Etch-a-sketch vision

What is my problem, anyway?

I feel timid. Unsure.

Where are my bold strokes of brilliance, light steps, raised fists, solar bursts of joy?

Where is my elemental sense of belonging?

I don't feel right. Down to my cells. Something is wrong.

It's that I have this clear vision of what I want for my life in my head and it is NOT AT ALL what my life actually is right now. It's not like I'm asking for diamonds or leather boots for unicorn riding. I'm not asking for a unicorn.

I'm asking for BALANCE, yes, a feeling that I am doing well at my work and doing well in my home. I'm asking for more time at home and less time at work. I'm asking for passion for home and passion for work. And, well,

I might as well be asking for diamonds.

I can't unstick myself. I'm like detritus snagged on a submerged limb in a river. I can't go with the flow.

This the problem, how I frame myself. Detritus. Snagged. Submerged limbs. Can't.

Be the river, maybe. Don't make a plan. Erase that etch-a-sketch vision I have for my life, just give it a good shaking and it's gone. Color within the lines of what I have, then smudge it a bit. Cerulean blue streaking the page into yellow into red then off the table.

Make a mess and get there.

Do magical, miraculous movie moments ever happen in real life? If so, I'd like one to happen to me today or some time soon. Pleaseandthankyou.

The people I really like to see.

From Geese Aplenty:

"The people I really like to see are a rare occurrence, but I keep an eye out for them. They’re the people who come at you from the opposite direction. And they’re smiling and laughing. You have to look to see if they’re actually talking on a bluetooth, or if a little white wire trickling out of their ears indicates they’re listening to a funny podcast. If not, then you’re in the presence of a very rare sighting. You’ve found the people who are remembering something or thinking something so great that they can’t keep it inside of them. It floats up to their face and causes them to grin as they walk, and they carry their amusement with them like a balloon."

Here is what we grow toward.

Life begins in the first gasp of breath, when you take the outside world into your body for the first time and let it fill your lungs. When you give back to the world by exhaling, letting that piece of the world out again. So begins our relationship with human existence.

If you’re healthy, you’re expected to cry big lusty cries, gulping the world in greedily so you can send it screaming back out again.

Mothers hold their babies and feel whole and halved all at once, and they might cry, too, an overwhelmed give and take with the world. Gentle, thankful exhalations or great gulping sobs of fear and exhilaration. We feel it all at once.

Babies are calmer nestled against their mothers, mothers calmer nestled against their babies. So begins our relationship with eternity.

Plans are made. We imagine great big lives for our babies; we imagine the whole world for them. We see all the potential in them, expect to see them grow bigger than the room that holds them, to have every bit of greatness you ever imagined and were too scared to strive for, and then some. And somehow that they will still fit within us, that our shared bodies will still make sense in some cosmic way.

Sometimes our plans work and we are relieved or smug or both. Sometimes our plans don’t work and we despair.

But here is what we grow toward, regardless of plans: a simple life, a smaller life. We don’t ever really want to be bigger than a room. We do want to be contained, to fit somewhere. We want our lives to be small enough to slip into a pocket and go. What we really want is freedom.

Our lives end in rooms, in beds or chairs, in our bodies that will no longer accept the world, regardless of the plans we made. This is the universe’s plan for you, and it is never smug when its plans are realized, and its plans are always realized.

If you lived well, your life fitting just so into your pocket or the palm of your hand, the universe will cast its eyes up into the sky in relief, in thanks, to be carrying a soul so light and free that it can rise and fill a galaxy.

Three things.

1. Last night I dreamed I was riding a train on the way to a work conference that was far away. After riding for a long time, we stopped near a mountain for lunch. When we returned from lunch, the conductor was standing outside of the train, scratching his head and looking confused. "This is taking longer than I thought it would," he said. I saw a map of the route we were taking, and it was long and winding, circuitous. The conductor said, "Someone else is going to have to drive. Someone who will get us there faster." Then an old woman showed up and ushered a bunch of kids onto the train.

2. This quote by e.e. cummings: "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

3. This song by Josh Ritter, which will be the cornerstone of my Fall 2010 mix.

I belong to all my beloved.

(From the Breast cancer: High risk of reoccurrence series by Amanda Enayati)

This is not my world. You don’t own me and I don’t belong here. I belong to the lush green world, filled with grass and trees and flowers. I belong to rolling hills and mountains and rivers and oceans. I belong to fresh air and soft warm wind. I belong to Beethoven and Chopin and Corinne Bailey Rae and James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel and Stevie Wonder. I belong to the scents of lavender and jasmine and honeysuckle. I belong to hours-long, leisurely bike rides with stops for lunch or to read under a tree. I belong to watermelons and cherries and Satsuma mandarins. I belong to the "Matrix" and "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" and all manners of random science fiction movies. I belong to Charles Dickens and Chimamanda Adichie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Maya Angelou and JRR Tolkien and Jhumpa Lahiri and every one of the Bronte sisters. I belong to Tehran and Shiraz and Den Brielle, to London, Paris and Edinburgh and Capri and Cape Town, to Washington, D.C., and New York. I belong to my girl and my boy and my husband. I belong to all my beloved. I belong to myself.

Maybe it comes from where we are.

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The evening of the after-dark neighborhood fair for the kids was, in a word, lovely. It was pleasantly warm and there were kids and families milling about everywhere, some costumed and some not, and we all joined together on this evening with a shared purpose: to delight our children. And so we were delighted in turn.

Madeleine played games in her pink skirt with silver sparkles, tossing bean bags into tubs marked with snakes and navigating a pumpkin through a hay maze with a push broom. Once she played all the games, she selected a prize that came in a plain brown bag: a few erasers, a pencil and a toy centipede.

I walked with Violet to the face painting table, and she sat perfectly still while the high school volunteer painted a black nose and whiskers on her face. The volunteer held a mirror to Violet's face and I watched V, rewarded when a huge smile lit her eyes. Sheer pleasure is all you can see when Violet is happy, unadulterated joy every single time.

The girls sat in a fire truck and talked to the firemen who gave them plastic "stop, drop and roll" bracelets. We collected pumpkins from the pumpkin patch and the girls decorated theirs with markers and foam stickers.

We walked back home in the dark, the girls with their princess glow wands and Wayland with his phone set on the flashlight app to light the way. Madeleine was thrilled, chattering away the whole time as she ran down the sidewalk. Violet wanted to be held, so I held her, hefting all 30 pounds of her the mile + walk home.

Of course we were on the lookout for snakes, and we found one to the side of the trail, unmoving for a brief moment while Wayland shined a light on it. A copperhead, orange and almost pinkish in the light, stared back at him for a moment before it slithered back into the bushes.

Thanks to Madeleine's obsession with snakes, we have become very knowledgeable about the types of snakes in the area and have a healthy respect for the poisonous ones, knowing that if we keep our distance, we will be safe. Madeleine pondered ways we might have been able to catch it, determining that a net would be our best bet for capturing a copperhead.

"We wouldn't want to keep a copperhead for a pet," I tell her for the millionth time, and she pauses before replying. "I know, but I would be careful," she tells me. "It couldn't bite us with a net, and I know if I hold it I will just hold it by its head. And that way it can't bite me!"

My fearless daughter, staring at danger and summarily dismissing it -- simply because of her all-consuming passion for the subject at hand. And my other more timid daughter perched in my arms, patting my face and singing the "Nocturnal Animals" song. She makes up her own words: "Over by the twig, I hear a CAT," she sings. "Meow, meow meow." She lays her head down on my shoulder and I shift her weight. "You are HEAVY," I tell her. "No, I'm not," she replies. "I'm small."

And she is. They both are. My two daughters, one insisting she is bigger than a fear that most of us have, the other insisting she is small enough to remain comfortable in my arms forever. They are both right and wrong, this dichotomy that lives in us all: sometimes we are bigger than poisonous snake bites and sometimes we are smaller than our mothers' arms. And tonight, the night spins out all around us, a spiraling depth of darkness and stars and the loud hum of nighttime creatures, and we are all four such small, large things in the middle of it.

A wide, accepting universe.

Lately when I'm walking around campus, I like to look at other people and think, "We're the same." I know we're not the same exactly, but stripped of context, our experiences will be strikingly similar: we've all failed, made mistakes, had successes, enjoyed moments of sheer bliss. Maybe that guy's greatest success has been just getting out of bed on this day. Maybe he woke up and thought, "Not another day. I can't do this," but got up anyway. And maybe that other guy's greatest success is that he just finished a triathlon this morning, and totally rocked it. Either way, I want to pat them both on the back and say, "Good for you!" My greatest success has been having babies. Stretch that all out on the scale of human experience and they will be same-sized blips on the graph.

Thinking we're all the same helps yank me out of the world in my head, pulls me from that place where my problems seem insurmountable and my joys must be bigger than the world because they're happening to me. God, how exhausting. How heavy.

Instead I look around at all these people, who look different and talk differently and are different ages and come from different backgrounds, and think, I'm no different than you. You've been here before. Maybe you are there right now. And suddenly my life feels exactly as large and as small as it should be, and I look at these unfamiliar faces and feel such an incredible warmth toward them. I want to grab them and say, "Isn't it great how we're sharing this experience?"

How comforting this is, to walk in the world and suddenly realize that you belong to it -- and not the other way around. And that there are millions of people in the world who are just the same, resting in the arms of a wide, accepting universe. Resting even if they're thrashing against it because on a grand enough scale, from a far enough perspective, even the most dramatic movements will be imperceptible. We're all still in this place, and even time doesn't matter.

Intersect.

This is what you should know.

You step one foot in front of the other,
down a sidewalk, grass on either side,
buildings knocking against the sky.

It's all around you.

People walk by, whole worlds in their heads.
His is two triangles. Yellow and green.
Hers is placid dark and a silver dip in the distance.

They walk the same sidewalks.
Her shoe size is the same as yours.
He ate a banana for breakfast, you ate a banana muffin.

He is thinking about calculus.

And so are you, really.

Circuitous.

There is a day that unrolls and becomes
everything a day should be;
a day unrolling, a day of everything.