Routine

Predictability is tiresome to me. I know that most creatures, humans as well, thrive on routines, but to me they’re maddening.

I’m a morning person and love getting up with the sun, but as soon as the stretching is done I have to slip back into the usual every morning and it makes me want to rip my hair out. It’s the same damn thing every day. I get up, stumble to the bathroom, listen to Yuki tell me good morning and fluff and purr with excitement at seeing me up and about. I get dressed and brush my teeth and take my meds. I put on earbuds and turn on music and strap bulky clothes about me to make me unremarkable. (Because no woman walking alone wants to be noticed, believe me, it’s dangerous.) I walk the same sidewalks in the same shoes looking at the same cars and houses. The trees and wild things change, yes, but where in the city do you actually find those? I get back, take off my clothes once again, shower, feed Yuki the same dry and wet food, get dressed again, have to eat, and log in to work.

With work at the least it’s variable and rarely the same from day to day, when we actually get someone calling for help with something in scope for our team. Most of the day is NOT that.

This is why I read and read and read every day. Adventures and lives I can live just in pages in a book.

Perhaps it’s escapism…perhaps I don’t like sitting still in a manufactured world. In a house I’m so far removed from nature that it makes me restless. If I go too long without getting somewhere wild I feel an itchiness of the soul as if my skin is writhing from the inside out and I’m more impatient for the things that aren’t truly living.

Get me away from the city where people forget that food doesn’t come from grocery stores. Get me away from air smelling of exhaust rather than grasses. Get me to land that hasn’t been cleared to build housing developments on, shaven close to the skin of the earth until no spirit remains and all that is left is barrenness that never leaves the soil.

Give me a life as broad as this planet and give me experiences that change each day that I live it.

Perhaps I’m restless and just need a vacation.

Perhaps I’m too much a nomad for modern life.

All I know for sure is I need soil, soul, soil, that holds so many microbes and biodiversity that the very air above it sings with life and I can feel the tendrils of trees and mycelium branching beneath me, connecting my energy to theirs until I am a sheath of life pointing to the sun and can finally

breathe.