On her way outside to join us for lunch,
she misses a step and falls hard to the ground.
We rush to help her but she laughs us off,
disappears inside. Later, she comes back out.
I look at her. She winks.
Creases
Lost is Found
I drove out to Muir Beach the day before my thirtieth birthday. I felt a deep pull inside me to go and to go alone. A ritual of release and welcome. I walked slowly back and forth along the shore. The waves, edged in white foam, rushed to touch my feet and ankles and shins and then receded, over and over again.
On the beach, I saw a glowing orb in the sand. I thought it was sea glass, but when I picked it up it turned out to be a small piece of shell, worn smooth by the waves. The iridescent underside had caught the sunlight and reflected an eye-catching turquoise. The top was a faded blue and on it were three white lines.
After I couldn’t feel my feet anymore from the cold, I walked out of the ocean and sat down on the beach. I came across this poem. I must have read it before because I’ve had the book (American Primitive) forever, but it hit me in such a fresh way. The confirmation that nothing is truly lost. The assurance that following pleasure and curiosity leads to the place where everything lost is found.
HONEY AT THE TABLE
It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the tableand out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, untildeep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees — a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything
lost is found.– Mary Oliver
This coming year, I hope to follow curiosity and pleasure rather than fear. I want to embrace both joy and sorrow, to let go of expectations of how things should be and to welcome things just as they are.
Potential
We go camping whenever we feel like it and make coffee with water heated over an open fire. We go for hikes in the morning followed by swims in the ocean and come back salty and smiling. We drink beer and eat sausages heaped with caramelized onions and wrapped in tortillas. We talk about moving out here. Just us and this, forever.
You design our home, giving it modern lines and wood floors. We make it cozy with thick old rugs. We fill handmade bookshelves with books and keepsakes from our travels to Peru and Panama and Berlin. We sit on the floor by our fireplace and drink whiskey and talk about our dreams for the future.
We sand and stain the open shelves in the kitchen and fill them with mismatched plates and mugs and those antique glasses we found at the store near where you used to live. Sweet potatoes and lemons and avocados fill bowls. Oils and vinegars crowd the butcher block. Flowers and herbs spill over ceramic vases onto our cool countertops.
Outside the kitchen window: our backyard. Big enough for the studio you build for me to write in and for a lemon tree and a fig tree and a grapefruit tree and a garden. We eat kale stir fries and roasted squash and cucumber salads and sun-warmed tomatoes right off the vine.
Later come children with bare scuffed feet skidding around corners in costumes you make for them. Our skinned-knee kids jump up and down on the couch wearing our soft old t-shirts. They wake us up at night screaming of ghosts, too scared to brave the dark hallway to our room. We take them into bed with us.
We raise them. We grow old together. We have our children and our shared meals and our work and our travels and we never stop telling each other our dreams. One day, we move out here and it’s us and this forever.
I imagined my life with you.
Justification
I’m becoming less interested in justifying myself.
And yet — still — so many days I doubt and rage and ache.