All of a sudden?

Sometimes I wonder if, because I'm short of stature, my growth occurs in heart and mind, since it cannot in body; sometimes, it feels as if I'm catching up to myself, doing so in leaps and bounds, growth spurts of the spirit that I can't keep up with, and it lays me out, and builds me up.

This last weekend is an example of such growth, that, like the Grinch, my heart has swelled up to 20x its size. After a long and raucous 'family' dinner (for we've cobbled together a family here, of friends & fellow volunteers), and a decent night's sleep, nine of us trooped out to Tarboo Bay for some conservation work, consisting of pulling invasive English ivy from a location around the beach from the bay. The water was low when we arrived, and we picked our way through piles of driftwood stacked feet high, into our site.

The weather was clear but brisk, and the bay itself a wide, glittering stretch of water. Few houses lined it. Old pilings dotted the way out to sea. It smelled of mud and beach grass and pine. We worked. And while we worked we shouted. We hollered and cussed and hacked things with tools, pulling mats of ivy up by hand & stuffing them into burlap sacks. We talked nonsense: meatloaf pizza, the movie 'Deliverance', Bill Clinton, a record number of 'your mom' jokes, and 'that's what she said' one-liners. The wind blew in. Someone hacked up a stump. The stream bank was slick with mud. Someone else tried to run up it and failed. And we laughed. Oh, how we laughed.

Gut-constricting, leg-crossing, contorting laughter. At everything. At the names of plants, invasive or not. The girls at the boys' manly posturing with pruning shears & hoes. The boys at the girls' occasional shrieks of disgust. At the wind, the bay's nearby waves against the shore; at the gulls. At life.

It was backbreaking work, but. After only 2 hours, we all felt exhausted. The clouds had rolled in a bit & the wind was now whipping through the trees. Yet we detoured several times on the way home, tarrying in old-growth apple orchards, long abandoned, to shake down & pick up as many as we could. More laughter. Someone stepped in bear scat, prompting a lengthy discussion of shitting in the woods in its varying forms. Bags & bags & bags of apples. Blackberry brambles. Exhaustion.

I called it being "blissed out on life"-this curious & overwhelming feeling of satisfaction with the day, with the people around me, with the world. I feel smug, & sated, & overdone with the joy of all of this: apples & headwaters & laughing, with the revelation of being both small in a huge world, and big enough to take it all in.

I learn. Every day. My heart is expanding with thankfulness for what I'm taught. Today I learned to be forthright, firm & fair all at once. To wrangle back neediness in favor of love; the fallibility of what we become when we're shrewish & tired & want only to be comforted, when what we ought to do is give comfort instead. To accept my own distances-from myself as well as from others, the perspective gained by maintaining proximity: human beings can orbit each other, too, when they need to, & sometimes they must.

I'm taught that I'm capable of this-that I can take responsibility for what I'm good at, or bad at, or must be cognizant of. That this should not mean an argument, or hurt feelings, or a slight. That it simply means that I'm here, and present, and must therefore be willing to be fallible.

To be humbled.

I am. Because, as easy as it generally is to say the opposite, to dwell on a sliver in the skin, the chill instead of the warmth that comes after, it humbles me to give pause and then say that, irrefutably, my life is amazing. And more than that, that I am surrounded by stunning people who teach me something new every day-about them, about myself. About what it means to give, to teach & be taught. About laughing.

At everything. Every single day.