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Shortly after we met, I warned Frankie that I’m a serious flight risk. In some ways this is easy for me, the leaving. Put everything into boxes and appeal to a friend with a garage to keep them, like an anchor dropped into a quiet eddy of the ‘real world’, before I cast myself off into the great seeking. (Rest assured Frankie fans, we’re not breaking up; for once my flight is not away from a partner but towards!)
Sixteen days ago it happened. Life flipped upside down - no
funding to continue my work at the Quebec Community Learning Centre network
where I have been initiating Intergenerational & Aboriginal Programs.
Something might become available in September. I could be prudent, sublet my
apartment, take a little vacation, cross my fingers…
Instead, Plan A fell at my feet like a dress after a long
night out. I’ve always got a Plan B in the back of my mind; it’s hard for me to
stay put without one. A month previous I had finished paying off the debt from my
MA. Free and clear, jobless, Plan B suddenly saw it’s moment and reared up - it’s time for a sabbatical.
‘Sabbaticals’ I call these journeys, when instinct trumps
prudence and I run screaming past the edge of my ground, leap towards that urge
dangling down from the stars over the churning river of life below, to catch up
with some part of me that got ahead of myself. Because my nickname and initials
are both ‘sab’ & ‘S.A.B.’ it’s almost as if I was named for this, without
my parents’ conscious intent.
It’s been more than five years since I took one. I spent
three years (2008-2011) in a tiny village in the subarctic working with the
Naskapi Nation, and have spent the last two years in the Canadian cultural
metropolis of Montreal above the corner of St.Hubert & Jean Talon Ouest.
Now it’s time to get some distance and perspective, figure out how to integrate such juxtapositions. Recent memories are a tangled up blueprint for the next phase of my life, but what does it say? I’m reminded of those huge sand paintings left by the Nasca in the Peruvian desert over 2000 years ago; I need to get up high and see what shape I’ve left behind in the ground of my being.
Now it’s time to get some distance and perspective, figure out how to integrate such juxtapositions. Recent memories are a tangled up blueprint for the next phase of my life, but what does it say? I’m reminded of those huge sand paintings left by the Nasca in the Peruvian desert over 2000 years ago; I need to get up high and see what shape I’ve left behind in the ground of my being.
Now that I have made the decision, I am bursting with the
urge to go. I feel like I am being ripped in half because part of me has
already started to leap, while the part of me that is a body in an apartment
with a lease and stuff is still here. About 586 details stand between me and
the leaving. When I think of the moving to-do list I shudder and get the urge
to do even more drastic things, like scream out my window for people to come up
and clean me out.
Am I ready to let go of my “Live and Let Live” magnet from
the 2002 Vancouver Dyke March? Should I keep the stand up cheese grater I
splurged on? Eventually I’ll be back and I’ll be too
poor to buy another one, but not too poor to buy cheese… Past memories and
future scenarios play out over each little possession, laced with questions of
identity, fear and the meaning of life. Every one is a plank on the bridge that
must be crossed to be free of here, and the bridge is exactly the length of
every little thing I have- each piece of paper, each futon. But to repeat the
mantra of everyone stuck between here and there with a multi-pronged task, “one
way or another it will get done”… in the next 10 days!
Meanwhile, I am ecstatic. I can’t stop smiling. Fears and
doubts come in and then they go. It all sounds idealistic, but I know many
challenges are ahead of me. I am giving myself into the hands of a vague notion
of community, with little money. My inner princess will wake up craving the
$3.60 cafe et croissant deal no longer 20 feet from my front door. I feel it
necessary to call out my privilege here, I have enough to be assured that my
fall would stop before true poverty. Even though I have a reoccurring nightmare
that I need shelter and no one will let me in, I have an underlying confidence
that I would never end up actually barriered to housing.
But I am signing on to the types of training programs that
don’t let you sit back and hide, rather they rip you inside out and set you
forth into the world anew. Inner gremlins will rise up to do battle, in an
effort to protect my false self (ego).
And I am asking the Divine to bring me closer, to guide me
in a great unlearning; therefore is it not inevitable that I will be tested? But
at the end of each day, I will feel alive, and if not for that, than why am I here?
~ Sab, Summer Solstice, June 21st 2013
The LoveNest, Montreal
The LoveNest, Montreal
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