Good morning good morning — the birds are not awake yet. Are you? It’s 5am and I am back in the saddle. We are returned from vacation, the coffee is brewing, the dog is asleep in her chair, the garden is still quiet. Everything is at my back. Backside. Support. Lumbar. Supine. Behind. There. Before. Past.
I went back to the place I could have once said I was from, the place that was once home to me and still lives in my body. We spent two weeks away from home, away from Sophie, away from work. I took all kinds of work with me, of course, with the idea that now I would be able to Get Things Done, but once we got to the coast of Maine, I didn’t want to do any of it. Instead, I sat and read books for fourteen says. Not quite so consistently — we had a stretch of just-two-of-us together vacation and then 5 days of here’s-all-the-family vacation with my sweetheart’s son there, too.
I am thinking this morning of the pleasure — and the struggle, for me — of a long vacation, taking two full weeks of time “off.” Time to fall apart, get panicked, feel guilty and unworthy, and then actually drop all the way away from work. I didn’t even get much writing done during this vacation — I did morning pages the first week, but the second week, when the boys were awake early and draped across their computers in the living room, I didn’t worry about trying to hunt down private space for my writing time Instead, I walked with my sweetheart. We read and read and read. We let the sun bake us to relaxation. We slept. We learned the beach’s varying contours. We made routines and then broke them. We didn’t watch tv, and I stayed off the computer. We biked around the beachside communities and I swam in the ocean, diving through wave after wave until I felt the tides moving in me even after I came back to shore. Slowly but surely, the vacation opened up in me, and I was able to unwind there on this beautiful beach.