MY SPAIN VACATION
A friend of mine, whenever she goes on a trip, intentionally comes back artfully changed in some key way. When she went to Italy, she decided to come back as a Slow Food Person. She vowed to always eat more slowly here, and steer towards fresh and local food, and delicious small glasses of very good wine, longer meals. When she went to Sedona, she came back with the idea of meditating every day—just for five minutes, and, three years later, she does this, even under the grey flannel unSedona skies of West Michigan. In this way, a vacation isn’t another acquisition, it’s gift of dividends. It’s adding another room onto the house of self, a way of making a life more spacious, more generous. The new room in my house, post vacation turns out to be a tool shed.
I’m back from ten days in Spain and what I have decided to bring back with me by way of Artful New Intention is…
Friendliness Towards Tools.
I’m not a tool person. I’m a breaker, not a fixer. For my whole life, tools have been a foreign language, one spoken only by men (with one exception: my amazing beautiful tiny friend Debra, who not only owns glue, she glues things, including the broken tile I brought her back from Spain, and she maintains a wireless home all by herself and has also miraculously fixed her own washing machine using an online tutorial!).
Tools I have ignored, disliked, and feared. As one does with bacteria or difficult comma rules (all comma rules). Instead of thinking about using tools myself, I have relied completely on boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, potential boyfriends, the neighbors of ex-boyfriends, the adorable lanky silent sons of boyfriends and exboyfriends, male neighbors, the husbands of my friends, my former (male) department chair, and men simply passing down the street to fix, de-ice, unlock, open, assemble, paint, tighten, loosen, unscrew, inflate, ratchet, lathe, grease, degrease and pound my things. Using their own tools.
No one has ever suggested I purchase or locate a tool. And it never occurred to me to want to do so.
Until Spain. Spain! In
The light in southern Spain is completely gorgeous in November, and one evening on the patio at Casa Lemon Tree, even bike repair looked romantic and feasible and delicious to me. I wanted in. I decided then and there to stop outsourcing every single aspect of my bike care. Suddenly, I could see me fixing my own bike. How could I let someone else do this for me? My caring for Celeste would make my riding her more dimensional and more fun. On the patio, with jasmine and orange trees, I made my vow: I will return to the United States and make friends with a wrench.
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