exist
Deep winter dark. Quiet. The treed property of our Gatineau pad and the dark streets on which I walk the dog are thick with reflection. I think a lot about death. As the days come and go and I grow older, I focus on existence. What exactly is this matrix we are in? I wake up sometimes and have immediate anxiety over the fact that I will perish. What good is that knowledge? Would it almost be better to not know that we die? I'm not sure.
I think about my daughter as she speeds through various stages of kidness. I'm a passenger on a ship that does not stop. It steams on towards...something. It's hard to tell what is waiting.
My late thirties were filled with a lot of beauty and reflection. I soaked up those post marriage years like butter marrow in the deep alcove of a marinated flank steak. I worked a lot but my off time was my own. In having a child, you truly cross through a threshold and you see that this life is so not about you - and that we really all are small potatoes.
Everyone thinks their shit is so important.
Sneaking Suspicion
Expectations skirt around us. They flutter in easterly breezes and spring meadow winds. We do the things that we think we should - and why? What drives us from point A to point B? We are animae. Enemia. Aenima. Pulse. Pulsar. Pluribae.
I'm glad I grabbed this app. For ages, I've been looking for a quick add for the blog. I've been needing something that will help me get the words to the places they they need to go.
Writing > Righting
It's hard to get to a space where the words flow out - like wine from the upside-down spilling crown gullet of Cassiopeia.
I long for fireside notebook sessions, where I can just write everything down and slow the pace and hear the hot centre fire-snap-pop. I want my hand to cramp from the feeling and passion and the momentary driven wavebreak.
But those aren't things in my wheelhouse these days. I forge the path of parenthood, and my schedule and my time revolve around my partner and a tiny being that has come into our lives.
Lately, she's been climbing the stairs of the house - from the bottom, all the way to the tippety top. It's bizarre to think that children were a far notion from my freewheeling bachelor mind, even two and a bit years ago. And now, I am moving into a new phase of hurdles and struggles and mountaintops and valleys. My universe has shifted, and is shifting.
It's daunting as I watch her, because our stairs are open underneath. And at times, I want to pick her up or at least form a safety net the entire time, but she senses it when I do that. And often, she'll turn on the second last step and want me to grab her - even though she's capable of finishing.
It's as close as we can get to having a godlike feeling in this life. Because we know that, as adults, someone did that for us at one point. Someone watched over us.
But it also begs more metaphysical questions like 'am I being watched, now?' or 'is someone caring for my ultimate best as I do the same for this tiny nugget of humanity?'
The answers are not that simple - but we trek on. Towards all of it.
The stairs and the stars.
