Resolutions

I haven’t written for over a year…

I became a painting obscured by too many colors, blending together into a fog of grey. Life laid down dark blues of grief and reds of anger but I tried frantically to color over it with a calm green and sunny yellow…instead of reinventing the subject, I blurred the painting into paralysis.

There is a lump of grief stuck in my throat that I can’t even begin to verbalize. But every day there is joy bubbling up like an artesian well. I grab for that joy, a swimmer drowning, trying to hold onto an under-inflated innertube. We just sink and rise together. There is no drowning and no swimming, there is just floundering.

The morning was foggy when I asked the earth for signs…geomancy they call it.

I started to run/walk/slogging through the pasture. Our pasture is wild – – – bee brush and cactus, mesquite and a few short scrubby cedar. I looked out in the distance to our new neighbor’s property. He’s cleared the brush and trimmed the bottom limbs from all the oaks. It looks like a public park. I admit, it is beautiful and neat and clean…but fake… a clenched tooth smile at a funeral.

On our side of the fence, bee brush tangles with prickly pear; agarita reaches out and grabs t-shirts in the winter and feeds deer in the spring; cedar and mesquite rebound year after year of “brush control.” There is no control on this side of the fence. The tears come when memories drop in like uninvited guests, laughter tickles during serious moments, rain and drought remind us we have no control.

But the eight point buck calmly watches me from his lunch along Long Creek. We are starting to get quail back on this place and this past spring I heard turkey in the creek every morning. Painting Buntings dance in the lane. Mockingbirds fool me into seeking the scarlet red of cardinals. And I just noticed the first of the Meadowlarks coloring the grey misty mornings with their bright yellow chests.

Life seems to be drawn to the wild and messy.