It's a lazy Saturday morning, and I thought I would write a lazy blog while listening to lazy music with my guitar on my lap, occasionally playing lazy chord progressions along with the music, disregarding the frequent need for a capo.
It's snowing outside, and for once I am actually happy about it. Snow can be horrible sometimes; it can be fast and wet, stinging your eyes and biting through even the most hardy layers of fleece and wool, or it can be dry and thick, choking the air so any attempt to walk ends up in tripping over yourself or someone you didn't see until they were six inches away from you.
This snow is snowglobe snow. Big, fat, lethargic puffs of white drifting down from the clouds, almost reluctant to reach the ground where they seem to know they will be trampled and salted and compressed into disgusting piles of gray sludge.
From the first few paragraphs, I think I've almost convinced myself that I'm not stir-crazy. But that's a lie. I am so incredibly stir-crazy, and I think I have been for a long time. I know so many people who are content to stay in one place forever, and I envy them. I am not that way. Maybe it comes from two significant moves when I was growing up, or that I spent all my summers away from home, tramping around the Rockies.
It could even be genetic. My mom took a semester off college to go live in Colorado, where she knew no one, and work at a ski resort. I have a sweater knit in 1969 to prove that escapade. My dad got out of his hometown in Waymouth, Massachusetts because he didn't want to end up like everyone in his hometown; working at the factory and never leaving the house they grew up in.
Genetic, environmental, or spiritual...all I know is that I spend a good chunk of my time dreaming of the places I could live. I've had many wise people tell me to be happy wherever I am, and I'm certainly trying. The problem is...
I'm not that wise.
I'm restless. The inner peace that makes a person's eyes light up with warmth, and their shoulders relax, and their posture become welcoming...well, I haven't necessarily felt that for a significant amount of time yet. Sure, I'll get snippets, when I'm playing guitar, or writing, or reading, or eating with friends, or sprawled out on warm grass in the summer with three stereos playing This Side or Takk simultaneously...but I haven't been able to sustain that peace.
My heart is still jumping out of my chest at the thought of adventure, of far off places, and creating my own future.
Living in the moment, without thinking about the next one, is a huge challenge. I just need the world to stop spinning so madly so I can find that inner quiet without my head traveling without my body to Seattle, New York, Florence, London, Prague, Portland, Santa Fe, Wellington, Zurich, Sydney, Bordeaux, and everywhere else.
On a snowy day like today, I at least feel content to be in my little mountain snowglobe, watching from the inside, and holding on to the peace that the world tries so hard to distract me from.
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