To Everything There is a Season

I’ve been in a contemplative mood lately, which isn’t all that unusual for me. I believe that writers should be observant, and more highly aware of the emotional elements that are around them than other people. How can you write about human nature when you do not attempt to understand human nature?

However, the things that I’ve been contemplating are not the sort of things that one wants to publish for all the world to see on a blog—all the world meaning everyone from my beloved cousins in Arkansas to weird internet people that peruse other people’s websites just to leer and make creepy comments. Hence my long silence from the blogosphere that I love so well. Still, I find that I miss watching my sister’s face light up when she reads some silly thing I’ve written, and I would truly love to get my mom off my back (love you, Mama!) so I guess I’ll write tonight about one of the smaller things that I’ve been thinking a lot about in the past few days. Yes, children, tonight I’m going to tell you all about some of the goals I have before I get run over by a rampant moose, or however God chooses to remove me from this earth. Knowing the black cloud that seems to loom over my head, the moose alternative seems highly likely. But I digress.

Here is a list of some of the things I want to do. I like making lists, but it is hard for me to organize them, so this list is not entirely accurate in the area of preference. Still, I’m sure you’ll get the general idea.

Before I get become the first person in history to die by a light falling out of the ceiling at a movie theater, I want:

To be married and have a family
To dance ballet again, maybe even have a solo en pointe
To sit on a green hill in Ireland
To go into space and see the stars up close
To play “Rhapsody in Blue”
To have a book published
To sing before an audience, songs like “On My Own” and “Learn to Be Lonely” and “Into the West.”
To be an aunt
To learn how to ride a horse and go galloping across a field
To become fluent in a language while living in a foreign country

Here’s hoping that some of these will one day happen.

What are your goals?

General Warnings to the World as Learned Through Yesterday's Events

1.) To the little birdie that delights in standing on my air conditioner unit at five in the morning and singing to greet the dawn, this warning: While what you are doing may be faintly romantic, it is undeniably disrupting to the old REM cycle. Continue in your present course, and I can assure you that you will be cat food.

2.) To those people that think blasting air horns at graduation, I caution you this: There are usually grandparents in the audience, trying to enjoy watching their descendants pass through the easiest part of life and into the next phase of their existence. If you think using air horns and whistles while sitting right behind them is wise, you have no one but yourself to blame if you give them a heart attack. Not to mention the fact that when you have succeeded in giving me a migraine, I will have absolutely no hesitation in grabbing a yearbook from my mom and beating you upside the head with it. The choice is up to you.

3.) To all the lovely fathers that decide to wait until the last minute to purchase Mother’s Day gifts—I WILL laugh out loud at you when I pass the card aisle at Target and see no less than ten fathers there all trying desperately to find something half decent to give their wives. Just don’t try and make it one of those amusing cards that usually begins: At least you…

I can assure you that if you tell the mother in your life that at least the third eye on the back of her head doesn’t need contacts or something else asinine, you will NOT be getting those golf clubs on Father’s Day that your kids will cheerfully perjure themselves to say they bought for you.

Ownership

I can see it all around me
The magic.
I can see it, taste it, hear it
But I can never feel it.
It is never my own.
Why is it that I can see what so many people cannot,
Yet I am never owned by it?

Those who ignore it, those who undervalue the magic
They always find it.
They don’t know to what they owe their happiness.
Yet I, who have always appreciated it,
Yes, loved it,
I can never seem to catch it.
It slips away from me continually in an unending chase.
I’m tired, deeply.

Oh, I yearn to know how many times I must surrender.
How many times must I look for a reason,
When none exists?
How long am I going to be in the refiner’s fire,
But never know the glory of the flame?
When will I be removed from the furnace
And be seen as a sparkling jewel?

I don’t ask for much, only for a reassurance of the end result.

When will the magic possess me?
When will I be able to look at it?
Hear it.
Taste it.
Touch it.
And feel it?

I can see it all around me
The magic.
Yet I am never owned by it.
I, who have always known it as a friend,
Would welcome it, cherish it.
People ignore it all the time.

I would not.

When will my time come?