I am feeling Spring tonight.  What with the way the spring peepers in the pond across the street are making their raucous song that echoes off the walls of my home, carries across the evening and awakens my soul.

I should be exhausted.  I haven’t slept well in three days, what with being seriously excited about the play and then trying to sleep off adrenaline rushes and then Daylight Saving Time deciding to reduce my sleep by an hour and then just a really hot feeling bedroom.

But I’m not.  I’m reading poetry when I should be grading.

Even though I have already graded.

And I’m sitting in my recliner, at one moment intellectually paralyzed by one poem that didn’t make a lick of sense and for a moment I felt completely and utterly stupid.

And then I randomly selected another poem, “How to Tie a Knot” by James Kimbrell, and I got it.  I understood it.  Or, at least I pulled out my own meaning and felt the momentary rush of I’m not so stupid after all!

He wrote about fishing.  I understand fishing.

I also felt like he wrote an answer to T. S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufock” which I also understand after much reading and analyzing and listening to other people at least explain to me that Prufock is debating about going out on a date.  I love Prufrock, love how he debates everything about himself and only sees his flaws.

I know that man.  I am his sister.

Spring has lent its hues to the trees.  All of the branches are surrounding their miserable gray-browns and are tinted with the rosy colors of new buds and new growth.  My rose bushes which looked spindly and deadish are suddenly surging with life.

A blueberry bush I never planted but left in its pot is burgeoning forth.  I’m hesitant to put it in the garden because the deer and birds will strip it before I even have a chance of dreaming about eating its fruit.

But I will find a way.  Will buy netting.  Will anchor it to the ground and will then someday strip the berries and eat my way through summer.

We struck the set today, took apart the play, peeled the memories off the floor, and I stood in the center of the stage and saw the characters walk across the stage, deliver their lines.

And I felt no more sadness, no more grieving of memories that are already fading around the edges.

No, I surrendered myself to the hope that I can do this again and again.  I am standing on the starting line of something amazing, balancing on my tippy toes like one of the actresses, and I feel it, this sense of God whispering in my ear, “Go.”

Go…write poetry.  Live your life.  

Run across the stage and grab every moment that is strung out for you and live, live, live in a glorious world that might not ever see me.  But don’t be afraid anymore about the causation of failure or the repercussions of success.  

I read the one-act script for I Never Saw Another Butterfly and will buy the full script.  I thought about staging.

I thought about my own novel, my dear and darling Polishing the Bones and I thought about how the characters move and talk to one another.  And I’m seeing past the gaps and into what might actually and finally work for me.

I am standing on the starting line of my life, balancing on my tippy toes, reaching out into the darkness that isn’t there and grabbing ahold of the DNA of life and getting ready to rush forward.

“No, I do not weep for the world, I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”  I love this quote from Zora Neale Hurston.  Right now.  This is where I am.  This is who I am.

I am standing on the starting line of my life, balancing on my tippy toes, my hands resting in the air.  I am ready.

I am ready.

I am ready.

Watch me go.