I’m not getting out much these days. I used to sprawl all over this city and region, driving for Lyft and Uber, but ever since the pandemic hit, and especially since my autoimmune disease diagnosis, I’ve been more of a homebody than ever before.
Ugh. Homebody. Is there a more deflating word??
I’ve always thought so, raging wanderer I am. But honestly homebody-life hasn’t been that bad. I’m living in my favorite dwelling I’ve ever built for myself, a homier, “Tom-ier” place than anywhere else, complete with maps and globes and buffalo art; early mornings with lighted candles and open windows and blanketed fog amidst the canopy.
It feels good to be a body in this home.
But it also feels good to get out and go for a drive. To open the moonroof and plunge into these hills. To roam them with no other agenda but embracing their beauty. And maybe capturing it.
I’m getting more into photography, and it is a creative muscle I’m enjoying stretching. The other day, bored out of my mind, I took my camera along for a drive and stopped on the sides of highways and parked in hardware store parking lots and walked city streets, snapping my lens this way and that at flowers and telephone poles and churches and clouds.
Photography is a lot like writing is a lot like any art form in that sometimes you have no idea what you’re doing or where you’re going with it, only that you sense this present moment with some mysterious, magnetic beckoning to go.
I’ve long wanted to turn my nature photography, past and present, into prints and canvases for my home, and I’m certain it will only make my place in the foggy canopy homier. Tom-ier.
My favorite view of Asheville comes westward on I-240. You creep up the hill toward exit 5B, and BAM – there it is. Everything you need to be sold on this city. The skyline. The Blue Ridge. Catching this view at sunset is especially golden.
I’m so glad I caught it the other day. It’s like a much needed shot of a reminder for my resonance with this place.
I can’t believe I get to live here. In this city, in these hills. If ever I leave one day, I pray I never forget this view, tattooed to the insides of my eyelids.
With 2020 falling like a stack of cards on a stack of blocks on an elephant balancing on a piece of plywood on a rubber ball, I have no clue what comes next in this city. As a storyteller, I’m back to regular blogging and podcasting and videoing; those were all working baselines before I got sick.
But with no more rideshare drives occupying bulks of my months, how else to fill my days? Both financially and recreationally? What do I do with myself when I’m not writing or at the hospital for six hours under an IV drip?
One way I’m moving forward creatively is with the coming debut of a TMZ store. I’ve long wanted to sell meaningful products on my website, and I’ve finally found this opening. Like photography, I’m a novice when it comes to this stuff – designing and selling products – and yet something about it feels right the more I’m laying the groundwork, the more I practice.
It’s like being a rookie homebody in these hills of the Blue Ridge as they whisper to me amid the chaos and emptiness of my schedule:
Just keep going. Candle after candle, foggy morning after foggy morning. You’re doing it. You’re right where you need to be.
I’ve finally returned to daily walks around my neighborhood after weeks of joint pain and sinus infections, and this simple act of movement never ceases to inspire me. Some new writing projects are rattling around my head thanks to these walks, and they’re creeping down into my heart.
I’m terrified and tickled as I wonder where this new road will take me in the coming months, hunkering down in these hills.
These hills have me, and maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be a homebody if this is the home. Thanks to pandemics and autoimmune diseases, I feel a new freedom here to try stuff like never before.
Life. It’s about trying stuff. Failing. A lot of failing. But oh how it’s better to fail than never try, to never wonder despite the blunders.
Three years ago, I wrote a second book that wasn’t nearly as successful as my first.
Two years ago, I started learning guitar only to quit.
Last year, I gave a new living situation in the sticks a go; eventually, I had to get out.
And don’t even get me started on all the relational failures in that same span.
Moving forward, I’m about to launch an online store that might sell zero products.
I might write something I’ve never attempted, and nobody goes for it. Give us the old stuff, they’ll say.
I might go for dozens of drives and snap thousands of pictures and all of them are horrible –
– or maybe, just maybe, even one will turn out okay.
