Word of the Week - 129

Word(s) of the Week:  IMPOSSIBLE THINGS

RubberMoon Stamp.

Life against all odds.  Winston Churchill told us, "Never, never, never give up."  In daily matters, matters of heart and mind, expressions of spirit, stubborn refusal to take no for an answer, fingers in our ears singing "la-la-la" as we are scolded, chided and told all the reasons why not.  Ha! we say.  The voice of that flea, that gnat, one of our better angels in disguise, sets up a rumbling soliloquy that only we can hear, either telling us to do it anyway or to wait, wait, wait.  Patience is considered a virtue for a reason.

I suppose "believe" is the operative word here.  We do not dissolve in our baths.  The great winds come yet we are still standing.  Reversals of fortune suggest that we grow more frugal, more cautious, but never hopeless.  Perhaps the opposite.  I have never accepted the notion that we are tested.  Life comes along wearing its ordinary-life resoled shoes and frequently washed, possibly hand-me-down unassuming and faded uniform and delivers messages good, bad and indifferent.  To each of us.  We are free to choose the next step.  Recall all the times goodness of a most unlikely nature sat itself down on your front step, more astonished than even you, beholding its presence.  Messages and their carriers are dispatched, who knows from where, and suddenly what couldn't possible be, is.  Today might be the day to run through the streets, calling "Thank you" to the animate and the inanimate.  Both will understand.

This year

"Leroy says, ah, keep on rockin', girl. Yeah, keep on rockin'."

This year I remembered...I have faerie folk in my lineage.

Previously, poetry grabbed me by "the sharp lapels of my checkered coat" and this year a teacher/friend/mentor/poet/angel appeared who reminds me that I can know with my heart and need not care so much about gaps in my formal education, yet steadily, subversively, affectionately, addresses them as well.

Those who would be called angels are abundant in my life, shoring up the still-skeletal hull of this vessel I decided to build in my second-floor living room. I have their unspoken promises to help me launch it. For today, we are not required to know how. It seems I have what I need to do my work. This year delivered my two assignments: show up and get out of the way.

It is a job of paring, paring, discarding and evaluating, finding how to keep the good from being siphoned off for no purpose. This year I have begun to see options where before there appeared to be none. I make my best choice and reserve the right to change my mind.

This year, as do all my years and other measures of time, evaporated. I am less and less inclined to count or quantify, growing closer to allowing events to unfold as they do. Unfolding is not a process to be hurried. Trusting it is no job for the impatient. At times the fluid quality of my days hisses at me about idleness. It may be true but I now have just the one speed and am learning not to call it by unloving names.

There have been miracles this year, as there have in years past, whether I recognized them in the moment or needed distance to clear my vision. Either I've relaxed my earlier definition of the miraculous or, as I suspect, it is ever more plentiful. What more could be asked of any year?