That Balancing Act

Today I laid down on a table and let skilled hands hold my neck. They coaxed the spasm out of my muscle fibers, and the competing sides of my psyche into the diplomatic arena of my core. Together, my core, my pragmatism, my, for lack of a better word, wisdom, and her hands and careful words began to unwrap my resolve and thus, my energy, from its visceral constraints. With two words I felt skin, tendons, muscles, veins, bones dissolve into sand and spread across the table. No longer wound into a space, I was expansive.

I can.

A few minutes before I had confessed: "I crave the woods, that blankness, that silence. And yet I have all but avoided them. My body itches for escape. All I want, many times a day, is to see nothing but the interstate rolling out ahead of me. Or the trail."
"Why aren't you on the interstate right now? Why aren't you on the trail?"
"I have to be working. Because I don't have the right gear; I don't want to spend that money on the gear. I have to work to afford my next escape."
"How often do you need to escape? Listen to your body."
"I don't know, I wait until I have no choice. Maybe once a week would even be enough." My brain was stubborn, ignoring the pain in my neck, exercising my stamina for discomfort.
Then, as I felt my fingers become rocks off kilter with my body, weighted down by unfamiliar arms, the mischievous current of a plan negotiated the fibers of my body, gathering toward fruition. She waited for me to speak. Then, as though something inside me fell asleep and another part awoke, muddy patterns appeared behind my eyes. These unfocused black holes for the light shining in the window accompanied a blankness. My thoughts eroded, emotions receded, body weighted merely by gravity on the table.
"Wow. That was a huge blankness." She waited.

"I feel the need to exhale. Like something is going to happen that will open my days, so that they are not constrained and defined and shrunken by obligations and routine and expectations but as open as the woods or the road. I'm waiting for something to happen, I'm practicing patience for the moment when I can breathe out."
"What do you think that will be?" Her fingers loosen, find new targets of pressure.
"I know it's something I have to make. Patience is a good exercise, but I think I have to make that exhale."
"You just answered from a different place. Let me ask you this. Can you balance your pragmatism, that you need to work now, with your craving for the woods?" And of course I knew. That was the thread of exhilaration, the plan whose course through me was unwrapping all the bindings of routine, the absorbed, artificial urgency of those rushing around me.
"I can use my work to get the gear I need. I have enough time during the week to spend the time I need out in the woods. I can have control over my day just by falling asleep outdoors in silence, and waking as my body needs."
"Did you feel that?"
"It felt like my body let go and spread like sand onto the table."
"Your energy just became so expansive." With my eyes closed, a yellow light was radiating out from my heart.
"Where did that come from? The 'I can.'"
"My core."
"Good, now, what will give you control about sleeping outside?"
"I've felt my body want to change its circadian rhythm. I think I'm just craving silence. But sharing the house as I am prevents that change." As I laid there, a tear of relief gathered volume in the corner of my left eye. Her hands hovered over my skull, fingers touching the hood of the tissue connected to my spasm-ing shoulder. The pieces of my life I thought I might have to let go, the obligations I worried were sources of my stress, were not mutually exclusive with the blankness I crave. Sure, simplicity at the house I live in isn't going to happen, too many people who create clutter live here. But this isn't really my home. The trail was/is home, and nothing had earned that title since I was a teenager. The quiet calm of windy winter woods, the crisp vacuum of urban stimulation, could afford me something similar, if not identical to the trail. And those hours of solitude, that rest in the open air, that I have known I needed since September, might just balance out the rest of it. Because I also need to work, and play with friends, and write and write and write.
And then our time was up.