just one of the birds

Just one of the birds.

The sentence repeats in my mind as I sort through and edit a selection of photos from this last journey out of the city. I don't know what it means, or why it has become this evening's mantra. I don't feel pressed to understand it.

We ran away this weekend, dog and I. A few more days in the wildness when we discovered five days wasn't enough. I came home because I had to, because Pilot wanted to, because the money would run out soon and the car needs new tires and oil. Because the cat needs water and food and her litter box changed and someone to pet her and tell her how pretty she is while she slurps up her wet food. Because I need to live in Oregon to stay on Oregon Health Plan. If I didn't need to do these things I would have stayed away forever, there in the woods and on the mountains and along the many shores of the Salish Sea.

It doesn't matter that an afternoon was spent drenched to the skin in a cold and clammy rainforest after a late spring cloudburst revealed the trail to be a creekbed, or that I forgot to pack my thermals and had to wear two hoodies and a base layer jacket in 30mph winds while cooking dinner with freezing legs at the edge of Haro Strait. I don't even mind the memory of the miniature earwigs obsessed with the folds and flaps of my tent, nor the one that found her way inside and onto the warmth of my belly in the middle of the night while the sea slapped the shore 50 feet below.

Freedom. It holds different meanings for different people. I don't think it means anything to wind or rain or water or earwigs. Or birds. Why make a word for something that encompasses your entire existence when you can just be?

That's what I want. That's my free. To just be. But it means giving up so much, and I am not ready.

Not yet.

This is my entry for the #monomad challenge, held daily in the Black and White Community.
Give it a try. Give it all up and just be.

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