Nerves

Every adventure is a challenge to your apprehensions. New sounds, new sensations, you train yourself to breathe across the hurdles and prepare yourself for bigger steps for days. Your accent stumbles and giggles across itself, you lie in a hammock in the early evening and remember how to read again. Is time slipping from your fingers again? Or are you playing your cards right, clearing the path for a cake walk through the rolling fields ahead?

Life is too short, always too short. Your days are so full and yet how hard to remember how it is to appreciate the world when you have it. 

All you can do is try. 

The hurdles will wait until you can climb them.  

Somerset

Weeks disappear in a rush, you do not write. Your journal is scribbled mayhem, trying to recall the exact color of the ocean on the west coast and the way the jellyfish stingers nettle your skin for just a brief moment before all you taste is salt. How your eyebrows turn white. How your heart rests differently in your chest when it is held up by those who've known you forever. How simple gratitude feels when everything is just the way you'd hoped. 

I arrived in England later than planned, only the slightest hint of dusk remaining as we careened through the sleeping villages. By the time I woke, rolling fields spread out around me, an old stone cottage sat on my shoulders, a foreign accent lilted around my tongue and I was unable to stop it. The dogs run ahead on our morning walks but they always find their way back. I wonder what it would be like to live here.

Weeks disappear, I do not write. 

Perhaps I don't always have to. The smell of an English rose can still linger, 
even when it's only in your mind.  

Arrive

Step off the commuter train and strain your eyes along the platform. At the very end, spot a small creature, mop of white hair, waving a balloon and a chocolate bar. He sees you in return, comes barreling towards you, arms outstretched, chocolate bar flailing. For children, reunions are simple, tangible, the hug comes easy. It's no more, no less than this moment. 

You sink back into your homeland, find your footing, hear your accent return, sleep like you never had trouble breathing. It feels complicated when you think about it. 

But maybe it's no more, no less, than moments stacked on each other. Maybe you're making mountains out of what could've just been 
a hug.  

Check In

One of the chickens disappears. Plucked – no pun intended – straight from the coop and vanished without a trace. Your nephews take it upon themselves to play detective, scouring the fields below with the kind of gusto only young sleuths could muster. 

You feel a sadness you don't currently have space for. 

A whole month passes, you do not write. There is no time – emotional or otherwise – in your schedule for efforts of such magnitude. You are tired. You are a wrung-out dish rag at the peak of summer, something doesn't add up. Your suitcase is a hundred pounds of expectations, plus a raincoat. The weather forecast changes by the day. Before you're back here, you'll have faced snow. Life is strange, and wondrous, and impossible all at once. This is the gift, when you remember to view it through that lens. 

Two days to departure. Everything is lighter 

after takeoff.  

Right

The desert doesn't linger, you are immediately thrust back into the world. Inspiration peters, the itch to always be writing is replaced with a to-do list. You founder in the questions. Outside the window, a minor squall whips itself across the valley, you commiserate with its dejected attitude. You're feeling something similar yourself. 

It's the knowing something is waiting in the wings that gets you. It's the impatient knockings of outside demands that drain the inspiration from your fingertips. You always were a sucker for a checked box. 

One thing at a time. The rain will pass, the sun return. One stumble does not make a fall.  

and Leaves

Another morning in the desert, I climb over the tortoise gate to the sandy path and run straight into one of the hard-shelled ancients, steady and still on the path. It does not care for my rush, sunny Sunday mornings are a day of rest for reptiles, like any other. You think you should take note, but where you come from, summers were not for resting, but for reviving, for returning to a life that had done nothing but rest all winter, had done nothing but lie in wait. 

The messages from across the ocean are clear: the first trembling days of summer are here, life is returning to their limbs, their hopeful hearts. It all begins now, and they don't want to miss a minute of it. 

In the 90-degree heat, in the scorching sunlight, in the towering awe of these red rocked mountains, I feel the same. Back at the house, a story waits patiently. You've lit the fire again, everything is buzzing. 

You know this is how it begins.  

Canyon

Early morning, the air is still but the bike paths and sidewalks already busy, everyone trying to get a moment in the sun before it turns into a swelter. You lace your shoes and turn up the canyon, legs aching to burn, lungs longing for the clarity that only comes at the end of a run. It's been decades, and you never tire of this feeling. Have found no drugs to beat the soar of this cleanse. 

The canyon is quiet as you enter, ancient cliffsides towering over you with little shade to offer. Lizards scurry where you run, the odd pedestrian offering a friendly hello but in your mind you are elsewhere. Last night, we climbed to the top of a petrified sand dune to watch the eons unfold beneath us, the awe of a million years like a comforting blanket around us as the sun set. On the page, a little girl discovers the magic of a new world and you think, that's exactly how it is. You feel again that responsibility to bring her into this one, to make something of all of these ideas. 

Remember again who you are
and what you came here to do.