Yang Time

When you grow up in an academic household, you tend to be comfortable with books. Whether you're comfortable with the out-of-doors, or other actual physical objects like motors and pulleys and whatnot, depends somewhat on the particular niche of academe you're affiliated with.

My parents' fields, mathematics and history, gave me the ability to suspend disbelief and attachment to the present to live mentally in many times in the past and future. I can solve puzzles and predict storylines and am not intimidated by cosmology (though not fascinated by it, either). I know my way around bookstores and libraries. When I'm sufficiently rested and motivated, I can even find something to talk about with damn near anyone. I also appreciate silence.

However, I don't consider myself an outdoor person. Or I didn't until moving here. In previous lives, I didn't garden or mow the grass or really do much outdoors other than lie around in the sun, hike, swim, or sit in the shade drinking cool drinks. I have always enjoyed being outside, sorta, and I'm not icked out by bugs, though snakes are another story and don't get me started on rodents. But I never had an urge to be outside.

Except when I was here, of course.

Now that I'm here all year and loving it, I find my relationship to the calendar changing. We're coming into the Yang Time, the outdoor season, the time for visible growth and reaping what you've sown all winter. Deer gambol, squirrels chatter, and the birds sing as if they've been composing all winter.

I like it. I like being more in synch with the outside world. I'm completing those nagging inside projects (hanging pictures and figuring out what the heck to do with my jewelry) so I can get to the outside projects full-time. I'm still an introvert and a writer. Every day all year must have quiet time and time with fingers on a keyboard or at least pen on paper.

But soon, most of my quiet time will come while drifting in a canoe or rowboat. I'll stare at the sky while walking down the path to the camp. I'll muse while hacking at undergrowth with loppers and my muscles. And I'm liking that a lot, too.