Both Extremes, Simultaneously

Lovelies,

After the fire on 7/30 I had no interest in home. 

I didn't want to look at new places. I didn't want to so much as look at listings. Peace was promising myself a year without an address -- traveling, visiting friends, everywhere and nowhere.

It was as if I'd just gotten out of a relationship and wasn't ready to date again. 

It was extreme. So extreme, in fact, that I recognized it was temporary. Not a destination but a transit.

And indeed mere days later I met its opposite: from someplace deeper than I'd known, an ache for home.

I looked at three places and chose the third. I wanted to be only there. A couple weeks later I experienced moving in without anything to move in. I sat in the empty space of home and heard the echo of 100% potential. I did my best to resume work but leading rehearsal felt like gesturing from the other side of glass. Singing melody felt like sewing with invisible thread. Writing prose felt like sand through my fingers. Because, I finally realized, until home wasn't empty space, all I could stand to create was home. 

This, too, was extreme. And again, I recognized it was so extreme it must be temporary. 

In a sense pendulum swings are not new to me. I only make decisions after choosing the far reaches of each option with my whole heart.

And as is often the case, the result now is not some third, compromising option. It is, instead, both extremes, simultaneously. Currently that looks like 1) A full-body commitment to home: trappings of belonging, Rachel headquarters, both cocoon and launch pad for my creative present. And 2) An aversion to being anywhere near it. I left town! I don't care to go back anytime soon! It can just be there, chilling in its echoing emptiness, while I ignore the living hell out of it.

Yeah, I'm traveling. And without those empty walls whispering for me to cover them, my BRAIN is back online. It feels nice to work again.

All my love,

Rachel