What is enough?
unfinished letter # 20
I’m in a fight
with my expectations
Relentless little brats
looking down their nose
at my joyous moments
my fluttering heart
saying, “So? What else you got?”
Last summer
I walked a broken path
through tree roots
clinging to the earth
and felt myself regenerate
a broken path
of whole felled trunks
whales of trees succumbing
to schools of mossy fish
breaking under the weight of their needed sacrifice.
Death
it turns out
is just the fuel for what comes next
trees feeding soil
the way deeds feed future
and yet I cannot seem to square
my past
and my obsession with the present.
In that moment in those woods
I thought
I’ll never need another thing again to make me happy
This, right here, is everything
and then at home
my expectations shook their head
and cackled,
Just wait. Just wait.
The forest calms me. It’s an unassuming example of how to live. Slowly. Trusting the timing of change and the regeneration of life. Trusting that we will each get what we need.
But I don’t live in the forest. I live out in the city, in a house with plumbing and insulation and synthetic materials.