Friends. Family. All of our loves. We write you from 30,000 feet (when do we start using meters?) above the cold and mighty Atlantic.
We did it. We finally did it.
You know we got married a year ago – don’t you remember the wedding? All the dancing, music, fire, connection…costumes, glowsticks…all that talk about leaving on a “year-long honeymoon”…did this year happen? Time is a fast old train, and of course it did. We rooted in Durango. We worked our asses off. We could have lived more frugally. But we fucking danced all night, we hooted and hollered at the stars, we effortlessly held on while at the same time our sanity depended on it, we hugged so freakin’ many of you, we talked til dawn, we roamed in the hills and rivers of Southwest Colorado…we lived this past year with the intensity of 10,000 suns. As Jenny so aptly put it over week-old stale bagels this morning – “you’re scared you’re gonna miss out on life, so you do everything” – while dad wisely beckons us to slow down with the next bite laborious bite of cream cheese….may this next year be a call to straddle both worlds.
As the aircraft raced down the runway gaining momentum towards the stars, I burst into tears. I completely lost it. Do you ever get that? You never know when tears are going to come until blat, boom, badicky doom dicky doom – cue that shredding guitar solo.
So much is in these tears…if only tears could talk…oh but they can! These eyes have a mouth attached, with a big old brain to mediate the flow, so here goes nothing.
I cry tears of grief for my mother. I did not know about death until she was gone. I still don’t know about death. But I’m learning. And it’s devastating, and beautiful too in the way that it’s cracked me open, and it’s so constricting at the same time, and so final – I’ve cried every day since my mom died. She was/is/will be on every stop of that train of time, and mama, this one’s for you.
I cry tears of relief for the load off my fanny when TAP Portugal Airlines fired up the old jet packs and launched us away on our flying shoes. Do you know what it took to get to this moment? It took 6 years of learning, growing, honing our craft as healers, working with our sweat and souls, just trying to scratch out a pleasant simple tune without breaking our necks! Not to be dramatic, but every one of us is part fiddler on the roof. It took a tornado of packing up our lives and our livelihoods, and bidding adieu to our hive (yes there was a couch and one final jam session in our backyard as the fetid plum tree dropped her fruit to be mashed under our bare feet at midnight), and heading East East East to get to this moment right here. And the train keeps moving.
We can put that in the “tears of crushing stress” category, walking hand in hand down the boulevard on a date with the “tears of intense joy and gratitude”.
And all this while watching someone I love so dearly fade away. How do you deal with the legacy that someone leaves behind in a week? How do you wrap up their memories, and bank accounts, and morals, and wisdom, and unpaid bills, and put them in a box in an attic until next year? You do it with your herd. Our herd. Yet another one of our hives. Buzzing and loving and tending and feeling and rubbing up against all the rough edges of being human while building something beautiful and harvesting the honey of family…
And so for all that, I cry trees of life.
Looming underneath all this has been terror. It has been/still is/will be scary. Why should it be? I’ve done this before…but of course it is. There’s more at stake now.
Because the last person/place/thing I cry for is my adoring wife JENNY. And not tears of sadness. Nor tears of relief. Not tears of stress either. Tears of LOVE my friends! I’m always gallivanting off to do it – on my own. And listening to Leo Kottke (6 & 12 String Guitar – if you don’t know the album, please do give it a tilt-a-whirl) brought all that nostalgia into stark focus. Nostalgia of sitting on a dusty curb in Salvador, Brazil, smoking a cigarette and pretending to be homeless so I wouldn’t get robbed, or knocking the old Martin backpacker guitar through the forests of the Eastern Mountains on the Appalachian Trail, or zipping through crosstown traffic on my little whipper zipper scooter bike in Suratthani, Thailand – just evading the rain, just trying to get to point A,B,C before the deluge…
But this time is different. Because this time, as the plane took off, I couldn’t or better yet wouldn’t bury myself in my own personal journalistic reverie. This time I stared into the bountiful fountains of my wife’s eyes and I cried tears of love. I can’t believe this is happening. And I’m grateful for this person/place/thing I call Jenny every single day.
Whew. Time to pause – cause my thoughts are a fountain too and my fingers are the jets. Here I go back into my own personal reverie. And I promise, I SWEAR, that this documentation of our lives for the foreseeable future will resemble more than my 8th grade MySpace account, even if I slip into the first person from time to time…
So Jenny, how the hell are ya? Please, elucidate me with experience.
“In this moment, I’m extremely hungry.”
“BUT. I’m also excited. Curious. Sad. Curious. Excited. EXCITED!”
Jenny has no fear. She is the rock in my hard place. The glue in my magnet.
Nick is only writing about his own thoughts and fears and musings and hopes and dreams (that I haven’t gotten to yet). But this trip is about us. It’s a downright little shindig of a honeymoon for chrissakes. We just haven’t done anything yet. Except for sit on a place for an hour and listen to Leo Kottke and cry.
SO my droogs – OUR little droogies – you can expect updates on our lives, peppered with Nick’s personal musings, accompanied by Jenny’s own commentaries on this real thing we call life after they pass through Nick’s series of filters and membranes, accented by incredibly breathtaking, bewitching, and bewildering photography taken by NONE OTHER THAN Mrs. Jenny Beth McDermed, all to be passed through and spit out of your own meaning-making mind-filters only to, well, make more meaning. And that, my friends, you can do with what you wish.
Here’s to growth.
Here’s to slowing down.
Here’s to experience.
Here’s to humility.
Here’s to patience.
Here’s to learning.
Here’s to acceptance.
Here’s to rest.
Here’s to LIFE. L’chaim!
Here’s to Lisbon. And here we go…
