Even if you don’t happen to gather in an old farmhouse at the edge of an Iowa cornfield where the road bends and the treeline’s perfect for long lazy walks with your songwriter friends in December as you unpeal the process again and again in bedrooms and sunrooms and kitchens and porches, you still should put Dar Williams’ “Iowa” on repeat. It lands every single time.
I don’t like making my passions other people’s concerns, but every once in a while I wake up and feel like this one luxurious life is my own and I can do with it as I dream. I am known to talk too much. I’m known for the over-dramatic and I live in the land of the under-dramatic most days. I live in the buttoned up, keep it close, clock in clock out practicality of the good middle class middle happy, middle distance stare into the ‘what could be’ if the invisible adults weren’t grading me on my staying in the lines. Case in point, we asked our freshman son yesterday morning what he thought the expression, “Bloom where you’re planted” meant and his reply was, “Something like, ‘stay in your lane.” OH. SHIT.
That’s NOT what ‘Bloom where you’re planted’ means but it makes sense growing into this mid-level band of burning buried deep inside bodies amongst us teaching you such a definition.
I wake up to pre-dawn coffee, a seasonal arrangement one week into wilting, a dryer spinning, a clock ticking and I feel the burning and the desire to run. I wonder, “Is this the day I’ll enrage the invisible grown ups with my wild belief that this one precious life is mine or will the old men old gods in overalls drinking coffee at the diner in the big blue sky above sip quietly and all will be right with the world?”
I know the answer. How? Because I wanted to scream it into the phone to a beloved I desperately wish would RUN. RUN RUN RUN. Quit this bullshit, take your life back, be who you were meant to be while the wicked witch melts into a puddle. Little tip: when you feel something deeply and you feel like you must speak and you don’t care the consequences of how it looks or what will happen? That’s a truth FOR YOU and for the other person. Brene Brown let me in on a little secret when she described how “help” can be control/manipulation from the helper in the form of “Do this, be this so I don’t have to feel the discomfort of you NOT being this or doing this.” BLAMO. Gut PUNCH. GAME OVER. What I wanted to scream into the phone in service to another? That’s for me. That’s my own psyche telling me something I need to hear myself. My beloved may be on a different, sadder, harder path I’ll never understand AND ALSO will never live. This one precious life is the only thing I’ve got and so instead of shilling out ten cent advice to the passing masses, best just tell myself the truth and go ahead and “run through that screen door of discretion.”
Don’t scream it into a phone to a person who is not you. Scream it into the phone on to your own voicemail. RUN. BE YOU. THIS IS NOT A TEST. THERE ARE NO DO OVERS. Remember the Service of Remembrance at the Funeral Home you sang at on Sunday after a weekend of Songwriting? That’s a message. The songs are a message. The friendship you got to enjoy is a message. This all ends and no one takes a damn thing with them. You are in the midst of endings all the time and you have to decide what will live tomorrow and what will die. Will it be your dreams that get the boot and you choose some bullshit appearance checklist marred in misery? Will you choose the same old sad story you always cling to or will you ask for help, burn the boats and never go back again?
I have a day two undecorated douglas fir in the corner of my living room. We’ve never left a tree undecorated for two days straight. Dunbar, are you going to say it’s a message? Heck yes I am. There’s meaning in everything. The empty tree is the empty canvas. The empty canvas is the challenge. What’s it gonna be, Dunbar? What are you going to love into tomorrow and what are you going to prune, remove and make into a fire?
My mom is a disappearing act. I admit the thought of her hits me at the strangest times and my knees buckle and I become the puddle. It is a thought that turns my dreaming into an illusion and digs me a deep dark hole. My dad is coming for Christmas and my mom will pleasantly, peacefully stay home at her residence and for that I am truly grateful. She and I were never close. Her illness made our fighting cease. Her life was and is a magnificent testimony to tragedy, resilience, grace, and the extraordinary. She was half orphan, half lost, all forgiven and five hundred feet tall. And aren’t we all in our own special cocktail the same?
You’ll know what ‘run’ means when it’s whispered.
(No douglas fir Christmas trees were burned in the writing of this blog post)