“I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.”
-Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Invitation
I tell myself I am unaccustomed to this. I tell myself that isn’t true.
We know it is fall because there is no one on the beaches, because the backroads smell dry, and because the winds blow offshore. I say it is winter, he says, not quite yet. Fall seems to be less of a season and more of a waiting space, a holding place for the things that will come out of this.
We are told growing up that every action has an opposite and equal reaction. I don’t think I truly understood that until now. How we make ripples and how they rock someone else’s boat. How irreversibly everything can, will, and should change. I start to recite my own lines to myself – earth time is hard time, show up for the change, you are only ever exactly where you are supposed to be.
I have to believe the things I have before sworn as true. I have to turn pages and build houses and find new ways to spend my mornings. We make beds, but we don’t always sleep well in them, and still, we have to go to sleep.
I can only imagine how the next year will look, and still, in ways, I will be wrong. I will be wrong about much of it and I will be right about other things. About early mornings and new eyes and the smell of the sea in the middle of the night. This was to be, and we have to get in line with what life gives us.
I wonder if everyone is as affected by the seasons as I am, if everyone else prays to weather vanes, and if they dream in ways that twist them even when they are awake. All I want is a ranch in Montana where I can make huckleberry jam and tell the kids to come inside.
But eventually, we put everything else to sleep, and we learn how to show and do what needs to be done.
THE LITTLE BLACQUE BLOG 