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.