Good
I stretch my legs this morning in bed, my toes frozen with familiar feeling. I forgot how cold my toes have always gotten here in this damp country.
I've been trying to not count down the days until I drive away, fly away. I want to be fully here, not let the sadness of leaving interject on Wednesday, Thursday, almost Friday. I'm packing a vial of maple syrup and a bag of apples is my carry-on. I hope that the scent of here sticks to me. I hope I wear the residue of here well.
Yesterday I ran a marathon of visits with people I love and who love me and some of them took my face in their hands, took my heart with theirs and said "You belong here. You fit here. It feels right with you here." And I couldn't disagree. No matter how out of place I have always felt, wherever I am, I cannot deny that others feel that I belong here. This morning after she made pumpkin pancakes and while I sipped my too-strong coffee slowly, she said it again a different way: I just want you to be breathing the same air we're breathing.
I love the air here. Today is a rainy autumn day, but the clouds, they move fast, billowing greys, whites, yellows and they carry new and fresh air with them. The water falls over the river dam, a constant hum, carrying new water to the St Lawrence River. These leaves are dying, giving their brilliant best before making way for new ones in the spring.
And I feel myself blown past too.
It is not easy to leave places you love. It is less easy still, to leave places you love and the people you love with them. There is nothing simple about making a choice because you know it is the right one and having nothing, really, to say in your defense.
There are black and whites, rights and wrongs in life, but when it comes down to it, when you are faced with a million choices in life, most of them will not be of that sort. It will not be so easy to decide whether something is worth fighting for or whether to say that enough is enough and it's time to choose a different way. It is not easy to pack up and move across the country on a deep soul hunch and not much more.
And people will balk, there will always be those. Wherever you go or whatever you do, someone will weigh in. Because when the choice is not their own, it looks very simple, very black and white. And there will be shame, because to leave one thing is to choose that another thing is better, even if you don't mean for it to be that way. It just is. And there will be fear, because new things are risks and leaving old things is a risk too. What if the laws of gravity are true in life too, and you are the only thing between every thing and one, and the hard ground that will break their fall and them too?
The only thing that keeps you, then, in a place where you feel out of place, a bit empty, void of the things you think are most beautiful, what keeps you there is only the confidence that God only does what is most good. And the daily realization that what you call good is not what He calls good.
Because here, on this porch, where the sun is beginning to peek over navy clouds in the distance, where the water is rushing past me, where the leaves are hanging on for dear life, this is what I call most good.
But He knows it's only a wind, a vapor, a breath and then gone.
For good.
