Hunger lurches through me and my fingers peck haplessly at the keys; my heart lurks at the edges of the room, where the lamplight doesn’t fall, licking the wound of worry like a dog.
It’s been decided—at least in part, that I’ll be going back to work next year, and it makes sense. But I've been balking a bit, since those words tumbled out into the room conspicuously like a pocketfull of marbles onto the floor in the middle of a sermon at church. It’s taking me a while to adjust to this idea.
Like always, my mind gallops off---the eager, sunny pony that it is, says: this will be wonderful, just what I need, I have been lonely and longing for the connections and meaning that work brings to my days. But my heart, like a donkey, is lurching about. I’ve grown deeply content with the span of my days, with the ampleness of creative time, with the simplicity of exhaustion after a day spent with only one little boy: mine.
So it’s been like this: cays of internal impasse (have you noticed the paucity of posts?) As though a permafrost has spread up from my heart to my head. Days of creative emptiness revealing the strange limbo of now.
I’m putting together my resume, cover letters, applications and I hate it. Like teasing out the burrs from wool; the inevitable process of preparation, before action. And also I hate how Murphy was right: things always converge like ths in piles, awkwardly, anxiety heaped upon stress, on top of exhaustion.
But even with all this (the creative freeze, the endless house renovations, the worry about next year,) it there is a part of my mind that keeps coming back to this phrase: what is meant be will be. What can go right, will go right. Perky and annoying , like dandelions in a lawn, but welcome just the same.
In the foreground, along the roadside, the pasture is turning green and old hay bales, round and taller in diameter than I am, sit heavily in a long row and wait.
Something will happen to them, eventually. A tractor might come, load them, lift them, toss them; or they might just stay at there at the edge of the field, as new grass grows tall, and slowly decompose. But right now there is no telling, they are just there, and beside them the fuzzy yellow heads of dandelions by the hundreds, heaping, golden, bustling, turn their faces up to the sun.