better

Remember this?

Well, that happened again. Not that exact thing, but the thing where I have some awful crisis occur that leaves me naked and wailing and clutching handfuls of dirt, not at all knowing how to go on, and then the clouds open up and the sun shines in this spectacular beam and something happens that is not quite a perfect solution, not quite, but close enough that no one would believe it except in a Coen brothers movie.

Last night I was driving to a yoga class that I was subbing, although I really was not up to it, and I was listening to the radio, and this song came on:

Visuals not recommended; just listen to the song. (Oh, Morphine. If those notes could talk about something other than themselves…Morphine and me go back a long way.) Anyway, that two-string bass groove floated on the surface of my mind for a few seconds, and then it dug under my skin. I blinked, and the world cleared; I was awake again, not just staring but seeing, actually here and present for the first time in a long time. The music got through, and felt good. It was working for me, making me walk a few steps away from my panic.

And I heard something. You have to be be bigger than your life, it said. I was listening to Mark Sandman sing Buena, Buena, Buena, Buena, good good GOOD!, and I heard you have to be bigger than your life. This stuff is small, I heard, and will pass, and in five years this will be a week of sorrow and heartache among many, a month when nothing went right surrounded by other months when some things did. I am letting the bastards grind me down. That is not right. The world is big, life is wide, there is something inside me that is too strong and brave and good to be ground out like a cigarette butt, I am bigger than my life!

And I smiled.

And when I got to the studio, I got a surprise $25 check for that sunrise class where no one showed up, which seemed to me to be a little hat-tip from the universe saying see? Sometimes, in this game of Monopoly, the bank will make an error in your favor. I taught a decent class, came home, ate dinner, and checked my email. In my email was a note from an oDesk employer, the employer that brought me to oDesk in the first place a month ago, offering me a full-time copy editing job starting two days after my current job ends.

It pays a little over half what I’m getting paid now. And I’m not sure all of that money is guaranteed. And it’s a contracting job, which means the taxes will be kind of shitty. But I’ve had this job on my mind, hoping for it as hard as I can, for the entire month that all this crap has been swirling around, because it solves about half a dozen problems in one swoop: I won’t have to worry about finding another job if we end up moving across the country; it’s a flexible-hours work-from-home job, which means I can work the job around a more significant teaching schedule, and means I have the numerous benefits of the work-at-home job that I’ve wanted for as long as I’ve been in the working world; I can even add other part-time jobs on top of it, like Starbucks or other oDesk work; and I will have the time to write and write and write if I want to. The job is theoretically still 40 hours a week – theoretically – and I’m not completely sure what the parameters of it are yet, so there are a lot of things about it that could still mean it won’t work out or I won’t be able to teach and write as much as I think I will. But still. I have a job. I am not going to be insolvent. Things are going to work out. They are! They are.

So. My gratitude is boundless. I think I just needed to see the black bottom of this crisis before I found the opportunity. And I’m grateful even for that; it reminds me of this Sugar column, the concept that the crucifixion is no less a part of the miracle than the rising. This is no deus ex machina, no utter phoenix action, but it’s…better. That’s all I wanted, was better.