Never build a wall in February.
Specifics: never build a retaining wall in Atlanta in February.
What began as a simple three-day project has turned into a three-week purgatory thanks to endless rain and a contractor with poor project planning skills and no apparent access to a weather app. As we moved into Mercury Retrograde on Sunday I shifted into acceptance that my desire for rapid completion could not compete with cosmic delays. I’ve gone from pushing the contractor for completion to nudging for any movement at all. What’s left is to get at the lesson before me: to make sense of this rubble that impedes entry to my home.
My life coalesces around a pattern of coming and going. Since my dad transitioned in 2001, I’ve lived in more than twenty different spaces. Nomad and archivist. I move, I write, I move on. And now here I am in my Earth house as I call it because it has called me to a final healing that has to do with my body and the Earth and my rooting into my humanness.
Building a wall to have a better relationship with the street, with my boundaries, with the soil and roots beneath my feet, which have grown into the plumbing. Tangled in the wrong direction. How I feel about being so rooted is a complicated emotion. Sometimes I turn on myself, loosen to the point of madness then reconfigure and off I go. The old pattern. But what happens if I stay still. If I allow this house and this land to continue to heal me. I feel broken at the point of connection. Too much solitude as a child; too much solitude as an adult. I feel free only when I am alone.
The sewer line collapsed two days into the retaining wall rebuild. Coincidental, but I don’t believe in coincidences. Everything has meaning. We are meant to search, to put the pieces together to find the answer to the riddles. Everything is mind. The lateral sewer line collapsed. The weight of the past was too much for the old system. I had to install a new one.
Order follows chaos but chaos follows order, too. Life is a cyclical event and it is only humans who try to impose linear movement to a fourth dimensional concept like time. We cannot hold it in our hands. We hold it in our mind and fold it inside out when we need to. So, my house exists as solid structure, then it breathes out this release, and I find its tangles in the roots and get to rebuilding. I feel lethargic as though I have been uprooted but this work is necessary.
I chose to build a wall, not as containment but as commitment. To bring beauty, to invest in myself, to grow in harmony with the land .
