WHO KNOWS?

i am always surprised by where i end up.

i don't mean, when i head to the market for some tomatoes, i instead end up at the post office—i mean, i strike out with a question, or turn a new page, or have a conversation, or get on a plane, and though i may have started out with a sort-of intention, i got curious. i happen on something i never would have thought of.

fiction is one of the best ways to find surprise endings. reading or writing. it's the—well, how could there have been an elephant that crashed through the roof of the opera house? that's impossible!—when reading, or the—i wonder what choice this prince will make if he is afraid. i wonder what happens if he hordes fear and loves ambition most of all...—when writing another chapter or narrative turn.

when reading and writing, you've got to throw yourself in there (with the chickens and foster kids and insecurities and calluses) without the answer straight in front of you, written in very neat lines.

tonight, i am looking forward to sleeping after a long, hard, good first week in klaipeda, lithuania. after a long trip and just a few days of university orientation, suddenly i'm supposed to be a teacher, with four classes and syllabi, as well as confidence and expertise and poise and a large dose of creativity. also, sanity. (how do you all do it? i can't imagine yet.) but i also have a few lithuanian words; i've had a good meal from a local restaurant, a view of the harbor and its ferries; i have wind-pinched cheeks and a day of rest tomorrow—time, the market, the sea.

i have no idea yet how this year will look. but i've started writing. and, as with any story, there is bound to be hard and good and bad all together, and, at the very beginning, mostly questions. here's to jumping right in.

who knows where i might end up?

FROM THE THIN PLACE

Everyone prefers to stick with the subject of people, but how shortsighted to leave out the question of how we got here and where we're going.

—Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place

How shortsighted we are.

How shortsighted I am today.

Measure from nose to chin. Shoulder, to fingertip, to toe. To bills and worry and fridge mold.

Dwell in questions much bigger than you are sometimes, before you must get back to the details.

...

Also. I just began that book, The Thin Place, though there are a thousand tasks and twelve things to think about at once and this and that to do—and it is really, really lovely.

TO HOLD THINGS, OR NOT

Sometimes it is difficult to hold things in your hands. Heavy boxes. Important decisions. Very hot potatoes.

But it might be more difficult not to hold anything in your hands at all. There is nothing for you to hold, and yet, you need there to be—want there to be—and so you close your fists tight around air, around anxiety, around necessity or panic, digging your fingernails into your palms. It hurts.

The most difficult thing of all is to hold nothing in your hands and to wait, open-palmed, for something to be placed in them. It is difficult, and your hands are shaking with the waiting, and the wanting, and the not-knowing what it will be—if it will be good, or bad, or not what you wanted or ever imagined it would be. It will be surprising. And, if you've really waited, open-palmed, not grabbing at air or other things that aren't very worth holding, it probably will be just the right thing.

Wait.