And River says: "Miranda!"

Notice the new picture at the top of my blog. It is called "Miranda: the Tempest". I like it. I like it so much that four years ago Muad'Dib bought me a 16x20 canvas print of it and I was able to frame it for my Christmas! It has hung in our bedroom ever since, always calming me, and beginning the water theme in our room.

The other night as we were attempting to put our little Rivulet to sleep, I realized how funny it was that we have a girl named River and a picture in our room named Miranda.

Real BrownCoats would get the joke.

Y'ever have those days where you feel like writing and you want to write something - anything, but only nothing comes out? Many pages in my journals are littered with these sorts of entries: times when my soul has something to say, but has not yet communicated it to my brain.

In these instances I often ramble of my days or my feelings. Not like brain poop rambling, but super romantic, pretty, Louisa May Alcott sappy rambling. I revert to my Anne of Green Gables self and use the largest prettiest words in my none-too-limited vocabulary.

I use words like "blithesome" and "floating". I conjur images like a goose coming to land softly and gracefully on an otherwise quiet pond, making only a few soft ripples that stretch ever so slowly to reach me as I sit on some shore or other. I begin to see things in pastel colors and gentle tones. The sound of a car going by reaches my ears with a calming sort of music and I want to cry from the beauty of it.

This is my pretty side. This is the self I really prefer to be when I am alone. It is the self that takes me to Antique stores and into quiet moments of nature. It is the self that remembers Subway and Lake Powel and Hilton Lakes. It is the self that writes the dreams and desires of a romantic girl's heart. It is the self that imagined wonderful and magical places that made no sense of any sort to anyone but itself. It is the self that is constantly sighing with contented relief because it is constantly releasing everything else from that other world: the cranky, tired or frustrated world. The calm state cannot understand the wired state. I take a look from one place as though onto another and feel entirely removed.

I have half a cedar chest full of the ramblings of my heart. I have a poetry book full of second rate poetry and first rate emotion. I have stories chock full of beauty and prose and images that still take my breath away.

Not long ago someone mentioned to me that I was merely surviving. When I shared that thought with another, they said that surviving is all a young mother can do. "What about thriving?" I wondered. Today I understand that to first thrive I must know what that means to me. What would it take for me to thrive?

One answer is: more moments like this. More chilly mornings where I sit by my newly-set-up Christmas tree with one space heater turned to me and a human incubator cuddled up on my lap. More created opportunities to write whatever romantic or glorified drivel I can conjur in my amazing mind. More moments where I take Cowboy Bob's advice and simply BE. What I can do is wonderful. What I can be is awe inspiring. What I am is enough.

And out of my nothing has come something. Thanks for sharing the moment with me.