further up & further in

the eye of the needle

I’m leaving my job on Friday. 

Maybe I should say: I have been leaving my job for a while now, and on Friday I will complete the process. I’ve known this news officially for months, and unofficially, it had been sitting like a stone deep in my gut for longer than I knew it was there, waiting to be turned over, the word of my leaving inscribed on the other side.

Water and earth ripple in the same way. One wave leads to another. So I am ready to say yes to all the ways this change will lead to another, and another.

I want to believe that this is a pivotal moment – not a moment in the singular sense, but a plural moment – a moment of a season. And I want to believe that the universe is conspiring to make it so. The signs seem clear to me, and I tend to trust signs.

But even if I’m wrong about that, even if the universe is not facilitating this monumental pivot, I’ve already decided that it is going to happen. And so I must facilitate it myself.

Leah tells me today, Wednesday, I am “in the eye of the needle.” My final week at work, and it is halfway over, and here I am in the finite openness of it, feeling the tug of the thread pulling forward and through. 

Here in the eye I’ve felt irritable, small-minded, closed off, afraid. And I’ve also felt sensitive, which has perhaps been the most unexpected of gifts. Managing an enhanced sensitivity to grief, resentment, loneliness, and attachment to power has been a hell of a challenge, but with it also comes an enhanced sensitivity to wisdom and joy and memory. And I find myself just bursting into laughter, or crying in awe, or remembering something totally obscure and tucked away that brings significance to a present situation. Someone asks me a simple question and without meaning to I answer in a proverb, or I start speaking words that are totally unplanned and profound – Did I just say that? – and suddenly, there it is – the truth – tumbling out of my mouth and ahead of me, and leaving me a hundred steps behind wondering what the fuck just happened. Did I just say that? It feels a little bit like I am discovering a superpower.

Of course, this comes with lots of unexpected crying, too, and irritability, and reckoning with pent-up disappointment and frustration, and avoidance of eye contact. Lots of procrastination. Organizing things that are totally unimportant to the work I do, like the office stationery, while books and clothes are strewn around my bedroom floor. I don’t want to talk to any of my friends and yet I want to open up to someone, anyone, even a stranger. I didn’t have an appetite yesterday and ate a total of two spring rolls, and today I couldn’t seem to feel full even after dinner: a bowl of fried rice with edamame, three eggs, two scoops of yogurt, a few hefty bites of sauerkraut, a handful of cashews, the remaining spring roll, and two slices of toast with hummus. (Cleaning out the fridge.) Like, I’m sitting in bed and I’m ravenous. I could eat an entire pizza. I am all kinds of off.

Here in the eye of the needle my view is both bigger and smaller, and so is the sky, the sky above and the sky within. Here I am poised, Leah says, for mystery. If mystery arrived I am not sure how I would greet her. With a hungry belly. With the end of a thread, so that she might string it through.