It’s hard to feel defeated and angry at the same time, unlike feeling both full of joy and sorrow which I find to be nearly completely compatible emotions. And so I must choose… to be defeated, or angry, or neither – a third option may be to move forward as best I can and offer my love and attention to my family in the meantime. I have been sick, not terribly so but enough to make me long to sleep for a thousand hours, and then some more.
Coffee isn’t working. Movement has eluded me, or I’ve avoided it. I’ve been dreaming, but the images slip away as I rise in the morning, wondering how I’ll feel today. In the midst of everything, my rough-and-tumbling boys have given me cause to laugh and cuddle and struggle and sigh, and while I am away from them, I think of them often. When they are at home, I listen to them or try to escape them – depends on the moment. But I always love them.
I haven’t been able to write much lately, so I am offering a poem by another instead.
Children
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, ‘Speak to us of Children.’
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
sunshineandsalad 