Beginning

There will be a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.
Louis L'Amour

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
Lao Tsu

And you? When will you begin your long journey into yourself?

*

If all you can do is crawl, start crawling.

*

Your mind, this globe of awareness, is a starry universe. When you push off with your foot, a thousand new roads become clear.
Rumi

I'm not sure why, but today feels like a new beginning. I'm sitting in expectation of turning 45 this week and somehow I have the feeling that the anniversary of my birth into this world will be a new birth for me. I may have to learn to walk again, and to understand what it is to be in the world, in a brand new way, with new eyes, new ears, a new mind. If I can "push off," out of the dark I've been living in these few months, I have a kind of new hope that I will open my eyes and see stars.

Tonight, I wrote this small poem:

Still

Still, I sit, waiting,

wanting the thing to move in me.

To move me. My heart used to be

an engine. Now it's a leaf,

sitting on a pond, waiting for wind

or a surfacing fish. Take it

somewhere, attach it to a tree again.

*

These last few months, it's been hard to push off of my own volition, but something stirred me today. Maybe it was the wind. I was up at the lake for a picnic, a big picnic full of fellowship and the wind was fierce, my hair blew into all kinds of curls and my skin was washed with air--summer's over, I thought, briefly. And though it's normally Spring that offers renewal, with my birthday in the fall and Rosh Hashanah near my birthday, there's a general trend towards newness each fall. During college, we used to start late September, so that also gave a new sense of fresh chances each September.

And all the leaves, working so hard to stay green through the heat of the summer, get to turn these brilliant colors and fall away--they, we, get to let go, and be swept up into something new. The old form disintegrating, becoming a part of the sky, and oh, I crave my place in that sky, that blue and blustery sky, and the rain coming down, and the stars, oh, the stars. . .