A Full Life

Laurel Maxwell

The idea of it is ludicrous at best. To be tied to a computer chair with a neck turning into a turtle. Peeking daily at a screen, which pulls you into a whirlpool of numbers merging onto spreadsheets. How the only thing which keeps you in that chair is a pension. That your life is measured in vacation days and dollars growing by mere percentage points until your back is too stiff and your ankle has given out. Where the remainder of your days will be on the couch watching National Geographic when instead we could be visiting those places. Streams where salmon know how to spawn, and birds are louder than airplanes in their rush overhead. Where there is a calendar of days with nothing to do but put toes in the sand. I once lived on an island for two years. The waves washed up trash like unwanted jewels. Once I fell out of a kayak. Flew feet first down the rapids of a river in Idaho. The water covering me like a second skin. The refreshing coolness until fear made me shiver. The current always stronger than our ability to swim. It’s gravitational pull powerful as some women’s maternal instincts. Unabated desire to have, hold, create a life outside oneself. A life that breathes and hums and sings. As the wind whispers between tree branches and fungi send signals through their underground network of morse code. And for a moment we realize what it must have felt like to dance among the cosmos, understand the power of fire to warm and destruct. To behold none other than our own greatness in the smallness of the universe. To fold ourselves like a paper crane into the creases of delicate existence.