“Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It is not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can.”
– Toni Morrison
It’s time to move.
I wrote these words eight weeks ago and they are still true. Only then, it was just a longing, a knowing without legs. Today, I sit amongst dozens of boxes and bags and stacks of furniture and bare walls with empty nails protruding from them. It’s Moving Day.
I’ve been feeling the pull to leave the city for about 18 months now. I was working out at our upscale gym (the one we’ve never really been able to afford) when I saw a winged creature flitting frantically amongst the metal crossbeams of the ceiling. It was at that moment that I thought: I am done with this life.
There is no doubt that the time to get out has come. We need to move closer to the land we are stewarding about an hour outside the city. The final straw, however, was the massive construction project next door that began some months ago. We’re not quite sure what it is they’re building over there, but it is gargantuan. It began with the installment of an unfathomably large hanger-style roof spanning the entire 20 x 60 meter property. It is not only the terrible noise (which includes the expected pounding, grinding, clanking, spluttering and machinic drone, AND also blasting banda music, bizarre shouts and yelps from the workers… all amplified by the enormous aluminum roof overhead), it is also the highly surreal experience of living in the shadow of this imposing metallic being that seems to have risen out of nowhere in a matter of weeks. When I say shadow, I mean that literally. The sun basically never touches the house at all and out all east-facing windows one only sees metal. The temperature inside is always several degrees cooler than the ambiente climes. Sometimes, we need an external push to take necessary but difficult steps forward.
After nearly a year of searching for a home to rent in this small Zapotec village, we found a place that we hope will hold us well. Today, on Moving Day, the main feelings with me after a long and arduous packing process are shame and overwhelm. Shame and overwhelm. Difficult things to feel. This modern lifestyle sickens me. As we prepare to shift our lives, I am painfully aware of just how much fucking stuff we have. Nonetheless, it has been hard to imagine leaving this “beautiful,” modern home, with all of its spaces, closets, drawers, terrazas and vistas. Even though I know that this move is exactly what we need, in the eyes of the so-called “developed” world, this new place we found would certainly be considered a “downgrade.” The fact that I am struggling with leaving this place reveals an attachment to Western ideas of comfort and success I was somewhat unaware of. Nauseating.
I have also been noticing a certain terror when it comes to this transition. The confusion, fear and general fuckery so present throughout our socio-political landscapes over the last months have not been helpful. For me, this move to a very rural, close-knit and extremely Catholic village feels deeply counterintuitive to my mind and heart and flesh. Mind and heart and flesh fashioned from ontologies of modernity, whiteness, development and a drive for never-ending growth and improvement. There’s something in the tenor and texture of our times that generates an impulse in me to retract, shrink and isolate. High on the illusion of individual safety, the idea of leaving what I know feels increasingly scary and destabilizing.
An aspect of this has to do with the specific place we are moving to. There is so much I don’t understand about the sociality, implicit structures, connective tissues and inner workings of a place like this. I’m sure that I will learn a lot if I am brave enough to really allow myself to be woven into the context. And, of course, there are some things that I am sure I’m simply incapable of learning. Despite the hollow, heart-pounding panic in me, I perceive a deeper knowing: one urging me forward into this unknown new world; one reassuring me that this transition can open multiple gateways to learning and unlearning about this land, the people, myself and the tangle of relationships that make me. I have no doubt that there will be many challenges and complexities. I hope I can meet these with grace and generosity rather than indignation and superiority.
In the course of touching, sorting through and packing every single object that I own, Rafa was ever-present. There were cynical-serious questions such as: where does one pack the ashes of their dead baby? (I ended up putting them in a suitcase I planned to live from for the first weeks in the new house.) What to do with the lingering toys and baby clothes which somehow escaped The Stuff purge? (I ended up giving the toys to an unexpectedly pregnant friend and kept just one simple white onesie and a soft baby blanket.) It made me reflect on the vast differences in the lives of parents-who’s-children-lived and those of the parents-who’s- children-died especially in these pivotal life transitions. What would it be like to be moving to this new home with a living 7 year-old? It is hard for me to imagine.
Then there is the nostalgia that comes with leaving a place. Driving around the city these past few weeks, memories of stillbirth flash in my mind’s eye. There’s the corner near the midwife’s consultorio with the cracked sidewalk next to the turquoise wall. There’s the hospital where I delivered his body at dawn, a light rain falling. There’s the busy avenue, always packed with traffic, outside the OBGYN’s office. It was there that I remember saying definitively: I will NOT have a C-section. I need to feel the pain of this birth as a way to help my heart-body-mind process what has happened-is-happening-will-always-be-happening. This was a choice which felt like it wasn’t “mine,” but more merely something that simply had to be done.
Something I’ve noticed in this half-century-long life is that those decisions which made me (not the ones “I” consciously and carefully made) have definitively shaped my life. Yes, some of those choices have come with incredible pain and confusion, however, when I have heeded the call to move in a certain direction I have inevitably grown and expanded in ways I could never have imagined. This was true when I moved from place to place around the world as a young nomad, when I moved to México all those years ago, when I knew I had to have a vaginal birth and, now, in choosing to leave the city and its many limitations.
In the Name of Rafa 