It is easy to sit in a chair and think about battles.  It is easy to do nothing and wonder at how much there is to do.  It never goes away, the being done, the standing straight, the letting go.  It is not easy to move, to hold, to scoop up the piles of mud along the roads and build with them.

There are times when a moment inserts itself in between actions,  a breath between despair and determination.  It is hard to fight what needs to be done, hard to do what must be done.  And the in between, when decisions hold their breath: I can hear the hush of time standing still.  A dewdrop, teetering on the edge of a leaf in the morning, the leaf suspended, no longer attached to the tree from which it came, not yet given to the ground.  Darkness and light an equidistance away. 

I wonder whether I am really good.  The battle that I fight inside doesn’t seem to have determined any victory– just me, torn between slipping beneath waves or continuing to tread water.  Dreams are beautiful, the everyday details of harvesting them are not.  We want children, but what kind of world do we give them?  I wonder how helpful it is to eek out my small existence here in papers and hot footsteps and prepared meals and broken thoughts when all the time living feels so inevitable, as even the rhythm of tomorrow is already pulsing under the heartbeat of the present.  The future is taking shape under my hands, with every second.

I’m not sure why I don’t do what I think would make me happy.  I’m not sure what would make me happy.  I’m not sure why I cannot break out of the hollow stare that has become the monotony of daylight, the sign language of opportunities and the imperceptible sigh they make when they get passed by.  Nothing breaks this silence, not even the roar of the earth turning, or the pleading I am so aware of, that fills me inside.  I am shivering despite the heat.  I am caught between the struggle to accept my own failures, and my indestructible instinct to stay alive.  All the time common sense flees because it’s cautions are no longer useful.  Light is a thing as transient as living and I wonder if a particle dreads it’s transition into wave form even though it is all one and the same.

Hope is butterfly shaped and just as fragile, as intricate as a drop of water, pink as the skin of a newborn, just as much on the brink of dissolving as a dying flower.  So much joy and sadness can happen in an hour.  It is easier not to struggle, but just to feel.  At least amidst the changing colors of  the sky, of the earth underfoot, I may do what is right, or what is wrong, but at least I will chart a course through this world, take responsibility for the things I can make real.