Freedom Swings

I have been desperate for a swing.

A literal swing.

You know, the ones at a good community playground with the long black rubber seat and attached to chains that hang from 15-foot-high steel frames and creak like they were bought from an Azkaban rummage sale? 

I love a good swing and, these days, they have been surprisingly hard to find...

In especially small towns (where I’ve found myself for the last 13+ months) you’ll be lucky to locate a park with an available swing set (and, if you’re lucky enough to find one – it’s likely at the elementary school and already in use and you can’t just sit around like a creeper, staring at the swings, waiting your turn. I might call somebody come talk to me…).

And in Michigan, the land of potentially perpetual winter, if you’ve managed to locate a park with swings, they are likely not going to be put back up until the last 10 day forecast, and the next 10 day forecast, all promise higher than 32 degrees and less than six inches of snow…

And this spring? This spring the parks were all shut down (some still are) as to avoid them becoming a public meeting place and therefore a COViD transmission potential. There were twice I found beautiful swings, completely available for use, on days when I would have loved to swing – but I couldn’t.

When I helped my best friend move out of her apartment, she reminded me the camp had gotten a swing set after I left and, though the swings were child sized and the set placed precariously in between trees, I did I get to swing for a few minutes then. It was good for my soul. Though not quite the same…

Because I love a good swing and have for years, perhaps even decades now.  I have distinct, clear, crisp memories of being a tween and teen and finding swings at a park after a walk or church picnic or some other type excursion. I remember pumping my legs long and hard, going as high as I could – so high gravity would jolt me a bit at the top, and so hard I would pendulum back and forth… There was something about a swing that made me feel weightless, burdenless, unhindered, free. I love the way a good swing makes me feel free…

In college I would seek them out.  I discovered an otherwise relatively pathetic park just down the road from the dorms with an excellent set of swings. When life got too crazy. When my head got too busy. When I needed to escape. When I needed to feel free... I’d go for a short walk, swing until my legs gave out, and walk back…somehow better able to take on life, and better able to untangle the thoughts in my head and the stirrings in my heart – for better or worse.

And all week I’ve been desperate to find a swing.

I pass a park on my way to work. Not far from where I’m staying. I know they have swings. Twice I stopped. 

The first time there was a ball game going on and there was a gaggle of children on the play equipment.  I would have to wait my turn, which would make me some kind of creeper…

The second time there were less people. I could have swung with the three or four kids on the monkey bars but I glanced at the swings as they were – without kids on them. They were swings. On play equipment. At a park. Meant for children. They were small. And short. And the frame not high enough for someone taller than 4 feet to pump and win… I drove back to the house and made dinner before dark (an especially admirable feat in my life!) instead.

Tonight, I wasn’t exactly restless. But nor was I settled. I picked up the book I had been reading, making it through a few pages with a disinterested distraction. I put it aside and picked up my phone; browsing, I found myself doing much of the same. I glanced at my watch. I declared, with the air of someone who is clearly no longer a young adult, that it was getting to be too late for adventures. Still, I countered: “What I need to do is find some swings…”

I ventured into the town in the opposite direction (seeing as the obvious park in the town on the other side had already let me down) and Google searched parks, typing the address into my maps. Several miles later and the “destination on my right” was DEFINITELY someone’s house. As were the properties on all sides. (One of them did appear to have a swing set – like the kind we had in the 90’s but you can still get at Wal-Mart for like $198.99, all metal with a plastic slide on the side and when you pumped too hard the legs would come up? – but it felt weird to ask to borrow it).  I tried typing in the name of the park. I backtracked two miles. I came upon something of a park – but people were totally setting up tents! Already dusk, I didn’t have time to walk the trails to see if they did indeed have swings… somewhere. Dejected, I drove into town and started driving around the block… when I came across the school playground and a family just leaving. In the dusk I saw three swings.

I walked over, chose the swing in the middle and sat down.

For a while I just swayed softly. The familiar sense of being able to exist without strings attached (sans the two chains holding me up, of course) playing in the recesses of my mind. I heard the ever so slight creak of the chains and I smiled, my head leaning gently on the links. 

I turned forward from the sideways lean I had been at and began to pump. Slowly and lightly at first, and then faster and harder as I picked up steam; my legs matching the momentum of my body as it continued in its arc-shaped flight, a pendulum back and forth and back and forth.

And that’s where this long (aka: Anika-length) story finds its climax…

Because this is where the story should end or begin to conclude with some note of my blissful sense of freedom just as maximum height and gravity met in a war for my body and my soul. Because swings help me to feel free… Because something about swings sets the world to right. 

But that’s not what happened.

I didn’t end up in some blissful zen-like flight pattern. I had no sooner made it back and forth a fifth or sixth time when my brain did the opposite of what my brain normally does and went into hyperdrive. I was processing the lackluster sunset and the sirens in the distance and why the lights were on in the school and whether I needed to stop for gas and how grateful I was to find a swing but how this couldn’t be my park because I didn’t want to share my sacred space with everyone and it was quite a bit out of my way and plus I wasn’t going to be living where I was forever which reminded me, I really needed to start apartment hunting again…

I wanted to say that it was my spiraling thoughts which caused my raging nausea, but I don’t think that was the case at all. If anything, the motion sickness started at the same time and I was trying to push past it – confident that the swinging would do what it does best and take care of the things in my heart and my head…

But it didn’t.

Less than 10 minutes after I found my swing, I found myself I shakily dismounting it.

In college I could have kept going for a half an hour or more. Stopping only when I had I had pumped all my inner angst loose. This time, had I not stopped, the only thing pumped loose would have been the lunch I consumed some several hours prior. 

The drive back was quiet. You would think most lonely drives are but mine only are when I’m thinking.  Otherwise I’m listening to music. Or more often than not, an audiobook. Or talking to myself. 

The drive was quiet.

I was thinking. And seething. And trying a little not to cry. It’s not like one night of motion sickness could ruin my love for swings, but it was a bit like being disappointed by an old friend. A close friend. Knowing she’d be there for you. That he wouldn’t let you down. Being so excited to spend time, to share your life, to be yourself. And then getting everything but. Leaving feeling like your friend wasn’t who you remembered and that though you loved them, you weren’t sure if they loved you. And that hurts!

It hurts to be suddenly trapped by something which is supposed to help you feel free…

It’s where I’ve been with words.

Another silly thing to say. To write. Especially, to write. I’ve only written a handful of times in the last five years. Since before grad school… Oh I wrote papers, endless papers. And I wrote camp curriculum which filled thick binders. And I wrote sermons. For the last year I wrote a sermon week after week after week.  All of it writing and all of it so far away from the way my fingers used to fly across a keyboard, flooding a screen to keep up with my heart and mind. All of it felt so confining. So trapping. So imprisoning.  I was working on a sermon at my parents’ house once last fall and my sister asked what I was working on. When I replied “my sermon”, she sighed. “I figured. But I keep hoping you’ll say you’re writing. And then I’ll know. I’ll know you’re back…”

Even the words now feel like burning, feel like clawing, painfully and slowly out of place I don’t know if I should yet return.

It hurts to have been trapped by something which once always helped me to feel free…

And maybe there are profound and divine words here. Words about where my true freedom should lay and Who they should lay with. Maybe I should be spending time with John and recalling that “if the Son has set you free, you are free indeed!” (Jn 8:36). Maybe I should be imparting something true right now… Because those words are true. 

But right now, all I know is that I’m stuck some where between the dark and the light. Somewhere between the fact I know while I crave to be free, that freedom in my soul, the freedom writing and swings and a bad run on a long road helped me tap into, isn’t something I’ve known in quite some time.