Tuesday, November 18, 2014

To Belong Among the Wildflowers

Wildflowers. I keep dreaming of wildflowers; waist deep and pungent - miles and miles of purples and burnt orange, of fiery pinks and cream whites - as far as the ye can see.

I can almost smell them - feel their gripping greens against the loose fabric of my skirt; they're asking me to stay, begging me to dance. I close my eyes.
I think they've fine-tuned this language within me that no one else can quite grasp the accent of; a reverberating question exists - beats against the cage showcasing my heart - 'just how do they know?'

Happily ever after litters the pages of a book about a tiny mouse - my fourth graders snicker - because love is funny and icky to the nine year old still searching . . .

Just what is happily ever after?

This world is conditioned to constantly change and morph - it spins, begging to be adored, only to change the direction of its wind once we fall. . .

I used to thrust myself against the course of change. I could quickly execute tantrums to rival a slew of toddlers - change was not welcome. Never welcome.

Change does not concern itself with your dinner invitation.

And so I succumb - and French braided with the going under of a life thoroughly planned to the last second comes the shift of what happily every after is designed to be.

Against all defiant-clinging stances I've taken, I am a creature of habit on a trajectory for change.

Brave knights and frilly dresses were once on the docket for my kind of happy ending . . . I quickly realized corseted living was never going to work for me, anyway.

And so it all shifted; marriage is in there somewhere, but keeping a job I love, having a porch to watch the sun waltz into and out of the sky from, to finally master the art of cooking and finely pick that banjo whenever I please - they're high on a list woven yearning. . .

Even more than the continual cycle of altering what a future looks like, what a future may hold, is the wing-thin differences in what, daily, would put final touches on the closing scene of a life.

And today . . . it all whirls and swirls and lifts and sways around wildflowers.

Maybe it's just a desire to exist wild - all the restless and anxious and unknowing racing high toward a certain gathering place.

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world. -C.S. Lewis