Where I Stand, Fall, and Fly.

Mondays have a bad rep. No one wants to believe that Mondays can begin and end on a good note because everyone is busy missing Saturday. I don’t belong to those crowds, though it always happens that Monday’s are tough. That getting back into the rigmarole stiffness makes us resent Monday for not being Saturday, or even Sunday.

My job is complex, yet easy. I pull words from deep down in my guts, let them come out my fingers, and move them around the page till they look like they sound behind my eyes. And, I guide these two kids gifted me and E in learning about writing and grammar, history and art, and how to read literature before handing them off to E for math and science. Housekeeping is not as important as cooking and gardening, and then there is lots of MFA work. That is the simple of my workweek. The full round of my Monday through Friday.

It only takes a slight breath to blow the balance of our simple complex off. Like last week. We had one of those weeks that combine too many uncomfortable things. Leftover monsoons in August, feverish kids with weak eyelids and drowsy stares, a full quart of almond milk left out, a fifty dollar food budget, a recipe fail and an ignored pot of food left out for hours, no one tending to the one recipe that worked. And just when that got too much, more heat and me doubled over in pain, crying and menstruating, with blood shot eyes, a queasy stomach, and two kids unable to fill a hot water bottle. I remember last week as sleep. Sleep, while E makes me tea and rubs the small of my back, till I cry because my body aches. Sleeping in spurts because I hear the boy stifle a cough. Sleeping late on the last weekend of summer. Sleeping till I’m done wishing to be numb, ice-cold, unable to feel the heat and pain.

But, today is Monday, and though I feel there is a clean slate beneath our feet, I still feel the slippery ground of last week. As if in any day, something or someone may fall. Saturday was suppose to be our restart button, but as we were primped and ready to head out apple picking, our car decided to play opossum. Just like that. After an hour of car pushing with E, a miraculous and spontaneous start, a clean bill of health from our mechanic, we ended Saturday buying used books and eating vegan burgers and sweet potato fries. Things that comfort us and make us feel like ourselves.

Sunday I tried to restart again. No apple picking, but a full day in the kitchen, good music and food—an earnest start. Before I got started, while E was busy making the kid’s favorite Sunday breakfast, I started to write a little. It had been a few days and I could feel something welling up in me.

I’m doing this all wrong. I thought, but didn’t write.

You have to eat your life, consume it and breath it in so you can taste it and all the nuances. Don’t shy from the bitter and hold your eyes open when it gets sour.

I can only continue this, blogging and writing about life and food and being creative, being hungry, if I write it all. I am not interested in living life for appearances. Being alive on the surface and displaying only the parts that are ideal. No.

Life has bullied me and loved me past everything unreal and superficial. I am too complete to write and live incomplete. There is too much Kiandra for half doing.

I want to write about now. I don’t want to be numb to today’s challenges and disappointments. When I am hopeful and inspired, finding peace in watching a butterfly grow drunk off my garden, I want to be transparent enough that my lessons are not my own.

We only recognize the strength of one color when it is placed next to its compliment, positioned within context. We experience life through context, like color.

This morning I walked circles in my mind around all the clutter. This is too loud. This is too fast. This is opaque and unclear. That is what living feels like to me when the noise of everyone else sings louder than my own song.

We often think being brave is about being strong, but it isn’t. It means you are willing to fall or fly. Vulnerable and at peace without control. You could be defiant and strong, but unwilling to fall and/or fly. Unable to fail and succeed. The fall and the soar both require vulnerability, despite or in spite of strength. Strong is not the full of it, being open is.

For me, getting to brave comes in realizing we all want and need a few things—to be understood, appreciated, and loved for who we are. Heard from where we stand. If we are not careful, everything that life brings only numbs and prevents us from standing right here, where we are, as we are.

Once brave, willing to stand in the midst of who we are, all that life gives brings true joy. 

I’m wiping my slate clean, starting over, and standing right here where I am and as I am.

These are our lean times, these are our proud times, these are the days where we are sacrificing the most, skating by and learning what abundance really is. We are not falling apart, but together. We are without and with, simultaneously having it all and having just barely enough.

I am no longer writing about food and writing and creating, I’m writing about being hungry—for my life.

This is about slow food and meager food, growing and building things earnestly, writing with my guts hanging out, looking and finding abundance where there is silence and life and nature, moving beyond the loud and opaque world that covers and numbs, being brave enough to fail and fly, understood and known for who I am.

If nothing else, I am grateful. No better place to restart then with that.

Gratitude List, 9.9.13

1. Lean times that are teaching us true abundance.
2. A husband strong enough to push a dead car uphill, by himself.
3. A hug in Target from the boy, because I said yes to Ring Pops.
4. All the poems I am able to catch.
5. E. He is so beautiful and magical in the way he cares and nurtures me.
6. Our mothers, whom love us the way mothers should, each in their own, distinct way.
7. Black Eye Peas.
8. The art of eating lean, and the chance to write and savor it.
9. Carrots. Sweet or savory, they make me feel good.
10. The garden—including June bugs because they give me goose bumps that always inspire a poem out of fear.
11. The peace and solace cooking and gardening brings.
12. The soreness in my fingers from hand quilting.
13. The one time I skinned my knee and my Papa told me to be grateful for the pain, because it reminds me I am living.

Peace and love,

Ki