Back?

Okay, so here I am again.  I'm soul searching this week, trying to figure out what mix of things is sustainable for me, and so far I've gotten one clear answer:  not this one.  I've packed every minute to the brim lately, and feel something deep inside of me, some important place where children run barefoot and there's time to watch clouds and what you do isn't groomed for resumes, was never meant to be--I feel that place wilting and shrinking and getting overshadowed by this other place, a place that isn't bad or even something to be wished away, but a place that must be held in check.  A place that wants badly to produce.  To matter to lots of people.  To have tangible things to show for my time, and not just things, but really wonderful amazing wiz-bang kinds of stuff.  Stuff that impresses people.  Lots of them.

And guess who suffers, besides me, when that place starts growing beyond itself?  The people who matter to me most.  Isn't that ironic?

I have a non-fiction book I want to write.  I have a new and more complicated blog I want to start.  I have a novel that's itching to see the light of day.  And I also have an 8-month-old who needs me quite a lot at this point, and deserves to be seen far, far differently than as a roadblock to some race track I'm trying to ride.

I'm realizing that life isn't something you wait to live until the kids are grown or even just in school.  Life isn't something you put off until your resume is long.  It isn't something you hold like your breath, or keep locked in a cage, feeding but once or twice a day. 

It's here.  Right now.  It's this week, and this spring, this night with all the trees in bloom, and the crickets cricking, this lamp spilling golden light across my lap, my hands, the little scar where I accidentally poked myself with led in seventh grade.  I don't want to fill this glorious life I've been given so full that the glory fades, and it doesn't even matter because I don't have time to notice anyway.  I don't want to be so preoccupied with the next ten things I'm trying to accomplish that the one right in front of me gets only half of me.  The little boy whose eyes are so blue and smile is so big and heart is just bursting with eagerness to be mine right now.  Not half-mine, but all the way.  And that goes for N, and the other dear ones in my life, too.  My own face in the mirror.

Be still, I hear, and I feel that place inside of me expand.  I feel my feet on cool, green grass, and see clouds start billowing by.  There's one the shape of the book I'm writing, and it's whispering all in good time, and another the shape of the book I hope to write next.  There's one the shape of fear, the fear that I'm losing time on a race I need to win, and if I don't catch up now, today, or at least by the end of this year, some important thing will get lost forever.  Something I really want.  That cloud is shifting into some new thing, a new mist that looks like gladness, and it's coming down to catch me up inside itself, catch me up and make me laugh like Eli, when all he can do is glee (if that's not a verb it should be).  Because glee is what a lot of life calls for.

When it finally sets me down I see the landscape of my life, and realize I don't want to get everything done I set out to do if that means missing out on here and now.  I don't want to if it means not living in the fullest sort of way, thinking living will have to happen later.  Because later sometimes never comes.  And even if it does, there will never be this night again, this season, this dear one on the phone or at my neck or lying next to me in bed, at this age, with this sort of love.

So I'm here on my blog right now because it makes me happy, and because speaking publically helps call a thing to life.  I'm trying to imagine my way into a lifestyle that's slower paced than the one I've lately tried to live, that still finds ways to honor the hats I truly love to wear:  writer, soul-nurturer, mother, wife, friend.  I want to honor these things in a much more liveable way.  As far as posting goes--here or on a new blog--we'll have to see what this might mean.