I had been thinking a lot about leaving. I have lived in Florida for over four years now, which is a near record for the family I have made. There is a massive dopamine rush that comes with moving, with migration. But when you stay? When you stay you have to settle in. You have to work on building relationships that aren’t blood. You see yourself, and sometimes that’s really uncomfortable. I don’t think I have ever sat so long with this discomfort. So I made use of time by propping myself up with books and projects and trying oil painting and roller skating and once again found my fingers at the piano and little by little old parts of me started to show up again. And it felt good. So maybe it was less prop, more excavation. Like a historical dig site of Me. 

The rabbit hole I had sunk into began while reading Gigantic Cinema, a generous anthology that weaves a tale of weather via classical literature, poetry, and essays, all telling different parts of the same story. I loved it first for its cover, then its content. I was about 145 pages in when I found the passage that made me want to read an original work. It’s a quote by D.H. Lawrence (AKA dude who wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover), and he says, “How is man to get himself into relation with the vast living convulsions of rain and thunder and sun, which are conscious and alive and potent, but like vastest of beasts, inscrutable and incomprehensible. How is man to get himself into relation with these, the vastest of cosmic beasts?”

Okay. Living convulsions of rain will stay with me forever, because I’m in Florida and that’s what it’s like at 4pm on a Tuesday in the summer and out of nowhere the sky quickly thickens and the air becomes still and then you smell it, sweet in the air before the drops fall. Then, maybe not convulsions (I forget now… was D.H. Lawrence an early feminist or just an early performative male?), because convulsions feel too unintentional for what’s at play here. Maybe contractions are better, and we roll with the whole mother earth vibe. Pulsating contractions of intense downpours ebbing in and out, pleasantly plump rain drops, to sheets of rain so dense the world disappears behind them.  

So now I needed to read the original work, and I had high hopes because of the whole rain thing that inspired my inner romantic. The original work is D.H. Lawrence’s essay “The Hopi Snake Dance,” written after he traveled to Hotevilla on Arizona’s Third Mesa in 1924 to witness the ceremony. Lawrence says the dance took place annually across the three mesas, and that year it had drawn roughly three thousand visitors into the desert, all arriving in cars that he describes crawling up the rock like black beetles (I love that description).

The essay is partly about the ceremony, but it is also about the people watching it. The tourists come from California and everywhere else, crossing miles of desert mostly because they want to see men hold live rattlesnakes in their mouths. They have traveled a great distance, but Lawrence makes them seem strangely incapable of consciously arriving. The tourists occupy the roofs and edges of the plaza, waiting for the snakes to appear, while the meaning of what is happening remains mostly inaccessible to them.

Lawrence is condescending (okay, downright dicky) throughout the essay, which complicates the whole thing. He romanticizes, generalizes, and repeatedly writes as though he can explain a people whose ceremony he has only briefly observed. But somewhere inside all that Lawrence-ness, he says…

“They say—people say—that rattlesnakes are not travellers. They haunt the same spots on earth, and die there. It is said also that the snake priest (so-called) of the Hopi probably capture the same snakes year after year.”

The same snakes! The same place! Generations of people returning to the same place, performing a ceremony that itself moves from mesa to mesa without ever leaving its center. Oh! And the tourists! They had crossed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles to get there, but all that movement had not necessarily brought them any closer to understanding where they were. The snakes, meanwhile, went almost nowhere. There was something in that reversal I recognized: movement could carry you across enormous distances without taking you very deep at all.

I had always thought movement was what kept a life from becoming stagnant. Pack the boxes. Change the view from the window. Become briefly unknowable again, even to yourself. Every move offers a little neurological firework, a new grocery store, new roads, new people who have not yet heard your stories. You can become whoever you say you are because nobody has been around long enough to know the real you.

Staying does not offer that mercy.

When you stay, the roads stop being new. The people begin to know your patterns. You cannot keep mistaking novelty for transformation. Eventually there is nothing left to unpack except yourself. And it’s HARD WORK to unpack things you have crammed deep down inside of you because the pain was too big to deal with the first time around.

And maybe that is what I have been doing here. I have not been standing still for four years. I have been making smaller and smaller circles around some internal center. And it feels like gravity, right? I tried oil painting. I returned to the piano. I started writing again. I put on roller skates and discovered that my body still remembered a version of me I thought I had lost. None of these things remade me. They uncovered me.

Oh! and the rattlesnakes! Haunting the same spots on earth and dying in the same space. Haunt is a cool concept because it suggests both remaining and having already left. To haunt a place is to inhabit it so thoroughly that your presence enters the atmosphere. Perhaps this is what happens when we stay. We stop passing through our own lives like tourists. We learn where to place the plants for the best amount of sunlight. We know which clouds mean rain and which are only making threats. We become familiar with the animals, the trees, the people, and eventually… the old versions of ourselves that we hid until the coast was clear.

I used to think the absence of departure meant the absence of progress. But perhaps the self is not something waiting farther down the road. Perhaps it is a center: something we circle, leave briefly, return to, and understand differently each time. The movement matters only because the center remains. I am not getting closer to myself because I am moving toward some final version of me. I am getting closer because I can return to the same questions about living with more of myself available to answer them.

In this way, movement lets us ask who we might become. But staying forces us to acknowledge who we have always been.