Brave limbs reaching up for the sun.

Perhaps you can walk the length of the sidewalk and keep your head up, and notice the sprouts shooting from optimistic trees and brave limbs reaching up for the sun. Maybe it's chilly when the wind blows and you wrap your arms around yourself. The sun still feels so good, surprising, this unexpected blessing you are just starting to get used to. So spring better come, and soon.

Maybe you've got some dim unformed dream of a well-organized life, proactive decisions, fully built dreams you hold firmly in hand, energized by the very act of breathing, motivated to try for more because -- Why not? Don't you deserve more?

Oh, this pressure.

For now, maybe you can just keep walking, keep your head up, feel the expanse of blue sky -- and receive it like a benediction. These blessings are yours, after all. The sprouts, the chilly wind, the brave limbs. And you know what? Yours are brave, too.

You've known it the whole time.

And I do need the grass to sway.

"Northern Lights" by the Bowerbirds.

Lovely day.

I might love the bokeh hearts tool in Picnik a little much.

I'm just pulling on a line.

three minutes and twenty four seconds of being at green lake from Amazing Factory Productions Inc. on Vimeo.

I keep crawling inside my head to pull words out, but they're stuck. I pull and I pull but nothing comes out, at least not the words I want. So: more music and a sweet video. Breathe, soul. Breathe.

Sing, sing to the lovely tune.

Art by Juliapott
Rad song: "Mazel Tov" by Walter

The ten minute pilgrimage.

I haven't wanted to write lately and it wasn't until last night that I was inspired to do it anyway. We took a quick trek down to the river, a ten minute pilgrimage down to the bank's edge where walls of dirt rise up on either side of the water, 30 feet high. A huge bridge spans above spans across those walls high above us. It's a great way to feel so, so small.

Somewhere along the way -- sometimes when my feet step onto that huge bridge, sometimes right when we reach the water's edge, sometimes later, closer to when we're ready to leave -- I feel this unloosening, a knot of something in my chest unraveling, slowly, smoothly, every time we go there. Standing there at the water's edge, watching strands of pink clouds reach far across the horizon, seeing the water reach and wind all the way around the bank, into some unknown infinity -- it's like I take my first real breaths of the day.

It got me thinking about the other time I feel this way:

- Sunday morning bike rides with the family, exploring the excavated land just past the six mile marker.
- Just after a run, when my breath is ragged and I feel spent, exhausted, like I just accomplished something really, really good.
- Putting the finishing touches on a perfectly clean kitchen.
- The act of baking or cooking something healthy and delicious for my family to eat.
- On the nights when Mad is actually tired at bedtime, and I snuggle in bed with her for the last few moments of the evening.
- Waking Violet up in the morning, holding her sleep-heavy body while she slowly, slowly wakes up to greet the day.

If anyone is reading this, I'd love to know what your version of a ten minute pilgrimage is - or whatever helps you feel that slow, necessary unraveling and take your first real breaths of the day.

Curating Flickr: Spring!

(click any picture to follow it back to its source)

Before they turn the summer into dust.

In honor of Arcade Fire winning a Grammy (!), probably my favorite Arcade Fire song:

I mean: "If the children don't grow up/Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up/We're just a million little gods causing rainstorms/Turning every good thing to rust/I guess we'll just have to adjust" ... COME ON. Every single time I hear this part I have to make an effort not to full-on SOB. It's just SO GOOD.

Drowning beautiful.

"Artist Jason de Caires Taylor creates life-size cement sculptures of people and submerges them into the waters of South America. As time passes the sculptures become part of the underwater landscape and slowly become artificial reefs ripe with marine life." (From Two Four Flinching - click through to see more amazing pictures.)

Her strange inventions.

The couch I'm sitting on is black leather, or faux leather, and there is a giant, slobbery St. Bernard sitting at my feet, staring at me with woeful eyes. My husband sits next to me, our bodies sagging toward the middle of the couch, thighs touching.

It is nearing the end of our session and we both have to go back to work. We've covered the usual stuff, and then Mad's play therapist pauses to collect her thoughts, eyes cast upward as she considers her words.

"One thing I wanted to talk to you about is Asperger's," she says, brown eyes meeting ours in turn. Her tone is warm and light, practiced. "Have you -- either of you -- read or heard much about it?"

Everything in me goes still, even as my brain starts spiraling away from the scene, denying where this new line of conversation is taking us. I think back to everything I've ever read on Autism and Asperger's, think of the blogs I've read and the show Parenthood and that one book about the kid looking for who or what killed the neighbor's dog and Temple Grandin, even.

It's easier to say I don't know much about it because what I know of Asperger's comes from loosely associated personal stories and pop culture references. I see Wayland come to that conclusion as well. We both deny, deny, deny.

She explains it to us in simple terms, touching on Mad's social development, her repetitive behaviors and a few other quirks. She asks if we've noticed anything like that at home and I say no almost before I can think it.

Wayland pauses, offers an observation of something he's noticed.

The play therapist nods. "I just want to be able to rule it out," she says. "We're certainly not making a diagnosis or anything. It's more for you guys than it is her - so we know what quirks we're dealing with, what we can expect in terms of development."

We nod.

The session ends and we're saying our goodbyes, then walking to the car.

"I feel....weird," I offer to Wayland after a moment of silence.

"Yeah," he agrees. "But this is not a big deal, really. I'm filing it under something to worry about later, if we need to."

This seems logical. I agree.

Still, ever since then, I find myself watching her behavior, cataloging it, wondering: Is this odd? Is it different? Her obsession with putting things in containers, of sorting things - not as a function of neatness, but because she wants everything to have a home, a place to be contained. Her obsession with footies - another container - and being wrapped in blankets, having a "nest."

Her method of engaging other kids, which involves jumping up and down right in front of the kid, invading his or her space, and laughing excitedly. I think with a wince of watching her do that at school, the way she would pause every now and then to check the kid's face, to see if they were making a connection. So hopeful. And they weren't making a connection - the other kid was confused - but Mad just kept jumping because it was the only thing she knew to do.

Her single-minded obsessions, which right now are 1) reptiles (as always) and 2) coloring every single page in a coloring book in one sitting.

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, is what I come up with. And the steady strum of worry in my chest, low but always there. And then there is the other side of it: her deep brown eyes, the strange inventions she is always imagining up for us, the elaborate stories she makes up as she flips through the pages of her books, the empty notebooks she has filled with scribbles. Each page means something, is a larger story she is eager to share: The Lonely Worm Wants His Family. The Cat Finds a Home. Where Did All the Snakes Go?

At night, in bed, saying she is lonely and asking for cuddle time. Of course, I tell her. She curls into the slope of my shoulder and reaches out to hold my hand. She's perfect.