keep the dream alive

thinking of moving here.

dear friends, if you feel that i have fallen off the face of the earth...

...it is because i have. the dark world of LIT 3125 and the others, complete with their various four-credit work loads, have pulled me away from life and writing as i used to know it. i had to pull out the stops for awhile, but it makes me feel like i'm shriveling up inside. i don't like feeling like a dead plant. so in the name of renewal, here is a list of things i am thinking about this winter and looking forward to in the next several months:

boundary water camping
garrison keillor's writer's almanac on mpr
time to read and therefore write
(since reading often leads to writing)
elsie's home in wentworth 
understanding what the feast of the booths was all about in nehemiah
seattle and the northern beaches
amy's cabin
annual sledding at battle creek with jo and liz
zumba and cycling
channel 2 with the fam
finishing my quilt
walker art museum with celinda
i always get to a point in the summer where i wish it was
christmas and a point in the winter where i wish it was summer.
december 26th and i already want hot indian summer.
- by the way, don't get too lazy to get in your car and run errands
in the winter.
sometimes i am like this.
sometimes i just hate getting out of the car and walking into a store
and then walking back outside and getting back in the car.
don't be like this. even though it's cold.
back to the list -
reading all of bleak house by charles dickens
gaining more wisdom about what peace in Christ looks like
returning my weighted exercise ball for one that doesn't have sand in the bottom
finding the ring and pin that i lost
(i know they're in the car, it's just a matter of squeezing my hand farther into the cracks than a hand should really go)
and coming up with a good new years resolution.

finally, here is a song to cheer you up in case the winter is long and hard. its full of clay men with beards and flannel:

mud slush.

everything is flying away away away away away.

lauren

...misses writing.

breathing space.

One thing I love about my friend Elsie is that every time we pray together, before we begin, she pauses for a long while. I always picture her dialing the Lord's telephone and waiting...waiting... until He answers. During those small seconds, I breathe. And I feel Him filling the room.

I know I don't need a dial tone to hear Him or tell him things; I can just think and He knows. But I like the coming, the consciousness. Willful. Studied.

Fools.

The locale of forests changes with each window,
one eyelid shut signifies a deadness of character.

I wonder what it feels like to be curled up in that eggshell, anywhere
but here. We always sleep and then suffer splinters from wooden sills.

Collecting debris-filled nights to throw out with the garbage has become
a full-grown habit; or rather, we've always piled them in heaps outside the window.

This laying in the dirt never really helped you see the lighthouse
in the shrubbery. The curtain creases are still sewn shut.

The space between the sheets could not grow wider if you yelled at me.
(You saw what I did through the shutters).

We can never rest in this train of a bed that sinks through the floor;
superimposed on the temporal lobe are the trees I stamp out in brain shapes.

The roar of the iron mine can still be heard from the bottom
of the mattress. Apertures in the wall show strings we untied from branches.

Victims of unraveling quilts and alliances rarely make it these days.
The frozen glass panes are cracking from the inside.

when geese attack.

Been learning that margin is very important in life. Like if you get done with class at 3:00pm, and you have a meeting at 3:15pm, but there's a ten minute walk in between...I mean, what if something happens in those five spare minutes? Like what if you get stopped at the corner crossing Snelling for about three rounds of stoplight changes? And what if some geese start crossing the road and everything stops for even longer? And then what if one of those geese starts glaring, weaving, and bobbing it's head in your direction while you stand by yourself on a crosswalk square, and all the drivers in their stopped cars just stare as you walk in a wide arc way off the crosswalk into the middle of the intersection to deliberately avoid the bird pooping on the fifth rectangle?

Anyways, in the words of my RD: "Margin is like toilet paper. You don't just use one piece, because what if you make a mistake?"