“The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of it.”

- Rollo May

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Three years ago, I wrote:

“Being alive is sucking in everything around you and strategizing how you fit or thrive in it or you don’t and deciding how much of that is ok with you. Constant, fluid modification, not complacency, with what does and doesn’t feel like you. Sacrifice, both personal and professional, as a route to more meaning. Making snap decisions that make little sense but feel right and then cringing and crossing your fingers. Knowing that pleasure and playing and personal indulgence aren’t dirty words. Pushing yourself to the edges of your own limits, then taking one more step. Living by imagination, learning by experiencing, loving by instinct. Making every day some varying-degree version of truth or dare with yourself. Accepting the alternating consequence-and-celebration cycle of that lifestyle. Being alive is being shamelessly frisked by your surroundings, letting yourself be accosted by your choices and circumstances once and awhile and coming out the other side a winner, even if just barely, beat up and short of breath. No thanks to security, but to risk and ingenuity and pure will and a drive to feel your own blood pumping. Adrenaline is a reminder. Why do so many people disable it?”

I need to cut a long path back to that person.

Posted by tee in de la vida, favorites
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In the middle of my dream about a massive storm, we were woken up by thunder, long and rumbling, and for a moment we wondered if we were hearing a tornado approaching. But its crescendo ended in a loud clap that echoed across the valleys and mesas then disappeared over the Sangre de Cristos.

And rain. Lots and lots of rain. We had the windows open and it felt so good to lay there under warm covers with the cool, damp air breathing in and out of the room.

‘Tis the season. There was a funnel cloud spotted in Albuquerque a few days ago, which was thought to have touched down momentarily over the southeast part of town before dissipating amidst hail and torrential rains. I learned about this through my mother, 1200 miles away. Who called to ask me why she’s considering moving to New Mexico when we’ve got tornados, and, as she read somewhere, one of the highest concentrations of lightning strikes in the country.

My answer, as you can guess, was a grin on the other end of the phone and then: “why wouldn’t you?”

Posted by tee in sense of place
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Me: “Sarah, did you eat lunch yet?
Sarah: “Yep!”
Me: What’d you have?”
Sarah: “A mustard + apricot jelly sandwich”

(silence….) 

Sarah: “Want me to make you one?”

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I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition–
add two cups of milk and stir–
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication’s school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else’s
garden now.

There’s an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers’ call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.

- Mary Cornish

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