Today was one of the more challenging days at home.  I'm wanting to acknowledge that that happens, but dang, I do not want to linger!!  Let's just say that everyone's needs and expectations were not even remotely in synch with each other and my desire for us to plunge in to new things and build a new routine after the yawning chasm of chaos that is December (and I wonder where my girl gets her drama) was met with Ani's need for hours and hours of Harry Potter (two. again.) and Eliza's need to ricochet from one thing to another, on her own time and in her own way.  

It is apparently mostly my problem, since I usually find great value in their finding their own way, but today I wanted things MY WAY.

Of course, I also was forgetting somehow that yesterday I had about 9 hours to plot and plan New Fun Things for us to do, while our amazing friends Jason and Noah took the girls to Columbus for the last day of Gunther Von Hagen's Body Worlds and The Brain exhibit at the science center, which made for a fun-packed, exhilarating and exhausting day for them.  Oh right. They needed downtime....right.

But rather than dwell, I thought I would share a poem.  Because yesterday, while the girls were still gone, I met Dan for nachos and a couple of beers, after which we still had time to walk home, crank some loud music and CLEAN for an hour.  Which of course lead to poetry reading, aloud, until they got home.  And so...AH! Some true beauty that we found.  A nod to the birds...

Starlings in Winter

Chunky and noisy,

but with stars in their black feathers,

they spring from the telephone wire

and instantly

they are acrobats

in the freezing wind.

And now, in the theater of air,

they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;

they float like one stippled star

that opens,

becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch

and you try

but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it

with no articulated instruction, no pause,

only the silent confirmation

that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin

over and over again,

full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,

even in the ashy city.

I am thinking now

of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots

trying to leave the ground,

I feel my heart

pumping hard.  I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.

I want to be light and frolicsome.

I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,

as though I had wings.

Mary Oliver, from Owls and Other Fantasies

NOTE:  i have come in to change the format of this poem several times, and each time it is as if there is a poltergeist lurking in my computer, playing with me...from 4-line stanzas (correct) to 2-line stanzas (nope) to random spacing...i'm giving up. the words are perfect, and maybe the ghost has something important to say...