I packed for rain: sweaters and books, a bag of dry lentils for making soup, cinnamon-infused brandy for hot toddies, slippers, movies... and every day the sun has burned through, the sky bright and blue. October, and I found myself lying on a sheet on the beach, skin bared to the sun, napping, reading, eating potato chips, drinking beer.

I took a long walk each day, along the shoreline that I have known my whole life, the one that is always shifting imperceptibly beneath me, the one that has always been there, the one that is my foundation. A foundation of sand somehow makes the most perfectly solid and tenuous all at once metaphor for all that is my life.

My nose and the apples of my cheeks are kissed with pink, my shoulders brown. My legs feel stretched long from their loose swing and sway. I am happy to be here, and I am ready to go home.

I've been feeling lately like mining my heart for content, scanning the horizon for something to say, the right thing to say, the right way to say it. It is the artist's struggle, the painfully mundane and predictable artist's struggle. But I have been remembering things, feelings, remembering the shape of hope, the formlessness of how words tangle, and the certain kinds of images that rearrange the deepest places in that ever-shifting foundation of sand in that thing that I call my heart. I've been scrambling to capture ideas again, not with the same fierceness of those early days of my first thesis, but in the way I felt when I spent 2 weeks here.

It was this time of year, 8 years ago. I was on medical leave from work, and I was scrambling to rearrange my life into a something I could fit inside, something that could fit inside of me. Those days here felt long and good, languid and bright. I gathered tiny pieces of driftwood that reminded me of wintered trees and  even smaller red and golden leaves, leaves smaller than my pinky nail, and arranged and rearranged them into tiny tableaus on the beach. I made postcards, and took photographs, and rerooted myself to this place of my familial and familiar history. I watched sunsets and stayed up too late in the empty house alone, I walked the shore at midnight, and spread myself out in the sand to stare at the stars. I drank wine and remembered that fluttering beating heart inside my chest, the leaping and settling of my gut as I felt my way slowly, steadily, unsurely back into myself.

Yesterday the rain settled in and all night I listened to its song outside my bedroom window as I drifted in and out of dreaming. Though it's still warm, fall is definitely here.  It's been a slow shift and still somehow hit with a bang. It feels like everything embodies that narrative lately. I watch a slow turn and then suddenly I'm looking at the other side of the thing.

The sky is white and I've had strange little hints of reminders the past few days of places I've been, places that feel so far and distant it's hard to imagine they once felt close to the marrow of me, places I feel fondness for and places I feel grateful to have left behind, bullets I managed to narrowly dodge, trainwrecks I watched unfold in the rearview mirror... in the same breath there have been breezes blowing through with the intoxicating scent of future possibility, directions that—like this impending season—feel fresh and grounding, full of earthy wonder.

This year, like every other, I went to visit the swifts for my birthday. I watched them gather in the sky, flutter and swirl, dart and soar, and was reminded once again of the way they work together, the way they so perfectly embody the singularity and togetherness that I feel in the world. They coalesce and converge, then break form—a mass of seeming chaos—then just as quickly, drop a wing and are one again. There was a time I would have called this the closest thing to religion I know how to understand, the way we are all—imperfectly—a part of something bigger.

Once, I wanted to trace the flight patterns of birds on paper, macro and micro—30 seconds, a lifetime. I made them up in short bursts of thread, of ink, tracing their way across paper. Do their movements across the sky, the continents follow those same patterns of tributaries, bark, the veins of a leaf, the veins beneath my own skin?

Somehow now though, the abstraction feels a little deeper, a little more distant. This year, my body is my body. That little bird body is his own. 2 beating hearts, a million. Meaning is less born of the sameness, the layering of pattern. Tangible proof isn't what I'm after, not exactly. The weight is no longer in making visual the gaps and convergences. The call I feel is something like wanting to learn to be them. This year my fantasy is to trace their goings more specifically, fly alongside them—if only in short jaunts in the metal body of a jet. This year my fantasy is to spend a year with them, see what they show me in the moments without the grandstanding of their yearly show, break free of the metaphors that have grown up around them in my own yearly rituals. I want to see their quiet moments. It is in those moments, I think, that I might find the simple beauty of the easing between community and singularity, the way a life is built in the accumulation of those moments.

I have always wanted to be that last bird in the sky, the one diving and darting alone as night falls, with the safety of the rest just below, waiting. This year I want to learn the ease of transition, slipping easily back and forth between that solitary delight and the pleasure of the whole, making something beautiful together.

I am both very happy and very sad. This is either a character trait or an extended state of being. This is both a character trait and an extended state of being.

Last week I camped at a lake, floated weightless in bracing cool clear water. Blue above me, blue below me, that special submerged silence, the small muffled splash of a toe breaching the surface.

......

For a time I prided myself on the shortening, the simplifying of my long languid sentences. See how I am breaking form? See how I am laying bare what I used to shroud in epiphanic gesture? See how I am revealing what simply is? See how I don't need to pretend there is beauty?

I need to pretend there is beauty.

I need for there to be beauty. I need to believe in it. It is the believing that makes it.

......

On the second night by the lake—the blue hour, the gloaming—the swifts dove and darted low and sweeping around me. It felt like something. It was that familiar something feeling, the precipice of something. 'I know I should be too old to believe in that feeling anymore,' I heard myself say, 'but I think I'm a better person when I believe in magic.'

I love that swelling feeling inside of me, that buoyed feeling of hope, that intangible slippery something. It is what I feel on warm summer nights on my bike, at sunset on the beach, with my face buried in the crook of the neck of someone I love, the feeling when artmaking and living are imbued with the same breath, when they are indivisible, that feeling that makes me want to press my tongue against the roof of my mouth, unfurl my fists and fingers, breathe deep. It is something like delight, something akin to peace.

......

In 3 days I turn 35. Three fat decades, plus half of another, a baker's dozen—almost twice: My mother's age at me 5, a few years shy of when my grandmother first got cancer, the age they start calling a pregnancy high risk... Because I don't have children, a friend of mine says, of herself. She speaks of it as a foregone conclusion.  Another woman, 10 years my junior, talks confidently of her future children. It is such a part of how we know ourselves as women, locate ourselves in society, in time, in culture, in lineage. I once spoke of my future children—a younger, sharper, more fierce and naive me—now I hear the story shift in the telling: If I have children... If I had children... The maybe crept in. And it isn't really sad in the way the younger version of me would have thought it—the 28 year old me who saw babies everywhere she went, who felt that ache in the pit of her at the sight of them, the smell. Now it is an abstraction more than a feeling. And now I know that lakeside champagne breakfasts and dance-parties, and collapsing on the couch at the end of a long work day, and spur of the moment beach trips or spur of the moment pretty-much-anythings are a product of this childless life I am living. My twenty year old cousin told me last week that being an adult seems alright the way I do it, that my adult life is blackberry picking and drinking beer. And from a certain angle she is right; it feels good to see this vision of myself, this particular freedom, the way the sound—the feeling—of the wind stops me in my tracks, spreads a grin wide and slow across my face. This is a good life, a full life, a thrillingly happy life.

It is a life in which I am learning to embrace being both very happy and very sad.

I went to the opera a couple of weeks ago and was so blown away by the scene of Lucia's hand dragging across a fogged-up window while her brother and lover fought below her, so blown away that I didn't know how to talk about it, the visual viscerality. I could dissect it for its symbology, its metaphor, how it became a fulcrum, the pivot point for the rest of the opera. I could write a whole dissertation on the movement, the tracks, each moment memorialized as the next unfolded on top of it... But no. It was glowing red, and I felt in my spine. I felt it. That is enough. That is everything.

And in that moment I remembered what I meant when I first laid claim to being an artist, what it felt like—the unnamed thing coursing through me. Before I cared about theory or the postmodern secret nods of artists to each other behind the closed curtains of their public faces, before I knew the pasted on smiles of openings, the things we were supposed to be talking about. The language and slight of hand that proved the point of the dissection that made what I had to say worth hearing, the worlds of prestige and tangled meaning.

I have been dog-paddling, forgotten entirely that I am a swimmer, grasping and scrambling to stay afloat, getting nowhere. It takes a willingness to stretch out long, point forward while looking down, have a little faith in muscle and breath and buoyancy. If—instead of all of this furious trying—I can let my muscle memory take over, I think I just might remember the cool meditative rhythm of my stroke: reach, pull, kick, breathe. Maybe after a little while inertia will take hold again, and movement will come more easily than the swirl of my own thoughts.

The snow is melting and has become a sea of slush. I tiptoe and slosh and try to maintain balance. What had frozen rigid has melted in a flash and flooded everything. We weren't prepared, aren't prepared.

It is like that. When the ice melts I don't know what to do with everything that is suddenly liquid and flowing. It is moving and bigger than anything I can corral, anything I can even pretend to try to control. It makes its own rivers, forges its own paths, carves ravines into anything between it and where its headed.

My feet slop through the muck on the streets. Everything is slick and soft and yielding.

Last week in yoga, my instructor had us spend the whole class on backbends, spoke of the metaphorical implications of the pose: baring your belly, committing with effort and intention to vulnerability. She told us how, in her personal life, vulnerability was the most anxiety-producing place—bare yourself and then freeze and hold your breath. It is like that. I step forward into open air; I do it every time. I am not unafraid; I am terrified, but I do it every time. I take risks; it is the only thing that feels worth it, but I bare myself and then I freeze and hold my breath. I cling and I gasp and I hope, and I lose my suppleness, my ability to move and breathe with ease. So we spent the hour bending back, baring our bellies, pushing evermore skyward, opening, opening... and breathing, moving in the place of vulnerability.

It is a muscle that needs work, a practice we could all tend to with more diligence, more grace, with more give and forgive. Even writing the words here is me stepping forward into the wind, and I feel my breath catch in my throat, the beginnings of steeling myself, the rigidity creeping in and up. So, deep breath, return to the slick soft slush of the fiercely wildly melting snow and ice. It knows not where it's going, but it's going, and no fear or self-consciousness can slow its pace or block its path.