Beltane Emergence Moon
A slow moving mountain. Or, a slow move to the mountains. Sitting here contemplating my study, its hundreds of books and file folders, computer equipment, desks, chairs. I feel overwhelmed at the thought of pruning, organizing, decluttering for selling the house and actually moving. That’s one reason we’re giving ourselves two years or so to move.
Two years might encompass the remaining lifespan of Vega and Rigel. We really don’t know since they’re hybrids, but we suspect 7-8 years and 2016 is 7 years plus. That’s a factor though not a determining one. Hell, who knows, it could encompass our lifespan, too, though I don’t imagine it will.
Talk about liminal space. Between now and then we are no longer fully here and definitely not fully there. I imagine a huge circus tent with many ropes and stakes and poles. Each stake must be pulled. Each rope removed. The poles must be taken down and the canvas rolled up. The canvas is our life in Minnesota and its attendant material possessions.
The stakes are friends, the MIA and the Walker, the Sierra Club Northstar Chapter, the background relationships developed over years of work in the church and in politics and in neighborhoods. The ropes are the emotional ties that bind us to places, to our years lived here, to our sense of ourselves as Minnesotans. The poles are those key relationships like the Woolly Mammoths, Anne, the docents, the folks Kate and I have worked with in multiple capacities: our vet, our doctors, our financial consultants.
All this must, in some way, be stored and the canvas packed. All these things will change once we reach our new destination. Our life will no longer be a Minnesota based life, but a Colorado based one. The friends will remain, of course, as will all the institutions and professionals, the places and their attached memories, but we will have stretched the ease and physical distance with many beyond the breaking point. It will not, of course, be possible to know which ones will suffer the most until time has passed. But all will suffer some, most will suffer a lot.
Feeling overwhelmed, of course, comes from imagining that the tent and its supports must be packed and moved for a train leaving tomorrow. That’s not the case. We have time and will use it well. It’s just that, well, right now, it’s a lot.
