carefree summer

"I don't believe in signs, Erica."

I faltered mid sentence and glanced at her briefly before turning back to the road. "You don't believe in signs?" I had to assure I'd heard her right.

"No. You're always talking about things like they're signs and I don't believe in signs."

Perhaps it's my innate skills of word working that has me constantly searching for deeper meaning in the text of life. Perhaps, in the way more analytical folks see patterns and numbers in the day to day things, writers and dreamers search for the metaphor within. That's what separates the disciplines; empirical vs spiritual. The deduction of how things work rather than why things work and what it all means. It's the artist in me. It's the religionist in me. It's what keeps me optimistic--my constant search for a clue of destiny, fate, the best to come.

There are moments in my life where I've felt what I believe to be pure peace, true joy, perfection even. But these moments are just that, moments, so the teaser of possibilities fades away, appearing only so I'll recognize it when I do finally stumble upon it. They'd come when I would read. I got into "chapter books" and novels in elementary because they made me feel something; dropped me in this world I didn't know about, took me places, had me experience things I never did. I would feel free, liberated, carefree, alive. It happens when I listen to Jason Mraz after any amount of time without hearing his angelic tones. It happens when I take the stage under another person's name. But it never stays. The book ends and it's over, the song ends and I'm empty, the show's done and the character evaporates into the vapor cloud that possessed me. I've wanted to capture it for years. I started writing a book in ninth grade that was/is titled in all my saved documents of it "carefree summer," because I wanted to write a book that embodied that feeling, that breezy life they always had in books (breezy naturally meaning feel-good, not simple and without adversity). I wanted to harness that peace, that joy, and maybe give myself the ability to keep it otherwise.

I've been muddled the past couple weeks. The semester is progressing, I'm growing more established in the new routines of my job at a credit union, the elementary school musical I'm directing is coming to the apex, and I don't know what I'm doing with my life.

I want to teach theatre. I won't find a job in that. I won't get paid for it. And should I be lucky enough to score a spot in the field, it's not a job I leave at work. Theatre doesn't stop, especially when you're the one running it all. I don't want to teach English. I'd be good at it. I can see that, but I've never wanted to, that's never been my desire. I want to write. I want to change my double major to creative writing and learn the things I really want to know to accomplish that part of my dreams. I won't find a job in that. If I happen to write something worth publishing, it's not going to rake in billions of dollars unless it somehow becomes the next teen fandom. I want to go on a mission, but I don't want to quit this job and lose that money and drop my schooling and....

Everything's just felt so wrong. Like the credit union was a mistake. Like taking generals this semester to get my associates done was the wrong course. Like I should have stayed home today.

But not this week. I can't pinpoint the exact moment it happened, but I'm going to guess it started Monday. I drove out to Ogden, and now that I do that regularly I've grown tired of the one CD I've been listening to for a couple weeks, when it usually takes a month or so before over-kill settles in. I popped in a recording of a Pickleville Playhouse melodrama and listened to the music and selected scenes of dialogue from the show, my insides burning with this excitement and happiness.

And it hasn't stopped all week. I'm addicted to it, to this feeling of feeling good. I can't get enough of this carefree summer, and other than the minor set back when an elementary school student left me a rather insulting note, this feeling hasn't gone away. I've gone from school to work to Friendsday to rehearsal to a live theatre production to lounging in my friends' apartment/duplex, and it hasn't gone away. I've been swarmed in this carefree summer all week, and I don't know what I did to get it, but it suddenly occurred to me I'm living that life I've been craving from the beginning. I'm at that point of peace and joy.

So I'm living in it. I'm taking it as a sign that things are right, here. That I'm where I'm meant to be standing regardless of what I thought now would look like. I'm taking this moment for all it is. And next semester can come when it comes. My next show will come when it's time. A mission will come when it's right. I don't need to plan ahead or worry about tomorrow. I need to lift where I stand in today and keep this carefree summer before it goes away.

Tracks in the Snow

Everyone knows it's going to hurt, but at least we'll get hurt trying.

I've always loved the snow, the way my perception becomes as though I'm locked in a log cabin, away from the world, snow cementing and nestling me into a safe-haven of contrasting warmth and frost. There is something enlivening to my soul when the earth becomes synonymous with the heavens, when I find myself in the middle of a cylinder of white, from my feet to as far back as I can lean my head. When the horizon vanishes, when it's white into infinity, I find myself at home.

I want to curl up on a windowsill and scribble in petite cursive all the workings of my mind, all the actions of my capacities, with my knees scrunched to my chest and the knowledge that I have nothing to do--no responsibility, no obligation, no plans--aside from absorbing the snow piling up against the window, taking breaths of the winter seeping through the double-pane glass.

It's a Virginia moment, one I haven't had for a long while. It's the desire for solitude, desire for cleanliness, desire for change and difference and peace; a certain sort of peace, an altered sort of peace from that which shrouds me constantly of late. Not the peace that life is working, life is right, and I am where I'm meant to be, the peace that makes words come, the peace that opens all the crevices of my soul up to the winds of words that dwell on snow drifts and swirl past in a haze. The kind of peace that brings longevity to my seldom failing heart and like a bellows feeds and fodders my spirit into a realm of knowledge, understanding, and creativity.

Perhaps the snow didn't bring it on, but is rather accenting the notion I've been skating with all week: that initial peace of correctness and joy. It presses in around me like a signifying beacon that here is where I should be, here is correct, here is beautiful like the snow.

I once imagined walking in a snow-crusted world, my hands in my coat pockets, unfeeling of the cold. My boots leaving soft prints in the unbroken ground as I traveled with head high, truly seeing the world, taking in the contrast of bark against scarves of snow draped round the trees, spying in the distance the faded existence of the forest, snowfall lending a whitewash across my senses, leaving the wilderness a duller version of itself, the colors faded and masked in a sepia grey scale, with an eternal light bouncing off of the winter it was shrouded by.

It's in these daydreams I picture the Indians. I draw back to childhood fascination of the natives to this land, and the early settlers that greeted and uprooted them. I read one book twice, Indian Captive, about a young blonde-haired girl taken captive by the natives and adopted into their culture. I imagine being her, or a beautiful red-skinned Pocahontas, taking to the woods by snowfall, at peace and at one with the land. My hand falls to the trunk of a tree and a remembrance of life rushes through my nerves to my core, and I'm half tempted to sit in the snow bank, to stay here and abide and breath this life and love. To stay until the snow fades away, a thought that never dawns in this daydream or the next, that the snow shall pass. A desire to partake of this world so often stranger to me.

There is love in my person, there is passion and acceptance to the extent that I could fling myself from this window to thwump with a puff of powder into the white beyond. I want to run away, I want to find Virginia, but not for a lack of satisfaction with where I stand, as it has been so often before. I want to take flight for the romance of discovering the white and feeling the possibilities that await awakened by the falling cold. I want to discover all that lies, buried and masked in the demeanor of the season.

I want to thrive within my situation. I want to sing of truth.