Unexpectedly, the completion of my long-awaited Ireland trip laid bare a fault line in the foundation of my identity. Weeks after deplaning, I felt rather wind swept, pieces of my disciplined planned life scattering like fallen leaves. Suddenly my lines of demarcation fell away and I was rendered boundless. For someone who routinely blocks their life off into outlined squares on their calendar, facing a “as far as the eye could see” panorama, whose invisible edges run off the page, I sensed what a dog might feel having jumped the fence untethered. Freedom, sought after and often glorified, spreads its tentacles out in wondrous space, whole heartedly encompassing a wide range of realities and possibilities. The freedom to wake anew, to change direction, to drop parts of who we are like sandbags from an air balloon, allowing us to soar or drift, eventually landing in new territory with a surprisingly different view.
It has been not so easy to define, describe the trembling underneath my feet, reminiscent of my first earthquake experience during my stint in California. The walls undulated, the floors quivered. A percolating prophecy has bubbled to the surface and like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, after flying through the air, I have been set down on a baseline that has moved.
When I was so much younger and setting out on my journey as a self-employed musician, my musical friends and I used to laugh at the thought of retirement – as if THAT would ever happen! But recently, that word has made an appearance in my thought process, forcing me to seriously contend with my relationship to it. Self-employed musicians (and non-musicians I would guess) don’t really retire. We just keeping moving around in our skill box, finding novel ways to use them. And having established my financial security, revenue gathering is not as crucial anymore so I can now evaluate my choices according to a more personal criteria, one that benefits me where I am in my life now.
As I attempt to stabilize my rattling fissures, the tempest has somewhat quieted, and I find myself atop a world with a tremendously varied landscape. A kaleidoscope of possibilities blanket the land from here to the horizon challenging me to live even more robustly and, dare I say, serendipitously.
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