This Nomad Needs to Get a Grip.

Lately I've been in a rut.  Well, several ruts.

I've been in a writing rut; a realization rut; a rough rut.

I know there are many factors at work here, there always are.  I'm a complicated individual with a complicated history and a mighty complicated brain.  But I've got patterns to my world and lately they've been challenged, changed.

Hence the rut.

I spent the better part of a decade in a constant state of motion.  This is well-worn territory on this blog, for sure, but to restate: I never planned my life more than six months out (in advance), and for a very long part of that better part of that decade, I moved every six months or so.  And not, you know, moved to a different side of town.  I'd move states or coasts or countries.

And then even when I did settle down again, for another six months, I'd inevitably leave for some unforeseen adventure and carve time off of that homebase, too.

So the reality is that I built a very solid foundation on very tenuous land.  I taught myself to not think of anywhere as home; to love my friends as family and love my family most of all; to make sure the most important things in the world fit in the back of an older-than-God Jeep; to be mobile, to be bold, to be me.

That's what living on quicksand is like.

And the longer you live there, the better you become at surviving.  The lighter you become.

So here I am today, after having lived in Norway for a little over a year and looking at two more years here, trying to sort out why I feel so... in a rut.  And I come to figure out that even though I have been here a year, and looking at two more, I still don't think of this place as my home (see above).  I still don't see my imprint here because it isn't.  I am so accustomed to the inexorable flee that I haven't actually done anything to combat it.  I haven't done anything other than hang a couple of prints and display a couple of keepsakes- and make a bed for my dog.  Other than that...

It's weird.  When you look around and can leave a place relatively unscathed after six months, that's one thing.  When you can do it after 15 months, that's another thing.  A somewhat unsettling thing.  It raises all manner of questions.

Have I gone too long untethered?  So long that coming back to the same place seems ... out of place?

Will I ever be not nomadic?  Will my mind ever not wander?  Will I?

One rut... clambered.