To Live

Yesterday, aimless on a breezy August day, wondering what to do, I went outside.  I was at my home place, the house where I spent countless hours growing up, looking at my reflection, learning my roots, and sprouting new fruit, and it has become the house where I go for solace on weekends.  It is a place where my mom sits and reads alone, without the comfort of my father, who is losing all of his memories in a nursing home.  As I walked outside though, I strode past my truck, the chainsaw, the kayak, and the bike, through some orchard grass and weeds to the garden.  

Messy with the spoils of unfettered loam and rain, the garden was overwhelming in its disorganization, but I grabbed a splintered handle of a shovel and began to dig potatoes, finding the dead stalks, and heaving at earth.  As I turned the first clod of soil, the smell of soil hit me, and took me back to childhood, before uncertainty of school, the toil of work, lost love and disappointment had arrived, and reminded me of what it felt like just to live, just to feel the earth under foot, smells of life asphyxiating every pore.  For a moment, my worries faded behind a wall of joy, separating me from the unnecessary worry that plagues me as I navigate my nomadic life between the city and this green valley, the place I want to call my home. 

For the past 18 months I have been working in Arlington Virginia, and living in Northern Virginia.  It is a far cry from the place where I lived just 2 years ago, and much different from the life I knew as a child while I dug potatoes in that same soil.  Although just 2 hours from the house I first knew, this place teems with a life that is foreign to me.  I don’t belong here in the middle of the city hype and discord, I know that, but what well-adjusted soul would?  Who am I to have any more disdain for this sprawling life than the Venezuelan immigrant who hangs sheetrock for minimum wage?  How much worse is my discontent than his, and what makes my ultimate happiness any more urgent?  These are the questions that I ask myself, and I am left knowing my own personal truth from yesterday, that the soil will always smell better than money, the rat race, or this ill-conceived civilization that we have created for ourselves. 

The past two years, since writing on this space last, I have grown in monumental ways, but, as with any incredible growth, that growth has given way to discouraging atrophy in others.  Now, as I begin to write again, finding happiness in all of the silly unknowns of life, I have seen that this is not my home, nor is the small town where I grew up, nor is Babatngon, or any of the other small places where I have laid my head.  My home is wherever my soul rests when it is weary, and wherever my mind finds peace.  The peace from within, as we all come to find out, is what makes our lives bearable, not the vestiges of our wealth.  That truth, though easily spoken and written, is much harder to live out. 

Life, I have found, will devour the soul if we are unable to accept it unconditionally.  Take the good with the bad, they say, and live, live, live.