in between

"In between"

That's a phrase that's meant a lot to me over the past year in many different contexts - not just my gender identity, but also navigating my relationships, figuring out my passions, and just where I am in life now. This weekend I thought about it in the context of the outdoors and my site sit. I went home..."home"...?...and for the first time in exactly a year, went down into my backyard and stood by the creek - the creek that Batten's creek reminds me of, the original, I suppose. Standing by the creek, stuck in a parallel, in an in between - Batten vs. my childhood home, Bryn Mawr family vs. blood family. Nature itself stood in between all around me - in between winter and spring, cold and warmth, death and life. Transition. Sometimes in that kind of in between, when the cold has left yet the trees are still dead, I wait anxiously, always reaching for the next day and the next, hoping for more life. But recently I've learned to love stillness in in betweens. So I tried being still, not thinking about the snow that was gone, or the flowers yet to come - only the now, the in between. In one of my favorite poems (oddly enough called "In Between") by genderqueer poet Dia Davina, their final line is: "We can live in that in between because that's where love is." So standing, somewhat uncomfortably, in an in between this weekend, I tried to find that love... I don't know if I did...