love letters to March

I want to remember the color of the mailbox

I wrote this piece in my journal nearly four years ago. It’s insanely relevant, yet again, in the month of March all these years later:

Big changes are coming. I don’t feel rocked by them yet. But there is a sense of destabilization happening, little by little. Waiting to be knocked directly off my center.

When I’m anxious for an extended period of time, it’s a reminder that I’ve lost touch with the present. I am no longer feeling the paint brush between my fingers; the exact pressure it takes to make a clean line vs the more expressive touch. I’m no longer paying close attention to the way Luna’s whiskers feel on my cheek when she licks me or the way food disintegrates on my tongue. I’m floating through space, with no sense of groundedness in sight. The Sam I knew several years ago, would have loved to stay here.

We can drive a road a thousand times to work each morning and not notice the color of a neighbor’s mailbox, or the tree that’s fallen in a backyard. Mostly because we are in fact, never bearing witness. We are on autopilot. Sometimes we don’t even remember getting to work.

When I’m feeling the sense of floating outside of my body, I have to focus on something outside of myself that I haven’t necessarily shifted focus to before. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, it’s hiking a new trail in Rocky Mountain National Park with snow as deep as my height– others, it’s simply noticing the mailbox is in fact, red. 

Driving to the airport today in Denver, the car next to me had the back window halfway down. Inside was a toddler, her face turned toward the open window…. Eyes wide and mouth open grinning ear to ear, mindlessly and whole-heartedly enjoying the freezing cold wind in her face. There was nothing more blissful for her in that moment; nothing about what came next or before. Wind. She was discovering wind. It probably felt like magic to her. To be reminded of this child-like essence is the spot we are missing; ever-searching for… longing to be back with. Why do we fight it?

Bearing witness in our lives takes many different forms.

Staying present in a difficult conversation, even when we are bored/angry/hurt. Not skipping to the end to see how it all turns out— our cheek turned in a deliberate and harsh coldness. The 3-am lure that craves something familiar, something to love that the light hasn’t touched. How we can notice when and why the ache stems from. Witnessing the way my grandmother’s wrinkled hands pass over the recipe card for the last time, without knowing that it was so. Accepting that there will be many more last moments. Scribbling on a page with no outcome. Sitting in traffic and smiling at the stranger next to you. Standing in line at the grocery store and feeling the weight of my feet grounding into the tile beneath me, without reaching for my phone. A holding of the door. Listening as a friend cries, with no projection or interjection of how we can fix. Witnessing the dissonance of both the harshness and beauty in a direct collision: the symmetry and asymmetry of all things, including ourselves. 

March is the perfect time to observe the subtle aliveness, the remembering of what it means to witness. Life is beginning to unfurl again. The snow begins to crack and melt, sprouts push through barren ground, rivers begin to dribble and sound again. We don’t wake up and immediately pass winter to mid-summer: where we run with the blooming wildflowers and sun on our skin. Instead we witness it– a slow progression–little by little each day… blade of grass by blade of grass.

I want to remember the world around me that way, too. Little noticings. Little moments where I become more in-tune again.

If we aren’t careful, our lives can pass, season after season– without us even glancing up. Staying endlessly busy in survival keeps us from noticing the robin collecting for its nest, the way our dog sleeps peacefully in the sun, the way the tulips bud in the garden to full bloom.

When I found myself watching that little girl in the car in Colorado, with her hair wild and mouth open to the breeze, I remember thinking– that’s it. The tenderness. She is so in tune with the world around her, the world is the moment. Tenderness is what allows all of this to be. Tenderness is a river of new beginnings, the first glimmers of color just before the sunrise. It is even found in boredom; in the scribbling, the heavy sigh, the quiet dispositions of a lover or friend. Tenderness is the vivid color, the bustling subway station, the chords of a guitar from the apartment below. Tenderness is noticing the color of the mailbox, and thanking the universe for the magnificence of its simplicity.