Tempus Fugit: On Taking A Break

So it's August 18th, and the last post here was July 11th.

A three-week cross-country road trip with The Teenager is my excuse.

I have found it difficult to start up again, not because I have nothing to say or note or write down.

This happened:

The Corn Palace, home of the best corn-shaped caramel corn EVAR.

And this:

Feeding prairie dogs outside the entrance to the Badlands. Yes, we touched them. Yes, it was AWESOME.

And this:

Me and ALL OF THE BOURBON at Buffalo Trace in Frankfort, KY.

And in between, many numbers of things, some of which are documented in photography, and some of which floated past with car windows the only frame.

In the week since we have been back, I have earned my RYT-200 (yoga teacher) designation, and we have done school shopping. I got another lovely writing assignment and have coerced two people into testing my gluten-free pizza crust recipe.

In other words, life has intervened. I suppose I should be writing things down, but sometimes a break from recording every moment in words (and pictures) is necessary and good.

My brain is making space to process all of the things that are happening right now (or have happened in the past few weeks), and that is occurring as we settle back into a routine and focus on practical things, like guests coming to town, back to school, and finding patio furniture.

The cup is full, the time is flying. A break from the electronic tether was necessary and good, but I think I am back. I think. There never seems to be enough time, yet we all have exactly the same 24 hours as Einstein and da Vinci. #NotAGoodExcuse

How was your summer? Did you take a break?

Take A Bite Out Of The Ass Of Life

It took me 26 years to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

In 1997 I had just moved to Seattle and was temping for a contractor's office. I had spent the previous 11-odd years drinking my way through college and moving to a different state or house when I felt restless or uncomfortable. I waited on my fair share of tables, slung thousands of drinks across a bar, nanny-ed for the same family for three years. Once I got to Seattle, I signed on with a temp agency and was immediately hired by the company I was temping for. I may have loathed office work, but I was damn good at it.

A year passed, and just as I was about to quit, an opportunity to become a VISTA volunteer in Seattle Public Schools came up. I don't know why I applied; I hated school, quitting in my senior year.  I was not especially fond of kids of any age. I guess it was a safer step than the Peace Corps, so I applied, was accepted, and promptly fell in love with middle schoolers and teaching. Like, both-feet-in, crazy-in-love with kids and teaching. I got my master's degree in education and settled in to my calling.

And I was a damn good teacher. The hard kind, the kind that believed in you more than you believed in yourself. The kind that kids came back and thanked, not for throwing pizza parties and for hand-holding (although there was a fair bit of that) but for pushing them to do better, to be better, and to work harder. I put everything I had into this work. If I was a religious person, I was say that I was called to teach, and then again to start a school. The work was hard, the pay was shit, and the respect was zero, but it was all about the kids and changing the world.

Yesterday it smacked me in the face, right after I published the blog about inertia and vata conspiring against me and my motivation: I am trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. AGAIN.

If we are lucky, we find something in our lives that drives us, something that we feel so passionate about that motivation isn't always an issue. Sure, there are days where even the most passionate people want to blob it out on the couch. There were days when I desperately needed a break from teaching, but the drive and the motivation to do better and be better was always there.

But then there is the reality for the vast majority of people, I think:

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." (Thoreau)

Most people don't find something that really drives them. They get a job, get up, go to work, work, come home, drink a beer, watch TV, go to bed. Lather, rinse, repeat. Maybe there is a vacation once a year or a weekend away. Maybe there is  a painting class or golf lessons. Maybe the kids play a team sport, so weekends are dominated by that. The job may not be the best ever, but it pays the bills and puts food on the table. For most people, this is enough. This paragraph is the point of life.

For me, that's not enough. And that is a blessing and a curse. In the movie Big Night, Angelo cries out, "It is never too much! It is only not enough! Take a bite out of the ass of life!"  A day job with an occasional night out or weekend off is not taking a bite out of the ass of life. Not even a nibble.

I think this lack of direction and feeling that what I am doing is not meaningful is causing my ennui. I blame Dane, 100%, which is not particularly helpful but super convenient. Most days, because that jackass had to go and die, it is really enough that I can keep everything together and continue to move forward. Teaching, giving so much of myself, is not really an option for me. So the calling that took 26 years for me to answer is a painful reminder of what I used to have, what life used to be like, not an uplifting and inspiring reason to get up every day.

I find myself muttering "fuck" every morning when my alarm goes off. I always knew that Dane was going through something, often before he did, when he would curse every morning when the alarm went off (we both favor "fuck" as our curse of choice). This feels the same. For now, I write (getting paid for writing assignments but also occasionally working on The Book That Shall Not Be Named), I docent at the American Visionary Art Museum, and I am in yoga teacher training.

I feel like a precious housewife, dabbling, a lady who lunches (although I don't really lunch). Some days are better than others. Some days are worse. Sometimes I get kooky and walk the dogs in the middle of the day or paint something.

And it is never too much. It is only not enough.

How many years will it take for the next calling to come? I am not the type of person to plod along and am liable to do something really, really stupid (I blame my dad for that character trait). I am still trying to say "yes" more often than "no" (failing at this of late), doing things that make me uncomfortable and exploring, but Christ on a bike. I just want this whole self-discovery bullshit phase to be over. How many times does a person have to figure out who they are in one lifetime?

Where do you fall? Do you have a passionate calling? Do you think that whole concept is a waste of time? What matters to you?

(image source)

The Road To Hell

So my 30-days-of-blogging extravaganza came to a screeching halt on the 15th when life intervened in the form of malware.

I am going to go ahead and give myself a big fat pass for missing the last five days because, well, just because. We all of us sometimes need to just forgive ourselves for not following through. It doesn't matter a bit sometimes why we don't follow through. In my case, a substantial malware infection, a yoga teacher training weekend, and a renovation intervened, not in that order, but even if I just felt like taking the weekend off because it was a gorgeous two days strung together, that's good, too.

This yoga weekend was not particularly fabulous for me, on a couple different levels, but the one thing I had reaffirmed was that it's really important to figure out what it is you want and go for that. The guest teacher talked about the word "should" as the heavy cat-o-nine that we flagellate ourselves with. He called it "shouldistic behavior" and said we were "shoulding" all over ourselves, two clever plays on words to indicate the painful and grotesque ways in which we sometimes attempt to motivate ourselves.

This applies even when your intentions are good. If you say things like "I should exercise more," then maybe your inner anti-cheerleader is talking shit in your head about how flabby you are. Maybe it's comparing you to the toned arms or buff abs of other people. In this way you perpetuate the cycle of feeling badly about yourself instead of focusing at the core of why you aren't doing what you feel you "should" be doing.

And here is (one of the places)  where the teacher and I parted ways. He said that motivation is about changing the word "should" to the word "want," and then everything will be just peachy. Turns out that is kind of bullshit. I have studied what motivates people for the past 18 years and have found unequivocally that just changing the words, although that may be a start, is not nearly enough to change the behavior. Even just changing the behavior (like forcing yourself to exercise more) doesn't really silence the anti-cheerleader or change the internal dialogue.

And here's the unfortunate punchline: motivation is a complex issue that I have no answer to (nor do experts, really. Just suggestions.). Neither did the speaker in the workshop (although he seemed to feel that he had the only answer, and any time there were objections it meant the objector just wasn't ready for his message or the objector was lying to themselves or  some other something. I felt like this teacher's ethos was very deeply rooted in est, the cult founded by Werner Erhard. I can speak directly to my interpretation of his premise because my father forced the entire family to go to an est weekend when I was younger, and the humiliation of that remains a vivid memory).

In other (somewhat depressing) words, motivation is unique to each person and can change over time. Key components to following through seem to be a mix of factors that are both internal and external. People who spend their lives being externally motivated (by gold stars as a child in school, by money in a job, or by compliments on appearance) may find themselves at a loss should (when) those external things disappear. Internal (intrinsic) motivation is far more valuable in the long run but far harder to cultivate, especially in a culture that is so comparative (and competitive)  in nature.  And, as evidenced by this weekend's computus interruptus, internal motivation can still be affected by the vagaries of life.

And here's where the rubber meets the road to hell:

"Notice that the stiffest tree is most  easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind." ~Bruce Lee~

It's good to have goals and develop persistence and internal motivation. It is satisfying to meet the bar we set for ourselves.

What's not good is beating ourselves up when shit happens. What's not good is comparing what we are doing to what other people are doing. What's not good is "shoulding" all over ourselves to the point where we are a puddly mess, incapable of taking the shape of the next move (that's  a Wonder Twins reference).

So today I am back on the road to hell. Expect blogs this week covering writing like a motherfucker and why Deepak Chopra made me cry. But if it doesn't happen, that's fine, too.

Have a beautiful week. Or don't. Either way, don't beat yourself up.

Namaste.

(image source)

 

Meditation

[caption id="attachment_1080" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Where I'd like to be, even if in my own mind.[/caption]


"You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day - unless you're too busy. Then you should sit for an hour." ~Zen proverb~

Today, I am dealing with:

1. The wrong color cabinets in a renovation that has already dragged on for too long

2. Rats under the house in Georgia

3. Writing deadlines for a job I wasn't going to try for then decided I should try for because...

4. Changes in my steady writing job (that don't take effect for a while, but still)

5. A leaky pipe in the tiny house that may be a connection outside...or it could be a burst pipe in the wall

I am so distracted and vata-high that I nearly ran over my yoga teacher just now at the little cafe where I was picking up some coffee to head to the next thing. I have so much running through my head (like rats in a crawlspace?) that I have tunnel vision. One task to the next, like a rat focused on cheese.

Do you see the rat-based figurative language? It's getting to me...

I am not sure even a couple of hours of meditation would help.

#Namaste

 

Common Courtesy

I started this post earlier in the week, but it got ranty and you-kids-get-off-my-lawn pretty fast, so I stepped back and am trying again.

The simple fact is this: the title of this post is an oxymoron. Common courtesy is uncommon, largely because we exist in our own little bubble and don't bother to look up from our screens long enough to recognize how we are impacting those around us.

From the person who lets the door slam in your face when you are coming in right behind them to the guy who leans his seat all the way back for seven hours on a transatlantic flight (during the day, including dinner service) to the person who takes up two parking spaces in a crowded lot. From the weird practice of walking around in a grocery store listening to (bad) music...without head phones...to the neighbor who decides to hang some pictures at 7:30 on a Sunday morning.

To everyone reading this or picking up the common vibrations of these words I say this: practice a little courtesy today. Before you get ready to do something, think for a moment about how it might impact the people around you. Not in a cosmic, climate-changing, evolutionary way. In a very simple, right-here-right-now way. Put down your cell phone and engage with the world around you. Say please and thank you. Hold the door for someone. Let old people go first. Let mothers with children go first. Pick up something someone dropped. Put your dishes away after you eat.

It is ridiculously easy to do something nice. You don't even have to go out of your way or be inconvenienced. Let's take approximately zero seconds out of our day today (or this weekend if you can't spare zero seconds) to offer up a little courtesy to someone.

As Garrison Keillor says as he closes his show The Writer's Almanac: "Be well, do good work, and stay in touch."

As a common courtesy and to spread the love, please share this post on your various social networks. Maybe we can get something started today.

(image source)

Sorrow Prepares You For Joy

What would the world be without Rumi? A dark and terrible place, I think. A place I wouldn't want to be.

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.

~ Rumi ~

I confess I have not deeply read his writings; rather, it seems like the universe sends them to me at times that are most appropriate. Which is very considerate of the universe, seeing as how I have not always been its most enthusiastic or reverent member.

If I had read this two years ago, it would have washed over me like rain on a newly-waxed car. Today, this quote speaks to a place in me that is so deep I cannot see the bottom. With a child newly returned from Paris, spring on the horizon (even as clouds and chilly rain move in), and a plethora of professional and personal opportunities offering themselves up, this quote gives me, dare I say it, hope. Curiosity.

The tagline of this blog is "Seeking joy." How nice would that be? Joy.

Do I dare hope?

(Image)

And So It Begins: Welcome Home

The Teenager came home yesterday.

I waited for two hours, tracking her plane as it landed, sat on the tarmac for a bit, and then pulled into the gate. She cleared customs quickly and only requested a ginger ale be waiting when she came out for a turbulence-induced queasy belly.

I didn't recognize her immediately as she strode through the crowd at International Arrivals. Her hair was in a messy bun, and she was all in black; tall, confident. Then I saw her, a moment before she saw me. Her face lit up when our eyes met, and I had the pleasure of my teenaged daughter running to greet me in public.

I imagine this is just the beginning of the times I will be picking her up at airports.

I thought I would miss her more in the longing, lonely sense of missing someone, but mostly I just felt elated that she was out in the world and proud that I was able to send her there. There were definitely moments this week when I missed her chatter, and the hugs I got when I picked her up and before she went to bed were sorely missed, but mostly I was glad to have sent her off.

Parenting seems to always be a balance between two things. When they are little, you are balancing keeping them safe (i.e., poking their eye out on the corner of the coffee table) with letting them learn new things (like how to walk). In adolescence, right now it seems to be letting go and enfolding.

I have to let her leave me so that I can feel the pleasure of her return.

I have to let her make mistakes but then be there to figure out where to go from there.

She has to know that as much as I want her to come home I  want her to experience the world in equal measure.

These truths seem self-evident, but try it once. I am so proud of the woman she is becoming, but I still remember the fat wrists and the chubby cheeks. The tiny voice. The sweet smile and delicious kisses. I want her to take her time, to savor each part of life as it comes. Even grief, in its own way, is something that must be felt and experienced. I want her to slow down as life comes rushing towards her and carries her away from me like a leaf dancing on the surface of a stream.

So instead of moaning the loss of The Teenager to the world, this morning I am vowing that I will be her home, the one person she knows will always meet her at the gate, take her in, make sure her sheets are clean and that there is a juicy, mid-rare barbecue bacon burger with fries waiting.

I think that's our job as parents, really, to teach them to be independent and make good choices, then to send them out in the world to see how we did. I am just glad she is home and that I have her until the next time. Which may be sooner rather than later, as my evil plan seems to have worked and the travel bug has bitten.

Who are you home to?

 

I Believe In Ladybugs

I believe in ladybugs.

I throw salt over my shoulder when I spill it.

I am immune to black cats, having owned one myself, and I don't set much stock in the rumors swirling around the bad-luck potency of the number 13.

I believe in the power of the moon, as it moves the ocean, and we are, all of us, 90% water. How could we not be swayed?

When my nose itches I wonder who is talking about me, and who is coming to visit when my ears tingle. Or the other way around. I can never remember.

I believe in the irrefutable power of the first kiss. That flutter means something, and if it's not there, well, that means something, too.

I can tell you for sure that when a bird flies into a house, someone is going to die.

I believe in signs and symbols. I think the universe talks to me, if I can just shut up enough to listen.

Today at the coffee shop I force myself to go to at least once a week, right after I hit "send" on an application for a job that I really, really want, this ladybug landed on my coffee.



S/he circled the rim, playing hide and seek as I tried to snap a photo. When I finally got this picture, s/he fluttered down to rest on my sweater and got cozy until I stood up to leave, when I finally placed him/her on the table.

I believe in ladybugs.

Do you?

Why Don't We Do What We Should?

As a former educator I have been thinking about persistence and motivation for twenty years. As a human, I suppose in some form or another I have been beating myself up with this topic my entire life.

Why don't we do what we should?

Take this blog, for instance. I haven't written a single entry in three weeks. It's not that I have nothing to say; what's in my head could fill an editorial calendar with daily blogs for months. So why don't I write?

And yoga. As I twist myself into pretzel-y shapes at yoga this morning, a class that I love but still had to drag myself to, I was even considering why it is so hard to push ourselves to do even the most basic of things we know we should do. Some of them, like folding laundry and putting away the clean dishes, are just mundane tasks that are no fun, but even those simple things take no time and yield small pleasures like clean clothes and eating utensils. In our house, we will sometimes nearly empty out the clean dishwasher by using the cups, plates, and spoons (always spoons), piling dishes in the sink until we can't take it anymore (which is a long time if you are a teenager, less long if you are her parent).

I don't think I will ever fully embrace folding laundry or emptying the dishwasher, but there are important things I am not doing. Knowing that yoga makes me feel better and writing is deeply satisfying, why is it still so hard to do it?

For me at least, this goes way beyond laziness or lack of motivation.

Reflecting on myself, The Teenager, other people around me, and the literally thousands of students I have taught, I have come to believe that it is a complicated mixture of fear and insecurity that keeps us from doing the things we love.

Fear

There has long been a theory that human behavior is motivated by two things: fear and love. Fear is a powerful block to pretty much anything in the world, just as love is a powerful motivator. When I don't write, or I don't throw myself fully into yoga teacher training, it's not love that is holding me back. It's fear. What if it doesn't work? Or *gasp* what if it actually does? What if all of my wildest dreams come true? Then what?

I can't turn this blog into a motivational speech. All I can do is speak for myself. If I actually do all of the things I say I want to do, the world will open up in ways both frightening and powerful. There are days when I am just not ready for that; I am not ready for the responsibility of living up to the life I say I want. Then there are days when I look around at the routine I have built for myself and shudder to think of me doing the same thing, 20 years from now. Both imaginings are rooted in fear, one of not living up to my own expectations and the other of  living up to my own expectations.

See how I did that?

Insecurity

Fear's bastard cousin is insecurity. This is the anti-cheerleader in my head, that bitch who follows me around chanting about how I can't possibly think that my writing is good enough and who do I think I am? It's the one that looks in the mirror and judges things others miss. It makes commentary on my walk, my voice, my face, my writing, my progress in yoga. It's judgmental and loud.

Insecurity is rooted in instability, in the idea that at any moment the world could change and things could be different. It's why we have bedtime routines for kids and take our dogs for walks at the same time every day; the routine is reassuring. But what happens when the routine is suddenly, violently changed and everything you knew to be true and planned for is swept away?

Get over it, right? It has been two years since Dane died. Move on, yeah?

Unless you have experienced a similar death, it is hard to understand what it feels like to have everything you planned for change in an instant. As to the stages of grief, I am still struggling with acceptance in that it is still very difficult to reconcile the life we had planned and the life we have now, especially as we are still not 100% settled and are still moving around a bit. Even becoming a mother was easier to adapt to; yes, I became a different person in many ways with different priorities, but at least there was planning and time to adapt. Even two years After The Crash the idea that everything could be gone is still ever-present.

Insecurity is also deeply tied to fear. As I get ready to send The Teenager to Paris for a week, I have had to work hard to not give in to every awful fear I have about what could happen.

So insecurity makes me clinging and grasping in some ways, holding on to what stability I have. It's like all of the balancing poses in yoga. First you have to hug into the center of yourself, and then when you feel stable you can expand outward. Like a turtle, I am not sure how stable I feel yet, and because of this it is very difficult to expand outward.

It has taken me three weeks to write this, which speaks to how hard it is to admit and to also put into words. Hello, everyone: I am a raging ball of fear and insecurity. Not necessarily a confident introduction.

But the first step is to admit you have a problem. Hi, my name is Suzannah, and I am deathly afraid of both success and failure and deeply worried about losing the tenuous grasp on reality that I have worked really hard to cultivate in the last two years, one month and 11 days.

Hi, Suzannah. Keep coming back.

I guess the plan is to keep coming back. The key is to feel the fear and insecurity and do it anyway (like sending The Teenager to Paris or writing this down). I spent the first year after Dane's death saying "yes," and that has changed; these days I have to force myself to go out of the house, to explore, to engage, to say "yes" when I just want to go home and take a nap. I am getting bogged down in the minutiae of daily living and find myself thinking if this is really it for the next ____ years until I am dead.

That, as they say in the parlance of the 12 Steps, is stinkin' thinkin'.

Still working on steps two through 12 on this path. Thoughts and suggestions? What works for you to move past whatever holds you back?

(Image)

On Vulnerability

"The question, then, is not only how to uncover our fundamental tenderness and warmth but also how to abide there with the fragile, often bittersweet vulnerability. How can we relax and open to the uncertainty of it?"

From this article by Pema Chodron, in which she discusses how loss and heartbreak opens us up to warmth, but then how we snap our hearts shut soon after. In the days following 9/11, this was the feeling of vulnerability that prompted most people to treat each other with tenderness. Shortly thereafter, just days, really, that tenderness faded, and we all went back to being gruff, protected, sheltered. Hiding our softest parts.

We all have them, these tender spaces that very few people are allowed to see. Babies are born with them, even called soft spots, so delicate that you can see their hearts beating through their downy hair. The body itself wisely closes that soft space as the baby grows, and our heart buries itself deep into our chests.

As 2014 ends and a new year begins, February looms. February, the most bittersweet month on the calendar, mercifully short. The month I met my love, and the month I lost him thirteen years later (almost to the day we met, on the day of our first date). I have felt crabbish and small these last few months, thinking daily of Dane and Life After.

I can feel myself shrinking a bit. I have had a hard time looking strangers in the eye. I have had a hard time being open and vulnerable. More often as I write this blog, this blog that is supposed to be the purest expression of myself (by my own design, as much as I can, as honest and authentic as I can be), I have had to stop or delete altogether blogs written for an audience by some version of the self I would like to project.

I don't want that to be me in my work anymore. I assume there is an audience of some kind reading out there because I get your comments and analytic reports. I cannot write for an audience, though. I have to write for me and know that on some level it might resonate with someone. Being authentic and vulnerable here has been harder of late.

This is the time, Chodron says, that we should turn to each other. The time we feel the most vulnerable and anxious and scared is the best time to recognize that these are universal feelings that everyone has felt or is feeling or will feel. Instead of feeling connected, though, we get angry and withdraw or blame something/one else. We shrink into anger instead of expanding into love.

I don't want to be that person. I want to be open and vulnerable and trust that the people I meet will not hurt me (intentionally). I don't know how to do that except to just do that, but transparency goes against my nature, or at least the vision of myself.

" For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." 1 Corinthians 13: 12 (KJV)

But then also...

"Ignorance is regarding the impermanent and permanent, the impure as pure, the painful as pleasant, and the non-Self as the Self." Sutra 5, Book Two The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali

So I think I know who I am but maybe not so much, and this darkly clouded glass is ignorance and confusion. Chodron says that pain is an illuminating experience in the most spiritual sense of the word if we can manage to seize the opportunity to stay with the tendency towards warmth and light as the pain starts to fade.

All this to say, simply, I want to fall in love again, but I don't know if I am capable of letting myself be that open to another human.

That was hard to say. It took 653 words to get there. It's what I was referring to in this earlier post but literally could not type the words yet.

But as I think about falling in love again, I feel myself closing up. I referred to myself as "not a hugger" multiple times in settings when, in fact, I actually could have easily been a hugger and people wanted to hug me, but I threw up the barrier as much as if I had stacked bricks.

I don't know if I have the capacity to let go that much anymore. But I know I don't want to be alone.

What do you do when you want to do a thing you don't feel you can do?

(image)

Just This Poem

Just this poem for you today, this beautiful, simple poem that has poked me right in my jelly-soft center this morning. Just this poem today.

Epitaph

When I die
Give what's left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.

Look for me
In the people I've known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on your eyes
And not on your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting
Bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Love doesn't die,
People do.
So, when all that's left of me
Is love,
Give me away

Merrit Malloy

(Image)

The Green Bean Truck

We drove down two-lane back roads into Delaware early Saturday morning. Corn was turning yellow in endless fields on either side of the road, and there was a stillness to our travel unbroken by wind or birds or other cars.

Our first view of the Chesapeake Bay in a long time. Flat calm and structural steel on a bridge that is the purest memory of my childhood.

Two hours later, we pulled into our driveway...

...and greeted the newest edition to the tiny house family.

(he was dispatched, along with several of his kinfolk, many of whom had decided that a tiny house was just the right size, although other than each other the pickings were slim.)

There was work to be done, but not for the dog. He got comfy on the porch and watched the world go by. The world, in this case, consisted of a car, some birds, and innumerable bugs. There was a lot of sleeping.

Later, this. A doughnut and a dog and a beach chair. A slash of light from the setting sun.

And later still, coming home from a walk. Blurry, yes, but exactly what we saw through the trees.

In the morning, sleepy babies in the loft...

...a walk to the beach...

...and a critter, trying desperately to make it to the other side of the road.

(Most of his wooly bear friends didn't make it to the other side, so it was hard to use them to predict the winter. We also found a very dead but wholly intact frog, stretched to his full length, a large pile of glass, and more mosquitoes. No snakes, thus far.)

We followed the green bean truck most of the way home.

If Wishes Were Candy..And The River Was Whisky

I am tired.

I am sore.

I am grateful for rain, M&Ms, my kid, and people who will take me in even when I am an asshole (thanks, Mom).

I would like to wake up in my own bed (which no longer technically exists, as I gave it away before we moved), in my own house.

I am grateful for steady writing assignments and dogs that sleep on the bed and love you SO MUCH when you wake up.

I would like to be done with this quest. I would like to no longer be on this path, or at least I would like to step off for a few moments and just be light and free. It is wearing, to have the steady hum of missing a person and reforming a life without them be the background white noise to your entire life, but not really knowing it until something quiets just enough to hear the hum. I wish I could quiet that hum.

I am grateful that I live in a place where I get to wish for that. If wishes were candy...and the river was whisky...

If the river was whiskey and I was a duck

I'd dive to the bottom and I'd never come up

Oh, tell me how long have I got to wait?

Oh, can I get you now, must I hesitate?

I am also grateful that I am not a black man in this country, but that's a whole other blog and so heart-wrenching and awful to me right now that I cannot even give it too much space in my head for fear that it will take me to a really bad place. It's hard enough to take small sips of the violence in Gaza and the poverty in the world without having to think about how little has really changed in the minds and hearts of the U.S. since Jim Crow.

But I digress.

I should go to sleep now. I should eat less chocolate so I can actually do that.

Tomorrow, I will worry less. I will breathe more.

(Image)