Unsettled

<p style=”clear: both”>It’s so seasonal one could set a calendar by it, the restlessness: I want to wander. I stack my to-read list with books about walking (I NEED the Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust: A History of Walking, don’t I? I am too impatient with the library hold system where I am the fourth hold and they have three copies, so it could be weeks!) (But then John Francis’s PlanetWalker, calls to me, I watch his TED Talk again, and am a little in love and it is not just the banjo.) As if reading about walking were able to stand next to walking itself.

Maybe this feeling is, in part, reaction against the tenderness in my feet, my internet-diagnosed fasciitis, the plantar fascism that wants to dictate where I can go, which isn’t painful enough to make me seek any help beyond asking Dana for some good stretches. I imagine my feet hurt as if there were some sympathetic magic that I would heal my connection to the ground, that I would again be footloose. It’s not pain, it’s twinges, it’s awareness, it’s the willingness to think how I set my foot, to roll through each step using each part of my foot, that the way of walking where I protect my tender heel is exacerbating the problem.

But this morning, it is more. I think I might be a character from Wind in the Willows, feeling something atavistic, I would embark, maunder, just set out. As if, after a period of being almost cloistered, nested, keeping to a small and quiet place, I am feeling an unquenchable thirst for the world. I am dragging my family out to hike, a small placatory gesture to the restlessness inside.

One of those serendipitous pickings up of a book I have had sitting by for weeks, last night in Fanny Howe’s The Wedding Dress, I found this:

Speed, aptitude, certitude. Direct yourself towards action. It is imperative to find a virtue in itinerancy because this is the world now. People are either fugitives who want to go home, or seekers who don’t want to go home.

Towards or from? Can I sort my hithers from my thences, my thithers from my hences?

Some days I am able to squint and with a wrenching of my heart be a stranger, that home is thrown back to mere house, that this patch of earth is a place among places. I cannot see it through a stranger’s eyes, but I can just unprivilege my own seeing enough, like a dissociative episode, that, so long as I don’t glimpse the bare feet of my sleeping children peeking out from the bottoms of their blankets, or the scrawled note one of them has left me, I can recognize that the being here is quite accidental and notice that to let go of being at home in this specificity I can be at home in the world.

My hiking boots are on, we fill water bottles, we are filled up on the oatmeal I made after I finished writing morning pages, doodling on the banjo, coming into the house to find them all still blessedly, peacefully asleep. The world is waiting for us.