Chasing the light of day.

I'm coming back from my run this morning and the sun is just coming up. It's still hazy-dim, and in the distance I can just make out the figures of Madeleine and Wayland standing in the street across from our house. Madeleine sees me and starts running down the street, full speed ahead, in her pajamas and bare feet. I am exhausted from my 4-mile run, but run to meet her anyway, and scoop her up in my arms. "Mama!" she exclaims, happy. Then she grabs her foot. "That hurt my feet a little bit," she says. I squeeze her foot. "I bet it did," I tell her. "But I'm glad you ran to meet me anyway."

Later, she is sitting at the table, eating cheerios. She looks outside. "Wow," she tells me. "It's getting cold out there." She hops out of her chair and runs to stand in the window frame. "GO AWAY, FALL!" she exclaims. "TURN SUNNY! AND BE A TREE!"

Waking up Violet is one of my favorite things to do. She's so heavy with sleep, always, and she stretches her body out, arms overhead, eyes closed. She turns to her side and she's got a raging case of bed head, as usual. I pull her into my lap and she drapes her body over me, head nestled on my shoulder. "Good morning, Violet," I say softly. "Good morning, Mama," she replies in a sleepy, quiet voice. I ask her if she wants to go say good morning to Mad, and still heavy in my arms she says, "Yes," in her decisive way. I ask if I can kiss her. "Just two kisses," she dictates. I kiss her once, twice, then steal a third. She smiles, scrambles out of my lap, and heads down the hall clutching her blanket, looking for her sister.

Listening to "Light of Day," by The Plastics Revolution:

Someday.

If you do the things you need to do by Volume Twenty Five.

What we need is here.

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

Wendell Berry

A meditation of sorts.

I step outside and see the sky - its vibrant blue, the stacks upon stacks of white clouds - and the sky and its clouds belong to me.

I take a breath and feel it in my lungs. All of this air belongs to me.

Where the trees bend and leaves applaud the day, the curves of branches and the enthusiastic, shimmering leaves - it all belongs to me.

I gift polite greetings to the cashier; he gifts them back to me. They rest in my ear. These words belong to me.

This afternoon I will head home and my children will not show me the pockets of their days. They have existed in a space without me for most of it, and that empty space we share, somehow, belongs to me.

It is my space to fill with sure feet, steady legs, wondering eyes, grateful hearts. So the spaces without are not truly without. So that I guide them so steadily that they no longer know I am there. But in spaces of breath, blue skies and clouds, the ovation of leaves and interactions with strangers, they will see beauty. And hopefully feel me there with them.

Inner anchors

I still feel kind of crummy.

But I have been thinking, since just after my birthday, that I needed to go on a short journey early one morning. I need to bring paper and pen and spend time somewhere outside, jotting down intentions for myself. And then I pretty much got sick right away and have spent every spare moment since then sniffling and coughing and resisting the tightening pain in my chest. Sleeping as much as I can.

I've just had it in my head for a long time that 31 is not going to be a good year for me. 32 will be my year, I declared. Then I got to thinking about the folly in that, setting out to believe that just because I am facing a certain set of obstacles, a set of less than convenient or ideal circumstances, that it will be a bad year. Why? So that at the end of it I can say, "Well, I knew it," and revel in that grim self satisfaction?

No.

So 31 will be a good year. Maybe even GREAT.

I had a conversation with my husband where he said, essentially, well -- it's hard when X, Y and Z aren't in order. And I realized today that X is going to create a whole other set of problems.

And I thought, who cares about X, Y and Z? We should be cultivating joy in our daily lives REGARDLESS of X Y Z.

I'd like to get to a point where joy is something I carry around with me, a consistent thing, and not something influenced by the evil machinations of the random factors that can push and pull us in any direction. Life pushes at us from all over. At any given second something can happen to yank us down, pull is an abrupt left turn, or even subtly shift us toward point B.

I'd like joy to be my anchor, something that keeps me firmly in the moment. Something that I can pick up and move with me to the next thing. That joy, those inner anchors -- these are the only things we can ever really control anyway.

Tomorrow, no matter how crummy I feel, I'm getting up early to ride my bike. I'll bring pen and paper, and I'm going to ride until I find the perfect spot to sit and consider joy, to cast an inner anchor.

My life is everything already.

My throat is sore and scratchy and the muscles in my chest and back ache from so much coughing. My whole body feels fatigued, in fact, and while my sinuses are definitely clearer, I am sniffling every few minutes or so.

This is the tail end of the cold, thank goodness. I have the ability to weather a cold and feel like I'm dying, to just feel utterly bleak and miserable throughout the duration. But today is the day of clouds parting, of doors opening, of light streaming through windows. I feel more motivated than I have in all of a week. Who knows, maybe I'll clean something at the house today. Maaaybe.

It helps that yesterday was a day of rescuing snapping turtles from a busy road, cleaning up the kitchen, hot dogs and burgers on the grill, fresh mango, flawless bedtimes, and later, tiramisu and wine and good season finales on TV. Yesterday was also the day that I finally finished The Book Thief, and it is seriously the best thing I have read in forever. The end had me sobbing. Such a beautifully told story.

Plus, on Saturday I rediscovered Kimya Dawson's album, Alphabutt, more specifically the song "Happy Home (Keep on Writing)" and I listen to the "just make sure your life's exciting" refrain at the end and it makes me think of my girls. It fills my chest with that expansive sense of hope and possibility. Their lives can be anything. Why do we grow up and stop thinking that? That our own lives can be anything? My own life can be ANYTHING. Say it with me: My life can be ANYTHING.

Maybe it's better to think: My life is everything already. Say that, and wrap your arms around it and squeeze it hard before flinging it up into the sky and watching to see where it lands.

The fun theory!

More awesome videos here. So great!

Say, "I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye."

Is there anything more flattering than when someone tells you they were reading something and thought of you? Well, unless they were reading something vile. Anyhow.

Today a coworker brought me his book, "Peace Is Every Step" by Thich Nhat Hanh because the excerpt, "Flower Insights," made him think of me.

It was a tremendous thing to read on a day like today, where it has been raining all morning, everything gray, and my head is foggy with an impending cold. It got me thinking of mindfulness most especially, and what a difficult word that is to even wrap your head around. To be aware of the moment in its simplest form -- not just where you are and what you are doing, but to be aware of yourself, in your body. Aware of your own physical presence and the space it takes up in the universe. And to be acutely aware of that scale - the universe: grand, immense; you: tiny, small.

Here are two things that remind me of being mindful, that implore me to stop stepping outside of myself to worry and fret or plan and execute, that tell me: just be.

From "Flower Insights": That is the problem of life. If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything. When a child presents himself to you with his smile, if you are not really there thinking about the future or the past, or preoccupied with other problems then the child is not really there for you. The technique of being alive is to go back to yourself in order for the child to appear like a marvelous reality. Then you can smile and embrace him in your arms. Read the whole thing here.

And the Kimya Dawson song, "I Like Giants."

3 Lovely Things

1. Still dark on my morning jog, rounding the corner out of the park, listening to Arcade Fire's "Rococo" while lightning flashes in the distance.

2. Driving to work in the rain, listening to Frontier Ruckus' "The Upper Room."

3. A dark, gray day in September, hazy headlights sopping up the rain.

A shaking quiet psalm.

the rain itches

its cold way

through

a stitch of cloud

in and out of silver

out of silver,

blue and gray

she steps streets,

supplanted

this moving day

of replacement

from here,

to there,

now here again

she steps streets,

everything upended

she swims a

blacktop

through a story:

the beginning

a brightness

the middle

a dirge

the end

a shaking

quiet

psalm of a

rainstorm