Moving Right Along

"Better than a kick in the head with a frozen boot."

This is something my father always said, perhaps my Grandmother before him.

Such is my family's philosophy, and now mine, that nothing is really all that bad. There's a line from Hamlet that expresses just this, using prettier words ("...for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."), however, that certainly Saskatchewanesque mantra makes everyone laugh when they hear it, therefore it wins.

Moving right along... previously I have found myself putting down roots in an ever-green Pacific Rainforest, watching VanCity grow (as I did, too) from sea to sky, landing land-locked in The Plains and now...facing the literally Desert-ed "Wind Capital of Texas", pop. 4,500 (plus one), where am I?

As if prompted (nuture or nature?), I started looking for the "somethings" in the nothing. Fears voiced by friends and family until now bouncing off my impermeable layer of positivity, or perhaps glancing off my body, in perpetual motion, like an atom, or a shark. Having been trained by life, in its various stages

to make my own fun
to live on nothing but my imagination
to build my own army of me
to do without
to remember what I have
to make things grow
to cultivate patience
to respect and help others
to laugh it off
to enjoy my own company
to collect company
to hunt and gather (and glean when necessary)
to leave it behind
to keep going
and going

so, who knew that after biking around for an hour feeling poached in a bag due to the unseasonable humidity plus the 100 degree heat, then coming to the realization that the closest place I would possibly find flystrips was a 50 minute drive (and therefore a three day wait) away...something so small would stop me in my tracks. Albeit temporarily, it still happened. It wasn't the lack of some THING so rudimentary as flypaper in town, it was the Universal Shrug. Oh, we don't have any? Must be Tuesday...

Really, it's not Cancer, the epiphany that I am "not in Kansas anymore", that positivity can only propel me so far, and most importantly that I am truly in the middle of nowhere and if it isn't here, I am not getting any.

There is a whole lotta nothing out here, the land is flat, here and there dotted by dusty green brush, flowering cactus clumps, black pumpjacks, thorny mesquite, steely white rows of turbines turn lazily at the edge of town, stretching into the distance. Two stoplights. One grocery store. Strangely, I am enjoying this slowness, despite the chain on my mental gears slipping a bit from lack of tension, not having found yet my rhythm, the wobble of my forward hesitant propulsion, wheels tracing a faint wavy line in the dirt. Toward my open path.

Because really, isn't this potentially everything I always wanted? A house with a garden. A studio and the time to be creative. Enough food in the fridge and rent paid. No petty distractions. A black cat curled up on my lap a white cat at my feet, my friends' art on the walls. Support from friends and family. A man who loves me.

Everything's coming up roses, right? Aside from the fact that I know it's coming, there's a catch. Ha! This thing inside, this gnawing feeling, it's the worry that the one thing I may have not learned along the way is how

to be still.

Ain't that a kick in the head.