Rebirth

The earth lives again, and everything is reproducing. The air sweetens and thickens with pollen, or love dust, as I like to call it. The trees glow green in the sun, tulips explode from the ground, and we throw off our winter coats—and perhaps a few inhibitions with them. I’m trying to be more connected with nature by renewing myself with it, but it’s not easy. Change takes time, and when you see days and years blowing away like March pear blossoms on April wind, it’s easy to wonder what good it does to try to change. Making 2015 a satisfying year of met goals and self-improvement is starting to feel like grabbing handfuls of wind. You can’t hold onto time and make it move at your own pace. However, though I may not be moving as quickly as time, I like to think I've at least caught up with it enough to see its silhouette on the horizon. I finally got a gym membership, I may have an opportunity for a promotion at work, and my latest documentary seems to finally be coming together.

I spent last Saturday morning at Duke Gardens in Durham taking pictures for said documentary, and the experience reminded me of how many people, including myself, seem to be losing touch with the tangible world, the sensory, primal, rooted world, things that exist outside the pretty patterns of light and weightless communication we submit to everyday. So many of us no longer seem to want or have time for real things that we can hold in our hands, feel at our backs, or stand on and trust to support us. I think it's killing us. Just being out in sunlight, sweating and climbing over things to get a good shot made me feel better than I had all week. The click of my camera was the sound of machinery working, not a synthetic sound effect coming from my phone. I thought about something I read recently; I can't remember what it was exactly, but the author basically said that, despite being as evolved as we are, humans still crave the physical movement that comes so naturally to our fellow primates. I also thought about something the writer Allan Gurganus said when he visited my creative writing class: we are angels and animals, bodies with spirits. I had a similar feeling as I spent the rest of the afternoon conversing with friends--not through Facebook or texting, but actually speaking to them face-to-face. Something about being physically present with someone makes communicating a little more satisfying.

My attempts at connecting more with the real world, instead of getting too comfortable with the world in my head, are part of a much larger self-reinvention process. Sometimes it feels like how I imagine giving birth to a child might feel. Creating a new self, a physically and creatively fit, more articulate, more confident, more forgiving self, is so difficult, especially when everything around you is changing too. I envy the azalea bushes in my parents' yard; they make change look so effortless. One minute, they're brown and scraggly, bent over from a winter storm. Then, all of a sudden, they're bursting with flowers and color and bees. It's taken me so much longer to recover from the storms of last winter, both literal and figurative. I wish I could straighten my back and keep growing as easily as those plants. But no one ever got anything in life by wishing. Wishing too much can keep a person from living. There's a biblical verse in Proverbs that reads, "Forsake the foolish, and live, and go in the way of the wise." I think "foolish" can be interpreted as both foolish people and foolish behaviors or habits. I need to stop regretting or fantasizing about what my life could be or could have been, and live. We all do, even when living hurts. If I stretch hard enough toward the sun, maybe I'll flower someday.

Untangling: A Few Thoughts from the Outer Banks

I fear this blog is spiraling into a state of perpetual mourning. My last post, "Personal Damascus," is probably one of the saddest I've
ever written, and part of me regrets writing it, therapeutic as it was. It was the product of an unusually stressful week at work, full of nine and ten hour days (don't get me wrong; I love my job). I also hadn't been sleeping well; changes in my schedule or environment seem to cause this problem. Finally, two of my roommates left for a few days, leaving the apartment somewhat lonely. All of these circumstances combined to form an emotional cluster bomb that I hope to not repeat. In the future, I'm thinking of expanding this blog to include book reviews and perhaps other things, in order to keep it from becoming "Considerable Self-Pity: The Blog Where Laura Rants About How Nobody Loves Her." I was looking back at some of my earlier writing and thought, "Remember when this blog used to be funny? Remember when it had badly drawn yet endearing cartoons?"

To help start this blog's long journey upward, here's some good news: all those long hours at work paid off when I finally finished my first segment for NC Weekend about Fair Game Beverage Company. You can watch it here. Also, my documentary that aired on Our State last year, "Poems for Everyone," is being considered for a NETA award--fingers crossed (NETA=National Educational Telecommunications Association). Another cause for rejoicing is the fact that I'm writing this from an oceanfront condo on Hatteras Island. The sea joins the ranks of romance, religion, and the rest of nature as one of the greatest inspirations for writers. Here are just a few thoughts I've jotted down in the course of my stay here:

--This entire shoreline stands as a monument to the conflict between man's desire for security and nature's desire for constant change. Year after year, wind and surf try to reclaim the island, blowing sand over the roads and washing new inlets in the land, yet we keep building new bridges and clearing the sand away, watching the dunes grow higher and higher.
--Why do people love the ocean so much? For one thing, it entices every one of the senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste through the food it provides (a mouthful of saltwater, on the other hand, is best left unexperienced). I think it also represents everything so many of us want out of jobs, relationships, life itself. It's constant, yet always changing, always moving. It's security without stagnation. We know it won't disappear while we sleep, yet we can never be completely sure what color it will be in the morning, or what shapes its waves will take.
--I've seen just about every color of the ocean this week; it reflects the moody sky. It's a brilliant blue under clear skies, a placid green under clouds, and gunmetal gray in the early evening. Under just the right mix of clouds and sun, it's liquid silver.Under the moon, it's black with a crest of white light, like a path to the other side of the world. The Swedish have their own word for this moon-road: "mangata."
--The sound of the sea is like breath, the rise and fall of waves like inhales and exhales.
--Facebook is terrible. Why do we use it?
--I like to plant my feet in the sand and just stand on the beach in the moonlight, pretending to be a wind-beaten fence post.
--Two men fish by lamp light on the beach tonight, their poles stuck in the sand. One of them tries to untangle their line from some type of seaweed. My mind is like that fishing line. Whenever I try to reel it in, it gets caught in stray thoughts. Maybe this vacation will help me untangle it.
--When the moon shines on bits of seashells, it looks like you're walking on the Milky Way.
--You can see the entire circle of life and death on the beach. I've seen the bodies of sharks strewn on the shore among the empty shells of scallops, gulls pecking at their gills. I've seen young clams tunnel into the sand, digging for a chance at life beyond the sandpiper's beak. With great sadness I report that yesterday, I even found the mangled corpse of Spongebob Squarepants tumbling in the surf.

Knowing Spongebob was gone, I did feel less guilty about eating Mr. Krabs for dinner that night.

I know I'll think of even more lines I could have put in this post once I hit "publish," but such is the nature of writing. For now, I'm going back down to the beach to see how many dogs I can pet (there seem to be a lot out there on this particular day), and hopefully I'll have more good news to follow.