Threads

There’s something about traveling home that always unravels me. A little bit more and a little bit more even. You’d think I’d expect it. You’d think I’d catch on to the fact that this space where I spent my first 18 years of life sponging my way through would be an automatic expectation of unraveling, but sometimes it still catches me off guard. I guess because it is always so different. Sometimes the lessons to be learned feel joyful as if what I need to remember is lightness of standing around a kitchen laughing with the people who shaped my years so strongly. Other times they come in hard with me finding myself yelling, crying, wanting to escape just like I did when I was seventeen and so desperate for something “better” something that understood me.

I’m sitting here at the end of my most recent trip. In the kitchen of my family’s home. Departing out of JFK this afternoon. I’ve spent most of the week not feeling great and coming down with one virus or another. In bed in the room I grew up in. The room I had covered with ripped out pages of magazine images I had liked, music posters, old signs from flea markets. The ‘For Sale’ sign still resting on the top of the window frame. The only remnant of me then.

In the early hours I woke and couldn’t fall back to sleep. I opened the window next to my bed to breathe in the humidity before returning to dry California and I noticed the most beautiful maple tree. There is a storm coming in and the breeze shakes the leaves of the tree on its way into my room. I’ve known this tree was here for pretty much my whole life. I’ve used the seed pods as ‘helicopters’ to float on the winds. I’ve collected lightening bugs from underneath it. And night crawlers for fishing with my grandfather too. But never, in all my years do I remember lying and bed and watching it dance in the wind.

It’s always going to be like that. This process of unraveling. Another piece comes undone, another story springs it’s way to the surface in a way that makes me see it in a different light, and there is something new to look at, to feel…and ultimately…to release. The unraveling is never going to be so straightforward as a single white thread being pulled from a spool. It’s going to be a tangle of knots woven together in a multicolored snarl. Sometimes I’ll see the path of the thread I’m trying to free and the laughter will pour out. Other times it will be clouded by a mess of knots that I can’t make sense of and the struggle will cloud my vision.

There is something constant in the unraveling though. Whether it’s tightly bound and messy or a clear path ahead - it is here. The presence of this knot is really just the presence of me getting to know me, getting to be me. It is coming to realize that I am neither the knot nor the threads. Instead, it is this each and every now moment asking me to be with it as I watch the things that come up. As I find the compassion to handle them as best I can. Asking me to come back to this piece that is right in front of me instead of taking something such as living, remembering, and turning it into tortured threads in a tangle. It - the very bright white thread that I seek - is right here waiting for me, beckoning me really, to unravel a little bit more and a little bit more.