Silence

So I have been silent the last few days on our blog...not that I have meant to be, nor that it has been my reality here. In fact the opposite my mind has been abuzz with thoughts and I am desperately missing our Zen sittings we sank into with initial reluctance at Upaya in September to a welcomed relief at the end of our writing retreat.

The sun finally came out today after two days of damp grey winterness in this northern tundra and it was a sweet relief I relished. The cloud covered sky was beginning to weigh on me, and I was beginning to think I may never see the sun or anything warm again. The boys worked on their igloo that they built five snowstorms ago in our front yard (it still manages to thrive even with an occasional melt).

Since we moved back to St. Paul from Santa Fe I sometimes feel like I am swimming underwater as I drive through the city streets. St. Paul is humid, and wet, and filled with snow. Santa Fe is arid, dusty, and filled with a crispness that St. Paul will never know because of altitude and the way the light hits here. When I am in Santa Fe I feel like I have come up for air after a long underwater swim. Especially after our hikes, that I so desparetly miss, even if my 5.5 pregnant self sucked wind up the last one post New Year! Thank you K for going at my snails paced--such an embarrassment!

Last night we were at our neighbor's Haggis party, and I got to talking with a mom who was on her third date since her 1.5 year old boy twins were born. As we chatted, she confessed that her friend asked her, "Have you taken the boys sledding yet?"
To which she replied, "I don't do things like that with them at their age when I am solo."
It hit me again, as it has before, the utter necessity to have single girlfriends in your life for this very reason. When you are single you have that carefree-ness that Steph has, that ability to do as you please and sometimes it pleases the single person to sink into the messy, chaotic life of child-rearing even for a fleeting moment, maybe even long enough for a run down a hill on a toboggan with twin boys inside. As I confessed this to her, we both emphatically agreed and then shared that most of our single friends live other places like NYC or California, not in the get-married-when-you-are-young-Twin Cities. As I looked around the party and the amount of boy children present, three of them being mine, with perhaps a fourth on the way, the idea of girls and girlfriends and finding time for girly things seemed all the more important as I tread in the my third trimester of perhaps birthing another son.

No I have been far from silent internally and that is why our writing practice is all the more a necessity to calm the jitters of my mind that race when untended, to focus my heart, and to keep my hands steady and strong.