Gray

Greetings to anyone reading this,

You are my morning pages today. It is Sunday, March 4th and the sky is ribboned with grays and white. The puffy clouds on the top are glorious. I can see my two-year old clear lights dangling, the plastic casings twinkling on the fire escape which is turning a rustic metal brown from years of rain and snow. There is a big wagon wheel of ironwork in the middle and I smile everytime I see it. I can never get away from the West. Not that I want to.

Being homesick for the desert is non-stop, even on the good days. When I flew out of El Paso on June 3, 1997, I looked down from the plane's window and saw the vanishing griese bushes and dunes of my beloved sand and desert and I said to my brother, "I will never see this again." He paused and now I know he was thinking perhaps back to the first time he left the Southwest for New York. "Yes, you will," he said, in a rare compassionate voice.

He knew.

Now he mourns New York the way I mourn the desert. We both know the ecstacy of both regions. As I sit here on a windy, quiet Sunday morning in Brooklyn, I can tell you that I love living in this vibrant city. I love getting on the subway train and riding it. I love walking the Brooklyn Bridge. I love Columbus Circle. The BQE. The Verrazano Bridge. The architecture. The food! And what I love about the Southwest is the landscape, the enormous sky (which as I lay down my tenth year in NYC is causing me to now miss the skyscrapers with all that vacant sky), border food, quiet, driving, and less need to make more money to do the same thing I am doing right now - writing.

I stay in New York for the energy and for my daughters. And I'm just not ready to leave, yet, not with my tail between my legs. Everything outside of this region is dull. Sorry.

I teach at a school where inside any classroom, simply by asking the students to voice the country they originated from, I realize I am truly in the center of the World. And even though my heart pants to be alone to write and to get things out of me, to explain, at this age of 51, for those moments of sitting in the middle of the World, I am grateful, and I pray I have given a bit to them, compared to the flood of knowledge they have given to me.

But I am tired. I want to stand rooted in my purpose as are the trees from across the park waving to me on this fifth floor walkup. I spent my two-hour break at school on Friday, scouring the grants available for hungry, unknown writers like me. I found enough to give me a charge and to try, try again, for a sabbatical. I have only been teaching for two weeks this semester and already am bone tired. This is not my passion. I know this now. This is not my dharma. I have done well. But it is not my purpose.

So I will work, work, work to get to my purpose. I will fill out every grant proposal I can find. I will write - as I am doing today - on my off day. I will plan out decent lessons for my good students and do them proper for these next 13 weeks. I'll not complain (any more than I just have to you, gentle reader), and I'll not discuss it with the other teachers. I will hold these truths in me and manifest my outcome.

Rain is coming today and there is much rain inside me. Finally the inside and outside match. That is enough to begin.