Dear Me

MY GOAL FOR 2013

Dear Me, I began. The words stared at me on the stark white paper until I couldn't stand it any longer.  So, journal in hand, I went outside, settled down in the grass and leaned against the Maple. 

What are my goals for the coming New Year, I wondered.  Leaves were already starting to fill the lawn and the sky was coated with a gumball blue that made me want to lick it.  How it would taste! I could imagine the sweet flavor like cotton candy.  I smiled and closed my eyes, picturing Pegasus by my side, sitting on a cloud, chewing on a bite of autumn sky.

I opened my book, full of the poetry I had written and the animal sketches I had drawn, and closed my eyes.  A slew of ideas crawled across the thinning lawn and I reached out and touched the one closest to me.  It curled up like a caterpillar and opened an eye as if looking me over.  I remembered Swift, then, the way he had looked at me as I stood before him while he munched on a wad of hay.  He liked me.  I could read it in his expression which painted me a deep copper; my arms, my face, even my hair, and I wanted to paint him back.  So I loved him with my heart, hoping he could read it in my eyes, or in my thoughts, or whatever way horses have of reading humans.  I believed he knew how I felt.  I had to believe it; it's all I had to go on.

But nothing belonged to me.  Not anymore.  I went back to Pegasus in my mind and hunkered down into the pillowy vapor of the heavens and tried to think of other things, hiding my tears and my sorrows as though they didn't exist.  The thin gumball blue coating cracked against my molars as I chomped down on the color and the sky began to fall.  Lucy, Goosey, I thought, look out!

But the sky didn't fall, anymore than it did on Henny Penny, but the rain did.  I picked up my paper and pencil, my book with all the pictures, and headed back inside.

There was Jordan . . . the little dark-eyed Schnauzer who had eyes like Swift and knew how to use them.  She loved me with her gaze, too, just as Swift did, and I ate it up like only a misplaced Aunt can.  How we can hold other living creatures with our eyes!  How we can communicate with them, and them with us!  How we can speak volumes with just a look!  Incredible.  It never ceased to amaze me.

When the rain stopped I went back out again.  The downpour had turned into sprinkles that strung out of the sky like diamonds.  I watched for a rainbow and as it appeared, I smiled.  Leaping for joy, I let my mind loose, flying around the garden, lighting in the branches of the tallest trees.

I couldn't sit down because the grass was too wet and all the chairs were dripping, so I stood for a while and breathed in the fresh air; the scent of actiniomysesis; dry ground open like pores to the moisture; friable grass drooping in the wet air.

Beneath my feet I knew were a million trillion living things.  Bugs and worms and other creatures.  I've seen them many times in my mind squirming through the soil, eating, defecating, existing without a human eye to validate them.

Just then my goals for the New Year suddenly became clear and I knew what I needed to do to achieve a successful year.  I grabbed my pen and began to write.  If I could harness the autumn path as I walk down a trail on foot behind Swift, I wrote,  as he meanders between the trees; the hollow holes in the semi-soft ground that squished soundlessly beneath each step, yielding to my weight.  If I could find a way to share my tears, prismatic as the opal leaves that carpeted the ground, as the branches bust against my peripheral and explode through my emotions banging against memories that clung to my heart, in a way that others could relate to.

If I could take the dark summer-worn soil, wet with October drizzle; the clutter of wilted leaves paving a russet and gold path before me; pieces of the patchy grey-blue sky that danced in and out of the canopy above, as they collected somewhere deep within me like drifts that had blown against a fence, and describe them in a way that would fill my audience with the aching I felt with each step, and the pining and longing and groaning I felt in my spirit, I could feel a sense of accomplishment.

If I could somehow mold Swift's dark legs that moved like furry sticks that quietly, yet powerfully, banged on a snare as he walked, simultaneously lifting, then plunging each one determinedly into the earth as the aroma of the soaked autumn sod wafted upwards, and put them into rhyme . . . if I could take my arms that cut through it as they swung by my sides and my boots that wore it on their soles as I wanted to plant myself into the ground like winter wheat and let the world suffocate me until my last breath and I became a part of the season soon to be overtaken by the cold brumal weather of another winter, and compile it into ideas; sentences; poetry!

Yes, that's it!  My goal for the new year is to find a way to harness nature; to open my toolbox and let the wind in!  To grab a rag of words and polish the stars; to hold the sky like a slate and write the clouds!  If I were to archive every drop in the ocean, every particle of sand in every desert, just right, and paragraph every mountain peak, file every idiosyncrasy in every valley around me, just so, perhaps they would come alive!  I could show others what I've learned about the intimacies and the inner workings of the world around us and, maybe, just maybe, the experience would make a real writer out of me!

Sincerely,
Pony Tale

896 words