run run run

Hello there.

It's been a hellofacoupleamonths, friends. Run together, run down, run away, run out.

This winter was one of the hardest for me on record for many reasons, but mainly because I came face-to-face with myself in some ways I didn't expect. I was surprised by the turn my insides took, a sharp left and a sharp right and there I found the things I thought were long gone, long resolved had climbed up, dusted themselves off and demanded my attention: family, expectations, disappointment, faith and trust. They're still there. Today, they're just a ghost parade following me through the house, blowing in my ear now and then. But they aren't screaming at me like before. And when they pulled me into that hole I thought was as wide as the muddy Mississippi, swift flowing and deep as the Atlantic, then comes a bright, clear day after a deep, dreamless sleep (no dreams anymore, please; I don't want them) and the girl Cardinal at the bird feeder, with the brightest orange beak, and the neighbor mowing his wet, wet grass at 8 a.m. And I feel the kernel of hope again, and here I am.

I know I'm the most unpredictable, unreliable poster. I realized that I really don't like showing the mess. I like things to be clean and neat and organized. Most people do, I suppose. But the reality is that most everything in the world is a mess, really.

KFW wrote this week about her own spot in the Internet, about finding, no, stating, an identity among all the keyword-focused, tagged blogs in the world. (Me, I am so bloody sick of all the food blogs, craft blogs, mommy blogs, theme-of-the-moment pithy blogs cluttering up the world because I'm sick of compartmentalizing and outlining life for ease and acceptance and AdSense revenue.) I don't know what this spot is about. Which begs the question of why write it at all? But I guess I believe that we don't have to always have to state the answer, to write the nutgraph. I guess I think if I'm going to write here at all, it'll be a lot about the mess, the swirling confusion, the uncertainty and questions. That's where I'm roaming. That's where I'm roving. And until I score another trip to Rome, that's where this'll be.