Rainbow Noodles

The other night I had a dream that I was running in circles. When I woke up, I thought, Of course. Because that is currently a standout attribute of my life: moving around things, and around things, and feeling slightly ridiculous and dizzy, traveling a great distance but not necessarily in a linear fashion, and certainly not moving forward very much. At least that is how it feels. It makes me recall Ted Kooser’s poem, Starlight. A short, prophetic, two-line beauty:

All night, this soft rain from the distant past.
No wonder I sometimes waken as a child.

Of course. In our dreams we are versions of ourselves we have not yet worked out. There I was running in circles because when I am awake, working, cleaning, searching, resting, I am holding the reckless abandon in my flesh. Don’t do anything too weird now, Jordan. Often I fall into this strange desire to keep myself in check, knowing I see everything differently from everyone else. I learn to think before bringing up poetic references because most people will not find anything very interesting about them. (See above: I’m still working on that one). It is not that I feel there is anything wrong with how I think or am, just that I am not always gunning to proclaim my point of view everywhere I go. Sometimes I fear I will not be received or understood. And while I think we begin to digest this fear in childhood, (hence the waking as a child to face the overload of life), we do get a few years head start on comparison and all of its dauntingly specific spreadsheets. You have to work to get back there.

Yesterday I found this picture of myself at my parents' house, and I realized I want to be that girl again. I want to be a woman who, when asked what she has been up to lately, will peacefully and joyfully hold up with pride the work of her life; the life that she made with her own two hands and own one mind. I do not want to be the sort of woman who works on things she finds lovely but is too uncertain of their worth to share. When you ask me who and what I am, I am going to practice telling you. And I will not apologize that it looks an awful lot like a random assortment of painted pasta pasted to a piece of construction paper. (I will not apologize that I am reveling in that alliteration which you probably did not even notice, either.)

Let’s take yesterday. I spent the morning studying the names of God and then left the house without wearing any makeup, which is no small thing for me. I had leftover sushi with imitation crab meat for lunch, because I love it, and spent the rest of the afternoon at my parents' house going through my old room. I found a storage bin under my bed filled with childhood treasures, including a box of deflated birthday balloons. What can I say—I love a birthday. That night I had a diluted cocktail and somehow ended up watching an embarrassingly corny movie that made me cry for all the wrong reasons. Reasons such as, when the rest of the viewing audience is crying because two people who love each other can’t be together, I’m crying at the underlying issue that there is a woman who can’t figure out who she is because she gave an integral piece of herself to an unstable man who ran off and came back and is a huge idiot who can’t remember what he did with the piece of this woman on my screen. But I digress. Before I turned out my light, I looked at my NCAA bracket (somehow still hanging on, Villanova or not) and wondered how anyone can love an underdog, the kind of dog who is always so dang hard to find.

This is a typical Saturday off for me. There is not much pomp and circumstance in my life. Antiquing, maybe. But no pomp. And I mostly like it that way. I have always said I am good at rest. Sabbath is kind of my thing. I may not always make it to church, but I Sabbath with the best of them. My point is, all this life and when someone asks me what I’ve been up to lately, my jackrabbit response is, Not much. Working a lot. It is, perhaps, not the socially prescribed way to answer such questions, but I wish, just once, my brain would let something a little more odd and gritty be the reply. Something like, Well, I’ve developed an extreme fondness for avocados lately—I eat them on everything; and I just finished a book about the Ennegram and I am a 4, which clarifies a lot of things I know about myself; and I just bought a whole box of mason jars, which is life-changing, because I’ve always wanted to be the sort of person who drinks out of mason jars, and makes salad dressing in mason jars, and just always has a mason jar on hand for whatever situation may need a mason jar. Wouldn’t that be something if we all walked around opening and closing our cabinets for people like that? I don’t mean in an obnoxious, TMI sort of way. I mean in the way that stands up and gives a firm handshake to the question, Who are you? Or a hug, if you’re a hugger, not a hand-shaker. A high-five is also acceptable. Just so long as you aren’t ashamed of yourself.

Oh to abolish shame! If I try, will you try? If I admit that my lunch today was eight pieces of fresh pineapple followed by alternating handfuls of bottom-of-the-bag tortilla chip crumbs and shredded taco cheese, will you admit to someone, or maybe just yourself, that there are strange pieces of you that can’t be accounted for but THANK GOODNESS? Because the world needs your weird. The world needs the element that you like to garden because when you have dirt under your fingernails it makes you feel closer to God. It needs the fact that you don’t want your food to touch, or you secretly write songs when no one is home that may be truly good, or that you can’t eat chicken salad without thinking of someone very specific from your past you’d rather not remember. That’s a piece of art I’d like the NEA to be able to fund so we can look at it every day.

So I want to get back to my childhood ambition. I want that look of peace and joy and pride when I’m not doing anything but standing in my socks in the kitchen holding up something I made, something I think is interesting. Even if the world is reaching out to me saying, I think if maybe you just moved that piece of pasta a bit to the left...No. I like the green one where it is. When people tell you not to rush growing up and to try and stay young forever, I think what they mean is, while you grow up, and get a job, and buy a car, and rent a house, keep your finger on the pulse of your life as to what makes you thrive. Because the things you think up are beautiful.

Own your rainbow noodles.