"Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." Galations 6:2 A friend in college once talked about how he didn't want to travel to different places so much as live in them because of the different view this gives one of a place. So it is for the last 10 years of my adult life that I have "lived" in different parts of the U.S. on a long, strange trip from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Huntsville, Alabama to Annapolis, Maryland to New York City to Jackson, Mississippi to Longmont, Colorado (with amazement did I recently realize that as a native and second generation Californian and through and through westerner that I had spent seven straight years living east of the Mississippi River and a total of five and half years south of the Mason-Dixon line, even as the deep south denies the southern legitimacy of Maryland). But in all these places, because I or my husband were either thinking about going to school or going to school, my living was temporary. I knew, even when I moved to each place, that my landing was a rest stop.
Now, living in Longmont with no intentions or plans of leaving, I am "putting down roots" here, staking a claim to the community that I don't plan on abandoning. It was at first comforting to know that I am not moving, to have a home that I own. Recently, it has been frightening. I don't have an escape plan once people see who I am, see how messy my family life is, discover me. I don't have a way to escape the difficult people and situations in my life. And then - with no escape - I came to see that in all the places I have lived, I have lived temporarily. I have been a long term visitor, but I have not trully lived there. I now live in a community that not only knows my name, works with me, hangs out with me but that knows (and greets!) all the skeletons, all the cob webs, all the dirty, mucky stuff in my life.
As the daughter of an alcoholic father, being so open and vulnerable is disconcerting. I was trained in childhood to put up defenses - walls, motes, trap doors (no wonder I collected castle figurines and loved the Egyptian pyramids as an adolescent) - to protect the family, to hide our terrible secret (how do you hide an elephant exactly?). Living otherwise comes unnaturally to me even as I struggle to keep the walls low. There was a time even in the last year when I got a creepy feeling after sharing difficult things in my life - the creepy feeling one might get when discovering one's identity has been stolen or house broken into, as if by sharing my secrets, I have lost pieces of myself.
But there was that prayer for close girl friends - perhaps not really my own prayer, but God's hand in my life moving me to pray for a closeness I fear - and the amazing results of finding a tree house I can retreat to, pour out the little items I've collected, trade closely held treasure and coveted pebbles (lowly, lowly things that I hide), and then laugh at the things that I've mistaken for treasure or pebbles or kept so closely held.
I woke up this morning with a brain that was functioning at two miles per hour with the acumen of a single cell organism. My son was functioning immediately at 35 miles per hour, and we had a lot of miles to cover yet for the day. I looked out the back door at the beautiful weather and could not remember what season we were in until I noticed the green plants returning to my garden. I slogged through the day and called Megan in the afternoon - sharing, laughter, jokes and well wishes even as she was telling me about her doctor's visit for the day and two more to come for the week as she figures out why she is critically anemic and if she has Crohn's disease, even as I tell her that I am starting the filing process for a legal separation. I got off the phone no less cured of my life's crisis but highly cured of a fatigued soul. In this community, I have come to see what it means to carry each other's burdens, to be freed of the effort of carrying them, to bundle and hide them so that they all fit on my back, and that I can not go it alone as a castle.
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