silver joy

ohio-bound

Years ago, a professor explained that interior of the Pantheon in Rome had been cannily built to just surpass the limits of the human field of vision. There are particular spots where you can stand and look, and you can't see the edges of the interior space, tricking your mind into thinking the space is much bigger than it is. I am not sure if this is actually true or just professorial guff, but it felt true when I visited later that year and looked for myself. Of course, take a step to the right or left and the illusion breaks. The walls and edges are always there. It's just that your eyes can't see everything at once.

New York can feel terrifically expansive. All sorts of things possible, innumerable things present. But there are limits. For one, when you look up, the sky is always bounded by something built. This is something it took me a few years to notice. We were driving through Pennsylvania and watching clouds and hills, and Sean and I were just mesmerized. It felt limitless.

Something about the bigness of that sky on that particular day that shifted things. When we got home, the edges of our life in the city came into view, and once we saw them, we couldn't un-see them. Just keeping our 420 square foot toehold meant working as hard as we could. There was no more money we could make, and no extra hours in the day. Being here was all we could afford to do, and where we were at was all we could manage. For a handful of years, that was okay. Simply being here was adventure enough. But our perspective changed, and we found ourselves needing more. More time, more space, more adventures in other places. A less-terrifying rent check every month. Room to grow and change. 

So, at the end of September, we'll be moving back to Ohio. I'll be keeping bees and looking for a job, and Sean will still work crazy days, but at least get a handful of hours to spare for weeknight basketball games and drinks with friends.

It has been a gift to be in the city for five years. It's also a gift, maybe bittersweet, to realize that we build our own Pantheons wherever we go. Everywhere has its opportunities and its limits. Perhaps the trick is to simply to stay put and enjoy the view, not to step and seek. Or maybe the stepping and seeking is the gift. That we can build again and again in many different places, endless masterpieces that we construct for ourselves, because we are what's vast and varied and wonderful. 

sunday tune: damien jurado - ohio

My cousin put this song on a mix tape for me back in 2001, but accidentally cut the track off right after he sings 'I wish'. My dad, Sean and I all fell in love with this song from the first listen, and we went a little crazy wondering what exactly he wished and how the song ended. We had to special order the cd from the record shop (different days), and while we waited for it to come in, we listened to the tape over and over and tried to figure it out. Eventually the cd came in and we got to listen to the whole song.

The lyric is: 'I wish she belonged to me'. Perfect.