It is Spring here, finally. My lilacs are blooming, the tulips have opened, and the grass needs to be mowed. It's windy here on the Plains, but the sun and wide sky are so beautiful this time of year, tempered by the timidly unfolding leaves on trees. Can the season change be trusted? It's as if they're peeking, just in case there's a last-ditch effort by Winter to sabotage their courage.
Oh, soul who is waxing poetic, there you are.
What a see-saw week. My trust in Spring is tenuous, just like the leaves'. After a period of relative quiet, lots of things popped up, just like my flowers. Messages from my mother's wonderful friend; photographs of the empty house with its newly exposed hardwood floors; a long phone conversation with my aunt; my husband posting baby pictures of me on FB; Karl's busy gig schedule; notice from the stone mason that my parents' grave stone has been completed and placed in the cemetery.
I flow from event to event without knowing my reaction in advance. This is new to me. I have always protected myself from "un-knowing" as much as humanly possible. Safer. This habitual practice would, in many ways, serve me now. If I could create a sense of peace, of evenness, life could be taken more in stride. Oh, my god, I was so wrong--I had no idea what taking life "in stride" even meant. I never looked beyond the cliche.
Life is fucking bumpy. Sure, it matters not what the situation is but how we handle it. My father had a substantial quote from Charles Swindoll on his fridge: "Attitude." It was his life-long mantra, even when I didn't know it. Life is fucking bumpy, but you just hand on and deal. True.
"Going with the flow" has a different, more organic meaning to me now. It is accepting the cragginess, the crevasses, the peaks, the meadows as the path unfolds. Hell, yes, it's bumpy. And right now, there's a lot of uphill rocky terrain with loose stones everywhere. I'm tripping, stumbling, and occasionally bleeding. But when I look up, the sun is shining, and I smell the breeze, and I breathe in and out a little deeper. Spring.
About Me
- Catherine
- In this blog I have created a haven, a place I allow my deepest emotions to go and sit. I can write easily about what I’ve accomplished. This biography I can recite in my sleep. But I’ve always written poetry and in diaries since I was a teenager. I continued to write poetry in my journals, and not until 2006 did I show them to anyone. I generally write every day, at the present in memoir form. I haven’t written poetry since my mother died in January, 2007. I didn’t write at all between her death and the death of my father three years later in January, 2010. On my father’s birthday in March, 2010, I began this blog, to honor my father and to help me grieve. But I also desperately needed to write, and this stream of conscious style emerged. I needed to find my organic voice.
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