By Ayyoubsabawiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43193432

Awakening from the riveted furrows of dreams, I walk out of the room I share with my beloved into an early pre-dawn. The new microwave, installed yesterday, glows like a beacon of modern fidelity.

I’m letting my ego go at long last in the one area I’ve allowed it to lead: My own dreams for my writing career. I surrender my will and my microwave-installing fingers to you, oh God. Make of all of me as you will.

I tingle. I’m scared. It’s crazy stillness and the click of my fingers on the keys that respond. But that’s not all, oh, no, that’s not all. God, I miss reading Dr. Seuss regularly. I recently realized that the way our foyer is set up—with inside shoes and outside shoes and a bench to sit and change them—reminds me of Mr. Rogers. My beloved is even a debonair (if threadbare) professor type, gentle and well dressed, so he seems to fit this scenario, too. I have been happy since we’ve decided to get married.

So much on my plate: Plan a wedding, plan a garden, sew an apron and put together an incredible recipe book for Harmony (with her dad, Steve), prepare for our only child to graduate high school and get ready for her to go off to college. Oh, and like go to work everyday.

Sunday, as I waited for Christopher to run to the shed for a different tool, my shoulder braced under the microwave to stabilize it, Hannah walked out of her bedroom wearing her wine-colored down jacket and carrying her three bags. Captain, her caramel-colored pit bull, trotted beside her.

“Bye Mama,” she said, so nonchalantly it hurt my stomach. I’m so proud of how independent she’s become, but I miss her already. These weekends with her go so fast. After spending the first three years after our divorce more at my house, she’s opted to live with Steve during the week for this, her senior year of high school. I literally couldn’t run to hug her on her way out the door. I felt like I’d failed because tools were strewn across the kitchen. I felt like somehow, if we’d completed the project in time, she wouldn’t leave. But her life has nothing to do with me anymore. And her timing’s her own.

I learned last night that a friend we all worked with in our early 20s at Long’s Gardens died last month. He was young enough I worry that it must have been suicide. The friend who told me, she and her family have lost way more than their fair share of beloved people to such despair. Yet she, her husband, and their grown children are among the kindest, most positive people I know, so believe me there is no cause and effect here. But families sometimes seem to cluster around themes, things we need to learn, and so, perhaps, this is in some way part of their path.

Or maybe we live in especially dangerous times. Our Earth warms, our government decays. Both alone and together we must grow in big leaps to cure climate change and other ills that seemed less urgent just a few years back. If I didn’t have a deep and daily connection with God and Nature to fill me in light, I might also have succumbed to this dark night.

But there is so much to live for! The joy that pervades everything with my beloved feels a tonic for these troubled times. Thank you! Thank you so much.

As for writing, I must do it. It feels like either a curse or a blessing. I love it, love you, God, or demons who make me do it. The creative impulse isn’t good, or evil; rather it’s the force of desire born of breath and mind, heart, body and soul. I cannot control it any more than I can control the wind. It is into this confusion my soul pours and churls and turns. And when I emerge, something has been put back together that had slipped. Again and again, I emerge.

My thighs spread like butter onto the chair. I surrender to another Monday with its hopes and fears, its charity cases and happiness, nuts and bolts and flying saucers, lakes and the furrowed brows of pine trees.

I take a moment that’s just for now.

I can hardly believe I feel this safe, this warm. I am among the most fortunate of people. I breathe air that lingers in my heart before traversing toward the sky and the lungs. I rest, knowing all of life unfolds beacons like stars and I am one of these, or I would be, God willing. I take a deep breath and wonder of the kindred spirits. Should I find these, Nature, and shift with them into the new times? Maybe if I discover our finer connections, like silken guitar strings, none will feel so overbearingly alone.

It is into this consciousness, this willingness to forge a ray of hope across a rainbow of sky, that I rise. Together, we rise.

How are we finding our communities? How do we thrive? Bless the cougar’s third eye, we rise.

And for now, this dusky dawn eclipses my would-be trajectories. I’m giving up in the most unusual way: I’m not giving in, but giving it all away instead, to thee, God. My life, my thoughts, my writing, my heart, this body, my imagination, my music, my love, my faults. I lay them all at your feet and ask to soar with you, one with you and the great love that’s bigger than what we can call on. I call you anyway. Expand me out beyond the rainbow, bigger than Dr. Seuss’ worlds and yet more tidy, kind like Mr. Rogers but more funky, whatever it takes to feel myself one with you. I give it all up. You’ve been inviting me to lay down in this green pasture always. And there you are, the gift that’s all I’ve ever wanted or needed, blooming in my heart. Thank you, Lord, for your infinite incredible patience and your longing to meet me wherever I kneel at last and you bid me rise.

Together, we rise.