My good friend Beccah Ray, gave me this encouragement. She said "I know this isn't what you had planned for your life, but you're an adventurer, and this is your next journey". That is a true statement, and anybody who knows me knows that I do like to make my own path, preferring to do things my own way. My brother-in-law always jokes about a time during my teen angst years (which seemed to have followed me well into my 20s) when I responded to him, "well Josh, you know I'm not a conventional girl!" in a huffy, exasperated tone. Deep down, I love the conventional. I love houses with gray siding and white trim and porches and a garden. I love fall traditions of pumpkin carving and apple picking and hay rides and campfires. I love Christmas songs and movies and cookies; and making New Year's resolutions, and playing card games, and living in a suburban area that is quiet and safe. I love the idea of family, although my family unit is going to be smaller than the norm. I love many conventional ideas, but I don't discriminate against the creative, or against lives that are led in different ways. Life can be lived a million ways, and each person's experience in life is unique, it is one of a kind, it is their own. Life is as different as our fingerprint - to each their own.
And to me, this is now my life. I have already felt myself being changed, doing things I previously wouldn't do or think - thinking more about someone else than myself, than my own feelings. I have a little, tiny, living infant inside my belly, and it is time to think about them already. I don't overdo my "work outs" because I know that I need to take it easy on myself so that the baby will be safe and sound, undisturbed in the little home they have. As I am cleaning out the things I have kept over the years (because I am a packrat), I have found many things that are awakening my creative side once again, a side of me I lost many years ago. A side that appreciates fiction novels, and idealism, and critical thinking about what is around us and presented to us each day. I want to share one of, possibly my favorite, poem:
A Dream Within a Dream - Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
And to me, this is now my life. I have already felt myself being changed, doing things I previously wouldn't do or think - thinking more about someone else than myself, than my own feelings. I have a little, tiny, living infant inside my belly, and it is time to think about them already. I don't overdo my "work outs" because I know that I need to take it easy on myself so that the baby will be safe and sound, undisturbed in the little home they have. As I am cleaning out the things I have kept over the years (because I am a packrat), I have found many things that are awakening my creative side once again, a side of me I lost many years ago. A side that appreciates fiction novels, and idealism, and critical thinking about what is around us and presented to us each day. I want to share one of, possibly my favorite, poem:
A Dream Within a Dream - Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep-while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep-while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
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