The Gist of It

My main goals for this blog are to be myself--to not get all caught up in whether I sound interesting or funny or cool. To not over-edit my sentences to the point where I whittle away each word and forget to write a whole paragraph. And to write here often enough that there emerges a story of some kind, some kind of path that seems to be sort of just written word by word, but eventually gets where I want to go. That would be gratifying.

Lately I've been trying to remind myself to take things a day at a time. Day by day, I say to myself when I feel overwhelmed. Or else I'll start humming a St. Francis song, something like, "do your work and do it well, step by step go slowly." It's such an enormous concept. To just focus on the moment at hand, to zone in on the present experience and stop all the muddling about of an over-stimulated, over-tired brain. I think daily life can have a way of making people forget themselves, and that's what I am trying to battle right now. It feels too easy to get up every morning, make my tea, follow the same routine, and march forward to evening time where a good book sits next to my pillow and I read a page or two before my eyes can't stay open any longer.

Dream, imagine, happen. A lot fits in there. It's what I believe--maybe more than I care to admit: That every thought you have starts to gain energy. When you think the same thought over and over, it begins to form its own force field, it starts to have actual mass, it begins to head down its own trajectory. Suddenly there you are. But even if you're an optimist, it's very unlikely you'll pat yourself on the back for having the wherewithal to think a good thought and bring about a happy ending. You'll chalk it up to luck or chance or fate, or you might decide the stars had aligned. But my point is that I believe it is all interconnected, that it's impossible to have a thought and for that thought to not have any impact.

I put the word Dream on my daughter's wall, right above her window looking out on our backyard, and that is the only word I want her to worry about for her entire childhood.

It's so easy to look at your offspring and want to give them the world, to hand them every pearl, to wish for them every inspired moment. It's a lot harder to remember to cast your line into the vast, soupy muck of your own adult experience and believe you can pluck out the thing you've been wanting all your life.