Spring, can you come now?

Spring, come now and release me from the darkness.

I am weary of making slides, of conducting classes in my living room and courting cool ideas, only to let people down by sagging with mental exhaustion into the mattress to read one more chapter. I am tired of mediating struggles about what makes a better slide and caring about education and exclusion and beautiful things and good ideas.

My responses are adequate. I respond, but only just. My kids, more tuned into my tone than anyone else in my life, gauge my responses and shield themselves from rejection by phrasing their suggestions in particular ways-ways that (hopefully) elicit something more than a flat, monotone response from me, and limit the utterance of the word no.

I am in need of soil and light to lean into.

The dreams of being sucked below the surface keep coming. I need to warm up out on crumbly arid sand.

The only thing that releases this stress is "spring cleaning". 3 weeks before it arrives. If I clean, I can justify working alone. If I clean enough, the results will give me enough resilience to be present.

Do you have winter days like these?

Comments

A 5 minute challenge

WifeMotherExpletive extended an invitation I could not refuse: " Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking" on the word, Real . real is what I always strive to be. in a hurry to be as real as possible, I've overlooked so much. I have denied myself things that would have helped me understand things better. real, but real for who? as I age, I want to be more real to me because I suspect that there will be many surprises. hard to believe that I will be surprised since I have lived with myself for 36 , going on 37 years, but I don't doubt it for one minute. Honesty is where I falter. I can achieve "real" (does it qualify as real if it is in quotation marks) but it may not be true. In general, I want things to be tied up in a package and smooth even it is too jagged to fit. I want this, I know that to be real, it cannot happen but I think true is what I need to really aim for. I know some things are tru...

Bringing her back

As the first anniversary finally passed, I exhaled. The sadness still nibbled away at the edges, but not clawing deep into my chest like it had been with varying degrees of ferocity in the twelve months previously. She died in early summer, so I plunged into ocean and lakes and ate fruit straight from the plant. The grief became softer, the folk songs carried me along in the potato patch we planted in therapy. But then, I started to miss her. The deep grief kept her so close and now as the pressure eased, so did her presence. I held my breath and decided to be really sad this morning just to see her face. To sit in her prescence. My breath became jagged as I cried for her, for us. This Taylor Swift cover by Marc Maron broke me right open this morning. Here's to staying broken open enough to keep your loved ones close. And then, I walked into her garden. The garden she envisionied, planted over and over and still pre...

A Small Craft

I accompanied my mother-in-law to an appointment this week. On the paper, preparing her for the appointment, it invited her bring along something to read or a small craft. As soon as I heard about this invitation to bring a small craft into an otherwise austere waiting area, my mind started to do bouncing somersaults in many different directions. Googly eyes? Glue gun? Feathers? Play clay? Friendship braclets?

Growing Versions

Search This Blog