Sometime yesterday I wrote to myself that today’s post would be: Like a pomegranate. After the peeling, but before the seed gets stuck between your teeth. Stay in the pop.
Like most notes I leave myself, this is (quite obviously) not helpful. Try grocery shopping for a mouth couch or a freezer hug. Yesterday I had to suffocate the bathroom (deep clean) and make more floor (sweep the hardwood).
I’ve never been great about notes to myself. I favor quick, distracted laps of the pens instead of slow-scribed details. I often write my notes without looking. I try to capture the why or the how, rather than the what– because if I write “ice cream sandwich” on my grocery list, I’ll simply move on if I don’t find them. If I say “freezer hug”, I understand that I want something that can remain frozen until comfort is needed. There are options.
StrokeBrain has left me without a reasonable arsenal of words, but I wield my leftovers equally unafraid. If I must go to metaphorical-war with an armful of carrots and a vague sense of the game of pinochle, so be it. If I must write — and I must— I’ll do what I can with what I have.
All this misplaced bravery.
It microseisms in me: small pulses that shake me like maracas, and all the hopes I’ve stockpiled over the years dance on top.
In prison, I used to make lists of things I would do when I got home, things I would have. I called those lists: This, or something better. I like that title because it speaks to how dreams can be bigger than the biggest thing we can imagine.
I mean, if the sun were the size of the period at the end of this sentence, the nearest star would be over four miles away. If today were the size of the period at the end of this sentence, how far would all the tomorrows go?
What could we do today to make them great?
Or, better, what could we do today to make them good?
Kind?
Safe?
Sometimes it’s easier to just think of the next one. It’s easier to only love the neighbor that is our immediate tomorrow, the one most like us. But the nearest star is still our neighbor, even if it does stretch farther than we can even really imagine. There are infinite ways to connect to it, even if the steps necessary are tiny.
Baby steps don’t mean we can’t look forward, that there isn’t a path, that the path is set in stone. There’s so much space for trying.
Between the peeling of the pomegranate and the seed that gets stuck in your teeth is a universe of happenings, a million opportunities for stain and pop alike.
Just think of the squirrel.
The tiny squirrel who does the work, who collects the nuts for the tomorrow at the end of this blog post, and accidentally grows a tree that feeds the squirrels who are so many tomorrows away that they might as well be stars.
They say millions of trees around our globe were planted by squirrels.
Imagine all the good we could grow, if we keep planting our hopes for our biggest dreams.
Our biggest dreams– or–
something even better.
Day 3 of 30.
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rarasaur 