Territory

Today, I woke up to my poem Territory featured on Poetry Daily. It was a lovely surprise. I wrote for a bit and then climbed up the Sugarloaf Ridge to Bald Mountain. I hadn't done that hike since I was a kid. I had forgotten what is what like up there. How you can see both valleys (Napa & Sonoma) and how at one point, you're higher than the birds.

It was a good walk, until I realized I was making a list of all my biggest fears and worries and replaying them over and over again like a little torture machine. I was thinking of my old meditation teacher and how she once said, "We can be in the most beautiful place and feel absolutely disconnected and stressed." And so I said, "Stop it!" real loud to myself and continued walking. It got easier and the worries got less loud.

By the time I was back in the valley, I felt better. I thought of how everyone has all these big thoughts in their brains all the time, and how it's so remarkable that we get up and go to work, and do our jobs, and love one another, and go grocery shopping, and pick up the kids, and write, and work more, and meanwhile our heads are so heavy we can barely lay them on our pillows.

So here's to carving out space, not just time, but space to live. Space in that brute of a brain. Space in this brute of a body. Just enough to drive home and return to the normal world, a little lighter, a little better for having seen the view from up there.