It has rained so much this season it is starting to get to me.

To reach me.

To thaw me.

To trick me into Spring.

The dreams are coming back again.

Mostly of my children.

But of The Trail, too. This undefined journey.

My children are always with me on the trail.

They have comprised so much of it.

I can still say I've been a mother nearly half my life, and when I'm really honest about it, I've been a mother all of my life in many ways.

Lately my dreams revolve around protecting my girls, both in such vulnerable stages of life.

And really, when is life, at it's best, not vulnerable for us all?

This a a recurring theme in my waking, walking thoughts so it's not surprising that it is in my unconscious even stronger. Racing.

I wake up with my chest pounding, sometimes even yelling, defending, fighting for those so close to my soul.

Nothing-NOTHING can ever stop me from being a mom.

So often I find some dark path working to lead me off into feeling worthless for having not produced. For not having a degree, which in my weird mind seems like it would lend me legitimacy or credibility.

I feel these two parts of me...First, the mom, and second, the artist in me that wants to hold stories and connect.

But I deny them both when I go on acting as if one is going to be left behind when the truth for me is that they are really a package deal.

The more I can accept the package of my beautiful, unfolding, synchronistic, mysterious life the more alive my motherhood is, the healthier me and my children are, the more I am inspired to share, the more graceful I become in my frequent fumbles toward ecstasy.

***

What is this with songs/lyrics making their way into these journal entries? I swear I do not plan this!

***

I once had a college professor chastise a paper I wrote for Interpersonal Communications class for sounding too much like it belonged as a monologue for "The Theatre of the Absurd." And then she referenced Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Towards's Ecstasy lyrics in her page and half long critique as being a more appropriate example of my efforts.. The assignment had been to write a paper telling about the influences in my life and how I thought I had become who I was.

I remember struggling to write that paper for days: a simple 3 page writing for a community college class that was to be structured more as a journal entry than even a casual essay. The sort of assignment you couldn't do poorly on, the kind where everybody in the class was given an automatic A+ for turning it in.

I couldn't find the words. Nothing made sense. I couldn't tell about anything. I hadn't discovered my identity and my life was absurd. Sadly, even that fact wasn't recognizable as pertaining to me at that time in my very early 20's.

Somehow, instead of acceptance my paper had triggered some version of contempt in my otherwise laid back teacher. I was still married to my ex-husband and he had picked me up from school that day. I remember screaming and crying in confusion all the way home and for days afterward at the response I'd received from that paper. I was heartbroken. I'd given it my all. I didn't understand her reference to Sarah McLachlan's lyrics or how that fit in at all. Things made even less sense than they had before!

She told me she ought to have me rewrite the paper...in proper form in more accordance to what she wanted.

It was a "journal entry" paper! How could I redo that!?

But there are times now, I think I "get it" a little more. I still think she was a harsh, not very well-read teacher, but in all those years that's the paper I've reflected on the most. It's one of the only assignments in school that's ever really mattered. And it wouldn't have been so without her response. Which luckily I survived.

I never returned to her class. I dropped that class and took it again about 5 years later and passed with flying colors with a different teacher. Thank goodness the assignments were different too.

Because it's taken me all this time to get a grip, become friends with the absurdity and not be offended by my own way of speaking.

"All the fear has left me now.

I'm not frightened anymore.

It's my heart that pounds beneath my flesh.

It's my mouth that pushes out this breath."

Sarah Mclachlan "Fumbling Toward Ecstasy"

***

I got off on a tangent. It's how it goes with me. We stop and look around and we're suddenly at a cliff's edge. How did we get here?

Don't ask. I promise (mostly to myself) this is going somewhere it's exactly meant to go.

This time, it's going to go good.

SO GOOD.

A++++++++++++ Good.

I love trail life so much.

I began to feel the pull to write as I was snuggling my 3 year old daughter in for her night of sleep as the gentle rain poured on the roof of our RV. The outside just feels so much nearer in here.

Somewhere in all this there is a tie in. Even if it takes a while to get there.

Risk to fall with me a while.

There is so much more to see.

Trust we're falling toward something awesome.

Sweet Dreams.