Photograph

There’s a picture of me looking at you. You took it at my request, and I didn’t tell you why at the time...it wasn’t about the grand background or the sea or sky or anything, It was about me looking at you. I wanted to remember how this feels inside. That wide-eyed wanderer who falls in love in a breath, and leaves just as quickly before anything can become real.

I had tried to leave that wanderer’s soul behind. Fill her full of responsibilities and work and told her she had

to grow up. I thought I was saving myself, but it turns out I was only drowning the me I needed to be all along.Life’s march of tragedies stripped all manner of pretense so I got on a plane and ran away for a while. 

I climbed, explored, discovered and felt. The ocean. A glacier. Lava running like a river.

Then you. I don’t know how or why, but inside, I heard you. Quiet at first. A whisper that felt like “I see you” followed by a cascade of you I never expected because I thought those parts of me were gone with the wanderer...I closed my eyes and let that feeling wash over me. Bathed in it a while, and I don’t think it’s anything you did, but who you are. What you bring to yourself and the world you’ve built around you. The picture of you you paint. You curate. 

There’s beauty there. Real beauty. A quiet eternity, waiting for something. A voice in the dark, maybe. A whisper between your thoughts. Like me.

But I wasn’t built to stay. 

I can still hear you now and again. More distant and a little harder to hear, but you're here. And I want you to stay. Not with promise or expectation, or the kinds of things that overturn lives. Just the quiet of you with the quiet of me.

When The Shoe No Longer Fits

 It’s ok if the favorite shoe doesn’t fit any more. The arch crushed, the heel worn from age. The soul tired from walking, and the laces long broken. They don’t hug your feet like they used to, or compliment your gait. Goodbye isn’t always so simple as throwing them away. They’re companions from a different life. All the paths and trails and mountains and puddles and rocks. They hold your secrets and are part of what made you...you. The very grit and sweat and blood and tears of you.

 But the shoes aren’t you.

And you can let them go.

It’s okay.

Thank You Iceland

 Clearly I am not very good at writing every day. Well, I write, but I don't always blog. I tried keeping a diary of days when the pandemic started, and I did great for about a month. But with kids home from school, and life soldiering on, I really didn't keep up very well. 

I did take pictures, though. Some selfies to chronicle mood, some of all the hiking we did--and we did quite a lot. I just returned from a solo trip to Iceland, and there's a lot more story there than I can fit into a single post. 

I found my words again in an AirBnB that creaked with every footstep, and felt like a home. Sitting on a  mountain, staring out over the land, the river and the sea, the words came flooding in like a dam broke, and I submitted to their will. I sat at the kitchen table and wrote until my hands hurt, slept and wrote some more. I will share the fractured pieces of what came out as time goes by--fiction, mostly. But fiction is like a painting and the words are my colors. 

I fell in love with that place. Like I was always meant to stay there. But "staying" was not what this trip was about. Another trip, another time. 

But as I said, more on all that later. For now, I'm just happy the words are back. 

So Thank you, Iceland. I love you for what you've given back to me.