Sometimes, things are ash.
Sweet Pea experiment: Gardening indoors.
Sometimes, what we think is a permanent piece of life is only a feather-light weight. What weighs us down is our own expectations, met or unmet, and under all these separate pieces we think we will never have the strength to get back up.
But it's all ash.
This morning I woke up and realized that I'm $300 short in paying bills. This even after I've borrowed money, so the actual number in the red is more. I wonder about all my neighbors, if they wake up in the same moment and think "Dear god/goddess/universe/something, how did I get to this place?" If we think we are all alone in our houses that back right up to each other.
I've been thinking of my own mindset lately related to money matters. I never thought that I had any sabotaging behaviors, but early one morning I realized that spending money to feed myself was something I viewed as loss, as an unworthy expenditure; feeding myself. What is that? Where did I learn that lesson? It informs everything that I do. I don't deserve anything. I don't deserve to be here on this earth.
you think you will die but you don't. instead you leave yourself behind and the snow is white ash.
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Speaking of snow, the weather is warmer. The snow peas are coming up and the brussels sprouts survived the winter.
The sage survived too and now it's taking over a section of the yard, snaking through the wild violets and the clover. I admire its ambition and I've promised not to cut it for 90 days - let it go where it will.
The collards burst into bloom and I'm hoping that soon they will be as prevalent as the weeds.
The dirt is meditation.
I will leave it under my fingernails until I've forgotten what my hands look like clean.
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Sometimes, before the sun is up, I sit with my coffee and pretend all is well.
If we pretend long enough that dream will inform reality, or so I've been told.
My children run through the house even at this early hour. They are unaware of my anxiety, blissful, carrying their treasures in baskets left over from their father's Easter celebration. I breathe into the pressure in my chest. It comes and goes in waves until I have to sit down, and they are in my lap, decorating my body with stickers and necklaces. This is what it feels like to be beautiful, to be a circle of women celebrating together our existence in this life.
For one moment I feel peace.
Let me remember this.