Earth is A'Flutter

Aspen leaves really do flutter in the wind, like a million green butterflies with wings all a'twitter. It rolls today, down from the mountains, across the plains, and eventually through my suburban backyard. Even here, there's no hiding, no avoiding the moving air and the things it brings.

For my part, I mostly stay inside. The wind and I don't get along. I don't think I've carried this animosity from childhood, though I remember days when I leaned so far into it walking to school that I wondered what would happen if it ever stopped.

The girl, though, she loves the wind. Or, rather, she doesn't seem to notice it much. I have a theory about this: she's so low to the ground that she doesn't really feel it. But I think that's only part of it. I think her world is so interesting, so colorful and new and fun to explore, that it doesn't matter what's going on around her.

And watching her, I begin to wonder: how often do I let one unpleasant aspect of an otherwise-beautiful life get in the way of my appreciation? How often do I forget how rarely things are perfect, even for a moment, and let my frustration with the imperfect rule rather than the deep and abiding joy that good things bring? And how long will I wait for my life to be perfect, rather than embracing the cracked and tottering now, bright colors and chipping paint together?

1. Fluttering aspen
2. Watching my girl learn to make friends
3. Long naps
4. Chubby white legs after a long winter
5. One morning of sleeping in this week
6. The celebration of another year, in a world where life itself is victory
7. Dark blue eyes in her pale, pale face
8. How he's almost done, at least with this part of his new education
9. The places where Jesus meets me
10. How adding ice makes everything better

Mother's Days Past

Two years ago on Mother's Day, we both called our moms and said, "Hi Grandma!" which, all in all, was rather a shock for them (though rather a hoot for us).

Last year, we muddled through, because we were still muddling even though the girl was 4 months old. I was going back to work in a week or so and didn't feel like celebrating. Our lives felt tenuous, like we were holding on by a hair and too much happiness might cause us to lose our balance.

This year, BabyCenter.com informs me that 8 weeks of baby is about the size of a kidney bean and we will be parents all over again before the end of the year. I imagine a boy this time, blonde (of course) and brawny, even as a tyke. Or maybe another girl, and my daughter will know the sweetness of having a sister (a sweetness her mother has never known).

Come Unto Me

Tired hangs off him like a million-pound weight, drips off him like he'd run through a summer thunderstorm. He's working and studying and daddy-ing and husbanding and it wears him thin, and I don't always know how to meet him there, how to touch that and bring him rest.

Rest is a hard word, hard for us right now because it feels like not working, and when we're not working we're not sure where the next dollar will come from or if we're striving hard enough to build a future. And it's different from falling into bed and sleeping at the end of a day spent rushing and fighting life and feeling like the best we can do in this life always falls short.

And yet rest we must. "This is a season," we say, and we both nod before we head back to work or collapse, to veg or sleep because the energy is gone. Rest . . . rest is what will keep us going, what will help us see our way through this season, what will help us see the answers and the open doors that are staring us in the face.

But it's hard to stop. It's one thing to open hands and hold plenty loosely, and quite another to hold lack, need, and unknowing. It's easier to let go of something than to open hands and realize the offering amounts to . . . nothing.

The call, though, is not to offer something of worth, for that's largely illusion anyway. The call is to offer the present, to present the present and ourselves in it as an offering. Because that's all we have, ever, even when life would have us believe something different.

When it's Silent

On days when God is silent, I try to listen anyway. If I can't hear him, I try to listen to the sun and the wind and the little voices and the big ones, hoping that I catch a word that spans two worlds.

Lately, it's hard to hear him, and hard for me to discern his voice when something comes and I wonder. I wonder if I don't hear him because he doesn't speak, or if he's speaking and I'm too confused or afraid to hear. I wonder if the words are pouring over me, but all I hear is the wind ripping across these plains. I wonder if, somewhere in the baby's babble, are his words for me, if I could just separate them from the nonsense.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if he's just not speaking at all.

God speaks through people and music and prayer and art and dance and in more ways than I can fit into this sentence, but sometimes he's silent. I'm tempted to think that he's an introvert like me, that sometimes he just needs to step away so he can be fully present when he steps back in.

But instead, I think he knows the place of silence, knows when his presence speaks louder than any words, and when it's enough to be near. I don't think he ever speaks when there's nothing to say, and that he knows how limited words can be.

And sometimes I think that's what he wants from me in return, someone to offer presence, not because he needs it but because he wants me. Words can bring us together but they can also help us keep ourselves a safe distance apart. That distance hurts him, the one who made us because he wanted to be with us.

So on the days when it's silent, I try to listen. And if I still don't hear anything, I try to be, to pull close and curl up and sit, until there's something to say again.

Wandering Words

What to write about?

Should I tell how she climbed on my lap yesterday, fever making her so sleepy, and put her head on my chest and slept? How I knew I should wake her, if I wanted her to sleep overnight, but I held her instead because she was beautiful and warm and sick, and because I miss getting to hold her when she sleeps?

Or maybe I should talk about how I feel, connected to my body in a way I haven't felt (indeed, that I'd forgotten) since the days of hook kicks and ridge hand breaks and Basai Dai? How it feels so good to push myself, to find out how far I can go, even when I'm the weakest in the class, and usually the slowest, too?

Maybe I could find the words to talk of disappointment and hope, of waiting and waiting and waiting for the future. I could tell you of impatience, of angry words and fear, and also of rest and peace and joy, when we finally see a road sign.

Or maybe I will just wander with my words, touching here and there but never landing. Maybe I'll toss out hints and see what becomes of them, throw out the first part of a sentence and see how you finish it. Because thoughts don't come whole and life isn't tossed around in digestable bits and pieces. Sometimes, I have to chew a while before there's much to say.

Back with Imperfect Prose today, where it doesn't have to be polished or fit in the nice little box with the ribbon.

Shhhh . . .

***I wrote this whole post the other night, only to lose it to a stupid human-computer communication error. I hate it when that happens, because I can't recreate the post I wrote, only write a whole new one on the same topic.***

I have a secret, if you won't tell.

Promise?

Double-pinky promise?

Ok, then.

I'm writing fiction again.

I know, I know, I do that a lot. And I have a whole novel in desperate need of revision, but I don't know where to start. I've even written on the current one before, 50,000 in November for NaNo, even though I knew halfway through that I wanted to make some serious changes to it.

But every time I start again, it feels like a secret, like springtime is coming and colors are popping up everywhere and the bunnies are getting busy behind the bushes and I blush to look at them but I celebrate them, too. New life is always worthy of celebration, right? And that's what this feels like to me.

I love the first-draft stage, the infatuation stage. I love it when my characters pop up in my day, because they have something to say, something they're sure I need to know so that I can write them well. I love waking up in the middle of the night with their stories in my mind, working out the details even as I sleep. And I love putting the words on paper, giving them life, making them walk around and talk and see their world and enjoy it.

But the more time I spend writing, the more efforts I make at putting these people on paper, the more I shy away from it, too. As close as I come to describing the scenes in my head, they're never perfect, and my method of revising seems to be more like rewriting, like finding the places where the story goes awry and starting over from there.

It's not that I'm a bad writer, but I'm a terrible reviser, mostly because I can't ever stop wondering what would happen if . . . what if I started at a different point? what if someone reacted differently in a key place? what if something changed and the main character could fall in love after all?

And then I have to explore the possibilities, have to write out many different versions of scenes, even different versions of the whole story. I get overwhelmed by all those words, and I can't keep them straight for anything, so I quit, I walk away, I take my space.

That's why starting again feels like such a delectable a secret, I think, because it means I've become brave enough to jump back into that world again. It means I'm trying to tolerate the ambiguity, then inherent imperfection that comes when putting image on paper. And I'm trying again, starting again, taking that deep breath and trying again.

It's like trying to see again, not discerning shapes amidst darkness but finding the thread in a jumble of chaos. Writing is like a giant game of Where's Waldo?, where my job is to find and follow Waldo and only Waldo, not getting distracted by all of the places he could be but finding where he is and sticking with him.

All of the writing books I've read stress making the right decisions, about characters, about plot, about the words on the page. But sometimes I wonder if stories aren't more like real life - a little ambiguous. You make a choice and it changes everything, but it really could have been different. I feel a little like God must feel, when He looks down and watches us. Yes, we DO only one thing, but He sees all the possibility, all the could-have-beens, both good and bad.

I wonder, sometimes, what it takes for him not to jump in and change a story so it becomes something better. Because that's what I do, I think. I forget to listen to my characters, forget to stop and see what they do, and so I make them and their stories into something else. So revising is learning to listen, learning to hear them more clearly and follow their threads amidst the noise that surrounds them.

I feel tentative about starting again, because I wonder if I won't finish, just like I haven't finished before. The things is, a good story is worth figuring out how to revise. I love this story. I love it more than I loved the last one I wrote. And so I let the new life in, because trying and failing to tell this story is better than not trying at all. I don't think I could live with that.

Baby Lessons

Yellow hair, like straw but much more frail, goes in every direction at the nape of her neck. In vain, I run my fingers through it, trying to make straight or curls, something other than chaos. But it doesn't matter. My efforts are futile and she doesn't care anyway.

She doesn't care.

I love how she doesn't care how she looks, doesn't care if I put her in a dress or a t-shirt, because it's all going to get dirty in the same way. And she doesn't notice her hair, doesn't notice it's crazy and runs wild with the wind and holds her food sometimes, when I wonder if she's saving it for later.

I knew another girl once, a girl who cared so much, too much. She tried so hard to make her own frail-straw hair do something other than hang straight and glint in the sun. Fingers and curling irons and enough hairspray to slick back a horse's mane didn't matter. It always ended up straw-straight, limp and shiny. It did whatever it wanted.

I keep saying that I can't wait until she can talk more, can't wait until we have conversations where we talk about ideas and Good and the stories we read. And I can't. But with that kind of knowledge, with knowledge of what she's thinking and how to articulate it, comes knowledge of herself. With the ability to discuss ideas comes comparing those ideas and, eventually, comparing herself.

To save her from that . . . oh, to save her from that. But already she sees what she does not have and strains for it. Now, across the table. Later, through the storefront glass that separates her from whatever she dreams will make her beautiful on that day.

I tell her every night that she is beautiful, and that she's loved no matter what. I hope it will make a difference, that somewhere in her baby-brain she holds that through all the years.  And I wonder how I know that, how I can say it with so much confidence to her. Is it because someone once whispered it to me, through yellow-straw hair that went every which way?

If only we believed the things we tell our children. I catch myself, sometimes, telling her things and realizing that they're true for me, too. I am loved and beautiful and held, chosen, a gift, so precious. But we lose those messages along the way. They get hidden, under layers born of the people we should be and the things we ought to do.

After a certain point, life is the peeling back of those layers. It's getting back to those so-early night whisperings, the ones we went to sleep to before the places our memory can reach. And the womb-whispers, the ones we may never remember as words but that warm us when life gets cold.

I want to live in the memory of those places, to fill myself with true words and not with things that seem easier to reach. But it's a journey, a slow uncovering, like getting out of bed on a cold, cold morning. Every day is a step, some forward, some back, but all going somewhere. And one day I'll wake up, warmed from the true center and not because I've successfully huddled under the blankets.