Monday, September 22, 2008
Equinox
Today is the first day of Autumn, and I really have nothing in particular to say about it aside that my heart seems to be overflowing from the sheer fact that the afternoon light is streaming through the atmosphere and hitting the sidewalk at the perfect slanted angle and trees are becoming confused about their colors and leaves about their subsequent displacement. Today the earth with divide equally the time it spends turning to face the sun and the time it spends making its retreat. Everything is going to sleep, but I am waking up. Waking up and drumming and exercising my imagination and writing run-on sentences with haphazard punctuation. All of this being reflective of my lack of direction, but my uncanny joy at the forward motion of life and my need to express said joy as it comes up.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
A Story Told with Permission
Disclaimer: Not all quotes are direct...more of paraphrases for narrative purpose
I always appreciate the opportunity to be a spectator when people reveal a little bit more of their humanity - especially the people whom I love so well. I don't remember how it came up, but the other day my family was sitting around talking about homesickness and anxiety. Mom told me this story:
"When we moved [from Baton Rouge] to North Carolina, Rachel was two years old and we only had one car. So we had to share the car to go anywhere. Every morning, me and Rachel and Papa would get in the car and drive Papa to work at Research Triangle Park. We would drop him off and then all the way home I would cry and Rachel and I would sing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.'"
Aunt Em asks, "why did you cry?"
"I guess I was just so homesick I didn't know what to do."
For some reason this really struck a deep chord in me. My mom was 26 or 27 years old at this point - still young, but older than I am now, very a much a person well-established in adulthood (as much as that's really possible for any of us...). And for months, she cried every morning from homesickness and used music and the company of a two-year old to cope. I see so much of her in myself - experiencing the same fear and emotional undoing that I regularly experience and will probably continue to undergo in similar circumstances, beautiful as they may ultimately be. It's so important for me to see that she made it. That she's a person, overall, in a state of internal peace. These struggles never leave us - especially those of us very often hanging on a last frayed nerve. But how alive we are!
"Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul,
and sings the tune without the words
and never stops at all."
-Emily Dickinson
I always appreciate the opportunity to be a spectator when people reveal a little bit more of their humanity - especially the people whom I love so well. I don't remember how it came up, but the other day my family was sitting around talking about homesickness and anxiety. Mom told me this story:
"When we moved [from Baton Rouge] to North Carolina, Rachel was two years old and we only had one car. So we had to share the car to go anywhere. Every morning, me and Rachel and Papa would get in the car and drive Papa to work at Research Triangle Park. We would drop him off and then all the way home I would cry and Rachel and I would sing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.'"
Aunt Em asks, "why did you cry?"
"I guess I was just so homesick I didn't know what to do."
For some reason this really struck a deep chord in me. My mom was 26 or 27 years old at this point - still young, but older than I am now, very a much a person well-established in adulthood (as much as that's really possible for any of us...). And for months, she cried every morning from homesickness and used music and the company of a two-year old to cope. I see so much of her in myself - experiencing the same fear and emotional undoing that I regularly experience and will probably continue to undergo in similar circumstances, beautiful as they may ultimately be. It's so important for me to see that she made it. That she's a person, overall, in a state of internal peace. These struggles never leave us - especially those of us very often hanging on a last frayed nerve. But how alive we are!
"Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul,
and sings the tune without the words
and never stops at all."
-Emily Dickinson
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