Hi There-
Participating again, occasionally, with the gang at Lisa Jo’s place, which you can find here: http://bit.ly/1cZ4w4t
Here are the rules should you want to join me, which I hope you do some day. This is fun stuff and challenging to boot. The side effect? Your writing gets better, stronger. And you also get to encourage others too, which is icing on the cake for me.
So, here’s the challenge, should you accept it: you write for 5 minutes with freedom like you have no fear or shame. Or propensity for run-on sentences and inappropriate comma use, like I do. And then you have to be brave (or at least pretend to be) and link up to her blog.
Encouraging the writer who links up before you is part of the deal, too. This last rule is crucial, as we all need to encourage others. Why encourage another writer? Because at one point or another in our lives, we all need encouraging, yes, oh yes we do.
You ready? Here we go:
See
I see the socks beside the bed, all wrangled and left in a pile as I try to make the house company ready. Sigh. Later, as I pad down to the kitchen, careful to not wake the baby, I will see a bill opened, left in the wrong place. He knows better, I think to myself. He knows where this goes.
Meanwhile, I’ll tend to forget my own inability to put the dishes in the dishwasher quickly, and I’ll turn a blind eye to the laundry piles. I’ll just see his faults, forgetfulness, not mine, never mine.
Oh how I have so much to see, truly, so much to really learn.
I’ll see his bookmark, a shred of a flyer, and grin at his always trying to make use of something inherently wasteful. I see the beautifully crafted small stool that he made from a tree we had to cut down. I smile warmly, a life we’ve created in these details that in my better moments I’ll remember how much I love it all.
I try to begin to really see the joy and the love between the beauties and the battles of what is an authentic marriage.
Most days I will forget, careless and caustic in forgetting to ask about his day, and putting away the cup I always inevitably leave at my bedside table that makes him crazy.
Later, he will forget all about the task I asked him to do.
Later still, we will both again dance in the familiar refrain of restlessness, frustration, forgiveness and love, over and over again, like we’ve not ever heard the song ever before. While our emotions forget, our feet remember the movements exactly, like a well-rehearsed, retired ballerina whose body remembers when her mind regresses.
And in this I’ll say a silent thank you while weaving in a prayer to see the beauty and the joy in all this. Especially knowing what we know–that we’re leaving two sets of permanent prints in this life not unlike fossilized dinosaur tracks, while the others leave bread crumbs in the snow, only to be lost in the snow drift of life, children, and obligations.
And only then do I begin to truly see.
