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In times of great transition and upheaval, it’s nice to return to places of quiet and stillness. Right now, there is a heavy blanket of snow outside, but everything inside my life is changing. I wrote this essay last January during our last big snowstorm. Everything was quiet, inside and out. Nothing was changing. I didn’t know it then, but it looks like I wrote this essay for future me in the middle of a snowstorm, when everything is changing.
Reading it again gave me a touch of quiet. I hope it gives you quiet, too. Here’s to stillness as well as the change that shakes and shines you up.
Drifty (adj.): full of drifts, drifting Putter (verb): proceeding in a dawdling or ineffective manner, trifle, to waste time
The debris of wind and sea, Wandering, wondering, An accumulation of movement. We are carried– Wood, seaweed, snow– Along a glacial, Dream-like drift. The point is to be driven off course.
Something stirs in January and things move around my house. I must move them. Pick up one thing and put it somewhere else. Over and over. Puttering. Picture an old lady shuffling around her house. There’s a bathrobe, a cat, curlers. Her mind and food are mush. But squint and she’s a witch. By puttering, precious tinkering becomes alchemy. Her gut tells things where to go. Moving them has a strange way of mattering. In this story, I am the witch.
It snowed for real for the first time in 2 years. There is something about snow. The heavy blanket that pushes pause. A steady downward drift, like eyes closing, urging you to look out the window. Inside, in snow, you step out of time. No before, no after, only right now. A black hole of being. A weighted blanket. A thunder shirt for busyness.
We define what we are worth by what we do. “What do you do?” is the essential question, but is it? Can we be outside of time? Can we drift? We love efficiency and hacking life so we can squeeze the juice and drop the mic. But I am inefficient and incapable of hacks. I do one thing at a time, slowly. No schedule. No price tag. Who am I outside of time?
As an air sign, I am in my element when adrift. It’s ungrounded and disorienting and tough to float when peers surge in the stream. They take meetings and make stuff happen. But I make stuff move. I putter. I place things around the house. To drift, in essence, is movement. An A to B kind of thing, but by way of every other letter. A slow juggling improv. A wandering tumbleweed. It might blow through town. It might not. Ideas drift into being. I approach sideways, never head-on, like sneaking up on a scaredy-cat. If I pounce, they run.
There is no doubt that puttering is a manifestation of anxiety, but it’s also my salve. To putter is to commune with intuition that’s been shoved in a dark corner. It’s pulling a huge wad of hair out of a drain to get the flow going. It’s the recurring dreams where I’ve lived in a house for years and then a door opens to reveal new rooms filled with knick knacks and bric-a-brac and tchotchkes. I can’t wait to re-choreograph the space.
Puttering is a practice with no end prize. Just the shuffle of a 3-cup magic trick. Round and round she goes. Everything moves towards a “right place” but maybe never arrives. My dream is maximalist plants and minimalist everything else. But that’s a far off dream. Still, moving the plants moves my heart, shifting the rooms of my mind.
I could putter by category or have a system. But where is the fun in that? There is something to formless bumbling. I’ve seen satisfying shows about organizing. Watching is a thrill, like I’m already dusting off my hands. But I am a mess and nothing is done. Instead of categories and systems, I let objects move me. My hands move things while thoughts, feelings and ideas run like programs in the background.
It’s no surprise my family called me drifty growing up. It meant dreamy, unattached to the present moment. Drifty in mind, spirit. Preoccupied, unhurried. Untethered. One might say introverted. A world within a world. Carried by currents. Not so much purposeless, but putter-ful.
Being drifty, there is a pile up, not of snow or sand, but house debris. The geology of time bearing down on stuff. There’s a locked up energy, built up over eons or weeks or years. So when rummaging, there is an undertow. Things call me and we come alive–the things and me. To putter is to be in the current, to change perspective. To upend. To open. It’s finding the thing by doing the thing, if you catch my drift.
Drifting takes me back to the timelessness of being a kid. To the endless months of early parenthood. To immortal college days that stretched on and on. To ethereal, light-filled rehearsal studios when we bounced ideas and bodies off walls to see what sticks.
An invisible wind picked up yesterday while Etta and I were walking. We drifted side by side in the middle space, plotless and free, my dog and me. Right before it happened, Etta looked up with her bright, eternal heart. A snuggle, a yes, yes, we are here, keep moving. Then together we walked through a portal, a break in space-time with no wind except what exhaled gently around us. Four or five leaves spiraled mid-air, hung from a hidden mobile, spinning up an unseen cone. An imaginary shape took place. All at once the leaves settled on the ground like nothing happened. The leaves were dead, you understand. They were dead as we say they are once they fall from a tree. But swept from the ground by windy ephemera, the briefest of runes, they were full of life. And so were we, buoyed by drifting.
Into–what? An ending? Clarity? Hilarious. I suppose while we are in the current in the stream (or maybe we are the current in the stream?), we are tugged along until we drift through a tiny, beautiful cyclone on a windless winter day.
"To putter is to be in the current, to change perspective. To upend. To open. It’s finding the thing by doing the thing, if you catch my drift."
Something I found all around me as dance artists uncovered their dances.