Elongated Seasonsal Change

It's spring again. It came early in New York, and then I went to Colorado during a blizzard, which gave way to another frigid beginning-of-spring. I got to see the end of summer in Ohio, and the beginning of fall in London and Paris. (I am fortunate that I get to change perspective whenever I feel like it.) There was hardly any winter for me this year, with the extra long autumn that began early in London, and late back in New York, and a winter that sped into an early New York spring - a spring that seemed to last forever once out west, in the mountains, experiencing its birth all over again.

Seasons of change like fall into winter or winter into spring, seem the most dramatic, and it's been interesting to have these two changes stretched and skewed and elongated this past year. As if you could take a picture of a digital clock, just as it changed from 11:59 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. - literally changing minutes, hours, a.m. to p.m., and even the calendar date - frozen for pondering for way longer than the split second during which it actually occurred. These stretched out seasonal changes made me feel like I had jumped into a moment in time and spread my arms and spun around and found lots of unexpected space in which to run and frolic.

Shifting perspectives made the impossible seem possible - that we are not just on this relentless fall forward into the future, but that there is space, even within moments of great change, for experience and pondering. Changing time zones and continents and climates with the simple hop aboard an airplane made it obvious that the way I am thinking of the world in any one moment relies heavily upon where I am and what I am experiencing. Landing in a snowstorm in Colorado, after driving with the windows down to the airport in New York, was enough to make me see, that a single moment contains a lot more than we usually think. It contains a blizzard, and a sunny-breezy day; it contains light and dark, depending on where on earth you find yourself; it contains peace and it contains tumult.

Maps are great because you can see all the places you are not, and begin to conceive of "elsewhere." Quantum physics says, it is impossible to measure both the location and the velocity of an object at the same time. It is 1 p.m. in New York, and 11 a.m. in Denver. Doesn't all of this boggle your mind?

New Orleans - Enchanted Field Trip

I stepped off the plane like someone who is always stepping off the plane, and up to the curb where we waited for the white truck, which was stuck in traffic. The air was almost jovial, sun trickling sideways and the scent of flowers bouncing off the breeze.

“This place reminds me of California crossed with Buenos Aires,” I thought, as if I had spent hours and weeks exploring its essence.

The wind in the truck was warm, and I sat in the back while the men spoke in the foreign language they had created through years and years of self-referential inside jokes. I smiled as if I had always known the comfort of this chatter, a chatter I would probably never fully make sense of. It was the symbol of a special bond that I would honor and never insult with a failed attempt to infiltrate, something I would appreciate from the outside, like the way my parents loved each other when I was a child.

I landed in this place of foreign comfort – and was not perplexed by the paradox of it. My mind was curious, “How could it feel so normal to be some place I’ve never been?” Yet, my heart and soul were settled, like something had been decided without having consulted my mind.

The entire essence of the place, for me, could be summed up in those first few moments. The air, the light, the love I felt but couldn’t understand the language of. Walking through the streets and through the park, walking and walking for days after my arrival, the same feeling was there, always.

Even the ghost I came upon in a corridor beneath a stairway was laughing at me as I went by, as if to say, “Silly woman, we’ve been waiting for you.”






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