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Writing This Moment

Writing This Moment

Last updated on: February 20, 2016 at 10:44 am by Annika Mongan

Writing This Moment 2016-02-20T10:44:35-07:00 Annika Mongan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

On a plane again, leaving Oakland.

I’m on a plane again, waiting for take off. As always, I am overcome with a feeling for which I have no name. It’s the feeling that has always fed the “travel bug” in me, the need to move from place to place, to live an ever changing existence. It exists somewhere between melancholy and contentment, longing and peace. I experience it every time I travel, although lately it’s changed to include a deep and abiding joy.

The plane is moving now, faster and faster across the runway. My face is pressed against the window and I am snapping pictures. People look at me, probably wondering if I am new to air travel. I laugh. I’ve logged many hours on planes, even a couple dozen before I was born. And yet that moment of take off, of seeing the ground disappear, when a machine lifts hundreds of humans into the sky – it never fails to amaze me. It never gets old.

I snap a picture of Oakland. This is where I’ve lived for half a dozen years now. I’ve just returned from PantheaCon in San Jose, and now I am flying to ConVocation in Detroit. But I will come home to Oakland, to the San Francisco Bay Area. I remember what it was like when I first moved here, when I thought I had landed on the planet Pandora. Everything was so new and exciting. It had been a year since my divorce, and I was moving to a place I didn’t know, a town I had never heard of, a county in which I knew no one. I was starting over. I could have become anyone I wanted to be. I could have changed my name. I could have invented a new story for myself.

But I didn’t. I came as myself, looking to find more of myself, without discarding who I had already become. Maybe this is the mistake we make when we set out to find ourselves. We think we’re looking for someone new, when in reality we’re trying to understand who we already are, and learn how to write the next chapter.

Not the I-580 and 238 cluster, because the picture came out boring. This is some insane cluster of freeways somewhere near Dallas, Texas.

The plane has lifted and the ground is dropping away quickly. I name the places beneath me, San Leandro, Hayward, Castro Valley. I trace the I-580 freeway to its intersection with 238. A place of crossroads. One disappears into the hills and emerges again on the other side, running through the outlying towns of the East Bay, Dublin, Pleasanton, Livermore. I used to travel that way all the time. I had a lover who lived over there and we were seeing each other every week, until recently our relationship changed. We had what they call a “break-up conversation”, but our relationship didn’t break. It didn’t fail. It didn’t even end. It changed.

I think of him and all the good times we have shared together. It makes me a little a sad, because change is always hard. But ultimately, I’m grateful. We’ve had wonderful experiences together and share memories that are important to us both. And I still love him. I am sure he still loves me, too. When we say “let’s stay friends”, we mean it. I will be in his life and he in mine, as is the case with almost all of my Exes.

My attention returns to the here and now, to the view outside my little oval window. I look down at 238 breaking off, leading east and then south. That is the route I travel more often these days, the road leading to another lover. I think back on last weekend, because PantheaCon marks our anniversary. A year ago, at PantheaCon 2015, I walked up to him and kissed him, making my intentions unmistakably clear. I still can’t believe I did that. In my mind I am still a pious Christian girl who doesn’t kiss men, especially not while they are walking down a hallways with their partner. Neither one of them minded, but still. I can’t believe I did that.

The Ole Time Good Spell Feri Pagan Tent Revival. I smile every time I write out the full name of the ritual.

I shake my head and take a breath into how my life has changed. Life is change. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, I hum, in homage of this PantheaCon’s Ole Time Good Spell Feri Pagan Tent Revival, dedicated to the late David Bowie. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Right on cue the landscape below changes. The rolling hills are green and dotted with windmills, contraptions we built to harness the power of change. I can’t tell if they are turning from up here, but I image they are spinning fast. The winds were strong last night, the swaying and creaking of the incense cedar outside my window woke me twice.

I ponder change in all of her forms and oscillate between melancholy and joy. What amazes me most is that my life has changed according to prophecy. Within a short two years, all of the prophecies spoken over me at a Christian church have come true. Here I am, sharing income with my partner, and for the first time in my adult life I’m not stressed about making ends meet. I’ve led interfaith kirtans with one of my loves, sacred music – but not for a Christian audience. And now my suitcase is packed and checked into the belly of this plane, and I am traveling to Detroit where I will sit on a panel of writers.

Fields in Eastern California

One reason I love writing about my life is that writing makes it feel more real. There’s still a small part of me that doesn’t trust the good changes. There are moments when I expect to wake up and be back in an abusive marriage, shy and introverted from years of gas lighting. I kind of like these moments, these times of revisiting the past. They remind me what it was like, and let me bask in the unspeakable joy of being free. I’d talk about the bad years more often if it didn’t make others so uncomfortable. They always try to offer me sympathy, when the reason I revisit the abuse is to indulge in the joy of knowing it is over.

How long will my life be like it is now? The only constant is change. The windmills below are gone now, as are the houses. Fields of various crops paint colored patterns across the land. They remind me of the fragility of the systems we humans have built. Densely populated areas that rely on industrial farming powered by fossil fuels. An unsustainable system, one that is bound to fail, probably within my lifetime.

On the ground in Detroit enjoying the sound of snow crunching beneath my boots.

We talk about this a lot in my community. We call it “the end of the world” and speak of the “apocalypse”. What we really mean is a slow decline of civilization, a long descent, but I like the hyperbole, the dramatic choice of words. It makes light of the change, of the suffering we believe is coming. It helps me distance myself from an uncertain future and live in the here and now.

And so I return to the here and now, right now. Everything outside, hills and fields and houses, dissolve into a bright light that hurts my eyes before I snap them shut. When I open them again, the fields are back, but at a greater distance. We’ve pierced through the first layer of clouds. The captain turns off the fasten seatbelt sign, and I pull out my laptop to write about this moment. My friend, Nyssa, once said, “we writers only live half of our lives. We spend the other half writing about it.” She’s right, but writing helps me be present, and being present lets me live more fully. Right now, as I am writing this moment, I feel twice as alive. Blessed be this moment.

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