Lately I've been wondering about what makes a life. In considering my own, and this very complicated and wonderful new place to which I've come--read: mother of a four month-old--I've been caught in a sort of eddy. Held still with questions, some doubt, anchored by business and life-speed, I look forward to the future with fragile hope. I do feel that that future is the river before me, whitewater churning, hidden with hydraulics--with rapids easy and stern. Can I (will I, and when?) dip paddle to the cold rush, slide forward into the wild?
If there's one thing I know at what some would call the tender age of almost-thirty-two, it's that life is unbearingly and heartbreakingly short. How can it be stretched in order to contemplate and live in and around each moment? Is it even possible? Or does a human being become a selfish thing when she attempts living fully--are there people and places left behind?
The novelist Eugenia Price famously said that "The great doing of little things makes the great life." The little things, I believe, can be the more profound. But if a soul yearns for the "big things," how to make it all come to pass in a way that not only avoids hurting loved ones, but elevates them?
This post is filled with question marks, and for that I half-heartedly apologize. The season now is one filled with an unflinching bareness and an awesome light, and I am left ever humbled.
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