Always in motion

Last week the smoke rolled in and stayed. Standing with David, I heard myself say it feels like our earth is crying. And for the day the sky held that colour, that was the truth I was living under. Everything muted. Everything close. It didn't feel like weather. It felt like what was.

Thirty-six hours later, the sky was blue again. The smoke had moved on. What stayed with me wasn't the clearing. The sky does what the sky does. It was the sentence I'd offered David. Our earth is crying. True in the moment. As a full description of what was, not quite. Without meaning to, I'd taken something already in motion and given it a fixed name. A weather report, promoted to a diagnosis. And once something is a diagnosis, it asks to be fixed. It asks why. And the afternoon goes to the why, the week goes to the fix. The weather has already moved on. Which is, if I'm honest, what I do to myself most weeks. Not to the earth. To me.

A hard week gets named I'm burnt out. A quiet doubt becomes I'm not cut out for this. A stretch of stuckness turns into the shape of me. Each one starts as weather. Each one gets handed a permanent address, and I sign for it. None of it is who I am. It's what's passing through, given more of a home than it earned. And some of what I've been carrying, the naming and the fixing that follows, was never mine to hold. So the question I've been carrying, and haven't finished with:

What am I holding right now as identity, or as mine to solve, that was only ever weather passing through?

Neither the smoke nor the blue was the sky. Only the moving was.