DAY 5/10 #quietthechaos
Every day I fail and don’t fail. And there on the heels of FAIL is FLAIL, two words close enough to infect. What use is that kind of thinking? Ooph. Flip the narrative. Every day I try and don’t try. Of course, CRY comes next but there hasn’t been much of that. Try again: Every day I try and don’t try. Every day I try. Every day I try and trying is enough. There we go—that’s a sentence I can live with. How ‘bout you? What sentence or word has been hassling you, and what words can you choose instead, to flip the narrative?
There’s an image that keeps hitting me right across the chest. It can be a brick or it can be wings, depending on the day. The image is this: Me, River, and Brad walking through the wooded slopes of Bailey Mountain that extend upwards from our backyard. My boys are strong, healthy—gregarious. I am translucent, cells visibly moving over my skin, blood coming and going along its passageways. Sinew, marrow. All of it exposed, breathing. Somedays, the cells cluster and claw at one another, a city riot. Other days, they expand like the stars, more spacious than anything I can imagine.
My husband, a Nurse Practitioner, has put his name forward to help wherever help is needed–ER/ICU/Hospital/You-name-it–within our region, when the time comes. We have set up the Airstream for quarantine, when the time comes. When I bought that Airstream, I bought it because I’d be alone for the rest of my life, just me and my stories, and–mostly–that was ok. My greatest fortune is how wrong I was about that…how lucky I am to share that life now with so much more than just my stories. And yet…that thirty-something determined gal who is known for being able to imagine, could not have imagined setting up that same Airstream to separate herself from her husband, to keep she and their child at a distance from his kind eyes, his fisherman’s hands. Could not have imagined our world breaking apart like this.
But I can imagine how we’ll put ourselves back together. We’re already doing it, amidst continued wreckage. We’re already healing ourselves, long-ago hurts and stress fractures, old scars and memories. We’re moving through them, people, we’re remembering kindness, selflessness, hope. Together. Oh, that image, there it is again–my body, translucent. A brick? Wings? Let me choose the stars. Again and again—the stars.
I’ll ask again, because I’m trying: What sentence or word has been hassling you, and what words can you choose instead, to flip it? How are you finding your way toward your own stars?
#soothethesoul #amwriting #quarantine #covid_19 #letterwriting #keepbreathing #inittogether #communitycounts #keepthepeace #givewhatyoucan #writeordie #artmatters #mindfulparenting #mompreneur #authorlife #everydayheroes #campfirestories #livelit #literatureheals #artmatters #poetrysaveslives #strongertogether #homeschooling
