Someone recently asked me why I blog. It started me thinking. My knee-jerk reaction was that it affords me the opportunity to reflect on a piece of my life and share that reflection with those I love...but knee jerk reactions are seldom the whole picture. My next answer rumbled up from the well of suffering (and it's bedfellow, self pity), I blog because it is public and once you have had all your journals and private ramblings stolen in a custody battle and used against you in court, it is difficult to write again, particularly with any expectation of privacy...so I made my ramblings public. But, that certainly isn't the whole picture either. I suppose I blog for any number of simplistic and convoluted reasons, most of them leading to a simple truth: recording the day-to-day incidentals of a life seems more important to me than all the many things that often overshadow them. These precious moments, captured in word or picture, are the threads of a life, my life. A simple vignette, an inhale and an exhale, breathing in and out, and sometimes, maybe rarely, that means something to someone else, but it always means something to me.
Yes, I know it doesn't look like much. It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall. The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep. But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy. I am a woman who loves the spring. I nearly live for it. When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis. I gorge. This year has been hard. Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally. The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...
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