Putting Down Roots

It’s right about noon, and I just stepped outside for the first time today. The porch on Mark’s house is shady this time of day, and I can see the street only through a jungle of marigolds, strawberries, tomato vines, and dill flower. There’s one cat nuzzling around my legs, and another one gazing at me through the window. I haven’t gotten dressed yet today, and haven’t really talked to anyone, and have spent the morning lazily organizing my jumbled possessions and sipping a banana peanut smoothie that Mark left for me in the fridge after I solidly slept through his whole leaving-for-work process. I think, soon, I might change out of my pajamas and write letters down by Jamaica Pond.

For all the gentle laziness, though, I keep getting these little twinges of anxiety: these nudges saying, “hey, shouldn’t you be doing something?”

As I was cleaning out my things from the summer, I came upon pages of to-do lists: schedules for check-ins with staff, reminders to photocopy paperwork, notes towards discipline talks, outlines of lessons to teach. I always write my to-do lists with little check-boxes next to each item so that I can check it off when I complete it, but I always just want to draw full, thick lines through things once they’re done. On each of the to-do lists I uncovered this morning, about two-thirds of the items were crossed off, and the others are things that I didn’t quite get to. For the last eleven weeks, I have been consistently behind. More than that, though, I’ve gotten used to my life being ridiculously scheduled, to always having things I needed to do, to planning a day based on a triage of what needed to get done.

And now, here I am, with a whole week in Boston before I have to show up to orientation at BU, and the main thing on my to-do list is to settle in.

As I work on settling in, I keep thinking about a workshop I went to about soil, and how if you want to determine what your soil type is–your mix of silt, sand and clay–what you can do is scoop up some of it, put it in a jar with some water, shake it up, and then put it somewhere where it won’t be disturbed. After long enough, all of the mixed-up bits will layer out: you’ll get a layer of sand, a layer of silt, a layer of clay. Once it all settles out, you can see what you’ve got, and you’ll know what you’re working with.

This is what I keep trying to remind myself of, and what I keep trying to tell the twinges of anxiety that sneak in while I’m balancing tea on my knee and listening to Mark’s housemates talk about the Delta Blues: that in the laziness and the solitude and the resting, some important sorting-out and settling will happen, and I can start to make sense of things.