My Thinking Chair is the gift that keeps on giving. I bought it and introduced you to it in 2016. That was the year I turned 40. That was the year I did a lot of things. My Thinking Chair comforted and inspired. Consoled and protected. It is the space where I am able to continually create new space.
We have talked about one of my Thinking Chair activities where I go through the things I wrote in the time from ago and evaluate them in the light of the now. I finally came across the piece where I described buying and living in my Thinking Chair. I shared the actual dictionary definition of the word “live” and explained how I remain alive in my Thinking Chair choosing that definition of “live” as more appropriate for the feelings at hand.
That piece came to me again in its due time. The second definition was untouched in that previous piece written in the time ago as it held little to no resonance for me then.
make one’s home in a particular place or with a particular person
This idea did not feel attainable for my life during much of my 30’s. In fact, in that last year of my thirties I was far more active in tearing down the facade of a home I tried to build as it had become Munchkin Land crushing to a heart that was feeling unrecognizably more like the Wicked Witch everyday.
For a moment I thought that was what I was becoming – bitter, unhappy, cold, unrecognizable, distant. That isn’t my skin. That isn’t my way. That isn’t my heart. That isn’t my home. It had to become the time from ago or I would lose the person I was always supposed to be. I decided I would rather be homeless than live in a home that wasn’t mine.
It isn’t lost on me that I chose to leave the definition I would not acknowledge in the time from ago only to happen back upon it in the now when my heart is open to it. I appreciate the wisdom of my past self even if I wasn’t always the best at paying attention to all the smart things she had to say. The gift finds me in 2018, in this life, in the now, that I live with my love and heart in tact. I see the rest of the definition.
make one’s home in a particular place or with a particular person
First off, if you have read any of this with the “home = house” disposition, stop and read it again without it. Accept my apologies that I didn’t mention it sooner. Accept then again that I do not feel compelled to edit this to put that little clarifier higher up in the reading. I can’t pinpoint the reason I refuse to do that edit. It just feels wrong some how and I don’t particularly feel compelled to question it any more than that.
Now that I can see this definition of “live” in concert with the capability of feeling a real sense of home, the word “or” smacks me in the face. I don’t like it. I don’t want to choose place or person to describe this freedom of “live” or this comfort of creating home. Then I realize it’s fine. While it only takes either to fit the dictionary definition, who is to say you can’t have the “and”? Maybe because I feel I am filling both qualifiers, the bigness I feel in the “live” is understandable.
A lot of work has gone into the achievement of skin comfort. I am proud of it. I relapse far less often than I use to. Exponentially so. It is a powerful feeling to understand and appreciate ones worth and to honor the self just as she is. I now live in my skin in a real way. I enjoy the home I have created in that place. It no longer feels foreign or unfamiliar.
I have made this home with the love of a man who is more supportive than I ever could have imagined another person being. I realize there is supposed to be some sort of self creation and self propulsion in this era of “I can do it all my damn self”. I have addressed that already and I still make no apologies. I found the one for whom my soul was made before either of us were smart enough to know what to do about that. Our paths did what they did and I am forever grateful that we were able to find our way back to this place of home.
He once told me that during the years we were apart, he would call my name in the moments before he fell asleep. He didn’t know why he did it, but he had developed a method for putting me back into the box that my memory escaped from when his mind was trying to find rest. For all the times I have now fallen asleep in his arms, I have never once heard this happen. Partly in jest, partly in earnest, I suggested to him recently that maybe he was making that story up during the early days of our reconnection. No, he insisted without hesitation. “I think that was just my soul calling out for yours and now it just doesn’t have to do that anymore.”
make one’s home in a particular place or with a particular person
And now in my skin, in his arms, in the comfort of my chair, I live.
