every[thing]'s changing

The red-tailed hawks are noticeably active again in my corner of the world. I noticed a pair the the first spring I was back in Alabama, called them Warren and Regina, and have continued to use those names for the resident hawk couple that starts to to screech, circle, swoop, and cry around the trees by my apartment this time of year. Maybe it is the same pair. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, I love them. I love looking up and seeing them as I take the trash out in between meetings. I love hearing them cry as I beep my car open to run my quotidian, endless errands. I love spotting their nest, love glancing across the street to see a huge rust-colored raptor perched on a handicapped parking sign, brazen at eye level.

It was the owl I heard tonight that got me thinking about the hawks, about the little flock of crows that used to call this courtyard home, the way I can now guess almost to the week when the daffodils will bloom, about the ways seasonality and nature feel so much more present in Alabama suburbia than they did in Kentucky and Connecticut. Is it really this place, though? I don’t think so. I think hawks and owls and crows and every other manner of local flora and fauna were probably just as readily available in those places.

I think it’s that for once, I have stayed in one place long enough to pick up the rhythms of the year. And by place, I don’t just mean city, I mean this place, this little plot of land.

I’m no naturalist, never will be. But the emergence of the hawks every February, the woodpecker that I hear every day and spot just a couple of times a year, watching the little girls of the resident divorced dad neighbor grow up a little every other weekend, the relief I feel when I see the beagle named Beagle after months of absence at the local park, the disappearance of Daisy the cancer-eaten mutt at the other park, the change from coded locks to keyed locks on the secret field—

they all strike a chord in me, something between gratitude and grief.

____

This past fall, I felt that I was at the threshold of something—some portal, some new chapter, some kind of transformation. That feeling has only grown stronger in the months since.

One example is how I’ve felt for over a year that I’m ready to move on from my current home. I want something more rooted—a place I can settle into, with a bigger garden, more space, more privacy. I’ve practiced gratitude for what I love and have loved about this place, practiced patience and surrender, and still nothing has budged in terms of finding something with roots. (I thought the agreement was I’m patient and grateful for long enough = I get what I want?!).

My problem has never been passivity, sometimes to my own detriment. I’m not afraid of action; I’m afraid of something not happening. Sometimes I’m so afraid I act without proper thought or intentionality.

95% of it I don’t regret.

But there’s something in that decisiveness that can also be a running from uncertainty. A knee-jerk reaction to feeling stuck, to feeling afraid that if I don’t act now, I’ll never get un-stuck.

I’ve been sitting with the stuckness, the things I can’t control, rather than spinning my wheels to make something happen. I feel deeply that this sitting-with is important for me, a continuation of learning to let go of urgency and fear, an essential part of my becoming which I’ll look back on later with lots of wonder, awe, and gratitude.

I also hate it.

It feels easier to me to shake my life up rather than move in harmony and rhythm with it. It feels easier to uproot and re-plant than to sit and be present in this edge of becoming. Who will I be in this next stage? I’m in that raw, ungainly place between the seed and the bloom of a cycle.

So when I heard the owl tonight, when I thought about the hawks, the fifth tilt of the year from winter to spring in this specific place, I thought about what it’s given me: the gift of paying attention. I abhor stagnation, but in staying here longer than I want, I give so much more of my attention every year to the life around me. Familiarity, for me, has bred some dissatisfaction, of course, but also—awe. Also wonder and the joy of recognition and renewal in each miniature season.

In this place where I never thought I’d be for more than a couple of years, I’ve grown a kind of attention I haven’t practiced since childhood— a muscular, buoyant attentiveness that I feel will root me wherever I go next.

I’m still impatient, still often flooded with discontent for all the ways I want a home that isn’t here. Right this moment, I’m restless.

So instead of distracting myself from it, instead of ending with a blithe bow on the end of this post— “I don’t need a place for roots, the roots are me!”—I’ll sit with the discontent.

I’ll give it my attention. I’ll notice.

The weight of my dog on my lap as I type, his soft breath, the growing rings of white around his eyes and nose.

The slap-up job of stick-on wallpaper and purple curtains I did a year ago, because the best cure for heartbreak is home renovation.

The needlework projects and half-read books spread out in messy piles on my ottoman, each its own journey of attention I’m now impatient to finish.

To stay present. To move, but unhurriedly. To give attention, not in duty but in curiosity, mutuality.

I am thinking about how each time I notice the hawks, hear the owl, see the cardinal light on the fence outside my kitchen window, I am stirred from discontent and routine into delight.

How do I live through the discontent?

“Pay attention

Be astonished.

Tell about it.”

-Mary Oliver, “Sometimes”