emBODYment

You have to go down to go up. A basic law of physics we forget as we watch people walk around collapsed in on themselves. I know this. I know this from years of doing just that. I went from a deep inner awareness I honed as a child, to a push, push, push, mentality that left me shoulders back, lower back tight, chest out, chin high, back line tight. Then we moved, not just once, but a bunch of times, and had lovely boys I nursed and held and cradled, and I began to overlay a collapsed posture upon the strive posture I had honed through college and grad school completions. I began to close in on myself. My shoulders drooped in-ward, my heart center spaciousness that had been exaggerated previously, was now smaller and hidden. And my mind went from “what's next” to “what now,” and “what if.” Thought patterns that took hold and were caught in a loop inside my body.

The spine meant to naturally curve in four distinct places, to create a flow of energy from the earth to the sky and back down again, a yielding with gravity instead of a prop or collapse state, in my body was batted down, and with this harsh hash-crossing in my body a harsh hash-crossing of thoughts emerged, looping on a repetitive play. "Is this the best choice?" "Am I right?" "What if..." It took me too many days, years, to realize I had left my body and hovered above it, around it, beneath it, even dragged myself behind it...my mind leaping ahead while my body lagged behind. Grief and shock mixed together to create this state. And my usual joyful self got buried. 

"Can I bring you dinner?" she asked me. We were standing outside, on an early warm June morning as my oldest boy started kinder camp, a week of adjusting to what the fall would bring. Preparing now for his leap ahead. I waited on the concrete, white paved plaza of the school I attended as a child. We were in the midst of discerning our return home, or to my childhood home of Saint Paul, from Santa Fe which had become our home. I wore skinny jeans and flip-flops with my favorite three quarter Kelly-green J. Crew sweater. A flowered bucket hat covered my head and long strands of shoulder length hair peeped out, except where there wasn't any. I had grown used to wearing hats in Santa Fe, after moving there with some major hair loss from baby 3. But no one there asked. People there were used to people wearing hats, used to cancer patients dotted about the city, were used to people with funky hairstyles. It was not a tip off. At least I did not think it was; strong was my denial.

Puzzled I looked at her, this woman with four kids of her own, her oldest, a fifth grader, helping at the kinder camp, and apologized saying, "No, I am good. Why do you ask?" She offered, stammered really, "Well because, I um...just thought maybe I could help you," she glanced upward at my hat with questioning eyes as to what was underneath it. A slow dawning of realization came across my face, I know that is cliche to say, but it really was like a slow light spreading from inside my mind to my outside facial expression, Oh I thought, this woman thinks I have cancer." This had never occurred to me. I know that sounds naive but it had not. Silly, really, when I think of it. But when this woman asked, it took me back. She thinks I have cancer. She called me Beth, my childhood nickname. I am no longer in Santa Fe. I am no longer anonymous. I can no longer hide my hair loss. I felt unsteady on my feet. I waited for the kids to come out the double doors to release me from this conversation, as a warm flush of embarrassment came over me, my cheeks reddening and my eyes holding back tears. I tried to casually explain to her that no, it was not cancer, only alopecia thank goodness--and brush off that I was shaken. 

Only alopecia. A term western medicine gives to unexplained hair loss. My bald spots reemerged and this time at a ferocious pace. One after the next after the next. Strands of hair falling out whenever I touched my hair. Hair, falling into the shower drain in Santa Fe. That shower with the tiled walled mural of fish that covered it. The sink that was decorated in desert tiled flowers of the southwest. Daily I would watch in horror as they slipped down the drain coiling just above it, blocking the drainage, while I stood naked. Head cast downward, eyes filling with salty tears mixing with the shower's hard water pellets, I stood-- a spine compromised, energy stuck, its drainage blocked. 

After showering, I took a piece of toilet paper and wiped the evidence up, that once again I had lost more hair that day than I had grown. Placing the balled toilet paper into the toilet bowl flushing away my fear of "What if I lose all my hair this go around?" Toweling off I would look up, barely making eye contact with myself in the mirror above the sink. A glance at the mirror, a glance at my image, bought disgust, all I could see, could focus on really---my emerging bald spots. I couldn’t see my beautiful deep brown set eyes, nor my long limbed bones, or my clear complexion, only the growing baldness and my eyes like lasers boring into those areas—as if with sight and thought I could make each area grow bigger.

My interior voice loomed like a loud speaker in my head, How could anyone think I was attractive, much less my husband, and I shrunk to hide beneath the hats I wore. While underneath them, I grew more and more bald. Inside my worry and fret stirred, simmered, cooked, bordering into self loathing Who losses their hair? Who looses their hair while pregnant? Writing this pains me. I had grown to practice the deep voice of self-hatred. This voice grew loud and disorientating leading me to discern decisions that were no longer best for me. Pulling me away from my centered self, tossing me into the large realm of space without orientation, without a naturally curved spine, without anything but worry to orbit around. And while I orbited I grew bald on my outside. I collapsed in on myself, wearing a posture of protecting my heart, the startle reaction seen in babies in full effect in me, an adult. The inquisitions of does she have cancer grew. Always followed by the wave of relief from the questioner, that no I do not have cancer only alopecia. These interactions followed me around like my lost strands of hair, lying on the floor, leaving a trail of despair. 

Begin Again

My dad's watch finally died. I hadn't pulled his old Timex out of my bathroom vanity drawer for months, fearful that the battery had conked out since I last checked. But in a moment of nerviness last week, I fished it out and looked at the simple, analog face. The white hands were halted forever at 4:31—am or pm, the watch wasn't telling.

Dad's Timex had been in overtime for years. That it kept ticking even after he died, more than three years ago, always seemed a little surreal to me, like the ghostly twitch of a limb you can still feel after it's been amputated. My father was wearing the watch the night he died on his farm in Virginia, and the next day, at the funeral home in Front Royal, the mortician presented it to my stepmother and my sister and me, along with his wedding ring, in a small white bowl. It was a grey, brittle December afternoon—all the skeletal trees had finally shrugged off their leaves, dead weight—a harbinger of the long, bleak winter that was to come.

In the beige mortuary parlor, my stepmother, Lesley, asked if one of us might like the watch. It was too soon to think about wanting anything—except for Dad, still alive, all the horrid cancer scrubbed from his body, the last three months a do-over—but as soon as I saw his watch, I knew I did. When I put it on, the black leather band was soft and water-cracked in places, permanently arced in a semi-circle, molded to his wrist, and much too big for me. But through the curve of it, I could almost feel Dad's wrist, the size and heft of it, the heat, even. A kind of negative space, the absence a presence.

Just moments before, the Timex had been strapped to his freckled wrist. Just yesterday,  his wrist had been alive, veins and pulse chugging weakly, their last hours on the job. But it was now December 10, and Dad was in the next room, sticking out from under a maroon blanket on a metal gurney. His skin was colorless and cold, but for the second time in two days, I surprised myself by stroking his face, kissing him. It was so much easier than I thought, to touch him. He was still familiar, intimate, my father.

After we said goodbye to Dad, we went grocery shopping. Dad and Lesley's close friends were bringing dinner to the farm, and we'd put ourselves in charge of providing dessert. It was a ridiculous assignment, prowling the aisles of Martin's for sugary treats none of use felt like eating. We couldn't decide: devil's food cake or coconut cake. Some kind of weird jiggly flan in a plastic container, or ice cream. Did we want to bake something from a mix? The longer we stumbled through the aisles, the more terrible we felt, as though we were somehow tarnishing Dad's memory by shopping for cheap, store-bought desserts, in a horrible, fluorescent grocery store next to the K-Mart where Dad used to buy his pajamas, probably the black-and-grey checkered pair he'd been wearing when he died. Our grief and shock were so raw, nothing else seemed real.

In a silent, mutual rage, we settled on a fruit tart. The raspberries on top glistened in a sinister, unnatural way. I knew I'd never take a bite. I pushed my infant daughter in her car seat stroller out through the automatic doors and into the pewter glare of the sun trying to press through clouds, insistent but somehow futile. These were the flat winter days I remembered from childhood.

I wore the watch through the winter, even though it was too big for me, and spun around so that the buckle was where the face should be, and the face was where the buckle should be, rubbing on tables and rough surfaces, the kitchen sink. It was getting scratched, and I worried about the band—the old arc, the memory of Dad's wrist—breaking. One day I replaced the band and had the jeweler punch extra holes in the end so that it would fit properly. But once in its rightful place, the grey, moony face was too large for my narrow wrist, and it rubbed my knobby bones in an uncomfortable way. I was grieving my father and my own mortality and my babies getting bigger, all at the same time, and I didn't need any more reminders that time was passing. I took it off and tucked it carefully in a drawer.

Every so often, I would retrieve the watch and check that it was still ticking. Sometimes I held it to my wrist, imagining it wound around Dad's, remembering his skin with its freckly age spots, and sometimes even hearing his voice, deep and affectionate. I came to view the watch as an extension of my father, and an arbiter of my grief. As long as the Timex was still ticking, his death was still fresh and in some intangible form, he was still close, and my grief was still acceptable, reasonable. I began to fear that when it stopped, Dad would be gone altogether, all over again, for good, and I might not be ready to say goodbye. Even as I fingered the watch and put it to my ear to hear its steady ticking, like a heartbeat, I knew this was arbitrary, the kind of fanciful logic that takes over in the spinning, upside-down aftermath of death. The same magical grief-thinking that convinced me I had cancer, too, a sneaky, sympathetic pain that morphed and migrated all over my body for more than a year.

How do we measure grief? In seconds, minutes, hours? Days, months, years? Like love, it can't be quantified. There is no time limit. What I couldn't imagine, when I put the watch in the drawer, was that over time my grief would fade and then reemerge, clutching at my itchy skin and tugging at my bones with a sharp, insistent ache. It wasn't linear, but cyclical. It bore down on me in the darkening days of winter, and lifted with the strength of the springtime sun. With each full spin of the seasons, I could begin to predict its comings and goings. It was growing sluggish, as I was becoming quicker and more nimble. Most of the time now, I could stay just out in front, the fear and grief trailing behind me with outstretched arms, trying to keep up, but falling further and further behind.

When I found Dad's watch the other night, it had been so long since I'd last pulled it out that for a brief, bewildering moment I wasn't sure where to look. But there it was in the top drawer, under an old bottle of pink nail polish. I was not surprised to find that it had stopped. Ever since that afternoon at the funeral home, I'd known this day was coming, and I'd worried I wouldn't be ready when it did. But what I felt instead was a kind of lifting, a faint relief. Dad's watch had finally caught up with him, still and silent, no longer twitching its inexplicable metallic pulse in my drawer.

What propelled me to look for it last week, I cannot say. We had dinner guests, and I had to get back to toss the salad, pour the wine, and make our friends feel at home. I did not press it to my ear or bend the band around my wrist or inspect the face for scratches, wondering which ones were mine and which were Dad's, phantom etchings of a lost life. I clasped it only briefly in in my hand, and then I put it back.

I no longer believe that Dad's dead Timex means my mourning is over or that the clock has run out on my grief. But I do believe that it has shifted, taken a sharp turn one way or the other, and that our paths continue to diverge. When we meet again, we will both be different. Maybe I will be wearing Dad's watch.

—Katie

Here's the little ditty on oil pulling...

Others may be able to write this up more scientifically than myself, but you asked me to give you the down and dirty on oil pulling today and so here it goes....

Oil pulling is quite simple. 
1. Choose an oil (olive oil, sesame oil, coconut oil, grape seed oil--preferably organic and definitely not canola oil). Different oils have different benefits.
2. Take a tablespoon of it into your mouth.
3. Set a timer for 20 minutes.
4. Swish and pull it throughout your mouth, between your teeth, from cheek to cheek while you unstack the morning dishes, make breakfast, take a shower, get dressed etc.
5. Spit it out in the trash (not the sink as it will have loads of unwanted bacteria in it.).
6. Swish and rinse with water into the trash if you like.
7. Brush those bucks.
8. Feel better and better. Rid yourself of toxins, whiten your teeth, feel clearer. To name a few benefits.

You asked is it gross? 
The first time I did it I lasted two minutes before almost gagging. Today I lasted the whole twenty minutes it took me to make popovers for breakfast.

Is it hard not to talk? 
My kids have gotten used to me doing it and they join me some days...but usually for five or ten minutes.

Has it helped?
I think it has helped my health. I feel brighter and calmer and have noticed things shifting...but I think things are shifting for many reasons, eating more whole foods, sleep, exercise, meditation, writing, yoga, energy work, apple cider vinegar drinks, smoothies, being more present, clear, grateful the list could go on. It definitely helps with bad breath and sore throats and sinus stuff...but it also helps with a whole host of other conditions.

Why did I begin?
I had a hunch that some of our illness start and frankly stay with us because they are camping out in our gums. I haven't confirmed this. Just a small voice inside said take note. Not very scientific I know. And while I try to be a good flosser I am not and oil pulling seems easier to me and more enjoyable. Plus a friend of mine who is a enthusiast for health also encouraged me.

Want to read more about it?
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-7857/why-you-should-start-oil-pulling-today.html

Want to fall into a rabbit hole of info on it?
Go to http://www.earthclinic.com/

And search "oil pulling"

Fall-en Goals

With the advent of fall we rearranged our rooms. With this rearrangement, came a reshifting of goals. There is something about the start of school that brings both sorrow and resolve. The languid days of summer with swimming punctuating our days gives way to flurry of pencil sharpening and uniform preps for the first day of school post labor day. 

With this surge of organizational activity I feel the urge to cleanse our house of stuff, of dormant idleness, and really an urge to move. I've moved many falls since I have been an adult so when the season of fall becomes apparent I get that itch. Instead of moving this year though, I decided to move rooms. And by rooms, every bedroom but the babies was involved. My sweet husband tolerated it, although did not feel the urge to do this. Finn's room became Kieran's room and my office. Our room became Finn and Liam's room. Liam and Ki Ki's room became ours. Did you follow that? Lots of beds were taken apart, reassembled and then taken apart again when the positioning in the room was not just so. 

During all this dusty upheaval came our kitchen farm table from the kitchen to my office/third's bedroom, where I resolved to get busy with my fall writing projects. 

Zen Desk-September light streaming in.

My nighttime view as I write...One of my sweets!

I need goals. I need the space to achieve those goals. And, I wanted to start my own schooling with the commencement of my boys schooling. The following is in no particular order, but is numbered for sanities sake--don't numbers look nice?!

1. Writing in my notebook...make this a daily meditation. When it is not daily do not get frustrated and feel all is lost, only reopen it and write. As you once wisely said: "Your notebook will not judge you it is always there waiting for you." 
2. Pull out past notebooks and start to piece together the hair book...daunting but necessary dragon to slay in order to move onward.
3. Write some shorter feature essays or short stories to send out to magazines.
4. Write some more posts for Outside.
5. Write daily poems--or at least weekly.
6. Recommit to the Nest!
7. Read good books. Good reading makes for good writing.

Then life happened to me and all my above goals gave way to real life.

Wild thing... you make my heart sing...you make everything...

Wild thing...I think I love you

Doulaing for a friend who's baby would have an intricately short life, reluctantly companioning my dog, Emma, through her sickness, Peter traveling oodles (thank God he is back again), and launching Yoga Calm classes at my boys school accompanied by six stitches in my achilles, and my zen office/third's bedroom now looks like this!

Real Life Zen Desk.

But guess what, all it took was some realization that I was missing my writing. Missing the page. Missing showing up. And realizing that without writing and exercise I can not do anything else with grace and composure, it's a life line for me. And guess what, confessing to you that I was spinning in my sorrow about the previous paragraph helped! Once I got that out and heard the gentle reassuring voice that nothing is ever lost, it all comes out in it's own time I was able to unclench, open my notebook, sit at my cluttered farm desk with the seasonal-clothes-switch-out still begging me for my attention, and like Max be able to tell the baskets: "Be still! And tamed them with the magic trick"--not now I am writing!

"BE STILL!"

Poem of the Day

Inspired by your 2012 project poem of the day, and your post on Power Bursts, which is totally the only way I can write these days, I share with you some of my poems of the day. Written with a call response form from my friend, Melissa, and inspired by her relationship with her children as well I give you...

Crayons

Coloring and Art work by Liam call me William

Request of a friend: "There's a poem to be written about crayons...their divine capacity to both transform paper and be an inspired tool of creators....as well as their cursed presence littering floors and demanding organizational attention...Who will write this poem for me?"

Coloring and Art work by Finn

My response to a friend: "Crayons crayons crayons, waxed and papered, prim and pointed. Belaying my child's inner world brought forth on crisp white snow of paper, on walls, in their mouths so that they speak their color. Oozing reds and yellows, wax indented molars, littered crayons, with scattered peeled paper traipsing my floors, missing my trash. They scamper like mice when I graze my unassuming toe upon their forgotten presence. Evidence of a masterpiece."

___________

Hiccups

Hiccups!

That's.how.I'm.thinking.of,this.dark.day.of.anxious.transitions.

Sleep.WILL.come!

Calm.will.reign!

Rest.will.be.restored!

For.now:hiccups.....

Xox

Total hiccups. Damn hiccups. Interrupting speech, thoughts, dreams. Hiccups total intrusion. Upside down water glass, peanut butter, surprise scares, prayers. Hiccups damn hiccups. Holding breath holding hope hiccups. Damn hiccups be gone!

___________

Hammocked

Sacred space, when analog time holds no meaning,

life suspends itself like a hammock between two rooted trees swaying in the breeze between here and there,          

between before and after,

swaying into that intimate space of the present.

When all you can do is breathe, deep breaths, shallow breaths, breaths…because no one can prepare you for the threshold you are crossing over,

they can only silently, reverently, hold your hand,

offer a gaze,

provide a subtle gesture to let you know that you do not walk alone;

the oils you were baptized with, blessed with, live in that garden of your body’s memory.

The hands that laid upon your own still lay there caressing you.

No, no one can do what your life asks of you.

They can just lay down on the tall grass next to you and sigh,

watching with you as the clouds overhead pass,

and notice as that ant climbs that blade of grass near your face, and that tall strand curves under its presence;

much like the arc of God’s arms cradles our weight in his embrace-- as we too strive to climb nearer to his heart.

And when we rise together from the summer’s green grass

and look back at the matted imprints our body’s left behind

we know we were there

in that sacred space of raw, real life that brings us to our knees

only to know what it is like to rise rooted again.

______________________

(Poem, prayer inspired by the Kiemde family written in July.)

Power Bursts

I only have a few minutes to dash off a post, my first on the Nest in ages. This is fitting, considering that I want to write about writing in short bursts, ten minutes, even five minutes. I like to think of it as a kind of interval training for creativity: Any writing time is good time.

I've always suspected that I write better under pressure but didn't fully test the theory until earlier this summer. For three weeks at Stony Lake in July, I was a solo parent while Steve was back at home in Santa Fe tending to our gardens and his clients'. I enlisted the help of a part-time babysitter several times a week and relied on my mother and sister to steal snippets of time for myself, a few minutes here and there. But other than that, I was in the thick of mothering on an island in Ontario: feeding, lifeguarding, bathing in the lake, boating to swim dates, bedtime, story time, middle-of-the-night potty breaks—all the summertime tasks of childrearing fell to me. 

This is how it had been the past four summers ever since Pippa was a newborn. The challenges of trying to manage one tiny baby—let alone two—in motorboats, around open water 24/7, were so great that it required a monumental effort just to get off the island. Needless to say, my writing took a hit. I was so worked at the end of the day, I barely had time or energy to change out of my bathing suit and comb my damp, tangled hair, let alone write any lines in my notebook. So I was expecting more of the same when we arrived at the landing on the second day of July and were ferried across to our cottage by my 12-year-old nephew Andrew. 

But, oh, how things had changed. The girls, 4 and 2, were bigger now. Maisy, who had learned to walk/teeter at the cottage last summer, was steady on her feet and—like her sister and mother, grandmother and aunt—went everywhere without shoes, hopping over the island's smooth granite rocks like her feet held their memory. She could sit unassisted in the boat now, so I didn't have to hold her on my lap or put her in her infant car seat while I drove. Pippa had learned to swim, so I could sit on the dock and watch her without having to be in the water myself—just like my mother had done for my sister and me when we were little. I knew we had to keep our eyes on her at all times around water, but it was such a relief to realize that if she fell in, she wouldn't sink to the bottom—extra energy I could put into writing, not worrying. 

I had fewer hassles, more help, and more time. I was also fresh off a silent writing retreat in France with the teacher, Natalie Goldberg, who championed 10-minute writing practice in her bestselling book, Writing Down the Bones. I knew from studying with Natalie that good writing didn't require heaps of time, just discipline and a little structure. I also knew from experience that when presented with eight hours in which to write, I will almost certainly squander half of that out of fear, procrastination, and doing useless things like shopping for cardigans online. 

So things got simpler. I settled into a routine. I put the girls to bed, and in the half an hour while I was making sure they had settled, I sat at my little green wooden writing table overlooking the lake and wrote in my notebook. Writing practice, writing my Outside blog, or writing about my day, it didn’t matter.  I wrote. If Pippa got up, I took her back to her room, and kept writing. It was writing interrupted, but it was writing. I wrote about summers I’d known and the summer that was happening right out the screen window, the summer I was living, we were all living, that minute, with loons shrilling out the window and the sun setting over Juniper Island. Later, after dinner with my parents, I’d write some more, but not on my computer. That was my rule: Powering down by 9 PM helped me sleep better. Later still, I’d climb into bed with a cup of chamomile tea and write my poem for the day. I'd read a few pages from Richard Ford’s novel, Canada, and then fall asleep to the sound of water sloshing under the dock. 

In the morning, I woke early in the bright, curtainless room above the boat house and wrote some more, before the girls woke up. My writing space consisted of a rickety table and a single bed and no doors for privacy. I wrote surrounded by the girls and their books, toys, clothes and lifejackets strewn about, and a stuffed white christening bear that sang "Jesus Loves Me" when you pushed his paw. Just like time, less space, the less stuff you have for writing, can turn out to be more.  

I carved out shards of time here and there and took them rather than bemoaning how little of it I had.  The results were obvious: I was writing much more in less time. And because of this, it was easier to  appreciate being with my girls, as they flung themselves off the front dock, raced to the store to buy penny candy after swim lessons, or sat at the old out-of-tune piano pounding the keys.

Now I suspect that this is how I write best: in pieces, snippets, found moments at the computer before bed or early in the morning before the girls wake up, or when they are just waking up, sleepy and content to sit on their beds and look at picture books. By making do with what you have, you suddenly have more of it. It’s a shift in logistics, but mostly attitude. Maybe some day I'll have more time to write my novel, but for now I'll take the time when I can get it. Who cares if it’s only 10 minutes and you think you need 100 days or 10 years to write a masterpiece? Short power intervals strengthen your creative muscles. Take the ten minutes, take the three minutes. Stop making excuses and start writing. Just write. 

—Katie

Peeling Back the Onion

So I am finally coming back to our neglected blog, like a favorite novel I am dusting off. I have missed our blog, our connection here where we meet on the pages of motherhood, friendship, nurturing our creativity, our ability to be prolific, or at least intentional. Where our lives crisscross like doodled hash marks on a mindlessly drawn dinner mat, waiting for a server to deliver the meal. I miss this sacred place of intersection, and instead of talking about it, I am just plunging in and recommitting to it. 

Seamus is now 15 months old and I feel like another layer to the onion of motherhood has lifted. The first being when he hit six months and I came up from air to look around, and see that yep everyone was still there in my life after six months of gazing down at his sweet cheeks while he nursed. The next layer revealed itself when he turned one in April and I breathed a sigh of relief that yes, he made it to one, able bodied, breathing, and in his case sprinting around our house like no other boy before him had done. (The others did not attempt walking, much less running until 15 months, he had mastered it by 12. Much to my chagrin.) Now this most recent layer peeled back to reveal my oldest boy waiting for more of my attention to his creative endeavor, photography. And no coincidence, my writing presses in on me for more time, and my running pulls me out of bed before dawn, or some mornings with dawn, when previously I would have hit snooze and rolled over; I roll out.

Having a new baby, is sacred it takes you into your center. Like diving into the center of the onion, its raw, pungent, sweet nucleus, its heart, its core, and then gradually layer by layer working your way back out to its papery sheaths. Seamus’ feet still tender, have slivers from walking barefoot on my brother’s dock, they will never be that newborn raw again like last summer. And reading your Outside post, made me miss the carefree ways of summer, the way I grew up, the way I want my boys to grow up. And yet, this summer has felt heavy with humidity; with summer’s abundance juxtaposed by some friends who have had near and dear losses, and with the anomaly of our lack of travel. No Seamus’ baby feet will never be that fresh again. As I write this, Sandro Cisneros’ words from A House on Mango Street echoes in my mind, “Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.” Summer is about barefeet, solitude, a space for myself to go, the quiet raucous; and having a baby is about that clean fresh paper before you know the poetry they will inevitably write upon your heart.  

And so, I begin again adding another layer to the sheath.