Trees and Bats

I don’t mind telling you that I’m resistant to doing this. Even now, there’s a voice within me doing everything in its power to convince me not to write, and by default, not to change. 

“Don’t change. Trust me, it’s overrated.”

This voice acts as advocate for the part of me that wants no part in a life of change, because change unequivocally means certain death. There is genuine fear, then, in confronting the blank page. Any writer will tell you this, an authentic cast of terror hiding behind their eyes. We convince ourselves that nobody’s reading this anyway, and so what’s the point. Better to watch tv or scroll the internet, then formulate a really compelling prayer schedule, begging God for a different, better life when He keeps bringing up the blank page and we keep pushing it away. 

“That’s for someone else. Someone more successful, more legitimate than I.” (Our grammar suffers when we’re being impertinent at God.)

And so really all this is, is an exercise for the benefit of change.

What changes will occur in my life—good ones—if I sit down every evening and every morning and churn out a little something new, just because it’s what my Soul craves and needs to do? Who will find me? Who will like me? (For it always comes down to being liked, if I’m telling the truth.)

So then…What happened today?

I woke up after a fitful night’s sleep (I’ve been trying to realign my head posture with a new assortment of pillows, which I heard about on Dr. Gundry’s podcast and was convinced to try it to relieve some deep pain I’ve been having in my back, though it’s taking a while to get used to), then dressed to look like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face—black cigarette pants, pointy black loafers, mustard yellow button-down tied in a knot at the waist. I set up shop at the coffeehouse, early, to get a number of things done (like editing this blog), then went to work where I stayed for 7.5 hours. It was quiet.

When I publish this, it will be Friday and I’ll be glad. It’s incredible to think that only last week I was in a foreign country—very foreign—though the city where I stayed was full of secrets and beauty. I could have stayed there for a very long time and gladly set up shop on a park bench along the promenade at David Ben Gurion Boulevard (and a grand boulevard it was).

I took almost no photographs the week I was there, and only tried to deposit every detail of Tel Aviv into the bank of my mind’s eye, though a follow-up visit is, in every way, necessary. But, the trees! Oh, the trees…And the bats! The bats that swooped beneath the boughs of the mighty trees. I shamelessly gawked like the tourist that I was, marveling at those giant bats. I would never, could never grow accustomed to those trees and those bats, even if I did set up shop one day and ceased from being a tourist, such that I would pass them by and not stop to wonder at this planet that contains us, wholly. “In the world, not of the world,” is my credo of joy. Big, swooping, unabashed joy. And it’s hard, sometimes, to remember that this is who I am, when the mechanisms of my life don’t always reflect that back to me while in the midst of some challenge or doldrum…

My change purse still has shekels in it, though I don’t really plan to put them away any time soon. And five days ago, I found a receipt that was given to me after buying a coffee from a kiosk in the city that I can’t yet seem to throw away. Though it was a triumphant miracle to successfully schedule a taxi to the airport which arrived on time and in the right location, I realized from the back seat that no part of me wanted to leave. I felt like a lonely little girl again, separate from the people I loved and terribly sad because of it.

So, If I keep writing, every day, maybe I can go back to all the paces where my heart felt itself at home. And I won’t have to schedule it around other commitments or ask for anyone to sign off on my plans. And if I keep writing, maybe I’ll discover that who I’ve been running after all this time was also running after me. “What you seek is seeking you.” Someone who owns an Airbnb in Lisbon has this displayed in neon over the master bed. I saw it online, making dreams into plans, eating my supper, summoning my nerve to come and sit here with you all over again.