(no subject)

It's quiet here, despite paper rustling, and words are mercury globules spilled, parting around my pen. So I gave up, and now I'm trying this space, a different sort of net for quicksilver fish.

I want to tell you.

One night I crossed a bridge, black water and shining streetlamp ripples below, and wondered if I dared to jump in. The water would have been cold, my jacket heavy, and I imagined kicking against the weight to surface for one more breath and one more look with my eyes stinging. A board creaked under my feet as my weight shifted -- and I shook my head, put one foot in front of the other, and walked on. Such is the seduction of rivers, and the grace of bridges.

One morning, I felt a sunrise, felt it in the drag of the waves around me and the warming of my eyelids as I floated, calm and joyous, until a fish brushed against me and it tickled. It is hard to float serenely while giggling. When I recovered, I opened my eyes to a sky bathed in gold and edging to softest pinks, and all that day, the world was a necklace of wonder strung with beads of awe. I handled it gently, and it reflected back love.

One day, I introduced a wide-eyed child to the concepts of soft and fluff. She giggled and wriggled her toes in the mess of down from the old pillow, and later we spent an hour combing feathers out of her hair, with no regrets for time lost.

I once picked up a thing of magic disguised as polished wood and metal strings, and, with a single note, stepped across the line of the soul that divides audience from musician. I carry no badge, bear no insignia -- but the heart knows. A friend told me that the only thing I would ever need to master in music was myself -- to learn to let the music flow from heart to hands and bypass my head entirely. I looked into his eyes and knew that he knew -- and, one evening, obeying an urge to accompany the music of a thunderstorm with a lesser storm of my own making, I began to understand.

I once put a net of words around an idea, and saw comprehension in the eyes of a reader, and understood something else.

It is not what I have seen, or done, or felt, that defines the space my life will occupy. It is not the impact my experiences have had on me that will endure. It is only what I manage to communicate, to express, to tell or show or help someone else to feel that will never entirely pass away.

anoisblue's Shower Meme.

eleanor asks:

If you could live anywhere, assuming that neither the kids or money are secure and aren't an issue, where would it be?

Wow... I have to pick one place?

I have a pet fantasy of buying a few hundred acres in the Canadian wilderness and carving out a small community, peopled with my core group. I would work downstairs in my home where the doors would almost never be shut and watch my children run through with the children of my friends.

If you could have one superpower, what would it be?

Time travel, please. There are so many things I feel like I've missed that will never come again. I want to see my littlest's first haircut and my daughter read her first word.

Again, assuming no barriers or restrictions, what would be the best job in the world and why?

I think I already have the best job in the world, though I seem to be on extended leave. I can't wait to get back to the work of being Mommy. Why? Because I can't think of a nicer way to touch the future.

What's the hardest part about being a parent?

That's an unfair question considering my circumstances. And really, I think that's a question every parent is going to answer differently. While they were home, disciplining them was the toughest thing. It took constant reminders that I was a mother, not just a babysitter, and there was no Mommy coming to collect them at the end of the shift. If I wanted kids I could live with, I had to set rules and enforce them.

Now that they're gone, of course, that's the hardest part.

What does spirituality mean to you?

It means the things I do to feel a part of the life going on around me, and the feeling of being in touch, plugged into that energy. It's trusting that there is a purpose, a Plan and a Planner, guiding my life, though I may not know what they are yet. It's knowing that I don't really need to know, I don't have to understand. Sometimes it's taking a long bath with the right music. Sometimes it's sitting down to a blinking cursor in an empty text field and doing my best to make the words carry all the meaning I intended them to have. Always, always, always, it's doing my level best to live my life in such a way that my friends could defend me if they had to -- but so that they never have to.

I will, of course, continue the meme. If you'd like to be interviewed, leave me a comment saying so. :)