circling

I took my kayak out on the lake this morning. It was a beautiful blue sky day with big puffball clouds and a little bit of wind. As I was paddling the shoreline, the wind started to pick up some but I didn’t think much of it. Halfway through my route, I rounded to the far end of the lake where the increasingly stiffening breeze had the entire surface to play with and I was confronted by suddenly bigger waves with growing white caps on their edges. The waves started breaking over the deck of my boat, and the now stiff wind was shimmying me off course. Before I’d made it back to the little boat ramp, my arms were aching and my legs were numb from bracing against the roll of the water. I’ve been out in weather much worse than these little windy riffles, before. But not in years.

I realized recently that it has been ten years this summer since I packed up my Subaru and drove to Alaska. No single decision I’ve made, I think, has set the trajectory of my life so solidly before or since, even though there have been a million little ones that have had their own ripple effects. Back in 2004, I certainly never would have imagined ending up where I am now. Although this place is hardly an ending. My dreams have changed a lot since then, in some ways. And in some ways they haven’t changed at all. I still want to make a go of writing, and I’m trying to now, with a little more concerted effort and a little more success than previously. Some of my dreams are on hold; running sled dogs, living on the edge of endless wilderness and traveling those trails instead of endless agriculture and asphalt, having the space for a sprawling garden, for goats and chickens. But those dreams are the same. I was reminded of this, rereading a post from four years ago. The fact that there is some consistency of trajectory despite what seem like impossibly constant twists and turns is comforting in its own way.

In the mean time, I’m in an odd bind physically and emotionally.  We are in a new town, and I’m without work, yet. I’m waiting to hear back from graduate schools, for programs I’m not entirely sure I want to pursue. We have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant for two years. With no medical explanation presenting itself, we are left circling through that monthly holding pattern as well. We have five years to go, still, before we can move back to the place we’ve decided to call home and make it so. I’ve found myself sinking into a shell of silent waiting, but also of discontent and anxiety about what is coming around the corner of the next weeks and months and years.

When I started paddling today, and every day I take the boat out, I still begin the first few strokes deep in the mindset that the course is a work out to be paced through and finished as quickly and efficiently as possible. Every time, I have to stop and remind myself that the goal of these mornings is not to complete the loop and return to the dock a little faster, a little more tired than the day before. The goal is to paddle. To feel every stroke. To get my arms used to the swing and heft of the shaft, my hips accustomed to the rock of the boat between waves. The goal is to see the drops of water silvering lily pads and the flash of wing from an unknown bird in the reeds. The goal is not to finish, because finishing is an end to the one activity I have to look forward to for the day.

And that’s the thing. I have stopped trying to convince myself to be content here, because I won’t be. I’ve stopped trying to force positivity, because despite being able to see little positives here and there, I am have never been a Pollyanna and I won’t start now. But in the midst of what feels so much like floundering, I need to at least embrace the flounder. To feel it, and to learn to live in it and move with it,  to see what it can teach me about being in the world even if it doesn’t feel like I’m moving towards anything at all besides this interminable circling.

After fighting the wind and getting a little freaked out by the white caps soaking my deck and spray skirt, I paddled into a small cove that was more protected to gather myself for the open water crossing back to the little state park boat ramp. I saw the tiny head of some water mammal, probably a muskrat, paddling itself through the downed branches of a huge cottonwood that fell far out into the water in the last big storm.  A huge turkey vulture banked far above the lake, circling. I gathered myself in the shallow reeds, and took up the chant I had started along the rocky shore with each stroke: “Trust Yourself. Trust your boat.” Trust that you have been in worse wind and wave than this before, and that if you have to bail out you know exactly what to do. Trust your boat, in its seaworthiness despite its patched hull and abraded surfaces, trust in its innate ability to ride these little white capped waves and slicing wind. It was built for much worse weather than this, as were you.