full moon safari

it seems to me that a deceased 17 year old boy was on trial for his own murder a month or so ago, and was somehow, much to my own (and may others') heartbreak, confusion and frustration, found guilty.

it felt like falling a million feet.

i go back to twenty years ago and how the world was a different shape through a different set of eyes. the urbanscape casting shadow and light into different places, making moments and places look new, larger, smaller, safer or more dangerous than they appear. and i can't seem to reconcile anything about loss anymore. it's too unfair. too sudden. too violent. too sad. too uncertain. too predictable. too familiar. too alien.

i was a wild teenager. i kind of stayed wild for awhile, and was kind of wild to begin with. my mother (like many others before her) wished onto me furiously on more than one occasion that "i should have a child just like myself one day," and here with each belly kick, i think maybe this tiny dancer (boy or girl) doing back flips and somersaults all day might just be. riding a rapid of internal streams of consciousness linking and winding i am taken back into that rabid fold like a ghost of adolescence past.

i've made tons of mistakes and have done so many things wrong.

i've run when i should have stayed and kept still when i should have got going. i've whispered when i should have shouted and been too loud when i should have been quiet. pushed when i should have retreated and held back when i should have fought harder. cried when i should have laughed and laughed when i should have cried. been careless when i should have been cautious and been too careful when i could have let go. refused help when i really needed it and accepted it when i could have done it all myself.

and in the throes of looking forward--i keep looking back.

it's been done forever. babies (which then grow up to be people) come into the world via the most elusive yet known path. i really had no idea. sure i've read some stuff, heard some stories and known some people but none of it aligned until it began happening to me; i'm a hands on learner of the purest kind. and now at eight months along, i am certainly no expert. i am well aware that i am just approaching the starting line of what is sure to be the ride of my life, and i am not going to attempt to articulate the dorsal constellation of physical, emotional and even spiritual complexities i've experienced so far because i'm not sure that i can, and i'm not so sure that i should.

in a word, however, it's been powerful. each of my senses resting on a fault line of an earthquake that acts like a volcano that erupts at unpredictable intervals each day. sometimes i'm my very own cyclone and sometimes i'm like a glassy lake shell reflecting on a million years of erosion, mirroring the mountain at both ends. sometimes i'm in love with a bowl of cereal and sometimes i look at my husband and i can't imagine how lucky we got. to be able to have a baby seems like the easiest thing in the world to take for granted, when truly it's the most generous gift nature could give.

and then the largeness of the world comes back into focus and i am panting trying to wrap my arms around the exquisite beauty along with the tremendous sadness folded into each day. wanting to prepare myself to teach someone else how to make sense of the vast paradoxes that line our lives like trees on a street.

and then i think, maybe a tiny dancer this belly kicker is not. maybe we've got a poet wading. busy writing tiny poems about what it's like to be a fish in its very own universe or about what it's like to hear about another world in another language and still find sense in everything that goes missing in translation.

it's been passed around for weeks, but that won't stop me from sharing George Saunder's  commencement speech to Syracuse's graduating class of 2013. what a perfect message to us all, and to those approaching the world on a pivot, no matter at what stage. if there was a church of kindness and nature, you could find me in those pews and i would consider that speech a sermon, and one for the good book.

these days you can find me somewhere between moments. i'm awake in the space between the synapse; feeling and thinking and so on. waiting in vain for the planet to spin on its side so we can shake it up a bit, and tirelessly pulling for the good guys to win.

i am a writer because it saves me.