There is a migration happening inside my body. A push/pull that privately pulses through my interior landscape. Half of me longs to be tethered to this earth. The other half begs to fly. Regardless of my altitude, all of me must move and meander. But I am distended by my own desire; the contrary corners of my heart. I work to understand this longing body, always in navigational conflict. I reach for things that do not touch; I exist between them, the peacemaker in search of agreement.
I was born in the Pacific Northwest, in the middle of two states that share little semblance of one another. Oregon is almost perfectly square, with a quarter of its border touching the ocean. I am delighted by land that lingers next to a great body of water. I admire how it can touch two worlds without going anywhere, how it understands movement by being still. Oregon is inside the Pacific flyway, a migratory map making sense of magnetic fields, but mostly magic. I am quick to fall captive to the mystery of flight migration. I study the spacious sky, curious how birds just know what their bodies need. A bird’s journey begins in Alaska and adventures as far south as Chile. Is it still an adventure if they don’t choose it? Like clockwork, without a watch, I witness their temporary exodus. When I was a child, I never wanted to know where they were going; somewhere warmer, was always enough. Something about flight turns me back into a child. Every time I see a plane, I beg everyone to stop and stare; I insist we all guess where it is going. When I married an air traffic controller this game was not nearly as amusing; it turns out I don’t love answers as much as questions. Thankfully his passion for flight did not transfer to birds, so there was still something left, just for me.
To be a bird is to know you must go, and then follow yourself back home. Migratory birds return to where they came from, year after year. Most species are born with migration routes already embedded into their DNA. Their cells know their destiny, long before they do. Daylight and darkness act like a god, triggering their instinct to travel north and south. Their intuitive appetite is metamorphic, constantly in motion, mirroring the trajectory of their life. They do not choose their navigation. They do not choose what hungers and nourishes them. They just choose their bodies; bodies that are not divided. Why do I feel this great divide?
I teach dancers about creating resistance in their bodies, energy out of the crown of their head, energy out their feet and into the earth. An imaginary pull from north to soul, of equal opposition. This is what creates perfect balance. This is how a body can linger in time and space, seemingly effortlessly. Except it is not effortless. It works well for a body, but not for my mind. All of this length and longing, just to keep me balanced? Sometimes I loathe my longing; always making me feel like something is missing. But I mostly worry it makes me ungrateful; captive to the grass is greener syndrome. Despite being lost in my senses, I am sensible enough to know there is no greener grass. It’s just that I want to run my bare feet in every shade: fern, moss, seafoam, sage and pine.
I fly often enough to watch the world change size within seconds, to memorize the making of my margin; the space between my desires. In a micro moment I become a single cell so close to concrete I can do nothing more than celebrate my smallness. And in the next, my elevation asks me to expand time, lengthen my periphery across a perspective so wide I worry I cannot stretch wide enough to fit and find; to feel the bed sheets tucked under all four sides. I really love to fly; to feel my desire dissipate. My man-made migration provides respite from my longing, and in these still spacious moments my body makes a petition and a promise. It prefers I use all of it, at once. It begs to see my home, not with new eyes but with a full body and whole. Maybe this is home; my body, whole. Is home perfect presence, or is longing my home?
My first daughter was born in Denver, the mile high city, 5,280 feet above sea level. I got used to the altitude quickly, and loved the idea of my lungs working harder for something I may have once taken for granted. When I was pregnant with Octave, I often wondered if she would always feel at home in high elevation. I liked the idea of our bodies comparing every condition to the one where we took our first breath. I liked how it made me feel, her feeling closer to the clouds, with a bird’s eye view of this big, wild world. We brought her home to a one room apartment with a world map that spread across one of our four humble walls. I spent hours nursing her next to that map, nourishing her body and extending mine. I studied our same old map, and a brand-new world. I studied my daughter; deliciously designed to detour and reorient everything that came before her. I bounced and rocked and studied the man-made borders of the world, curious about the confidence it must have taken to commit to such boundaries. Before daughters, early on in my marriage, my then husband and I moved from Oregon to Colorado, in a Penske piled high with books and ambition. There was something exhilarating and anti-climactic when we entered a new state. If not for each welcome sign, proudly displaying potatoes and buffalo, would we even know we were in a new place? As a child I thought the lines of the map were engraved into the earth, it wasn’t until years later I learned that they were imaginary. I understood that nothing magical happens the moment you cross a state border, you just know you are suddenly someplace else. But this is the magic: our movement, our proof of life. Like motherhood, the alchemy was not urgent. It took sweet and stable time, an adventure of osmosis, asking two worlds to balance and find each other, after they had already been one.
The largest imaginary line in the world runs through Colorado. The Rocky Mountains mark the separation between two bodies of water. It sounds so majestic, but when we drove right up to it I remember it feeling more approachable than its name; The Great Divide. There was a sign or two, the iconic mountains, and us. I wanted more drama and dichotomy; two things my mind relentlessly looks and longs for, as if my mind and body are two different species in search of symbiosis. Maybe it is me who creates my own divide? The one I feel I must submit to. The one I still cannot make peace with. The push/pull, and tension between two, the wanting to be both/and, here and there, everywhere all at once. This wanting and being, so, damn, much.
Some species of birds take up residence all year round, and others follow their internal compass, moving when their bodies know it’s time. Maybe my body has never been divided, it just demands my desire be dealt with. A story of migratory birds is a promise; a promise to return. These bodies are home.