I am writing this blog to offer a view through my lens on the world, and to invite through my regular sitting and writing, a blessing. Over the years, I have written regularly in my journals; in fact, I have a couple shelves filled with them. My husband of nearly 32 years asked me why I wrote and who I wrote for, wondering, I am sure, who would want to wade through thousands of pages to mine the gems. I told him I write for me: to help me tune in and pay attention, to help me process experiences and questions, to remember.
When I have shared my stories, insights, photographs, and more with friends, they ask me to continue. I think they are being kind. But I know the work it took for me to claim my voice as a writer, and to stop judging this creative endeavor as a selfish act. I also have come to know that there is healing power in the sharing of stories. And plenty of synchrony.
Today, for example, I went out to my mailbox to see if there were any cards to mark my turning 65. On the way, a huge Williamsburg blue dragonfly circled my head, flew off and returned, circling, darting, dancing before me, like a child begging, “Look at me, look at me!” I stopped, said hello, remarked out loud how beautiful it was: “I see you!” And I laughed. And then I realized I was part of the dance, this day a milestone of full-out living.
One of the cards came from a long time friend, who designed on the envelope a dragonfly straddling a flower and a promising bud. How perfect an image for this season. I, too, find myself landing on the reality of a life in full bloom and the yet to open. I am celebrating and readying, and the dragonfly dance reminds me to honor it all.
I went back into my house, to my writing space, and opened an email that had just arrived. This gift of a poem, so timely and true, sang to me. Hear it with me:
Halleluiah
Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!
And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.
Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.
Mary Oliver