At the park yesterday morning, parts of the paved path were damp. It didn’t seem that wet, not wet enough that a runner’s shoe would leave a trail of footprints, but it was. Perhaps because I had not yet achieved sufficient caffeine intake for the morning, it felt like a revelation that your footprint trail is always behind you. In fact, your footprints are no predictor of where you will go next. You could run or walk for a mile in one direction, and with the next step you could veer to the right or left.

It’s easy enough to get discouraged by the past, to believe that things will always remain the same. At least it is for me. But we’re not limited by our footprint trail. Turns out where we’ve been doesn’t dictate where we’ll go.

The bird feeder was empty yesterday morning. This winter, as always, the sparrows and juncos and wrens have kept me with an eye on the weather forecast and another on the bag of bird seed. I hate to let them down. Continue reading “Feeding the Birds” →

This morning I cried while eating breakfast—undone by a few lines from Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. Real life almost never makes me cry, but a book, well that is something else altogether. Stories are the doorway to another’s reality but also to my own feelings.

I read through my childhood; it was nearly all I did. In my family, we didn’t talk about things, and I was quiet anyway. It was books that taught me about people, that honed my empathy, that turned on the light.

I wrote something for a client recently, and he said something about it maybe scratching my itch to write, but words for a client will never scratch that itch. The only thing that will is my own words for my own purpose, helping me find my way back to myself, to the truth I am looking for. I’ll fix the words you write, but the ones I write are for me, and for anyone who can find their way home inside them.

Words are the truest thing about me. In the last years of my marriage, my husband resented any time I spent reading books. He thought it excluded him. Never mind that books made me, me. Never mind all the ways that drinking, drugs, and his other diversions excluded me. I was not supposed to read.

 

I was never one to keep a diary or journal. Probably there were too many things I didn’t want to know. But now I find myself grateful for every word I’ve written.

My own words are a sort of relief map— revealing the topography of my days. That was the valley, that was the winding passage. Here is where I learned this. Memory speaks, reorients me to what is true.

My life itself is a book, a sure guide if I will take the time to record what today is saying.