State of Obvious

At times I am a stone in the river.  I feel the cool water rushing over me, bringing change, bringing life, bringing death.  I feel the river get rough, the water too high and too fast as it rushes by.  It bumps up against me, forcing me from my settled bed and into the moving stream.  The moss is rolled away, the slippery adhesions of choices and mistakes.  It all comes away like cotton in the wind.  Sometimes I am rolled to a spot that is too deep, the water gurgling over my head, a laughing sound.  Eventually I notice it is peaceful and dark down here and some of the fear is washed away.  I have time to think and just be still.  Be still, a simple refrain.  Be still. I am a stone in the river.  My rough edges are slowly polished away.  It is not an easy process, oh no.  It is pain and fear and mistakes.  But also joy - joy smooths away those spiny bits just as skillfully as pain.  I am made smooth, a product...

I haven't written about adoption for a little while, so you might think I'm not thinking about it much these days or maybe it has slipped into such a state of normalcy that it is normal now.  But you'd be wrong. I still think about adoption all the time.  I'm not going to go so far as to say every day, and I certainly don't think about it in terms of worry and wait and fear like I used to, pre-finalization.  But I still have many thoughts, concerns, worries, fears, joys, thankfuls and other moments along those lines all the time. For example, sometimes I will turn my head and catch a glimpse of the silky smooth brown skin so different from my own and be amazed.  Amazed at how different it feels and looks, how pretty the shadows around her eyes are, how amazing and sometimes strange the change in pigmentation is.  I watch with wonder as her skin darkens to cocoa in the summer sun, turns ashy when its gotten too dry, and retains this flawless quality so common...

We get funny ideas in our head about how good or bad our life is.  About what kind of memories we lived and lived through and lived for.  We hold things like golden strings between our fingers, sometimes so tightly that we don't even notice they have slipped away into the lost folds of time. The other night Eric sat in the chair across the room and said "We have a pretty good life, don't we?" It caught me off guard.  Not because it wasn't true, but rather because it was and his blunt, unfiltered, unexpected, off topic statement jolted me back into that reality.  I get busy sometimes remembering.  Reminding myself constantly how bad my choices are and were.  How hard it was and is to weather the storm.  How sad I felt and feel, how mixed up and turned around I still get.  I dwell on the tornadoes in my memory, spinning around until the present falls away and only the past pain is real.  Forgetting, in my memory, how happy the past was to...

water my garden.  Something simple and clean and earthy about water falling on leaves and the spattering sound the droplets make as life hits root.  Something wonderful about wet concrete butting up against dry, thirsty grass.  Something good about the cool evening hour and the sound of settling silence when the wind stops blowing and the birds nestle in. Peaceful. There are little bugs on some of the plants.  I won't pretend they don't gross me out, but most I ignore.  They're just going about, like I am, fussing and fixing and getting ready for another day to close.  Some I don't ignore, particularly the kind that eat my stretching plants.  Those get squished beneath an uncaring shoe (or in between some pliers, but only if Eric's doing the pruning).  Cleansing. I could draw a thousand lines between life and my garden, simple parables about growing and stretching, weeding and pruning, squashing the bad bugs and letting others go, making room....

Freedom doesn't come free, so the old saying goes.  We've heard it a thousand times without a second thought.  Freedom isn't free, our country's freedom came at the high price of blood and sweat and tears, each shed so we could live in relative freedom.  Free to earn, to try, to change, to strive.  Free to live and let live.  But freedom in life isn't free, either.  It comes with choices and hard consequences and darkness.  Free to live, free to die by our own hands.  Freedom isn't free, it's paid in blood and sweat and tears.  Happy freedom, friends. image here