The secret to life

All my life I have seen someone ready to share the secret of something with everyone, which sort of belies its secrecy, but that is irrelevant here.

There is something child like and sweet about believing there is a secret that will solve everything if I only figure out what it is.

There is also something kind of gullible about it.

If there really were secrets or if money could buy it, I think rich people would all be slim, trim, healthy, eternally young, and beautiful on the outside.

My experience has been that there are really no great secrets that work better than plain old common sense coupled with some healthy curiosity and a little bit of brazen self confidence.

If there is any secret at all I think it might be to put my time, energy and money into those things I love.

Then it doesn't seem like such hard work, but that's no secret.

The road to safety

Everyone has a dark side.

Some people have terrible dark sides, they are the serial killers, the abusers, those who torture the innocent.

Most of us just have something we'd rather other people not know about. 

Feelings are sacred parts of me, each one a testament to who I am, where I've been, what I've done and what's been done to me.

It is easy to change clothes, a little harder to change actions and almost impossible to change feelings.

Feelings were burned into me when I was so young my only recourse was finding a way to survive some of them.

Separating myself from pain by escaping inside of me, the only place I can go to hide, or multiple personalities, or replicating the way it feels into something I can do to myself is the last resort.  Nobody can hurt me more than I can, so I can survive anything.

These are the first steps towards safety.  If I am lucky many others come over time until that dark secret is just something I hide in the bottom of my closet because life is so good I don't really need it anymore.

It always comes back to finding the love.

That's the spot!

Sometimes I feel like a violin string with nature running her finger down the line looking for that sweet spot, that place where harmony comes into being and my world is in tune.

I have never thought I was a creature of routines.  Doing something over and over has been hard for me most of my life, practicing, exercising, re-reading a book or watching a movie more than once.  Those were all real chores for me in the past.

But when I do get into routines my life is better.

Last year I found that place where eating healthy and less was relatively easy.  Even exercising became almost like breathing--for a while.  Then I fell out of it at Christmas.

I think it is found!

Dreams

Dreaming vividly is part of who I am.

I still remember dreams when I was under three!  They reflected my deepest fears and were probably really called night terrors because they appeared in actual three dimensional forms on my bed covers.  I remember the feelings, the fear, the confusion.  Even then I knew these things shouldn't be possible for one reason or another.

Fire!  I opened my eyes to see a huge fire burning in front of me and my first thought was why doesn't it hurt me this time?

Three pale pigs with gleaming red toothed smiles and burning cigarette red noses, so unlike the three little pigs, but perhaps reflecting a game people played with me that ended, "Gonna eat you up!"

These are the first dreams I remember.  Since then there have been many good and bad ones.

I was part of a dream group where we shared and studied our dreams for over ten years.  I knew the dreams of the other people as well as my own by the time it ended.  It wasn't unusual for one of us to say, "Remember that other dream you had that...."

I've tried lucid dreaming with almost no success.  Once in a blue moon I realize I am dreaming but that is usually just before I wake up.  I have had unusual dreams that seemed to portend future events or appear to be shared dreams, but neither one is something I have any control over and they are rare.

Wherever my dreams come from they color my life like mini vacations or nightmare movies, so it is good to have someone who knows me well enough to say, "That is because you drew a picture of a castle," or "You said he wanted to live to be three hundred."

Last night I lived in a castle, the old fashioned real sort with old wooden floors and a weedy overgrown courtyard.   I had so many children, both mine and my husband's, that I was constantly discovering more trying to sleep in odd places; like a three hundred year old girl I found in a cupboard!  I worked hard in that dream, trying to clean the place up, polish the glasses, take care of all those children, some of whom were not pleased I was there.  It was real!

But only for a while and that is the beauty of dreams.

Carole

She was born in Long Beach California at a Navy Hospital on November 15, 1945,  right after WWII.

Growing up in a small town in northern Illinois she earned her B.S. in psychology at the University of Illinois and worked as a counselor for a Sheriff's Boy's Camp in Florida after graduation.  Later she moved to Colorado and worked as a deputy sheriff and counselor at a prison where she was a legendary crack shot who out shot all the officers on the force.

She earned her Master's degree in psychology at JFK University in 1984 and became a licensed Mariage and Family Therapist in 1990.

She truly believed that life was meant to be spent helping others.  She helped so many people during her lifetime, both through her work and just by living. 

Although she never did either one professionally, she danced and sang with absolute abandon, always encouraging everyone around her to, "Dance like no one is watching." 

She rode a motorcycle, did her own gardening, loved clothes and jewelry, her cats and the big dogs she was always rescuing.  She was an all around awesome woman, a true free spirit.  One of the best,

Most of all, for me, she was my friend.  We lived far apart, both busy with our own lives, occasionally not contacting each other for months at a time, but never doubting the other was there if she was needed.

I wasn't there.  I didn't know she died, October 11, 2012.  For that I am truly sorry.

Parade

The sun is shining!

I look out my window, an eye to the world this house has had for over a hundred years, and wonder at all the things it has seen.

Unpaved streets that would have been swampy muck-holes in this year's rain gradually became brick avenues!  Ladies dresses have gone up and down and back up from the bustles of the gay nineties to the mini skirts of the not so gay seventies and everywhere in between.

Today the brick streets are mostly covered over in asphalt and most of the women wear pants, but people still walk here, still take their dogs out to stroll around the park up the street, still push children in wheeled contraptions of all sorts.

It is a perfect place to live.  It always has been.  Two blocks west is the Constitution Trail, the old Illinois Central Railroad.  Two blocks east is the off and on affluent neighborhood that housed Adlai Stevenson.  Our garages, the ones still standing, were once barns.  Horses stamped their feet here and snuffled great whiffs of steam in the cold morning air.

Sidewalks morphed from nonexistent to brick to concrete.  Streetlights appeared.  Traffic stopped whinnying and began roaring and honking, but both emitted noise and steam and smells!

I go out for my morning walk, adding my presence to the great parade of time, imprinting my own self on this world that came before me and will go on without me.

What a magnificent day!

A crack in the door

No matter how far I go I will never really leave home.  Even if I wanted to and some people do want to, but most just say they do, because in reality home is too comfortable.  It is the known world, the place where my creator walked on two legs and laid down laws.  Laws that were sometimes incomprehensible, but there none the less.

I imprinted on this place before I knew it existed.  It took me into its bosom and shaped me.  Like one of those hexagonal pegs hammered down into the top of a preschool toy, I was made to fit.

Whatever else is inside of me lies behind the veneer that was lacquered on layer after layer year after year.  Sanded by insiders and outsiders alike, there was never any question of where I belonged.

My position was at the bottom of two highly unique people and at the top of four disappointing little ones.

I was never clean enough, pretty enough, smart enough, good enough.  I was a work in progress.  My job was to be worthy of it all without stepping on any toes. 

I actually walked on my tip toes all the way through elementary school hoping to get rid of my flat feet and become good enough to be a ballerina. But there was no money for dancing lessons for me.  I was a piano player.  Not a very good one, not one anyone wanted to come hear at a recital, but a piano player none the less.

And I had "potential" so they put me in advanced classes where you didn't get to choose what you liked because they already knew.  There was quite a bit of variety though because we moved a lot and each place "knew" different things.

When I left home I was terrified.  Who was going to do my homework, tell me when to eat and sleep, what to think, how to feel? 

Here I was so full of "potential" and all I felt was homesick.  Totally unprepared for a world that saw me as a young adult; I just wanted to be little again and I got stuck.

It has taken the rest of my life to find a crack in the door, but now that I have the light is starting to stream in.

Honor

In an age where some companies are only hiring people with college degrees, even for things like sorting the mail, I understand that a degree is considered necessary.

Education has always been an asset, but the difference between a degree and an education is widening.

A candle maker teaches her apprentice to make quality candles.  That is an education. A custodian for a building teaches his replacement how to keep the building running smoothly and in good shape.  That is also an education.  Farmers teach their children to run the family farm and send them to school to learn more about agriculture which is both a science and an art.  In all of these cases someone is learning valuable information that they will use to enhance their life and others.

Education is a process where one person imparts knowledge to another.  It begins the first time a mother teaches her child to nurse and continues on in some instances until that child receives a PHD designating her an expert in her field.

People seem to be losing track of this.  Mothers write their children's papers.  Fathers build wings for schools.  The internet sells research papers. And junior gets a degree.  Forgive them, they know not what they do!

Although this may seem like the loving thing to do for a struggling child, it only teaches her what she can't do.  It doesn't prepare anyone for living in the real world.  You can only cheat so long before it catches up with you.  Who among us wants to go to an auto mechanic whose father just bought him a garage full of tools or a doctor whose mother wrote his paper on the cerebral cortex for him when we need brain surgery?

These are extreme examples, but apt.  Education is a process that builds one skill upon another.  If the end is to produce an adult with useful skills, then those steps need to be faithfully adhered to.

There is honor in learning.  It doesn't matter whether it is learning to finger paint, or write a thesis. Let's not teach our children that honor can be bought or finagled.  They deserve more than that.

Adventures

Taking the time to know someone is a huge undertaking.

I barely scratch the surface of most people, even the ones I know very well.

Below that surface is an entire world filled with primordial fears, extraordinary bliss, dreams, thoughts and wells of creativity that may never be tapped.

Finding even one person who is willing and wanting to take the time to explore that world and trustworthy enough to be invited in is a daunting undertaking.

The journey then becomes one of fairy tales and myths.  The unlikely happens again and again.  The impossible turns out not to be so.

It is revealed as an epic adventure, too large for one person's life alone.

Change

The ability to change is one of the mile markers between children and adults.

Growing up requires change.  Growing at all requires change!

I age.  I die and even then change continues as I become a more integrated part of eternity.

Children appear to embrace changes, they really have no choice much of the time.

Adults seem to become more rigid as time goes by.  I wonder if rigidity is a foreshadowing of death.

A certain amount of change is constant, but changing some things is so painful people try to believe the need doesn't exist or isn't necessary.  The harder it is, the bigger the toll.

The bigger the toll, the more unpleasant people become.

Like everything else in nature, I get bigger and bigger until it is time to just continue to ripen.  Unlike apples and pears, whether I become softer and sweeter, or rot, has more to do with me than I probably care to think. 

Perspective

I know that everything I see and hear is censored by my perception.

Three people hear the same comment.  One is incensed. One finds it amusing and one doesn't care one way or another.

It is the same way with almost everything.   Even wars.  Some people feel they are justified.  Others find them horrific and some people just don't care because they feel it doesn't have anything to do with them.

Politicians know this.  They are the greatest chameleons of all, changing with the tide at every turn.

I wonder, do we program our babies to see things through our perspective and by doing so change our reality?

By changing the way baby is brought up I can certainly foster hatred.  Is it possible I could also create peace and prosperity?

I think so.

Perspective is a powerful tool.

Itchy

I look into the mirror through eyes nearly glued together by some allergy.  It is obvious I have been scratching.  Scratching for nearly a month now and it is taking its toll.

The allergy medicine seems to work -- sometimes. But sometimes it doesn't help at all.

The past month has seen whatever this is escalate from itching ears to a huge spot on my neck that is nearly raw.

My attempts to ignore it are failing.  My attempts to alleviate it have failed, but only part of the time.  I wonder if it could be related to something I am using?

I tried to walk today, but it was just too cold and windy.  There were hard biting little pieces of icy snow blowing through the air when I went to the library.

I came home and immersed myself in the bathtub until I thought I would just melt away and slip down the drain.  Getting out I didn't use anything but a towel.  Maybe it is some lotion?

Right now I am trying to distract myself by writing, but obviously it is not working.

Misery verses joy

My world is so full of blessings that I sometimes believe I am dreaming.

There are a lot of bad things happening in the world today, but there are also lots of really good things going on.  We just don't hear about them as often.

For some reason misery is major news,  but joy seldom is.  Perhaps because joy tends to come in smaller doses and be more personal.

I guess everyone can relate to grieving people, but not everyone understands the joy of seeing a father playing with his two young children, or a young professor bringing opportunities to a small southern university.

People are a bit short sighted sometimes. 

We can learn from bad things, but we build a better world on the seemingly insignificant things.

Every opportunity a child has to grow up happy and healthy in an enriching environment,  increases our chances for a better world.

I see tons of little joyful moments every day.  I hope they never cease to happen and that I always am aware of them.

Beasts of The Southern Wild

The world is always smaller than I believe.

Imagine being a simple woman in the heartland, someone who volunteers in a kindergarten class or does tours at a small aviation museum.

I do good things, but they are on such a tiny scale compared to so many others.

Imagine a teenager being so moved by the plight of a people he sees at fourteen that he makes a movie about them years later.  Imagine basing that movie on a six year old girl whose courage and actions change her world!  Imagine a young man in the wilderness of the south giving his students the opportunity to touch the lives of people who have used their lives so beautifully.

This is an example of how goodness grows, rolling forward, picking up momentum.

Beasts of the Southern Wild has won, or been nominated for, nearly every major movie award.  It speaks to the best in all of us from its conception to its story to the changes it is bringing to the real world.

And it touches me even more today as my bestest, my best friend, shows his students that great things are possible no matter how small and insignificant you may think you are.

Lovers

Lovers live to love.  They find happiness everywhere.  They are never happier than when giving or doing for the beloved.  They will forgive and make excuses for an unbelievably long time.

Open and direct, what you see and hear from them is who they are, what things are, the reality of the moment.  When the beloved is unable to be the same way, a lover understands.  It isn't easy to look in your own eyes and see the bare faced truth of who you are.

Most of us make up stories about who we really are, telling them mostly to ourselves.  Lovers find that difficult.  They make up stories about the beloved.

Using a lover's openness and child like joy against them is easy.  Making a lover live in a passive aggressive relationship is the worst sort of torture.  They would rather be slapped in the face than receive veiled barbs or suffer the agony of unspoken wrath.  They are sensitive, wearing their feelings on the outside unlike the turtles who are blessed with hard shells.

Evil, in a lover's eyes, is meanness.  Once that is revealed they have to protect themselves, or perish.  Ready to duel to the death to protect another, most lovers simply remove themselves from the presence of those who would hurt them.

And so the world goes on.

Until two lovers meet each other and then life bursts into bloom.

It takes time to tune a child.

More and more children are diagnosed with problems that seem new to this era, so we look for vaccines and food additives and other things in our culture that could be the cause.  This is not a bad thing.  Science is constantly evolving.   We need to be sure what we are adding is not detrimental.

A recent study shows that two simple instruments, one that mimics the ocean and another that mimics the mother's heartbeat, as well as the parent simply singing a lullaby, helps premature infants.  They found recorded music too complex for these babies, but simple sounds replicating the womb and the mother's heart helped babies increase their sleeping and sucking.  Something as simple as whispering, "ah" and gently patting their back in a rhythmic way made a difference.

All of this sounds a little like, "Duh, we have always done that."  But we don't anymore.  Television shows a baby growing up in sixty minutes.  Nobody watches a program that shows a parent sitting quietly in a room, gently rocking their child and murmuring sweet nothings to them.  There may be a glimpse of it, but the reality requires more time.

In today's loud chaotic world we want to plug our children in and program them like we do our phones and computers, but children are much more complex. 

I think the time is coming when newborn instructions will include, turn off the television and the radio while your child is young.  Allow him to lie quietly in your arms listening to you and your heart.  He will grow up stronger and more focused.

It takes time to tune a child. 

No part is too small.

The bigger, the more noticeable, the better!  That seems to be the base of the value system for many people.  If you look important you must be important!

The truth is a little less obvious.

Everyone has a part to play.

One person drives the car, the other one navigates.  One person takes care of people, another takes care of buildings.

If no one knows how to change the light bulbs pretty soon the world will fall into darkness.  If no one sweeps the floor eventually we will be living in filth.

The value system needs to remember each one of us is here for a reason and we need to remember to do the best we can for the same reason!

Back on the road

We are in Virginia Beach! 

I can't believe I drove under the ocean!  I also couldn't believe that I passed Jamestown and Williams burg, West Point and huge navy ships on the last leg of this trip.  What an historic part of the country I am in.

Decatur, our gentle giant, was so excited to see us.  A hundred thirty pounds of bouncing doggie is something to see.

His mother wanted to go back without going through the mountains, but I think we have decided that is just not feasible, so we are packing up the car and will be back on the road later today for the trip to Illinois.

Decatur

Spent the day driving from Decatur, Illinois to Lewisburg, West Virgina!

Lots of miles, lots of mountains, good company and the best apple dumpling for dessert I've had in a long time!

Tomorrow we head on to Virginia Beach and the reason for this trip, a large black Great Dane named Decatur who is waiting patiently for his owner to come back home and get him.

Then we turn around and do it all in reverse, stopping a bit more often for the royalty in the back seat who insists on being walked and loved on quite frequently.

Control

Control is an ugly word to many people.  Who wants someone else to control him?  Children yearn to be adults so they have control over their own lives.

Each of us believes that we know what is best, that we can control ourselves and if others would just behave we wouldn't have to control them.

As top predators we have taken control to a whole new level in this world.  We don't even have to look into the eyes of another creature to kill it if it doesn't do what we want.

We have a million reasons that make us feel we are entitled to use violence, beginning with the toddlers excuse, "He hit me first."

It has always been this way.  We are a violent species.

And the best of us are not infallible.

In the middle of the night there is an intruder and we are glad we have our gun handy.  The normal human being trying to protect his or her family will rise, heart pounding, and look for the terrifying shadow of the monster invading their home.  It appears, the gun goes off, it drops!  Minutes later the mind numbing shock that a beloved child has been shot becomes apparent and the grief is inconsolable.

First of all, everyone is somebody's beloved child.  Secondly, a gunshot is often fatal.  There are no second chances.  Thirdly guns are fast.  They can fire several times doing so much more damage than the arrows and swords of old.

Everyone has their own story to protect their views, but I wonder if anyone has done a study of how many people have successfully defended their home with a gun as opposed to how many innocent people have died because someone had access to a gun in the past fifty years.

Glancing

The need to belong is such an integral part of me that I cannot remember a time when I didn't long for more of it.

As a very young child the world was orderly, simple and safe. I was near the bottom of a hierarchy that ended in my grandparents and moved on down to my baby brother.  I was the big kid.  My job was to be sure the little kids were okay.  My mother's job was to be sure I was okay.  My father's job was to be sure we were all okay.  Whether it was true or not, that was the way I understood it.  And it was enough.  One of my favorite places was all together in the car at night, close together away from everything else.  If everyone else went to sleep I hung over the back seat and talked incessantly to whoever was driving.  Absolute attention.  Total bliss!

Later I discovered other groups.  The Jewish Rabbi down the street,  the Catholic Cathedral nearby, both hugely patriarchal cultures with unique forms of dressing and strictly defined places for everyone.  I liked the Yiddish songs, the sister's habits, the guitar music at the convent when I visited there as a candy striper, the folk mass when I went to college.

My parents were an unorthodox mix of Episcopalian and Baptist who seldom attended any church, so I was in awe of the communion rites, the high church hymns of one and the fervent rhythm of the other.  I yearned to really belong to one or the other.

I wanted to identify with some absolute, some place where someone knew all the answers, where there was no question of what to wear, or say, or be, or do.

I married someone who grew up in a totalitarian church family and brought my children up in his church, to a point.  During that time I experimented with various ways of finding God through less orthodox methods like drumming or meditation, which was much like centering prayer.  I read books from other cultures, Kahlil Gibran, Thich Nhat Hahn, the Upanishads, Harner's Shamanism, and many others.  Everyone except me seemed to have found the magic words, the Way, the path.

And then one day, while sitting quietly all by myself, a door opened and eternity lay before me. I felt the glancing blow of such unbelievable love that I have never quite recovered.

There is no trick, nothing to do, no magic words, not even a path in reality.  It is here, always here and when I am here too then I do belong and all the answers are either apparent or irrelevant.

It is the blessing of being. Everything else is just a prop, a way there that is okay, but not necessary.

High Maintenance Joy

I love words.  Word play, word games, talking, writing, I just love words!  When I took Library Science and discovered The Oxford English Dictionary I was in heaven.  I spent hours sitting on one of those little scooting stools in the library pouring through those volumes.

The idea that a word could be traced back to its beginnings fascinated me.  It made me wish I could read and speak Latin and all the other languages so I could really examine these things.

Still I tend to use words in unusual ways.  Not because I don't know the official use, but because I can't find another word that works.

Last night I discovered high maintenance joy!   More of a phrase than a word and certainly not something I carefully made up.  It just popped out while I was talking with a friend. 

What is it?  It is what happens when a person discovers they are busier than ever and happier than ever doing things that make another happy.  It's not codependent, or enabling, it is total reciprocity. 

It happens when two people have huge needs.  Other people might find them exhausting after a while, but when they discover each other, they find that other half, the part that needs to give what they need.  Like two endless wells pouring into each other.

In a momentary need to give it a name I called it high maintenance joy! 

A new phrase and I was there at the moment of its birth.

Misery might love company, but does company love Misery?

It is easy to forget that it isn't enough to just love our children.  We can love teddy bears and flowers and hot fudge sundaes, but children also need to be prepared to live in this world.  Actually that is very loving, but not always hugs and kisses and good times.

Part of being a charming child, or likeable human being means knowing how to act.  I just spent an afternoon with the most delightful little girl.  She was funny and articulate, out going and well behaved.

Children are not just an extension of their parents.  Well they really are, but that shouldn't be the parent's point of view.  As entertaining as they are and as much as they reflect who we are, they are not simply here for our benefit.  My child isn't here to make me look good, or make me happy.  She is here until she grows up and goes out into the world to live on her own.

My job is to give her the skills she needs to succeed there.  Those differ from place to place and child to child, but they are the difference between misery and content.

It is in a child's nature to fight for freedom of will and push the limits.  It is a parent's job to turn that nature into a way of living that finds harmony with her surroundings. 

I heard of a really smart mother whose child tended to lie.  She got him into acting, the perfect place to live out those fantasies, so he could focus on the real things in other places. 

Children don't know what is in their best interests.  They don't have the vast array of experiences adults have.

It isn't easy being a parent.

What's up doc?

My life goes from almost boring to crazy in ten seconds flat!

That's one of the perks of a big family.  There is almost always someone in need if you care to step up to the plate or join the game.

And you can play as much as you like, an hour, a day, a week?

As my bestest says, "O Lordy" when told of our newest escapade.

I just never know what's next.

Evolution

In a wild world of fight or flight it is necessary that I perceive anything different from myself as a possible threat.  My stone age ancestors survived because they honed these skills, made them such an integral part of who they were that it was possible to make an instantaneous decision based on fear of the unknown.

It worked for them and so I exist, but what do I do with this deeply ingrained, almost unconscious part of me now?

The next big step in evolution is to embrace our differences.

Diversity has always served the world well and in our shrinking world it becomes even more important not to handicap myself by judging others through a haze of personal insecurity, failure and fear.

Perhaps the glasses of the future will be interfaced with my mind so I can see past my own shortcomings to the true value of others.

My mind your mind

I think it would be fascinating to know how other people's minds work.

Of course I barely know how my own does.  When my mind slips free of me it does amazing things, crazy things, and sometimes unbelievable things!

Not always the greatest things, but sometimes more interesting than I might have expected.

Brains are the command center of lives.  Out of them come all those automatic things that say, "Heart keep beating, lungs breathe, stomach is full!"

Sometimes there is a disconnect between me and that last one.

But the programming in my dreams is always rich and varied.  I never know if I will be leaping into a lake with my love or trying to outrun an invisible enemy.

And my drawing and writing ideas pop up seemingly out of nowhere sometimes. 

If they ever invent a way to see what people are thinking....well, that sounds fascinating to me, but it might be pretty unsettling.  Cause that's the real them!

Bestest

Best friends are a rare breed of people.

Mine hears what I'm really saying no matter how garbled it comes out.

He patches up all the little indentations and nicks in life with band aids and a secret potion of love and understanding.

He backs me up whether I am right or wrong just cause he's my friend.

And if I think I might fall over, I know he's gonna be there to catch me!

We finish each others sentences, think each others thoughts and not even a million miles can really stand between us.

Such a blessing is so rare and wonderful.

Everyone needs a best friend.

Good people

Reality checks are the measure of maturity.  Not just getting older, but truly coming into full being.

Everything gets older, but some things become better as they age, good wine, good cheese, people!

A good person has an aroma, a tang, a million layers of interesting flavors that speak of a life well lived, choices well made, time well spent.

Some mature early, some later and some not at all.

A robust maturity has less to do with years than it does a healthy curiosity, a willingness to see things from all sides, a sense of humor, an ability to roll with the punches and a knack for making the best of whatever is.
 
In the real world some people mature as early as five and some never, but you can't miss them.  They draw people to them like moths to a flame.  With apparently endless energy they try to pull everyone into the warmth and light that emanates from the very center of their being.

In its own time

My thots are wildly scattered today. 

I suppose that is okay once in a while.  I just don't feel grounded,  so I suppose this is nature's way of saying it is not time for me to put anything down in words.

The words need time to find their place and settle in, then perhaps they will grow into something bigger and better.

At the very least I am honoring the attempt, or many attempts since early this morning, to write a thot.