Mirror Mirror of my Mind~

For all the fabulous experiences I find in my New York home, it also seems that it is when I am outside of it that I slow down enough to experience another kind of encounter. Where in Manhattan, I often happen upon surprisingly inspiring people or places, in my Connecticut or New Hampshire homes, I knowingly create them.
Neither mode of stimulation is better, but there’s something to the intentional manifestation of inspiration that really stays with a person, perhaps more than the revelatory quality of magical Manhattan’s many mysterious characters and the lessons they regularly offer up. Or maybe it’s just that New York is in such a constant site of meaning and motivation that such becomes old hat and commonplace, impersonal for it’s ever-constant flow and impartial impartment.
Perhaps I’ll never work it out, doesn’t matter really…what does matter are the experiences I find in each place and the cultivation of my capacity to tell their stories. Today has yielded one such story, with many parts and no real point, aside from the peaceful easy feeling it has left in my heart.

This morning began blustery and with bursts of rain, splattering drops upon the windshield of my mom’s hybrid as it whirred along on the way to Weston CT, carrying myself, my mom, and two of the people who’ve known me the longest, characters I call my family. We were on our way to a memorial service, a gathering of friends at the home of one of the decade’s most noted architectural talents. I wandered through his family’s home, a house of many windows, each of which ushered in light, despite the dreary day. In each pane I saw myself reflected and as the afternoon wore away, full of tears, wine spritzer, and mini quiches my mind became another mirror, at times reflecting reality from the perspective of someone looking at me, a vantage from which I saw myself, sitting in my steam pressed suit set, and watching people feeling the inevitable loss that life entails. I watched my mother’s best friends, people I love, stand up and speak about someone whom they had loved. I saw that person’s thirteen-year-old daughter stand there with them, in front of fifty some odd people, all of whom had loved her father. I furrowed my brow, wondering if she knew, wondering how she could know, that her father was gone and her life forever changed. In that moment, I was an absolute observer of unfiltered life, and in that moment, I felt myself more alive than I had in some time. I touched my own fears and felt myself a woman, and I know now, that no matter what, I’ll be all right.

Later today, after the service, after we’d driven home in a fog of four o’clock traffic, I had to get out, had to move. Emotion was clustered in my core, not uncomfortable, but congealed and in need of some shaking up. I drove fast and with the radio loud, window down and cold air on my face. From time to time, I watched my eyes in the rear view window and smiled at the light that danced in their blue reflection.

I went to a movie and was one of two people in the whole theater and found it fun.
I went to the beach long after the sun had set and the Moon sat almost full in the night sky.
The clouds had cleared and several stars stood out so brightly that I wondered if they were planets, or moons, or just sparkling reflections of my own eyes in a much larger mirror. The high school sweethearts cuddled in their cars watched as I sat myself on the abandoned swing set and pumped my legs till I flew towards the Moon, laughing for the perfection of the moment, and my capacity to feel it so fully.
I am exhausted, the day has passed, and with it, a myriad of emotions, all of which I’ve allowed to flow through me, watching them just as I watch myself reflected back by multiple mirrors, each of which changing the way I look at things, and by extension, the very things I am looking at.