adulthood, imagination, and taking risks

A big misconception about being an adult is that nothing is worth risking your pride or stability over--or, worse, that the important things are the ones that benefit from avoiding risk. This is actually backwards--you have to take risks in order to find those things that are worth risking it for, or you never will. I just try to get better--which includes making mistakes.

Risks are the only way you end up learning what is worth risking for, and what is not. And so with each lesson it becomes easier to think you shouldn't risk at all, that you've suffered your losses and it is time to move on, settle down, stop worrying, when in fact it is these losses that hold your inner life, your spark, the new beginning of the person you are about to be. That person will risk better, or just differently, even if you don't know what's "right," and your sense of discouragement from prior risks, even despair, tells you that the sense you have of "rightness" seems to diminish or retreat each day. That internal compass lives within you, always. Each moment of listening to it, each instance of indulging its curiosity, and each impulse toward nurturing its carefulness, can make you more alive. I have never graduated from this process.

11.26.2014

Today/light on my wall from between curtains

Against the shaded umber of my
clean apartment walls

This morning through curtained windows one narrow

Eye of sun has stolen, and

Yes, without my glasses becomes
obscured and whimsical,

These things do:

Moment of cherry blossoms releasing
to a breeze,
dandelion seeds, sure; or

Muted stars from

turning painter’s careless arm

Cast widely toward the shadows;
delicately drifting

And only just

Aglow.

I never know what today will bring:

Survival, surrender, realization

Each morning is a mystery met in the dark

And I, forever known by blundering,

befuddled, fumbling; a stupor
as settles about me,

often

and still,

Harrowed by

Its easy gifts of

Open windows

blank pages

daylight,

I, as always,

Listen,
counting the exceptions

and repetitions,

hopeful by a history occasioned once

by coalescence,

And wait.

My meditation is a braided yarn:

Yeoman’s work of the mind.

I’ve been sorting and weaving

Thoughts all morning, but silent

As a gently moving shaft of light, this one
appears:

I am not easy with myself,

And I never have been happy here,
Not really.

And, yes, perhaps today…

 ©Sara Taylor 11/26/2014

the broken vessel

You made mistakes
We all do
And this is how I saw it
Absence, presence, recognition;
    faltering, recovery.
The broken vase that sees itself,
And keeps shining
As your laugh filled
That mighty and beautiful basin.