…things are just coming to me, flowing around me, carrying me along in some crazy kind of buoyancy, a leaf cast into waters, floating along eddies, drifting towards shores, released again and again into currents stronger than the impediments attempting to hold me.

The sun glinting against the snow this morning created refractions of light, sparkling pinpoints caught for an instant. I never again want to be blind to small miracles, to have a heart hardened by an inability to see clearly, or the desire to chase fantasies towards empty futures.

The hunter and its prey, something I understand intrinsically. I understand the obsession, even compulsion, of seeking redemption in destruction. Tempering desire with ration is a fine line to balance and hunger drives us all to strange painful edges.

Chance: the assumed impersonal purposeless determiner of unaccountable happenings.

If I could just stand still, in a bit of wonder now and then, in just the right place, I might understand that the structure of who I am is constant, the paths I travel serve a purpose, and the relationships I have are not variable, but are all crossings on an interconnected life growing from a center, stretching out far beyond my own breadth.

There are times when we feel the torrential downpour of change and there are moments when we witness it in a tiny drop of water resting before it falls.

Memories are funny things. Some of them shift and tilt, like looking at the past through a kaleidoscope. Others are tangible and solid, but the stories they tell are incomplete. Many of mine are fragments, flotsam washing up to shore, bits and pieces of things I don’t understand intellectually, harbingers of a shipwreck sunk so deeply within I can’t fathom the entirety of what’s been capsized.

The last year has involved a lot of letting go, tearing down walls, and entering some darkness I’ve been a little scared to descend into fully. Untangling, uncertainty, and, yes, a sense of understanding of how it’s all come together, just so.

I felt a pull inside of me, the yearning of these small fossils desperate to be reunited with the elements they were born into. It was as if the thirst still residing in the bones I held, caught for hundreds and thousands of years in dust, was pulsating out to me, its desire to be deep within the ocean tangible.

I am awestruck to stand on top of a ridge, and then, minutes later, find myself standing on a layer of bedrock beneath it, witnessing the fragility of something whose solidity I take for granted. Each step I take towards recognizing my own truth brings me to another layer of myself and a deeper understanding of how each event, on the timeline from the beginning to now, has contributed to my formation.