The HEN NEST, Before Dawn Breaks

The house is quiet and the birds have yet to begin their morning song.

Happy Little Home

The office is dim and I can barely see the keys on the board in front of me and I don't care.  I wish for the cadence and rhythm as the keys take my thoughts to the screen in front of me. I wonder, as I sit here, if someday this sound will become a memory.  Similar to the spin of the rotary dial on the telephone.   Will the advances in voice recognition dictation send the keyboard to the museums of relics? How simple to create a page of writing straight from our voice to the screen and then a click to publish; but how sad to not have the comfort of the keyboard.  If that ever happens.

I'm surrounded by paper.  Class course changes, health insurance reimbursements, mail to open, Euros for little big girls upcoming trip to Italy, Tryout schedules and masterpieces of love drawn by our littlest one. The taxes,evidence of that deadline all around, like wrapping presents at 2AM Christmas Morning, how is it that I know it is coming, have the date clearly marked on the calendar, yet I am still like wha??? 

I should be more organized I guess but in reality, I really don't want to be.  I  love my quirky way of being Not Perfect, coloring outside the lines, like I mentioned here

As long as Pandora is playing and the house is quiet and I can be what I wish, a writer, life at this moment is so good to me.  But what about those other moments, when real life interjects and takes over.......

way more fun than homework!

Yesterdays silliness struggles to surface and I heed the call to those memories rather than to the call of the papers.

I can clearly see young faces, attached to growing bodies and I can hear voices, still fresh, still full of questions and still so in love with me. 

 I love being their "go to" person. I love the ideas their questions create in me, when they open their souls to me. 

I love knowing that Grandfather Google is the source of  my answers to their most obscure questions.   

I can see more clearly who they are and how they are motivated from the questions they present to me   I am always quite in awe of how they are so much the same but all so different.   You can recognize it  from what questions matter most to them.

 One is out to save the earth from the people who inhabit and openly abuse it in front of her, I think she will grow up to not only avoid all sources of paper but plastic too. She loves her animals, to be outside is to be home.

 And yet, her sister, older and searching for a career, is out to save people from themselves.  She questions why anyone would want to waste a single moment, what makes a person good, and where will humanity be in twenty years.

 Somewhere in between are the boys,whose main questions at this point in their lives are:

what is to eat and why is there not more of it.

 Hunters and gathers they are, naturally looking and searching for sustenance.Then questioning why we are not immediately going to burn all that energy off in some activity or sport.

 All the while, searching for  guidance and to reset what the world attempts to distort within them, They come to me. 

And because of where we are in life right now, this past decade. A father whose office is on the road when it is not here. Immediate family far, a few states away....I am everything.

I am their mom, their dad, their grandparent, their aunt, uncle, god parents, cousins, their health advocate, education advocate, Pharmacist, nurse, nutritionist, financial planner, and friend.

I never realized how much more I would have to be when they came into this world.  None of us can.

We will become so much to one person and they will demand that we be one hundred percent that which they are seeking,despite the paper, the calls, the meetings, the carpools, the cooking,the ninety other thousand things that need to be done.  

Exhausting but invigorating, motherhood is all encompassing and sometimes all consuming.  The responsibility of the job does not leave  much time for anything else.  Which is why I write now, before dawn has thought about stretching across the sky.   Before the ocean tide of today sweeps in with the first foot step on the floor above me. Before life is toppling around me, upside down and around.

 I write  about the things that silently fill my soul during the loudest periods of the day.

Playing songs in my heart, I give them all of me and still find some little reserve to give myself. 

It isn't always perfect, but it is human and it is beautiful because of it.

Music Lessons

I can tell I am in the throws of Lent, the dawn of Spring. The titles of upcoming posts are all titled Lessons

One day I think I will be able to write a Laundry Lessons.....ummm, probably not.

Anyways,  I come asking you questions today.

Why are many afraid to go back and look into the past, fumbling in fear of what they will find?  Not to stay there but to learn and move on?  Why is there so much fear of reflection in our world?

Or maybe it isn't a fear.  Maybe,reflection has become too time consuming?  In a world where we can take thousands of selfies a day, tweet a new thought per second ,where there are hundreds of television channels and dvrs full of anything that might not possibly be on those hundreds of channels and when we can open tabs until our computer becomes cranky and Let's not forget the 24/7 Headlines that move us from one event to the next Breaking News.   Could we have become too Instant and Up to the Minute? and less pause and reflect?

If we want to learn to play a song, we do not play it once and move on, do we?  No, we sit and play it over and over, practicing and strengthening and learning how to hold our hands, how to play the instrument. It is a practice in patience and temperament. We give ourselves calluses on our fingertips and/or blisters on our thumbs as we strum the strings or search the keys  (or if your lucky enough to have a percussionist in the house, hear banging, clashing and trolling).   Often as we practice, there is reflection about what works and what doesn't.  Many times we learn a short cut or a lesson that prepares us for a similar song that we play in the future. Or maybe we realize that we just don't like a certain type of music as much as we thought we did. But we went there, we tried, we reflected and we learned.

After all that practice, we often have a beautiful piece of music to play.

What is wrong with replaying the music of our mind's memories until we have fashioned a lesson on how the song was meant to be played?  And maybe when we come to a future situation we will be able to play a harmony, instead of plucking painfully across the strings.

How amazed we will be to hear the music of our souls.

My underlying fear is that in letting go of reflection, we are loosing the art of story telling and without stories to tell, there is no music to write, to be played.

If you agree, spend some time reflecting today.  Drum up a beat and find your way.  It's okay if it isn't perfect, after all,  we are all just learning as we go : )