Hearing nothing, everything.

It's easy in the bustling clashes of spring to see beauty everywhere. Green burgeons into yellow into blue sky, and everywhere there is the buzz of bugs and people going outside for the sake of it. Warmth that jostles the cells of your skin so that even you feel a certain burning. Life is blooming everywhere in all of its noisy, chaotic urgency. An obvious beauty.

It's easy to forget, then, how beautiful it is to walk in late fall. How simply necessary it is, how vital it feels to the soul. We walked yesterday just before the sun went down and it was chilly and gray and brown and still. The trees have been scraped nearly barren over the last few weeks, and where leaves remained on branches they were yellow and fragile, shivering in the wind. You can see for miles through the tress now and everything stands so certain, so solid and resolute.

If you stopped walking to listen, you would hear: nothing. Nothing except a cold endless sweep of sound in the distance, cars rushing down a nearby road, the lonely sound of a plane overhead, the tiny rustling of leaves from creatures burrowing deep against the cold.

The river, even. The swirls and eddies that I could swear make noise in the spring are eerily silent, slipping and overlapping in one long, continuous run over the top of the water. Little whirlpools appear here and there. We stopped to listen and heard: nothing. A long silence.

On the walk home we talked of poetry, and I told the girls about the Yehuda Amichai poem where he describes a woman whose skin is made of lizards, and all of them love the sun. We talked about the same poem, where the woman has the laughter of grapes, many round, green laughs. I asked the girls what that would sound like.

"Shaking," Madeleine says. "Like when they're in the trees and the wind blows them."

We're quiet as I contemplate that. It's a perspective I hadn't considered - I always think of when you eat grapes, how they feel in your mouth and how sweet they are when you bite them. I like her take here in this long, quiet cold - the poem feels sadder to me from her perspective, more grounded. I picture green grapes hanging from the vine, trembling in the wind, on the verge of falling. I feel grateful.

Dream little.

There's all this talk about the importance of dreaming big. I took a whole online class on the subject, in fact, and found it wonderfully inspiring. I just found a notebook for dreaming big - complete with three steps on how to get to the big dreams (I guess), and I was so lured by those gleaming words - "dream big" - that I felt that little buy it! click in my brain. It's the answer, my brain whispered at me. That's where your happiness is.

No. No no no no no.

I love the idea of dreaming big because I think it's important to inflate your concept of what is possible, to stretch the boundaries of possibility and explore them, and to take it further and step outside of them, just to see what happens when you do. That's where the excitement is, surely, and some would say the contentment is there, too.

But you can't live there.

Climb the shiny turrets as far as you can, take in the view from up there and appreciate the big picture for all it's worth. But don't live there.

I say: dream little. A dream is just a beautiful idea of what reality could be, and the thing is that a beautiful reality is always right in front of your face if you want it to be. Little is where you live. Little is what you are. Contentment is up there, but it's down here, too. It should be, anyway. Lift up a rock and look for it. Toss a pebble and watch it ripple across water. Feel it in the small hands of your children and the smell of coffee and butter melting on toast, in the sound of biting into an apple and the thump of your very own heart in your chest.

It takes time to build a home in the clouds, above the shiny turrets, just like it took time to build a home right where you are today. Who knows if the impossible is even attainable? Who cares? Take slow steps. Keep your eyes firmly ahead, even if you're climbing toward something. It's so easy to forget the beauty right in front of you if you're always reaching for something higher.

That second of attainment.

Sticky hot, and miserable, my limbs are heavy and tired. My eyes are fuzzy; it feels like sand beneath my lids. Things are slightly out of focus and I have the stirring of a headache at my temple. I don't really want to be here, but I'm trudging along, trying to find my way through the muck, to find comfort in old patterns. It's not what I want to do, but I know it's what I should do, and that right now, when I feel this way, what I want to do is a trap. I don't want to get stuck there.

I want to smash through this fuzziness, plow through it, remember energy coursing in my muscles. Remember joy. Remember that life isn't this gross haze I've been slogging in.

My husband is walking just behind me with Violet; I am walking with Mad. Mad is carrying a clear plastic tupperware container, excited at the prospect of catching a lizard. I wonder at her dogged enthusiasm for the endeavor, and wonder at the stirring of excitement I always feel at the prospect of lizard-hunting. I'm sure that one day we'll find The Big One, meaning that we'll find some lizard, any lizard, and bring it home. Mad would be ecstatic.

Violet's been in a mood, but when she sees me ahead, she breaks into a smile and runs to me yelling "Mama!" And I am worried she's going to trip because she's still so....loose, her legs folding around each other, arms open outward, she's reaching for me.

But she makes it to me as I close the distance and I pick her up and swing her high into the air and she is all smiles, and I take a minute to appreciate her smile, the way happiness just beams from her face when she smiles, the way her eyes pop with joy.

We make it to the dead end and stop for drinks and Wayland and Mad go down a side path looking for lizards, and I peer worriedly down at them as they navigate a steep wall leading down to a chasm where the river is winding through. I don't worry too much, because I know Wayland would never let her fall, that he's careful, and then I wonder at my steady belief in that.

Violet is thrilled because Mad's leaving her stuffed cats unattended, and she's talking to them and moving them from cement block to cement block, sorting. I lean back on one of the cement blocks and stare up at the sky and wish I had my camera because the light is beating through the trees overhead in a different way. It's still summer and still hot, but it feels different somehow, less oppressive, and as the sun warms my skin and I rest and listen to Violet playing happily. I wonder why people feel compelled to take pictures of the sky, and I know it's not really so much an attempt to capture what they're looking at but how they feel when they look at it, that there are days when the sky and you match perfectly, the wide expanse, the sun the stuff of life and you believe in it, you feel it's blessing you: go ahead and hope. Really, it's why you're here.

And Wayland and Mad come back and they don't have a lizard, but they go to another side path and a few minutes later they come back out and Mad is holding her tupperware container out in front of her, looking triumphant. "Tell her," says Wayland and Mad is so excited she can't really tell me anything. She thrusts the tupperware container out and finally says lizard! And I am on my feet peering inside.

"She caught it herself," says Wayland. "I had nothing to do with it; she just plucked it from the ground and said, 'A SKINK!'"

I look at it. She was right -- it is a skink. I look at her beaming with pride.

In a few seconds the moment passes because Mad notices that Violet is playing with her cats and there is the usual fight over stuff. It is time to go home and the girls fall apart; Mad is tired and ignoring our directions, Violet is tired and crying, wanting to walk but not reallywanting to walk, so the whole walk home is trying to make her okaywith being held but mostly just juggling her weight, trying not to drop her as she thrashes angrily. And I am miserable in it, miserable again.

Life is that. A journey that is sometimes miserable, sometimes not, toward a goal that may or may not pan out. But you go, you do it anyway, because that moment of realization, that second of attainment - the smiling daughters, the caught lizard - is what you live for. It's what you ache for. It's what sustains you on the second leg of the journey, when all you want to do is run away, or at least stop moving, or just fast forward yourself to the next destination.

I want to learn these things, then remember I have to relearn them over and over again. I want my daughters to know these things. I want them to always look for lizards. I want them always to seize the moment, grasp opportunity, like Violet did when she played with Mad's toys. I want them to always stare up at the sky even when they are tired and restless and feel miserable, and recognize it, I want them to always want to take its picture.

Reposted from Umbrella Sewing, the old blog, because it's a good reminder today.