I am not in the world

I think I am brave

Sometimes.

People often tell me I am brave, directly or in so many ways. Sometimes I believe them, and sometimes I am not so sure. Sometimes I think it up all on my own, like just now while I laid in bed reading my dirt&coffee-stained copy of Mary Oliver’s poems. Laying here in my share house, in this coastal Australian town, I read the line from her poem ‘October’ where she ponders,

so this the world.

I’m not in it.

It is beautiful.

In the poem she is talking about seeing a fox in the autumn forest, and I have a distinct memory of reading that line while I laid in a bed of crunchy orange & brown leaves in early October. I had driven down the parkway, Highway 93 by it’s official name, and stopped when I found a pullover that felt peaceful. There was a sunny spot in the soon-to-be-baren poplars and I sat right down and read Mary, whom at the time I had just discovered and whose words felt like a warm blanket to me. The line at that time had impacted me so much that I’d later drawn a sketch in my journal of the scene I’d remembered reading it in. That sketch, too is now attached to the line in my brain and brings me back to that moment.

How strange to now be reading it again five years later, far away from the journal with the sketch of the aspen trees. That journal is in a box somewhere in my mother’s house, and I am in someone else’s house. My things are here, and I eat here and brush my teeth here and hang my sheets to dry in the backyard- but this is not my house. Three weeks from now I will once again squish everything I own into the back of our duct taped Toyota and unload it into someone else’s house. This is the world, and I am not in it. My world is back in those boxes at my mother’s house. Any sense of permanency, identity, or comfort is buried in there, too.

I know I am brave for leaving everything I knew behind and following the man I love to Australia. I knew I was brave when I moved to Canmore after the year 2020 left me with a broken heart, twice, and no direction but up. I also knew I was brave when I left Edmonton in 2019 to live next to a glacier for 6 months, and I knew I was brave in 2017 when I went on a 40-day trip to Southeast Asia with 12 other strangers. I am not short on courage.

What I often fear I am short on is patience. The moment it feels like something might not work out, I forget how brave I’ve been; how determined and persistent and smart I am.

 I am thankful for moments that remind me of my courage during times where the patience wears out. Mary Oliver’s words in ‘October’ cannot stand alone with her above sentiment. She understands that while we are not in the world, we still must love it and experience it as if we are:

Look, I want to love this world

as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get

to be alive

and know it.

I want to be brave enough to follow her directions here, and above. To leave my permanence in a box at my mother’s house, and to keep with me only fleeting memories of it so I may move through the world discovering it, experiencing it, and revelling in it.