Grab a cuppa and a comfy seat, and let’s chat a while.
It’s Monday again – time for Coffee and Conversation.
When I was six, myfamilywas driving on a highway late at night. Streaks of headlights and taillights painted the dark. For the first time, I realized that each car held people living lives as important to them as mine was to me.
I wanted to know what those lives were, and to share my own...
It’s nearly nine o’clock on the second Monday of June, local time. It’s been over a week now since I completed the two month writing marathon of the Blogging from A-Z April Challenge and Story A Day.
I’m still feeling tired, and a bit disoriented, after all that sustained effort. My blogging has been a bit erratic – I have things to say, but I’m finding it exhausting and sometimes all but impossible to write the words that will say them.
It’s making me a bit restless. I’m not especially a creature of routine, which, given the rather freeform manner of our family life, is probably just as well.
I do have a certain affinity for flow and rhythm. Running water. Poetry. Music. The gently settling darkness outside my open window, with birds and crickets and fireflies and June bugs (well, actually, I’m not especially a fan of those big screen bashing beetles….). I like the flow of seasons, and days, the sun rising out the same bedroom window, and falling, amidst deepening shadows, giving its last light to the kitchen window…
I had a plan for today’s post, and it was going to be a part of the flow of my day.
But I’m tired, and I’m heading into a time of quiet and contemplation. The thoughts, emotions, and desire to express them are there.
But the words and the will aren’t. The things I would say, right now, are still subterranean, tucked within the sleepy aquifers deep within my soul.
I need to leave the creative outpouring of the last two months, to some degree, while remembering things like laundry and dishes and homeschool reports due soon and taking time to indulge myself and my beloveds; to reconnect, perhaps paradoxically, with my surfaces and my deep places…
Less of a balancing act, and more of a blending…
I’m tired, and spent, but it’s the good fatigue that comes from having done something strenuous, and done it with attention and care.
I “officially” wrote 57 stories (in lengths from 140 character Twitter fiction to 6,000-plus word complex “short” stories), in two months. I say “officially”, because that wasn’t all of them. I wrote two stories that I loved, but which didn’t fit the arc I was weaving (yes, I’ve saved them, and I had the delight of writing them). One story was rewritten, experimentally, using several points of view, and changed with each new framing.
And, through it all, I blogged.
I’m (if you will indulge the pun) all Tuckered out. I might even T’Pol asleep. (Okay, I could be a bit loopy from all that crawling into other skins and other lives…
During May, I wasn’t even human, all the time. It’s an odd trick, to be a Trellium-D addicted Vulcan starship officer fighting her rampant and uncontrolled desires while at the same time being a settled wife and mother who’s never left her planet of origin, and only canoodled with members of her own species…
I‘ve been living life:
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Strangely?
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Differently?
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In odd wisps and fragments?
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Beneath the surface, and on it?
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As though it’s all up for creative debate?
The question marks mean I don’t know for sure. I’ve never been anything other than a seeker, a dreamer, a dweller in depth and breadth. For the first couple of decades of my life, I resisted, and gave myself to a string of false pearls known as “have-to”.
And then, I came, through shattering personal experience, to know that not one of us is immortal; not one of us can depend on a certain span of life to hold who we are and what we choose to give ourselves to.
For now, I give myself wholly to the deep places within – the currents and veins of as-yet unworded life, and to those I love. I give myself to passion, and indulgence of this breath, and all it contains, and then to the next, and the next, and beyond…
This isn’t what I planned to write today.
But it is who I am, in this moment. It’s honest, and true, and I’m sharing it with you.
Who are you, in this moment, while you read this? My house is filled with sleeping people who are wrapped around and through my heart and my soul, but we can sip our hot beverages and have a quiet chat while we listen to the nightsong of the crickets…
