pressing flowers and saving grace
Some days you have a story that isn’t yours to tell. The words add up and bobble around inside your head, bouncing off the boundaries you’ve put in place to keep them corralled. Silence fills the room like a big grey blanket. Everything is muffled, charged with static, covered over with the possibility of fog.
Today in one of those days, and all I can do is think about the ways we save each other in this life. The ways we save ourselves. The tiny little things that heal hearts, or sew them back together with crooked sampler stitches. Smiles and soup and hugs and listening. Being there.
Love is always messy and unchartered. And we are always finding our way together, bumping blindly along the path that stretches before us.
And the questions rise. How do you fit a whole life into a box?
The memories we have become a knot too complicated to untangle. We can only pull out a strand here and there and watch as it dangles. That day, that night, that violet neatly placed between the pages of a bible. Remember when? Heartache and happiness all mixed together in a jumble of once was. Love holding it all together like glue.
Suffice it to say that all we have is our story. Some of them are big and broken, some are smaller and demure. I am learning to cradle each one in the palm of my hand. Delicate petals dried and tucked away between pages that smell of time’s passing. Bits of hope gone dry and brittle, but saved, just the same.
Cherished.
And there it is, the dust of grace, gathered in the seam.
Some days you purse your lips and blow that dust back out into the world. Other days, you close the book back up again, ever-so-gently.
For safekeeping.
.
.
.
October 1st, 2015 at 9:11 am
This hit me so close that — as I have, more than once — I wonder if there are some type of atmospheric thing that wafts through us all, poking us at the same time.
October 1st, 2015 at 9:28 am
The stories that aren’t mine, but become part of me, that become part of my own story, are the hard part for me. They silence me and I hobble around, screaming them inside my head, looking for secret ways to say just parts of the whole.
You are right – it is always messy, and yet, there is always a moment that saves us, that lets us whisper some words out loud. The stories stay, pressed in the book of our lives, but we can breathe a bit easier.
You tell this so well. I know you know.
October 1st, 2015 at 10:33 am
So happy that you are always Being there.
October 1st, 2015 at 1:27 pm
mrs. mediocrity – for someone professing general malaise as your pen name might imply – I’m completely delighted to find it most ironic in this intense writing…. Not sure what to call it exactly – if not prophetic – or simply wonderfully human – then absolutely the thing we are most expected to learn in this life, love…. And you know we go through our daily lives often disregarding the pure things that make us who we are. Like you. You have had an influence on who I am over these past few years. There hasn’t been a visit to your blog yet where I haven’t felt most welcome and in turn charmed by your most wonderful musings. I think you are wonderful, mrs. mediocrity – and I most certainly and definitely can say without hesitation that I love you……. You inspire me.
October 1st, 2015 at 7:53 pm
It is a good thing when we are able to find a way to help someone, to save someone. I have decided I am not especially good at that. Perhaps by example is the best I can hope for. We do all have our stories, and hopefully in each of our stories we are ‘saved.’
October 2nd, 2015 at 12:02 pm
I remember an old Simon & Garfunkel song that went “Time it was,
oh, what a time it was,
it was a time of innocence,
a time of confidences.
Long ago, it must be,
I have a photograph.
Preserve your memories,
they’re all that’s left you.”
This reminded me of that. Your writing was very powerful. Thanks.
October 7th, 2015 at 1:08 pm
First made me think of the boxed we have for each of our children. We are still putting things in them. But yes, we dont have just our stories but so many intersect as well, that we touch – but that is a choice