Like this:

“Therefore I will be quiet,
comforted that I am dust.” Job 42:6

“Be still and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10

“Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight, something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.” Rilke

After Dad died, we went into Dad mode. That is, we got shit done. He died on a Thursday, Saturday evening was the funeral, Sunday afternoon the burial. My brother had to go back to work, but my sister and I got on the house and other jobs that had to be done. Those who have lost people close to them will recognize the pattern. Either you drown in your sorrow or you get up and move, and when you start moving, it’s hard to stop. For the next couple of weeks my sister and I went through the house like a hurricane and got it ready to sell. With my brother, we began the complicated tasks of dealing with the estate.

Weeks later, my sister back in Dayton, I sit in the empty house and imagine other places to be. My immediate thought is of New York. After the summer of my life, I was pulled into a wormhole and came out in my home town with my dad gone. I have always been ambivalent about my home town and find it alienating rather than welcoming. I could still hear and taste New York, and I felt like a boat that suddenly cuts its engines and waves come in behind it. I was dead in the water. Out of gas. Stuck. From the frenetic energy of New York and before that the road and before that California to nowhere.

Taking my sister back to Dayton, I took a familiar Blue Highway in West Virginia. We stopped at a train crossing, and I opened up my email on my iPhone. There was a message from Dean Palin from Cool University. I had won the poker game back in June when they folded their cards and let me take the pot. It seems now that, rather than play any more, they wanted me to take the money they had brought to the table and just leave, like for good. “The check’s in the mail,” she wrote, and my sister and I sat at the train tracks in West Virginia and marveled at the vagaries of life. Only a few weeks ago, I had just won a year-long poker match with the administration of a university, was living in New York, and had a father who was my hero and inspiration. Now I was a homeless, unemployed orphan who was about to get enough money from the poker match to retire, travel the world, and write. Life moves pretty fast, and if you stay open to it, it will break your heart and repair it, sometimes in the same stroke.

The stakes in the poker game were real enough that I had to decide what I would do if I lost. It didn’t take long: I would travel the world, beginning in South America, write, and live. I never really thought about what I would do if I won the poker game, much less get all the money on the table without playing another hand. It turns out the answer is the same. I will travel the world and write. My mind raced. First of all, I would not believe that a check was real until it cleared, but as stupidly as Cool University had played its hands over the past year or so, it is hard to imagine that they would lie about this. Still, I’ll wait. Secondly, I need to stay and take care of things at the house, at least for a while, and there are things left to do with the estate. So, I’ll wait. Thirdly, my son is getting married at the end of October. I can’t very well take off for the unknown and not attend his wedding. After that, however, and if the check does indeed clear, the world is open to me. I am now a writer, alone in the world except for my siblings and my friends.

The hard part is remaining quiet, being still, waiting, because staying is nowhere, and I want to be somewhere. I am in a liminal zone, and something major is about to happen. I went back and read some of the posts from my trip out here, and it’s there already in several of the entries, such as this one:

It really was becoming a vision quest of sorts. I was stripping away one life and waiting for another to emerge, and that new life would be born of the road. I liked feeling light and free, or as Walt would say, strong and content. This was indeed a sacred journey.

You can’t rush a sacred journey. I need to be quiet, comforted that because I am nothing, I am everything. I need to be still and know that I am god, in charge of my life and destiny but also dependent upon the sacred other. I need to know that I am the arrow, enduring the bow, about to be released into flight. Staying is nowhere, and nowhere is right where I need to be right now.