Does it matter?

Baby steps, really.

I just pried myself out of my oh-so-comfy chair, set aside my oh-so-comforting reading material, and got ready to go out into the oh-s0-cold, dark night to the Rec Center and walk my two miles around the track.

Warm coat on and zipped in anticipation of the snow-laden night, I walked my bare feet over to a tumble of shoes. At the last minute, instead of slipping my second foot into a matching red clog, I watched my foot slide into a pink one. Hmmm. Who says that a pair of shoes means they match?

Did it matter to the universe that I set out into the dark, one foot red and the other pink? I don't know. But it mattered to me.

This New Day

Mid-morning here . . . I had to listen a little harder today when I asked "What if . . .? . . . .or maybe actually a little softer?? . . but I did hear a whisper, a beckoning, an invitation . . .I'm to have music on, all day today. Even the thought makes me uncomfortable, so that's proof I'm tickling an area that would like me to leave it alone, but not really.



I got a second unmistakable nudge: to share this poem

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Someday

Young enough to fit inside the refrigerator box
my sister and I set up housekeeping
Her blankets run along one side, mine hug the other
Our two dollbabies sit in between

Lace curtains taped to box flaps
float in summer breeze
a fragile doorway between
make believe and Out There

Did I know then
that all my life I’d need a place
alone
a place set apart?

A Nebraska boy tells of his early writing place,
a refrigerator box in a bedroom corner
when newly married

He sat in the box, wrote poems,
taped their adolescent shapes
on cardboard walls

We slept outside, my sister and I,
sheltered, by choice, in our Kelvinator cardboard
three feet from the back door, three feet
from indoor plumbing and a mother’s eyes

When summer’s night rain wet our box
we slid out from under a sagging roof, slid inside before
complete collapse, slid back into a bedroom
I’d spend the rest of life trying to escape

The Nebraska boy, from his box,
wrote his way to praise as
poet laureate of America

Me, most comfortable with a wall at my back
and a clear way out, I write and
dream of living open, free,
someday unboxed entirely

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I pasted a copy of this poem on today's page in my 2009 Project journal and found myself writing at the end of it: "oh my sweet precious baby . . . 'someday' is NOW