We Have to Move

On bewilderment, beauty, and finding my bearings.

Is this just me?
Or is there something about this prolonged, disruptive moment in history that’s leaving so many of us feeling untethered and unsure?
How do we find our bearings in a world that seems to be losing its own?

I don’t ask these as rhetorical questions. I ask them because I have a hunch many of us are asking similar questions. I’m not looking for answers so much as trying to find some ground to stand on while the swirl of the world challenges, provokes, and disorients me.

Last week, I ran into my landlord. We talked for a while about the flood and everything that’s happened over the past month. Then she told me she’d decided not to rebuild the downstairs apartment after all. The flooding had changed her thinking, and now she was seriously considering selling the house altogether.

My dad and I had already been loosely talking about moving to the Philadelphia area to be closer to my older brother. We’d been turning the idea over ever since my mom died, but there had never been much urgency or a catalyst to spark any movement. Standing there in the driveway, though, I realized the conversation had changed. We weren’t simply weighing our options anymore. The decision suddenly seemed obvious, even if it was complicated.

We are moving.

And I’m beginning to wonder: How many moves do I have in me before nowhere feels like home? Maybe, in some ways, I’m already there.

I’ve moved more than most people. I grew up in western Pennsylvania before my family moved to Florida, then Maryland, then New Jersey. These weren’t carefully planned moves. Some of them were literally midnight moves. I’d come home from school and find out we were leaving, and within a day or two we’d be on the road to another state. The day after I graduated from high school we moved to Amish country in eastern Pennsylvania. Before long I was gone too. Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Colorado. Three years living full-time on the road. Vermont. New Hampshire. Florida. Boston. Western Massachusetts. New York. Eventually I landed in Portland, Oregon, where I lived for thirteen years before moving back to western Pennsylvania to help care for my parents. Now another move sits just over the horizon, and I honestly don’t know how I’m going to do it again.

As I write, I realize I’m not thinking about moving anymore. I’m thinking about what it feels like to lose your bearings. As I sit here on the deck, I realize this isn’t really about changing location. It’s about not quite knowing where I am. I don’t mean geographically. I mean inwardly. I find myself reaching for old maps that don’t seem to describe the territory I’m standing in anymore.

Mary Oliver writes in her poem Bone:

“…truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving…”

What if not knowing is the work?
What if the questions we spend so much energy trying to answer are actually what we need in order to change and grow?
What if certainty isn’t the goal?

I keep thinking about what David Whyte wrote years ago. He says it’s actually the fortunate ones who arrive, willingly or unwillingly, at that place where the road is no longer clear or no longer makes sense. Not because being lost is pleasant, but because it loosens our grip on the life we imagined or hoped for.

It’s easy enough to agree with David Whyte while reading one of his books in a comfortable chair. It’s something else when you’re looking at another move in the midst of grief, disruption, and financial strain. It’s something else when you’ve spent the last several years exhausted, lonely, and trying to rebuild a life that no longer feels familiar. His words don’t feel like an explanation to me anymore. They feel like another question.

I think I’m still trying to find the right question. Then I catch myself wondering if searching for the right question is just another way of trying to find an answer. As though if I can finally ask the right question, I’ll discover the solid ground I’ve been looking for all along.

And then I wonder: Can I lose my bearings without losing my capacity for amazement?

What I believe, and what I’ve spent years practicing through yoga, meditation, poetry, long walks, birds, and simply paying attention, is that uncertainty and beauty are not opposites. I’ve never believed the world had to make sense before it could be beautiful. If anything, I’ve found the opposite to be true. Some of the deepest experiences of amazement have arrived precisely when I couldn’t see very far ahead, when I was forced to pay attention to what was directly in front of me.

That’s where I find myself today. My dad is back home in the little upstairs apartment. I made curry for lunch. Groceries will be be delivered before I leave for work. The birds are singing. Somewhere in the distance that damn rooster has been crowing since early this morning and still hasn’t run out of things to say.

I’m still full of questions.

But somewhere beneath them is an unshakeable conviction that this world, for all its darkness and bewilderment, is still astonishingly beautiful.

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A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.