Growth

I am feeling especially fertile today. I don't know what it is, in case you were planning to ask. Maybe it's that my hair has gotten too long, or that the winds insist on blowing warm instead of cold, but my brain these days is rich with imagination, my heart is an endless ocean of feeling and depth. My skin is finally clear! Hallelujah, is what! And thoughts that are planted in me are nurtured, grown tall and strong, branching out and reaching to the sky. It is really some kind of dramatic.

I am also feeling super cluttered. My soul is ripe and delicious and my kitchen is a disaster area. Last night I baked four dozen cupcakes and two dozen sugar cookies in a whirlwind of flour for the young women in my ward and their parents. I slaved over those cupcakes, decorated them to within an inch of their lives and propped them lovingly on my nicest cake plates and platters. As the evening ticked closer I threw together some sugar cookies as an afterthought and slapped some frosting on them all pell-mell and showed up at the door of the church crusty with icing with just seconds to spare. The refreshments table was greeted with oohs and aahhs and copious slatherings of compliments on my gracious being but the proof was in the pudding as they say, and for all those compliments what did they eat? Not the cupcakes, I noticed bitterly as I stacked them all together on a paper plate afterwards and unceremoniously threw them away, their glossy sugar-dipped tops staring at me forlornly from the trash bin. No, they ate those ugly, good for nothing sugar cookies. Damn those sugar cookies!

It caused me to reflect as the night grew late and the dishes remained caked in frosting in the sink on the nature of all of these well-laid plans. Isn't it funny how the afterthoughts sometimes become the best of thoughts? Every time without fail, right? Afterthoughts have got to be some kind of direct communication from God, is how I figure.

I spent the better part of my day staring at online shopping carts filled with my soul's deepest desires. The Internet is on sale right now! But I just could not commit, and not because my Holbs would murder me in my sleep if I did, though he would, you best believe it, but because I am feeling adrift with myself. Some days I wake up and can't remember who I am! Things I had figured out already are vanished from my brain parts. How do I like my cheeks blushed again? Call it how you want it but these are the essentials of female self when the deep stuff is too tired of being examined to be counted on anymore. November brought with it a flurry of questions and I just cannot put a finger on myself! Come on, November! And to think we used to be such friends . . .

Here is something else for you to chew on. At night after the dogs have licked every inch of their furried selves and finally settled into sleep is when I get my best thinking done. Are you that way too? I find my best sleeping spot and then I let my mind wander over the hillsides and landscapes. I usually like to plan out mornings and dream up afternoons and review my to-do lists and other entirely disnoteworthy things but lately when I let my mind wander it finds a path bumpy with serious rocks to be tackled, one at a time. What do you think about that?

It is possibly the impending holidays and possibly The Holbs's impending graduation but I feel like I am in the calm before the storm. Or perhaps it is the darkest night before the dawn? Pick your metaphor. But something is coming. At any minute the blast will hit and then everything around me will change. But I can't find it in my heart to worry, though in weak spots I want to try - at least when I am worried I am actively taking part in it, stressing the future into some sort of shape I can recognize. But I have been praying too long and too hard to believe that anything that happens now is by chance. No, God's got this one by the tail I figure, and all I have to do at this point is go along with it. It makes me feel smaller than a speck to acknowledge my utter powerlessness, but also bigger than a giant for all the ways it seems the world is bent about just for me.

So, I trust in the fertile bits of what surrounds and let things take hold and grow. What else can I do? I don't know what it will grow to be, maybe an oak tree or maybe just a daisy, but it is a certain kind of something when you can accept your limits and trust your all to something bigger, isn't it though?

And anyway, how about this?

But will somebody just buy me these already and get it over with? Gosh.