For those of us who feel…human sometimes:

Rock me to sleep (from Tom Hunter’s album Bits and Pieces)

Charlotte, 2 months

“Questions that tap into our mortality, our pain, our selfishness, our basic needs, questions that arise from the immeasurable darkness, light, or mystery of our lives, require more than Answerization. They require our suffering, steadfastness, silent yearning, and deepest faith.”

Amen

It’s Saturday. I’m sitting in my new little writing cove, tucked in a corner of our bedroom. Sun is streaming through the window to my right, and the house is quiet. I got about 5 hours of sleep last night and N and Eli both have colds. I’m probably coming down with one too. The house is a mess, toys and burp rags, dust, dirty dishes, laundry, kitchen utensils (E plays with those endlessly), sealed and unsealed mail littering every surface.

But I’ve such a swell of hope inside, such gladness to be alive. I’m coming out of the hardest adjustment phase of a second child - we all are. I’m excited to get back to this computer, however meager and chopped up my hours here are (N’s out with the kids for a little while) - to resume baby steps toward finishing my novel, expanding non-fiction endeavors, dusting off short stories and getting them off to find homes.

And I heard geese today (I think that’s what they were). Their calls came through the bathroom window, cracked to release steam from our un-ventilation into the outside stillness. The world outside was sleeping, blanketed in layers of frost. My sick boy was up on the other side of the door, husband dealing with his varied frustrations, but I heard them. I heard them speak into the sunrise. My bleary eyes and weary bones were caught up in a rush of hope at the sound. That hope flew out the window and joined their brisk formation, coming back happy and cold.

While all of these contrasts swirl around me, every reason to want to get up in the morning and a thousand more to want to stay in bed, I’ll leave you with a quote I read last night, one hand holding a book, the other a baby. It’s from David James Duncan’s book of essays titled My Story as Told By Water:

Our eyes, it has been said, are the windows of our souls. Since the soul is not a literal object but a spiritual one, eyes cannot be the soul’s literal windows. But they are, literally, openings into and out of living human beings. When our eyes are open, they become not one of our many walls but one of our very few doors. The mouth is another such door. Through it we inhale air that is not ownable, air that we share with every being on Earth. And out of our mouths we send words - our personal reshaping of that same communal air.

Seeing, I have come to feel, is the same kind of process as speaking. Through our eyes we inhale light and images we cannot own - light and images shared with every being on earth. And out of our eyes we exhale a light or a darkness that is the spirit in which we perceive. This visual exhalation, this personal energizing and aiming of perception, is the eyes’ speech. It is a shaping, it is something we make, as surely as words are a shaping of air. I feel responsible for my vision. My eye-speech changes the world. Seeing is a blood sport. (p 46)

With unhelpable bouts of negativity along the way, I’d like to try to see my seeing as something I can shape, to let my eye-speech smith a world, among so many other options, where hope peaks out from unexpected places. Where alongside whining toddlers and whining selves there are moments for writing, sun-streaked writing coves, geese in frigid skies, sounding their clumsy-elegant call: See the sun rise. Come: see.

Wow, the spam at this here site is out of control! Can I just say about Wordpress: “not as user-friendly as Typepad when it comes to dealing with this stuff”? My deep apologies for the grossness of it, and I’ll do what I can to get it taken care of today. As my time in front of this computer is *extremely* limited these days, “today” might need a few sets of quotes around it. We’ll see…

UPDATE:  Okay, I’m pretty sure I got the problem taken care of in terms of new spam coming in, but I still have to figure out how to mass delete all the old stuff that got through.  The support forum suggests that Spam Karma 2 pluggin will delete old spam, but so far it doesn’t seem to be doing so.  Suggestions welcome!