Chronicle

ACCOMPANYING MUSIC  Journaling Music

Sunday, September 24, 2023  3:37pm

I just decided to quit my job at the end of this year and focus on writing, art, photography, walks in the mountains, and sitting by the sea.  I keep saying that the world is on fire and I want to see it before it all blows away. So why wait?  My body is still pretty intact, as is my mind, most of the time.  While I have the agency to get out and about and see and think and feel and do, then I will.  I love my home, my garden, my pets, and my family.  But I know that if I don’t walk out that door and WANDER, I will regret that.  Of course, this decision is paired with fear about how my absence will result in the dissolution of my marriage, and the grief thinking that my old sweet dogs and cats won’t be here to greet me when I finally return.  But I’ve always been a traveler.  Through books, movies, make believe with my dolls, I was always on a journey to see something new.

Why do I call this Coloring Outside of the Lines? I’ve always been a little on the periphery of things– of friend groups, of my family of origin. I watched and listened and kept silent until I learned to speak up.  My mother chided me for being “so weird” and asked why I couldn’t be like other people’s children.  Well, Mama.  I couldn’t. I’m not made that way.  Look at all the things I’ve done that “Black women don’t do”.  I was a wildland firefighter, a lumberjane, did stream clearance in the icy waters of the Klamath, went into the Peace Corps, married a man with 7 children.  What parameters did you expect me to live in?  When I joined the CCC, I told myself “I’m going where no-one knows me and no-one from  here will  likely know me afterwards.  So I’m going to be the person I’ve always wanted to be.”  That led to problems of all kinds throughout my life, but I never regretted being myself.  What I feared was not being REAL.  Once I told Valentin that the JuJu who existed before she heard about Paraguay was still alive inside me, and I wasn’t going to let her die just because I am a mother and wife.  That JuJu has her passport in her hand and her backpack ready to go. I love the poems by Mary Oliver.

“ What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” she asks. My answer–have fun and do purposeful work.  Where that will happen exactly, I can’t foresee at the moment, but I believe that I will find that place.  See you on the road.

The Journey  by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

– from Dream Work