Working

I was sitting on my front porch where I was writing a love letter to myself signed off with, “I’m proud of you for trying,” after a week of teary panics and picking apart the giant looming black blob in my brain and wondering what direction I should point my body. I was sitting there in that spot, after taking some time that day to gently heal my own self, to access my breath and tend to the parts of me that are mine alone and belong to no one else but myself, the parts that I must remind my own self to nourish and protect even when it’s been a long while and I seem to have forgotten to do those chores. It was a day of doing a lot of that type of gentle work after coming from a place of unemployment and anxiety and pandemic and living in my mind and in moments that were never now.

When I was sitting on my front porch writing that love letter to myself and being proud of myself for trying, a very tiny human passed by my apartment with someone that I assumed to be her father. This was a very small human indeed and one that could talk, but only a little bit due to her tiny size. She was looking at me, the way that tiny humans do, in a way that makes you feel like they are seeing the real you because they are small and pure and do not pass judgement and because it seems that when they are looking at you, there is really nothing else in the world but you and your fascinating existence in that moment, which you understand to be true because of the way they stare without knowing the manners that say that they probably shouldn't be staring. Yes, that was the way the tiny human was looking at me while I was sitting in my state of self-repair.

She pointed at me and looked at the bigger human who I believed to be her dad and then her dad looked at me and then back at her and said, “Come on let’s go, she’s working!” My first instinct was to feel a little joy due to the cuteness, followed by a little shame due to the fact that I actually was not working due to the fact that I was laid off from my job and trying to figure out what was next for me and how I felt about being a human in the world. But then my second instinct (the truer one) was a thought that said, “Today, my work is to reconnect to the secret tree-house part of myself that I deeply love and will never ever be able to lose no matter how lost I feel” and that is the thought that stuck. And then the third thought (a transcendental one) was picturing the tiny human version of myself on the sidewalk, unapologetically staring at the older and “working” version of myself, and there would be a sort of unspoken recognition and tender understanding floating in the air between us that sort of looked like sparkling sunbeams and, in human-word terms, meant that both me’s knew that they were proud of simply being alive and recognized that they were both made of the same very serious and very soft stuff.