PSST! Rantings, Musings, & "Not Your Mama's" Platitudes

I've spent the past several weeks full of worry. For my daughter. For my parents. For my finances. I just spent the past two hours budgeting, canceling any subscriptions that I could, and applying for part-time jobs on top of my full-time job. I am very concerned, as many other people are right now. Everything feels so volatile. I'm not sure what to do. All I want is to be able to pay my bills and have a savings account. I went without home internet for a full year. I finally broke down and got it again a couple of months ago. I'm already pausing it because I simply cannot afford it. I am very thankful for my job, and I know that if I stick it out, I will get paid more as the years progress. I just need to keep my head down and keep going. Everything will be okay. I'm done mourning my life and my past. Life isn't what I thought or hoped it would be. That's just how it goes. I have a job, I have a home, and I enjoy the company of a couple of cats and a couple of ...

DOING whatever  I feel like  doing for the rest of my life  would be nice. Meanwhile, there is a  meanwhile. Where is  it?

I shall go out again and find a tree, trees, pines, mountains of pine If my silence succeeds in song, you will hear of it from the winds.

For out of a house of matchboard and stone     Where men would argue till the stars be green,   It is good to step onto the earth, alone,           And be struck dumb, if only for a time.

We are all living in cages with the door wide open.

You are immortal; you've existed for billions of years in different manifestations, because you are life, and life cannot die. You are in the trees, the butterflies, the fish, the air, the moon, the sun. Wherever you go, you are there, waiting for yourself.

I lift my eyes To the blue Open-ended ocean. Why worry? Some things are always there.

Human beings  are made of water— we were not designed to hold ourselves together rather run freely like oceans like rivers

My daughter is bored so I tell her silverfish are neither silver nor a fish, but a spoon-dull insect that loves kitchens bathrooms the mouths of children. " Silverfish! Silverfish! " she squeals, the word peeling from her lips and crawling down her legs. She watches me knead the day's dough and asks if Kleenex are used to clean necks. The TV says a crane collapsed off 34th and she wants to know if it's because the crane was thirsty. Some afternoons we visit the neighborhood pool and even though she can barely swim my daughter isn't afraid. She's so unafraid it makes me afraid. She loves it when I pick her up and throw her as far away as possible. She loves to paddle back and scream Again! Again! But she loves it most when I swim away as fast as I can, when my back becomes a shore she's trying to reach. My daughter's named the pool Edna. Sometimes Edna helps her reach me. When it's time to go my daughter says, "See you soon, Edna." Every d...

Maybe it's a kind of freedom too. To stay home.

"And when I turned to face grief, I saw that it was just love in a heavy coat." Shannon Barry "My brother used to ask the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless but it is right; for all is like the ocean, all things flow and touch each other; a disturbance in one place is felt at the other end of the world." Fyodor Dostoyevsky "Maybe you've spent some time trying every day not to die, out on your own somewhere. Maybe that effort has become your work in life." Donald Antrim "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." Audre Lorde "And the world has become merely an unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing." Albert Camus "May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children." Rainer Maria Rilke "How wild it was, to let it be." Cheryl Strayed "The first rule is to keep an untroubled ...

Picking Cranberries The week after you arrived, I took you cranberry picking on the trails close to town.  You told me about your husband, your clenched jaw, the damage the pressure had done. I picked, fingers pulling, cooling against hard, dark berries. Buckets filled, sun slanted through the birch. That afternoon our words puffed visible from our mouths, and I knew what it had been for you, arriving more difficult than departing. I reached for your bucket and poured in my berries. I can see you in your kitchen in December, the short day peers in the window while your hands break open the bag. One square of pale sunlight on the sugar, measured, waiting.