Monday, February 13, 2012

Ten Thousand Hours

I want to kiss this piece of paper, because I worked really hard to gather up this pen and this notebook from the dregs of my bag in the middle of this crowded car on the way home.
A scary q was burning at the edges of my mind:
What do I want to invest 10,000 hours in, to become an expert? What would I be excited about spending that kind of time on?

And the answer was not necessarily photography, not necessarily music education, not necessarily writing or teaching or being a zen-ish person, but just: all forms and flavors of creativity.

I felt excited when I thought it; I'm going to accept things as they come to me as a somewhat transient excited loony artist.

And right now I feel excited about my life being cracked right open like an egg and the yolk is just running out all over the wide earth. The snow dusts the mountains, powder-sugaring its cold magic on the little things that live in the fields. I get to see it with my eyes that don't see well without glasses but a lot of times when I see these things I just look and then other times I SEE, and not that my eyeballs bulge or do anything different at all but my heart accepts all kinds of possibilities and I get excited thinking of all the gifts I have in my world, and just thinking of these amazing things that have to be handmade by God and I feel happy and blessed and open and totally undeserving of all the awesome in my life, but still I know God wants me to have it.

I feel my life flowing more toward Him, naturally, and I feel the more I write the more He shows up on my paper and I include Him better, more decisively and consciously. The light is fading outside the car window, but I have to keep going. I have to keep telling about my lifelong paths and quests that other people conduct with ranging levels of seriousness. But I'm dramatic and I take everything in my life seriously because I live this life this way one time and each moment is so new and transitory and sometimes that's so weightful I don't know quite what to do? And how could I? Because I'm appalled by the wastes of time, even how long it took to turn the page to keep on writing.

I've started worrying a little less about the perfect allocation of blame and I've just started working to accept accept accept my life in the world and give away the need to know everything in its proper compartment. I am learning to balance scheduling with being wild. Because I am a wild child control freak spread out and and formed back again, like a cheeseball. A cheeseball that compliments all kinds of crackers and could do any big thing with her life she wanted. She doesn't have to write big but she can.

I feel God slowly and steadily directing the flow of traffic toward those sweet sweet little babies. They are so needy, so full of big ideas and brain waves and I am excited to meet them in a place where they can thrive in my care, in my love that will be big and wide as rivers and oceans and just as full of salt water. I will be able to take care of them with my heart open and my head brimming with ideas about how to teach them, read them fantastic literature and sing them beautiful songs and be their caretaker,
and I wish there was a more beautiful, full word to say what it really is.

It's almost pitch black and it's just the moon lighting up the corner of the blue sky on my right, a perfectly pink gradient of a sunset behind me to the west, on my left. The plants grow still, evergreen in the snow and there is dirt underneath the ice to support. The dirt doesn't die and it still compiles and hardens to make the mountains. Passing the curves of the rolling in the hills and the peaks that people climb, sometimes they even run up them. Listen to your body, the mountains it asks to climb and the world calling out what it needs you to contribute, be it dirt or a seed or a full grown tree.

It is too dark to write now.

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