Let me have courage, I said, in about 2017. Well. I’ll come back to that.

I have been re-reading Tell the Turning lately. I wrote these poems in my mid-30s—not so long ago, and also, it’s been an age. An era, is one way of thinking about it. Pre- vs. post-COVID, globally. Pre- vs. post-40, personally. And a number of other possible dividing lines.

Pre- vs. post-intentionally-changing-my-life. I’m amazed how I could write, before, to explore what I could not yet fully understand, or live into. Not that I didn’t understand it, just that there are layers now that I couldn’t have foreseen, and yet I wrote them. I have said before that my own poems are my advisors, my companions, my spiritual directors, my wise councillors. I forget the things I know, all the time. Fortunately, Past Me has written them down.

Let me tell you (though how many of you reading this already know?) how absolutely wild it is to have changed my life. And to be still learning—(only?) 4 months in—what that means, and what that costs.

Recently I shook hands on a housing situation here in Astoria for the months of April and May. It (Astoria) is not where I want to live, but it’s lovely, the house is a good match for my very specific needs, it’s an easy move after my upcoming international travel, and it’s within a few hours’ reach of my beloved, not to mention my medical insurance. (Non-American readers right now are possibly startled at that last clause. Yeah. I know.)

Then a whole bunch more things happened that encouraged me to make some plans for that time. I ran into a dear friend by chance at Fisherpoets, and we are working out dates to spend some concentrated time together. I reconnected with another friend who is teaching me about his wonderful art, and introduced me to his teacher, who lives just down the coast. I joined a dance class I like a lot, and I pre-paid for a bunch of weeks. I found a florist, who sells by the stem and makes fascinating conversation. I found a tailor (!) who fixed my sloppy pants, and was in discussions to have her add some shaping to the weird boxy bullshit that is button-down shirts these days. I made some useful medical appointments, which are 2.5 hours away in Portland, but that’s totally doable with a little planning. I haven’t made hard plans in 4 months; it felt nice.

I thought to myself: you know, every time you hit a wall, it turns out in retrospect to have been an invitation. I went to sleep all cozy in my solo bed, with sleet slapping the windows and warm covers and silence all around. About two hours after I woke up today, I lost my house.

Call the winds to me? Shit, stop calling if you don’t want them to answer.

The how here is not important. Misunderstandings, scarcity-brain, “the economy,” the end-times era that is now.* The point is: I leave the country next week, and suddenly I don’t have a home when I come back.

As several folks have already pointed out, it’s not like I’ll be sleeping under a bridge. They’re right, and I know that, and I’m grateful. And also. Can we please stop reflexively making a hierarchy of our (and everyone else’s) difficulties? Sometimes hard is hard. In this case, I made a compact with my deepest needs, and moving back to Portland is a betrayal of that promise, which means an abandonment of my own self. That’s fucking hard, y’all.

So I’m not moving back to Portland. Where am I moving? This I do not yet know. I’m here in Astoria for three more days, then I’m traveling with my dearest ones on a long-planned long vacation. And then I’m back in the States, and…?

*Cue the winds*

There are plenty of conclusions to be drawn from this. Believe me, I am already trying. The pop-theology of our day (and every other) makes it easy to see “the Universe” (God, the Divine, whatever) as having a plan for me that I just don’t see the contours of yet. And maybe that’s right. I am not writing here about a lack of faith. Faith is trust, and I have a fair amount. I resist facile interpretations, though, so the next time somebody tells me these things happen for a reason, they’re going to get…well, a polite nod, probably. Like I said, I don’t exactly think they’re wrong. More than most things, what I’m actually grateful for is that trust. It’s not trust in an outcome, though—and that’s the point of it—and friends, that is hard.

Is this an invitation? Obviously. I get to be upset about it first, though.

What’s the point here? Trust, I guess. Difficulty: as a thing in itself, not to be reflexively fixed or explained away. Change: when you make one, don’t expect the rest of your life to stand still around it.

Let me have courage. And you, too. For the difficult and the beautiful and the unknown, I think we all need it.

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*More like Ragnarok than the Rapture, but still: endings.