I Look Around

It’s Sunday, so I’m on the couch in my pajamas, ten exposed toes and a half-perfect manicure. Really, we can’t expect more than a half-perfect anything, so I’m drinking that metaphor down like punch at a non-alcoholic wedding. My blinds are cracked open to the north and I’m staring at the February sky, blue-grey like that crayon nobody knows what to use for. I’m trying to remember last May, when I was hopeful and could go outside without a coat. It seems a lifetime ago. The tree line is threadbare and motionless. The only activity is the minimal swaying of one dead leaf on a slim branch. I can’t decide if it is resisting death’s whisper of finality or striving to release itself from purgatory.

My sister turns on the television and the screen appears with a man and a woman standing face to face. She changes the channel before I hear what they’re saying, but I could tell the woman loved the man more than the man loved the woman.

I look around for inspiration. Tonight the whole world will try to forget all the headlines while watching 22 men combat each other for the high score. But now, I take my time shuffling to the bookshelf to lift out my dictionary, let it fall open in my hands, and trace my finger down the page without looking. I glance down to see where my finger has fallen.

Nomad. n. A member of a people that travels from place to place to find fresh pasture for its animals.

What a word to land on. Had I opened to the previous page, the word would have been nightstand. But now my head is working on the dot-to-dot game connecting my life to this nomad word, this nomad life. It’s not hard. True, I have lived in the same hometown for 25 years and the farthest I have ever traveled is Florida. I consider myself to be fairly grounded geographically. Yet, mentally, spiritually, theologically, though I am resolute in my core beliefs, I feel that traveling. I feel the searching, the constant moving from hill to hill, through valleys, wading across streams, checking the wind, smelling the clover, pine, lily. Smiling at butterflies, scowling at bees. I shouldn’t scowl at bees, they’re dying out. For that, I am sorry. I analyze life trying to find another view of things, the best view of things, and feel I never arrive. The landscape shifts when I learn, when people walk in or out of my life, when I fail, triumph, cease to care. Whatever the situation, one thing remains: I am restless, I live the life of a nomad in my heart, I am desperate to find fresh pasture. Something green.

Something green for my animals. My dreams are my flock of sheep, my ideas are my herd of cows. My feelings are a gaggle of geese—they don’t need the grass so much, but they like to waddle their orange feet around in the blades a little bit before they fly up in great, white streaks. It’s my job to foster their needs, and as the grass is consumed we move on. I take them from place to place, looking for pasture that will fill them and give them ground on which to stand, to thrive. Looking for new inspiration means a constant moving on. Geographically and emotionally. But I like my animals so I herd my nervous, impressionable dreams and my bull-headed ideas, and I let my feelings wander around with them in the pasture, because I think they’re amusing. And they follow me around because we’re used to each other, and we like each other, and we have this mutual understanding about apples.

Wherever I lead, we stand on the little hills and look around, together. They give me perspective, and joy, and someone to talk to. I like their sweet, simple faces that look at me and wait for the signal to move on, to find new, green pasture, and to maybe arrive at some place that feels like it could be a home.

What’s beautiful is that I’ve always been able to find it. There’s always a good deal of chewed up, brown grass, but when I walk through it and learn the song of the bleating and lowing and squawking, there is green on the horizon, newness, things to admire, words to sing. A few paces up the hill, calf muscles tingling, lungs burning up the cold oxygen, silhouette horizon, a cotton ball sheep body leaning against my knees, one tear from my right eye, two lines of poetry that fold themselves into a paper crane, and it is all something I want to eat up for the rest of my abundant, gorgeous life.