Three nights ago was the last night of Joe being home before another month away. Always the sad time that hits. But the joke is that it’s before I get annoyed with him. We enjoyed the last moments, had a hard and fast bike ride, a good hot tub soak after a swim, eating an amazing yummy dinner. Work also begins for me after today. One last night of in bed with wine, netflix, and cookies…..

Well, with Joe involved.

After this last vacation, we are a bit sun touched, my nails have seen better days and a lot of rock, we each have our share of bug bites, and we’ve enjoyed every outdoor moment of it all. Hiking, climbing, caves, swimming, even swimming into caves, riding our bicycles, back roads driving, amazing meals, good recommended from strangers wines, exploring, and fun, laughter, a lot of laughter. We’ve sang the songs of our hearts, and napped underneath the sunshine.

Hit several new and neat spots of America this trip, I have a few myself coming this next month, and then we are onto even more new terrain. Though it’s looking like we are getting ready to transition from RV to boat and the process soon begins. It will be a long process, but eventually new adventures, while still never ending adventures now. Sail to Cuba! is in my future. Nearer than later.

Now he’s gone and even the cat is waiting for him by the door (our joke is she does things constantly acting like a dog to make us not want a dog), today is my latest deep clean time, put some things away back in place…organize piles of books I’ve collected these past two weeks and thrown to one of the couches. Throw in a load of laundry and pull out my work for the next month, unfold it and set it up from the place I’ve tucked it away for a couple of weeks. Lay out my calendar, touch up what needs to be (as I pretty much often have it done with only needing some changes, often due to location and added work) pull out my stack of notebooks and different projects in the works…everything needed for this month, as well as always what I try and get to but may not. And always the main work, my main current project, and the main food on the table works. #WillWriteForFood always. lol Such is a writer’s life.

Is it glamorous? #absolfuckinglutely .

To feed the body is to feed the soul is to feed the mind is to feed the writing. Though through my month of work I work a lot and hard, I also have my time of meditation, yoga, bike riding, swimming, and enjoyment through libraries and museums and coffeeshops and gardens. Even then, though, all of it seems to lead back to work in some way….so my two week vacations after each month of work is the time to set it all aside, to completely clear the mind of work, to allow space for fresh and new ideas, or the sudden answer in a dream or along a long drive, to the questions I have pondered. For rest. And most certainly for feeding the soul. A time to step back outside of the work….when in it, it seems to swirl around me like I am standing inside the middle of a hurricane, it can get to that place where I don’t seem to grasp what I am doing anymore. My two weeks are a time when it slows….slows…and I can sleep. I can rest. And then I can reach for it again, and I can grasp it. Without even trying.

Balance. I have it through the work month, and I don’t do badly at it, but when standing in the middle you can’t get that view from outside….that full picture when you step back; in the past two years I’ve realized just how important my two weeks have become to my work.

Even my relationship with Joe and our work schedules have worked perfectly.  Perhaps on of the biggest questions we get, and others who we see fail at it, only very few thrive, some just get by. For us, we thrive he and I both in our own ways and our own works. If he were here all the time, interrupting me at around that 5 O’Clock part of the day, I wouldn’t find the dive into my work that I need. I miss him when he’s gone. My bed will feel more empty tonight than I’ll almost bear. I held onto him tightly before he left. We said our sweet nothings. But he and I both know that reality is, I need my time to dive. I submerge myself in what I do. My thoughts begin and don’t stop and I walk by like a ghost, my body is here, but my eye’s show I am elsewhere. I do it even at moments during when he is here and then he gives me my space and my quiet, fixes me a tea and rests it at my side, or walks beside me in nature allowing me my quiet to hear the voices he can not. Not in the “crazy way” though I am sure every writer questions that at some point, I won’t deny my own questioning. But there is always something building. In my mind and my way it’s like a city, architectural, a building of…

So, our life and schedules work out, and have for two years now. In the future things will change, they always do. Eventually he will be home for one month and away for one month, rather than 2 weeks and 4. And at some other time that will differ, too. I may have my interruptions, or my space where as to not be interrupted would be needed. And we will adjust. Adjust is an important word I learned around aged thirty when my life seemed then to be thirty years of a constant adjustment. The actual word, of course, known, the term itself unfolded.

My writing is as important to him as it is to me. Never have I known the strength and rock like solid love, encouragement, and support. Nor had the sound board I’ve learned to allow him to be. He knows that I’ll receive criticism by many, I have stacks of letters and emails printed out of that and of failure, rejection from the world professionally, from the friends that once were, and from family even beyond what a normal person ever should…and so he is none of those things. Ever. He is love. He will go out on a limb to help me make it happen…..I am sure he would know no limits should I ever allow him to show it.

Life will always be an adjustment, it seems more in my control than ever….by not trying to control it, however I don’t sit back and wait for my guide to show up out of thin air, either. I take it like a ball of clay and mold it but without the quickness, the fever to make it happen as I seemed to before, sure to make mistakes by not paying attention….instead I handle it now with the loving tender thoughtful caresses that allow life to slowly emerge. I pay attention. I take my time. I listen.

When the words don’t flow, I sit to write anyway. When my mind is blocked I will take my yoga mat, jump on my bike, and find the perfect tree and find a release to the dam. Notebook there.

I read to write and write to read. I put it in the work. I plan and make my life, my feet are ready for the boat to tilt…and  the need to adjust where adjusting is needed. Rather than to try and “be the way it should be” that I have before. I also don’t put ME aside anymore. I never sacrifice my work now as I often did. When I make a wrong move in the clay, I am learning to move it to take shape, refold it in, and begin again, rather than to toss it away and start fresh, and I’ve laid aside my anger and frustrations at my failures but embrace them to fold them into the clay. They are apart of me, and not something to trash, or burn, or to forget. I no longer leave them behind for the sake of someone else’s needs. Not any longer to adjust from, but to adjust with.

Maybe that is why it seems to be working a bit more now than ever.

I also finally don’t live life waiting for the storm to come and rock the boat whenever the sea’s have settled. Always in my life…good meant not for long. When bred into you from birth that idea can really drag you down, hold you back from your total ability. You don’t even realize you are just making the same mistakes, like a ripple in the water. Again…and again. Each one larger than the last. Only perhaps with some other form so that for a long time you don’t recognize it as same. Now…good is just life as it should be. And adjust is often more of an adjustment of your footing before the tumble down the mountain, not in total life after the fall.

And so….the music is on, the cat waits by the door wondering where he’s gone, I clean my home, and I set out my work to begin tomorrow. Tonight Sasha and I will cuddle in bed and watch some chick flick for our first too quiet and empty night in adjusting to him not being there. Would I change it? I miss him terribly already…but time allows for it. I have a chance to be excited to see him again, we count down the weeks, and then the days. And me being me, yes, after too much I would seek being alone. So it works for us. With it I am allowed to dive. Submerge. To allow the writing to close over my head, feel the coolness of it on my skin, and dive deeply inside of it all to create.

 

….Until next vacation.

#Vacation #VacationIsOver #EndOfVacation #AmWriting #WriterOnTheRoad #Writing #Writer #Relationships #Love