Day 3 - The Second Half of My Life

Crossroads

The second half of my life will be black

to the white rind of the old and fading moon.

The second half of my life will be water

over the cracked floor of these desert years.

I will land on my feet this time,

knowing at least two languages and who

my friends are. I will dress for the

occasion, and my hair shall be

whatever color I please.

Everyone will go on celebrating the old

birthday, counting the years as usual,

but I will count myself new from this

inception, this imprint of my own desire.


The second half of my life will be swift,

past leaning fenceposts, a gravel shoulder,

asphalt tickets, the beckon of open road.

The second half of my life will be wide-eyed,

fingers shifting through fine sands,

arms loose at my sides, wandering feet.

There will be new dreams every night,

and the drapes will never be closed.

I will toss my string of keys into a deep

well and old letters into the grate.


The second half of my life will be ice

breaking up on the river, rain

soaking the fields, a hand

held out, a fire,

and smoke going

upward, always up.


-Joyce Sutphen

To be fair, I think we should consider dividing our lives into thirds, after all the innocence of our childhood and the ignorance of our adolescence prevents us from really being able to live in the first third of our lives, although to live as a carefree child sounds like perfect living to me. We must climb the steep and dangerous rocks of our twenties before we can really evaluate what life means to us and what we want our life to mean to others. So, perhaps in serious consideration of this poem, a better and more applicable repetitive line would be "the last two thirds of my life." But I don't guess that has quite the same poetic ring to it. :)

Day 2 - We Create Without Turning

The Apple Tree

I remember this tree,
its white flowers all unfallen.
It’s the fall, the unfallen apples
hold their brightness
a little longer into the blue air, hold the dream
they can be brighter.

We create without turning,
without looking back, without ever
really knowing we create.
Having tasted
the first flower of the first spring
we go on,
we don’t turn again
until we touch the last flower of that last spring.

And that day, fondling
each grain one more time, like the overturned hourglass,
we die
of the return-streaming of everything we have lived.

When the fall apple rolls
into the grass, the apple worm
stops, then goes
all the way through and looks out
at the creation unopposed, the world
made entirely of lovers.

Or else there is no such thing as memory,
or else there is only the empty branches,

only the blossoms upon them,
only the apples,
that still grow full,
that still fail into brightness,
that still invent past their own decay the dream
they can be brighter,
that still
that still

The one who holds still and looks out,
alone
of all of us, that one may die mostly of happiness.

-Galway Kinnell

Day 1 - This Is What Life Does

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

-Eleanor Lerman

No Matter What...

This was a sign posted on a broken tree among the aftermath of one of the tornadoes that hit a local county Saturday evening. Homes were lost, people were injured, the damage is devastating, but the one thing that a tornado can't take from these people--or anyone for that matter--is their faith.

"No matter what, trust God." This is something that I have been diligently trying to work on in my own life, trusting God. Having taken a huge leap of faith and quitting my job shortly after the baby was born, I have been facing fears that things may not work out, fears of having to rely on the hubs when I've never relied on anyone my entire life. The security of knowing that I will be taken care of because I take care of myself has vanished. My peace of mind has always been determined by my sense of security and I'm currently struggling to maintain my peace of mind without it. I am trying to rebuild my relationship with God. I have finally arrived at a point where I have accepted that I am not perfect and that I have a long way to go to be in the place I need to be but I am taking baby steps to arrive there. I have been praying for the ability to trust Him rather than scramble around frantically trying to mend the things of my life or to always have a solution readily available rather than relying on Him to take care of things, to show me which path to take, to trust. A few days after leaving my job my car left my baby and I broken down on the side of the road. My first thought was that it was a sign that I had made the wrong decision leaving work and then that thought was crowded out by one a bit louder telling me, or perhaps God has created an opportunity for you to trust Him. I decided not to act on the reply to give him a call, a response to the email I had sent to my boss inquiring about the possibility of coming back. Though a constant struggle, I decided to trust.

Recently, I have been finding acute inspiration from various poems that I have come across. Getting back to my 37 Days project compilation that I abandoned shortly after the new year, I decided to create my own 37 Days project and post these inspirational poems here on my blog for the next 37 days. Even if I am unable to post personal blogs, I will remain committed to these poems in hopes of, if for no one else, uplifting myself, offering hope, instilling peace.

I'll begin with this motivational quote I found on a bottle of body wash, no doubt. The company Philosophy is all about luxurious and scrumptious bath and body products, each bottle containing a fun and feel-good quote, shampoo for the body and soul, if you will. This one I found particularly inspiring. It's called Shear Splendor, and splendor it is; the bottle reads:

we dream of the perfect life, perfect health, the perfect relationship, even perfect hair. in doing so we lost sight of the most perfect thing there is. we call it the perfect plan. it is the invisible energy life force that directs our every move, every triumph and every set back. it is the master plan that requires no perfection. once you surrender to it you genuinely see the perfection that is God's plan.

Welcome

After 9 long months, Wyatt Alexander finally made his way into the world on March 15th, 2011 at 9:56pm weighing in at 7lbs. 12oz. and 20 inches long.

The journey for him was a slow one. I entered the hospital around 5:30am at 3 centimeters dialated and the doctor broke my water at 7am. Twelve hours later, I was only a centimeter further dialated than I had been that morning. Plans were in the making that a C-section may be in order as the doctor started thinking that perhaps my pelvis was too small to pass the baby's head. She did another exam and manipulated his head a little bit and within an hour I was dialated the remaining 6 centimeters and ready to push. Twenty minutes later, Wyatt's tiny head emerged with the umbilical cord doubly wrapped around it. The doctor was able to quickly cut it away and attribute it to the reason he had been so slow to descend. Thankfully, aside from causing him to rock the labor casbah a little slower than expected, no permanent damage occurred.


He is absolute perfection.

Creaks

At nine months pregnant, I am still trying to arrive at a place in my mind where it is acceptable and even encouraged that some days I do nothing. Nothing typically consists of reading, tinkering about online, catching up on digitally streamed episodes of television shows I no longer watch for my loathing of the actual television set, perhaps a delicious afternoon nap. I have learned in my preference for silence, aside from ticking clocks, organic sounds that permeate the house walls from outdoors and the intermittent bleep of my cell phone, that this house creaks. The house is specific with its creaks saving most of them for the evening hours as the silence becomes muffled by the fading sun, particularly down the hallway. Numerous occasions have found my dog and I casting glances towards the hall in search of the entity causing the creaks, how they mimic footsteps. Our eyes'searches always turn up only the quick shadows of black and white photo's lining the long wall, silver and matte black photo frames of varying sizes and shapes. The silence and creaks, thought to reassure one that soaking in a lazy river of nothingness is acceptable at nine months pregnant, only validates my guilt. Things have been done. Over the past few weeks I have cleaned out and reorganized my pantry, begun painting the nursery, taken photo's, listed auctions, and shipped numerous packages, not to mention designed, photographed, and listed jewelry all in the name of extra income. I have hung up clothes that have remained in piles at the foot of my bed or dangling from an abandoned eliptical machine propped behind the door that I have also listed for sale. I have read several books, blogged recently, washed baby clothes until I was completely intoxicated with the delicately fresh scent of the bundle of joy floating around in my swollen belly that I am soon to meet. Despite all of that, the guilt of doing nothing festers in the small, dark corners of my stomach not already occupied by the baby. I am still trying to learn how to breathe which is difficult to do when you're suffocating.

Smudges of Waterproof Mascara

It is the memories and images that randomly come to mind that make it so hard to forget. The telephone call where I found myself out of character, vulnerable as I tearfully pleaded for him not to do what he was about to do which, in turn, elicited his own tearful response that he had to go. It was too much for him to bear, this was left unsaid, a given. The desperate and lonely bathing sessions, crying until it felt impossible that another tear could fall before it started up all over again. Trying to gain my composure, defeated by what was out of my hands, mindlessly staring at the sudsy water, which I could see clearly even through the tears, smudges of waterproof mascara, unlike my inability to see this coming. The feelings of being abandoned, the emptiness, the only relationship I could honestly describe as amazing, over without warning. Blind-sided. The songs that incessantly played their melancholy over the airwaves at all the wrong times while explaining exactly how I was feeling, reminders. "It's a quarter after one and I'm all alone and I need you now," lyrics that still bittersweetly sting me. Text messages, misleading but with drops of hope, that he missed me paired with the instantaneous thought that he was laying beside her, skin to skin, as he quickly punched the words into his phone. It didn't prove to be enough to turn photo frames over, they stared back at me when I lay in bed bragging that they encompassed everything that I loved. I packed them away along with everything else that refreshed my memory, as if the fragrance of them could be stifled by the stench of moth balls, forgotten if removed from sight. Aside from my broken-heart, my spirit had taken the brunt of the damage. Perhaps outside of the hurt that still resides in me most of my resentment is internalized for temporarily forgetting that he was human, thinking he would never hurt me like this. Trusting. I knew better. I allowed myself to get hurt. Just once though, I wanted to be the chosen one, the one so deeply loved that hurting me would be unfathomable. Perhaps I romanticize the capabilities of mankind, or rather their incapabilities. It is possible the books that I so often lose myself in have instead caused me to lose myself to the thought that true love exists...not the diluted euphoric love that eventually wears off after the honeymoon, but genuine love. The ultimate fact is that this broken spirit is simply harboring the paralyzing fear that it just wasn't meant for me.