Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Windows are Open

Windows are open, cool air coming into the house. It feels like spring. I know it will go back to winter but today the air feels so good and I am just about to plant pansies and primroses outside the front door.

Life feels so good.

My little girl is napping, I have good food to eat, I have love.

This new year we are feeling more layers of cocoonness dropping off. Which is interesting because I don't know if we fully realized that they were there. For the first time since Otto died I feel like going somewhere, to travel, to visit, to see new things. It feels like a natural desire.

Such great loss really changes life. For years we are coming out of the layers of blankets, one by one. But this is not such a bad thing. It makes everything... MORE. You know that line from the song by Peter Bjorn and John, Objects of My Affection, "I laugh more often now, I cry more often now, I am more me." I love that song.

I think that now I understand, I have experienced, more about death, and it's more real that there is no way to hold on to all we have, it makes days like this immeasurably special. A day to plant flowers in early February, a day to smell the air, to take a walk with my beautiful little girl who is learning to walk and who loves rubbing her hands in dirt and sand and rocks.

It is so freeing. My life isn't measured so much in how many people like what I do, it's measured more easily in how much I am able to tune in to the wonders around me. And make it into music, or a landscape, or a drawing. It is much easier to live this way, with the support of the earth and the stars all around.

I am so grateful for this. I miss my little boy so much, and I love him so much, and I am coming out of blaming myself so much or needing to hibernate. I respect those times too. They had to happen.

And so my friends, I am writing songs again, very open, airy and meandering as I am in the phase of listening, being, and letting the next work make itself known. Waiting, unfolding, happy.