyone I'd want to do this with more than him.
March 14, 2008:I had dinner with a girlfriend last night who is med school to be a nurse practitioner and we had a long conversation about how we go about assimilating these experiences and this knowledge of illness and disease and death into our beliefs about the world and ourselves. She spent all of Monday administering chemotherapy to cancer patients and I'd spent the week meeting dying and bedridden patients in their homes. The juxtaposition of the two of us last night drinking sangria at a trendy tapas bar was stark but also a vital part of accepting the impermanence of it all.
I rode the train home last night by myself, tipsy and starry-eyed by
my life, by this time we are allotted to live and love and give. It's
the falling in love that makes me want to stay here as long as possible.
On top of focusing on one thing, I've also been trying to focus on right now. This moment. In this moment it's about 10:30 and I'm sitting at my desk in my little home. The double doors are flung open wide to the warm Los Angeles night. Chet Baker is on the stereo, candles flickering all over the house. Being here right now means not thinking about all the things I did today or all the things I have to do tomorrow. It means not thinking about all the things that make me me, all the things I've done or seen or been over my life. It means not thinking about what I'm going to do this summer or when I turn thirty or some even more distant future.
It means just being here right now. It means knowing that I am everything that I have ever been and will ever be right now, in this moment. It means thinking about my life as though this moment is all there is...because really it is.
And it's really a lovely moment. The taste of an apple in my mouth, a saxophone gentle through the room, warmth and light and the dusky evening, me at 28 on a balmy March night in Los Angeles.


