The Process of Becoming Alive

There is something profound in reading stories you have read before but seeing them as a changed person. To read To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye as a child makes me think of possibility and as an adult, I feel a bit more regret, envy, or fear, that I have missed an important moment.

Sitting at my coffee shop table there is a poem that I keep reading, thinking that with each new look, it will give me the answer. Here it is (no author is quoted):

If we wait to foil

A BANK ROBBERY

or rescue someone ties on the railroad tracks
We will never be a hero. We probably won't

even come across a cat stuck in a tree. As
long as we sit at the bus stop waiting for

OUR GREAT MOMENT

we will miss our real chance at the heroic.
the infinite number of tiny, daily acts

inspired by the great. Our actions may seem
insignificant, but their results will grow

and multiply.
They are radical: they are

A SMOLDERING FIRE.

My best friends are off on new adventures. One is taking the long road to Alabama and camping along the way. Another is literally living on a sailboat, without a real plan for how long or whereto, just being there. My sailor talks through wind and water and I feel life is happening inside her and I want to be there.

My family and close friends went camping in Sleeping Bear Dunes, climbing and swimming and sitting around a fire and it was good. One one hike up Pyramid Point, most of our crew decided to climb down a steep slope to touch the water. The way down was easy, but the scaling the dune back took many over an hour. They sat down white faced on top and we all felt the relief of their being ok. As I sat watching and half wishing I had experienced the struggle, the water looked liquid glass agave. Like God was hovering just below the surface. I consider how He met people on mountain tops and wrestled them in the valleys of the Bible and I wait and wonder where he is in with me.

My impulse is to jump into a new class at Eastern, work as a creative writing teacher with InsideOut in Detroit and trying to complete a publishable novel in a week.

Instead I write my three morning pages about my dad's upcoming wedding, my neighborhood, and how I want to be, in my own skin. All the while I know that I'm not going to make it to the mountains of NH, or cruise (sail) the coast of Maine, but I am still me, without doing anything. That in this next two weeks, people are coming to me and that I will write and each day watch for God showing up in my life.