I have asked her to “keep the paint on the paper” for the last twenty minutes, off and on. I’ve spread a large piece of butcher paper onto the worn wood of the back porch, taped down with leftover painter’s tape from when we first painted the walls of this house almost five years ago. I take a few sips of my water, I look over just as she holds the small jar of pink paint precariously over the wood. “What did I just say?!” my voice rises, the tone inching skyward.
She looks at me, her face placid but her eyes watchful. In her shorts and rainboots and an old Bass Pro Shops shirt handed down from her Iowa cousins, I stop short.
Why am I saying no?
There is a myth that an ordered house is an ordered life. There are companies asking to sell me—never for very much, only my time and my belief, maybe $19 here or $45 there—the story that if I bought the containers and the bins, if I stack and arrange, if I keep the back porch free of paint and teach my children to keep their art on the paper, then I will find a neatness, an order, a calm in my brain.
And it is hard to admit that my brain is sometimes messier than my house. Some days it’s filled with worries I know aren’t true but still circle like vultures. Knowing they aren’t true doesn’t chase them away, they simply fly higher, bend in a wider arc, return. Some days my brain is full of fog, rolling and pitching. Some days my brain has no metaphors for what it is, and on these days I wonder if I will disappear, the words in my fingers shrinking into my bones and then this identity I’ve held cupped to my chest (being a writer, making a world out of words) will disappear.
Maybe there are days when your brain is like this? Maybe there are moments when you, too, look out in despair that you cannot make yourself ordered even by ordering your spices by color or alphabet. What I want is something to change within me but what I do is try to change something outside of me: keep someone else from painting outside the lines, order another organizer for colored pencils that will inevitably be used to store doll magnets and a used applesauce pouch, covet someone’s Instagram feed.
When we want to move the mood, we move the body, when we want to move the energy, move the body, when we want to move the mind, move the body. The yoga instructor’s words are imprinted in my brain - I must have done some of these practices well on thirty times now. Something happens, though, when I hear her say it: I move my body. I stop asking what it will take to stop being frazzled at my kids or my house or my brain, and I move my arms into warrior II. I stop asking how God might be faithful to me even when I forget to pray and I put my body in downward facing dog. I move the body and in moving the body - sometimes, not always, but sometimes, yes, which is enough - the mood and the energy and the mind move with it.
My daughter’s painting is not the reason my brain is scattered or my heart is heavy, and moving my body is not a magical cure. It is only one reminder that the mind and the heart are strange and wonderful and sometimes what they need is to think about something unrelated to paint on the porch or someone else’s spice drawer. They need to move.