Slowly, I’m learning.

I’m learning that there’s truth in the statement Life is not a race to be won. That Life, capital L, is an often-meandering journey, made for us to notice, observe, and learn from.  It’s work, but it’s also slow, sunny afternoons with budding trees and a persistent wind from the South, and warm dogs that lay on your feet until they boil.

It’s more than a to-do list.

*  *  *

Things continue falling in place for The Project this summer.  I need to clean up some things here first, but the prospect of six weeks Away has given it all a purpose again.

I’ve talked to so many people already in the area where The Project is taking place that I already feel like I know it a little bit.  I listen to the music, watch the travel movies they send, read books and historical accounts, and generally find context for things I haven’t seen yet, but will.

I can’t wait.

*  * *

This weekend, I have four days by myself.  This house seems a little bigger without the endless parade of stiltwalkers and Crazy, but I think I can handle that.  A break from the Crazy isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Time to take a breath, evict some dust bunnies, clean out the refrigerator.

Or just sit in the back yard, under the waving trees with their green-swollen branches, and enjoy the wind.

I’d bet on the latter.

For a while now, the focus word for my whole entire life has been synthesis.  (Well, that and change and omgmovetoNCnowplzkthxbai, but we’ll narrow it down to just the one word for today’s bloggy purposes.)

Synthesis, or rather, the lack thereof, has been a recurrent theme in my life.  Not so much from a negative connotation of such, but as a constant, nagging thought — why am I constantly attracted to/obsessed with such seemingly disparate things?  I’ve said it before, but I have this deep envy of people who have One Single Thing they love more than everything else in the world, and know exactly what it is that they’re supposed to do with that great love.  I don’t have that.  I have a ton of things I’m reasonably good at/versed in/knowledgeable about, but no one, overriding passion, per se.

By the same token, I’ve been a little frustrated with that fact sometimes.  I fight this propensity with undue effort and energy.  (Which, I’ve found, often has the effect of screaming at the sun for being so sunny.  This screaming has what purpose exactly? Oh, right.  Venting.  That’s about it.)  I think, wistfully, about giving everything up and moving to a mountain cabin somewhere and never having another interest again.   (Which, by the way, would last for about four seconds, until I started collecting wildflowers or rocks or something and turning them into tourist-gift earrings or writing serialized sonnets about flora and fauna.  I’m constitutionally incapable of being still for too long.)

So I was sitting here on Friday night, up later than I’d intended thanks to some ill-advised Starbucks earlier in the evening, and making a list of all the weird stuff I’m obsessed with.  Not just passing obsessions or interests, but the things that I’ve followed for some time, or are core beliefs, or that I’m  relatively competant with (which don’t drive me batshit insane to do for extended periods of time).  The short list looked kind of like this:

• Writing – blogs and articles and books and crazy emails at two a.m. and stories about perfumes and imaginary people.  I’m probably forgetting a type or two.  But I write.  A lot.
• The yarn thing.  Making it.  Knitting it.  Dyeing it all purdy so that other people can have a yarn thing, too.
• Media.  Old, new, doesn’t matter.  I’m obsessed with the medium being part of the message.
• Travel.  Like, road trip travel.  I did not name this site moderngypsy, back in 1996 (!!!),  without a reason.  The lure of and desire for the open road, despite my simultaneous need for roots, is strong within me, Luke.
• Related:  The concept of Place as a character in our stories, be that fiction or real life.  It’s what spawned and developed the next one.
• Community, and the way it’s formed, nourished, and interacts with itself, whether from an infrastructure point of view or a societal one.
• Journal-keeping/art stuff/the recording of days.  Which probably falls under “media”, above, but is out there enough on its own that it bears a separate bullet point.
• Faith, and the belief that none of any of this is by accident.  Call it grand design or call it being called or call it leaping without looking and hoping there’s a net somewhere before the big splat.  Whatever.  Concept’s the same.

I’d found a book I wrote back in 2001 that I never did publish as a book.  (I separated it out chapter-by-chapter and gave classes online and off instead.)  While flipping through it on Friday, I remember having the thought, Wow…this isn’t half-bad….I should totally write another book.

Because, you know, I have so much free time.  Ahem.

Synchronicitally (my word — made it up.  Tell Webster.), I found my travel journals from the Every Fifth Rest Stop project of 2005 –when I drove from Iowa to Baja to Seattle and back to Iowa, stopping at every fifth rest stop, rain or shine, day or night, and drew something from the area and wrote commentary — and had the same thought.

AT THE SAME TIME (wow…this is beginning to sound like neck and armhole shaping on a knitting pattern, isn’t it?), I was looking at a friend’s site, who happens to be an amazing knitwear designer.  She does these series things — patterns that are all related and serialized and follow a nice little theme for the month/year/whatever.  And I was thinking that something like that would be really, really fun to do.  Restrain the creativity just a tad, within a certain context, and let it all fly.  Because, again, I have EverSoMuch free time to even knit, much less do a series, right?

AND (I know, bear with me here), right about THAT SAME MOMENT….I get an email from Travelocity that mentions a particular destination for cheap-ass airfare, with one of the “Related Attractions” being a road trip I’ve been wanting to take since the minute I heard about it.  A destination with a ton of history, steeped in Americana (which I’m also totally into — kitsch and history tend to overlap, and I love that.), and accessible all of a sudden.  There’s a whole community aspect to it, too, and that whole sense of Place thing that I mentioned, and and and….

Okay, seriously folks.  Do I need a divinely-inspired Clue-By-Four, or what?  There were more little “coincidences” over the next few minutes.  Maybe I was just seeing them because I had that filter on the ol’ blinders, or maybe I just finally had my eyes open to what was going on around me.  Something.  It doesn’t matter, really.  The fact is:  it was all just too convenient, too coincidental, too perfect to be an accident.  As things usually are when they’re the Right Thing To Do.

Over the next several hours, everything started coalescing in my head.  Congealing, even, despite the fact that the word congeal makes me squick on about a thousand levels.  But that’s exactly what it did — it congealed into this Project.  This small-but-huge Project that brings in just about every single aspect of what’s interesting to me, which I now have to hope will not only remain accessible, but also be interesting to any other human that doesn’t live inside my head.  And that I’ll be able to get it OUT of my head when the time comes.

I have faith.  (Or, as one friend put it, God doesn’t ask you to the prom if he doesn’t think you’ll look good in the dress.  I love my friends.)

Today’s been all about the research.  I need to know, not IF it’s going to happen, but WHEN it’s best to make it happen.  I’ve been reading the histories and scrawling out ideas.  That picture up there is the mindmap at seven a.m. — it’s four pages now, not including notes.

(just as a sidenote?  Just now, while writing this?  Another email from Travelocity with an even lower price for airfare to my destination.  I kid you not.  I called Adminnie in here to look, because I thought maybe I was losing my mind and hallucinating, or someone had laced the starbucks with hallucinogens.  But no, it’s right there in the inbox, staring back at me and laughing in a faintly-divine-sounding voice.)

What started as a random collection of ideas, thoughts, and competencies have all been thrown into this giant melting pot, and have indicated a desire to come out the other side.  To synthesize, and finally work together.

It’s about time I could finally see what’s in front of me.

A few days ago, I stood here in the rain, head thrown back.

Tiny pinprick raindrops were curling my hair and washing the day from my face.  I could smell the green in the air; the smoke from a distant fire.  One of the last cool days before Spring shrugged in from that place Spring goes when it’s not here.

And I thought, maybe this is what home feels like.

*  *  *

“Death jogs our minds about what’s most important.  It separates wheat from chaff.  Life isn’t about money and big hourses or fancy cars and titles.  It’s about family and friends and our relationship with God and whether we love.  We can’t fit all that on a tombstone, so we carve our names and our dates of birth and death and hope that, somewhere between those two dates, life was well lived.”

For Everything a Season
Phillip Gulley

It’s become clear to me that the seasons are changing.  The metaphorical season and the physical season, chapter and verse.

There’s so much I don’t talk about, which, I’m sure, seems a little surprising, given that an entire internet’s-worth of people knows all about the intimate workings (or non-workings, as the case may be) of my boobs.

Someone, in an interview, asked me how I decide what to keep public and what to hold private, and at the time, I answered that I told my stories, unless it was someone else’s to tell.  Which is true, in a way — but I’m becoming more and more aware of a line, and the things I keep behind that line are the ones that tend to bother me the most.

When you talk to the world about everything, who do you talk to about the world?

*  *  *

I’m heading to Charlotte today for some goodbyes.  I’ve stayed longer than I meant to in North Carolina.  There are sites to administer and products to develop and markets to explore and search engines to optimize.  (heh.)  I’ve been here long enough to have taken some time in the planning of things, so I can execute what will amount to a tactical strike when I get back to the farm.

I didn’t plan for a period of downtime, and I’m thinking I should have.

This one, this season, may require a little grieving.  A little thought, a litle processing, a little balance.

Someday, I’ll tell the story of how the sun shone and the winds blew and the silence broke everything wide open.

Until then, I just fly home.