shining moment of life.

I remember, nearly one year ago, telling myself to just begin. Just begin. Hard words to heed. Just begin. It’s time to begin again? It’s time to begin again.

Stopping me are these things:
Fear, Embarrassment, Disappointment, Distraction, Powerlessness.

Those are things but they are only things.

Bear with me on this one. It might be messy. When you tear out your second beating heart, as Sugar so wisely advises, and slap it all over the page, it’s going to be messy. And the first cranks of the rusty gears are awkward. The first steps when your foot has gone to sleep. Saying I love you when your mouth hasn’t formed those words in a long time. You just do it however you can. It gets better.

I am thinking a lot of things these days. Quite a lot. I feel the rush of wind coming up from the canyon. You feel it on the edge. You feel it when you’re about to jump. Not the jump to fall, but the jump to see.

Ask me anything. I’m thinking too much lately. I might have the answers. I might not. I probably don’t. But I can fake it.

Who might I be letting down? Do you wonder that sometimes? Probably, most likely, usually, always, there is someone. But best to soldier on anyway.

A long time ago, I read Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. I read it for a class in college, one of a small handful of classes that woke me up to the other life that I was meant to live. I didn’t know it at the time. It’s a lovely story full of naked love and emotion wrapped up in the most beautiful metaphor of all: food. I had forgotten the story and that I ever knew it until I saw the movie on my Netflix queue one night. I started watching and it allcamebacktome. What a lovely story. The food! The love! It all came back to me.

I like the way something you have read can wrap itself up very tightly and lodge inside of you, a slumbering parasite of thought waiting to re-emerge. The cicada sleeping for 13 years before bursting forth for a brief and shining moment of life. I like the way a book can do that in your soul.

So I forgot and I remembered. I loved and raged and loved again. I stopped and then I started. I was defeated and ashamed and lost, but I crawled to the canyon and I leapt.