The blight of being a Gypsy… I am sure there are many but one is that when you are standing still, you are uncomfortable. The bottoms of your feet tingle, your mind spends of the future, and there is a small creature somewhere inside your stomach bouncing around. Some people mistake this for butterflies or a sense of nerves, but I have never met a painful butterfly out to wreak havoc on someone’s insides. No, this little creature inside wants change, adventure and it for darn sure does not want to be sitting still.
I know why my being inside doesn’t like holding still. Being still hurts. The strings of friendship we create rip our hearts out and leave us bleeding. I hate hurting and when someone leaves spiritually, figuratively from our lives, it takes our spirit a great deal of time to heal.
A new place, a new experience helps. It protects our hearts and spirits while they heal but it also always keeps the strings of a place, a person from throwing their lasso around our heart. If we are always moving, we just feel right now.
Problem is that one of those places, one of the people we meet don’t just lasso our heart they steal it. For a time, it is a beautiful thing but if there isn’t enough change, we get restless and suddenly our life feels like a treadmill on the street. Everyone else going by and we are trying to move but standing still. We feel like the wild beast in the zoo, pacing back and forth, testing their fences, the glass for some weak spot to escape.
Escape, physically, is impossible for me but it is times like these that I turn to books, writing, art, new recipes and dreaming. Anything to change the ordinary. To trick my mind into believing the sand is moving beneath my feet.
The irony of all this is, when life is hard and change lands you flat on your emotional butt, there is a tug to go to the one place that has always felt safe. Home. But there is no childhood home to a family of gypsies. The one steady harbor is a grandparents’ home miles away.
So this gypsy, held still by four lassos that have a firm hold on her heart, stands still with her feet tingling, feeling the sting of a lasso of friendship being loosened as another friend leaves. And it hurts! But for these four souls, this gypsy will lean in to feel the discomfort. She just might complain along the way.
Whitney Buckley 