Wrap your head with this material...

You know that music they play in massage salons that's all zen and watery? Sometimes when I hear it, I think about screaming, "No, YOU , calm down!!" 

Things that give me a sense of plenty: an empty drawer, closet, or bookshelf. Spaces you could fill whenever. A beautiful day where you don't take advantage of the weather, instead playing piano and not  taking a moment to notice the warmth of the sun on the back of your neck. Perhaps in those days I am a moon person.  Yesterday was like that. Christmas day, but without the family obligations of getting dressed up or making elaborate dishes or carting presents here or there. In past years, that's made me sad. I've felt the loss of the hubbub of all those people, felt the loss of that rush you get being with people who make you so excited and amped up like my cousins and family did when I was a kid. As an adult, I haven't been able to get over the loss of that as all the cousins have moved on to do their own thing and my own family has unraveled and become a set of beautiful scraps I examine in individual pieces.  But this year, nearly everyone spent Christmas in in a so...

 The morning of the last online class day before Christmas break I usually let my students choose fun activity. They can choose creative writing, Christmas carol around the school, or play games. One year a group of kids picked caroling and two of the boys performed this for the stoic Math teacher. They even had a sweet beat they played on the lockers for it. This year with online learning, it was hard to imagine how we would carol. But have no fear, the kids figured it out. By conspiring with classmates, they got the meeting code to crash another class. My class went to Spanish and sang Feliz Navidad (badly, and I mean  badly). Then we just stayed and played the Kahoot that class was playing and that was super fun. Then in my last class of the day, the boys from last year performed a dramatic poem that was imaginative and fun and a little strange, and dang, do I love to know someone's strange. I feel like it's a reflection of belonging when someone can let their weird spread ...

 I was about to type in a text to a friend a few days ago that said 'oh shit, here comes the guilt and panic.' but then autocorrect changed to it 'guilt and penis' and I decided to consider it an omen and not get myself quite so worked up. Just the next right action. What do I need to do right now? 

I want to sleep beneath the skin of a pond stare at boat bottoms, gliding above me, lay in the muck looking up. Or perhaps I wish to hide in a cabin quiet snow piled around melting it in a pot on the woodstove BUT no, that would not work.  I cannot thaw yet.  I require torpor. I need to dig beneath the earth and feel it press around me its scratchy jabs abrading my flesh the raw of it matching my inside with my outside. The pounding of the living stepping above me-- pause my overactive mind. Beneath the pressure of life above my thousand stinging emotions quelled, I'd know know like, I think I've known before. What I am, and how to live... when I wake from hibernating beneath the earth.

I faced a colossal thing. I looked right at the fact that I'd been pretending in my life for too long and needed to take my marriage off of autopilot. I had to stop letting my deep, wide self float in stagnant waters. I was lost. I was so completely certain of how it would all go. I knew exactly what my husband would say and do and how slimy I'd feel. But then that wasn't what happened at all. He somehow still loves me, wants to fight and grow and build a thing that is all our own, brick-by-brick, daily. Doesn't want to tell me, but show me that it is true.  The colossal thing is telling the whole truth about years of holding back. And we've both done it. It could have started as a kindness, a priority. There's no need to say everything after all. But then it became a withholding. He found something I'd written and it wasn't about him. And yes, I was holding back. Ripping off a scrap here or there of what I might have said, who I might have been... and ...