Tonight as I sat at the airport to do a pick-up, the day was at it’s most gorgeous. I forgot my phone at home so I couldn’t capture it and I’m glad I couldn’t. Just before the sun left the sky, it peeked over the mountains on Gravina Island and danced across the trees in Ketchikan. It made the trees show their varying heights, which it usually doesn’t. Almost always, when I look at the mountains, they appear one shade of green and one height. The lighting made such an impact on what details I could collect of the same mountains I pass every day. If I could paint, I would paint this whole business but life is short and I have no brushes on hand.
I scribbled this down as I waited:
I want to believe that satisfaction is a skill, or a muscle that collects data from each experience, soaks up nutrients from each new interaction from the roots. I want to believe that sadness, even suffering, promotes growth because it pushes us to search most aggressively for our own soul’s ideal ecosystem. The sunlight is laying across the trees in a most uncommon pattern. To be true, it’s like looking on them for the first time because I can see the varying heights of the trees and the undulating landscape, it’s like I have super vision but my eyes haven’t changed. It’s the lighting.
Maybe our souls have optimal lighting. At 30 I’ve come to accept that Florida is too hot too flat too blonde too conservative too cultureless and too religious for me. It’s where I was born. I was born too close to the equator.
BUT if I was required to live there, I’d make it work. I’d collect things to temper my dissatisfaction, I would adjust.
What I am sensing, from deep within the vibrations of my lungs, is that I am radiating with the thought that it’s possible that I can learn happiness. Is it possible that I can cultivate happiness, that I can harvest inner peace, even if I had to live a winter in Ketchikan without the sun or live a summer in Florida without reprieve or find a way to recovery if I lost a limb or lost a loved one?
I’m feeling myself grow powerful against my greatest fear: circumstance.
Why can’t being a person be just as much of a learned skill as captaining a boat, as fishing?
And while I’m on that path, am I strong enough to greet sadness not just as inevitable but as a necessity for survival?
I think if I could learn to open my door to all levels of experience, and to accept what comes my way with peace and gratitude, that I would be a strong ass lady. And I like the sound of that.
These are all concepts we’ve heard before: no pain no gain, you cannot have sunshine without a little rain, and the list continues.
Sure, but I grew up knowing Alaska existed, but I couldn’t tell you what it smelled like before, what it means to pay attention to the height of the tide every time you pass water, or to notice a cluster of sea stars as I casually walk by.
I used to imagine my life as a grown-up lady, without any idea of how it would actually go. And it hasn’t gone how I thought it would actually go.
