my life in photographs

Do you ever wake up from underneath the blanket, only to feel a slight tinge of sorrow or regret and there is absolutely no cause for you to feel this way. That is how I met morning — slightly strange, slightly nervous, slightly curious with no need for it, as if I said something wrong the evening before but I know I couldn't have. Honeyed light pours through the kitchen window, a coffee maker makes sounds I can hear, dried snapdragons are in view, dogs who are snoring, what could it possibly be that brings me to a mood that is not a celebration of all that this is? Perhaps, it is not a good time to ask, just a time to go on as I do.

 

 My weapon of choice. The banjo. The reason I ever began singing and ringing out what grows in the bones and the mind and the belly of a human. If it weren't for this moon shaped machine, I could be traveling through this wide unknown world less sure and certainly less satisfied.

When the world looks like roses before you.

I've been thinking of the mountains and how we are nearing the time where wildflowers start to sprout and paint the wild brush that is a mountainside. I grow tired of the city even though it does have good offerings of it's own-- music, people, pipe dreams being born, but I need that wild kind of strangeness and aliveness that seems to only exist when I am not here. 'I am mountain bound' might very well be my favorite sentence in the English language. After, 'I brought you snacks', of course.

Here I am with two dried bouquets, one is bright with snapdragon flowers and the other, made up of leftover plants dried over winter.

Can somebody send a little springtime to my neck of the woods? I want to adventure, catch a glimpse of flowers, toil in the soil, but May begins and although the may tree buds are starting to green, I just want them to bloom because when they do, I'll have more than dried snapdragons and leftover petals to grin upon.

I slept in until 11 am for the first time in years. Then, I was greeted by a warm plate of food made by a kindhearted woman I call my mum. Feeling lucky to be living today. Feeling well enough to take up singing and dancing through these halls.

When I entered the storyhive competition, I was rattled with shakes and uncertainty if it was something I could do - asking for help, asking for votes, talking about myself and my dreams for one week straight. I mean it when I say, I don't want to be a mosquito buzzing my way into your feeds, taking you away from your day, putting a microscope on me, but I now know that the weight of dreams is lifted and softened when you let others help you, confide in you, and love you. I have lived my entire life with the back of a turtle shell, always hiding, always believing that I was unfit to be loved, but the truth is as true as the sky can be blue, there are people in this world who want to lift you up.

From where I sit, I can hear the black capped chickadees parading from treetop to treetop as if the whole world is theirs and something in me says that it is and I am just here visiting. Before I could truly know the beauty that is birds singing on a warm weather day, I had to hear the crows echo through the chimney as I shivered and sighed at the length of a winter. We earn our seasons here, so every drop of sunlight counts. Like memories do. Like life does. Like seconds appearing and disappearing. Like remembering your mother's voice. Or that time you stayed out on the hillside until morning. It is seeing the geese finally return or letting lemonade sit on your tongue. It is the way dust shows on the window and the sight that is dandelions growing from the ground. In you, there is a certain kind of knowing and if you listen to it, you might one day hear it say "you're just visiting, so sit slowly with that which one day you will live without."

Follow