One cop out after the next

It's so easy.
It's so easy to lose hope when you have been trying so hard to reach just one of your goals.
And keeping faith is so hard.
I've compromised so much lately just to ensure a better chance for myself.
Or maybe I've compromised because I'm scared of making a decision for myself instead of having it made for me.
If I had been offered a job somewhere, anywhere, I'd go there.
But I haven't, and so it's hard to go anywhere.
And so I've come home.
And it's not that I don't like it here.
But this is not where I want to be.
Of all my choices, I've chosen the one that is the safest and the least fulfilling.

This is not who I wanted to be.
I want to be brave, fearless, adventuresome.
No more of this playing it safe.

If I don't have a job by the summertime, I'm doing one or more of the following things (I'm telling you now because I have to write it down somewhere or it will never be real, it will never happen. It will be as though I never thought it, at all):
1. Making a huge road trip to the west
2. Moving to New York City
3. Moving to Chicago
4. Making plans to go back to school

So, in the mean time, my plan is to make as much money as possible. I'm stuck here until I save money, anyway. But while I'm here I need to make a point to do things that make me feel happy. Coming back home has a way of making me dull, smothering me. It's like I'm 15 again, looking for myself and completely unaware of my wants, likes, abilities, passions.
I don't want to just survive. I don't want to stay afloat. I don't want any of that barely living but still living bullshit. I want to live so hard that I could die tomorrow.

So, I'm welcoming change in to my life. And tomorrow I'm going looking for an adventure. My mother would ask me, "What is it that scares you the most? Find it and do it." I'll have to think on that one.

I hope I wake up before noon tomorrow.

Do we ever really become who we want(ed) to be?

Droplets.

You ever sit at
the base of what you feel is the world
and you're looking up at it
with wide eyes
full of tears
begging for the world to let you drink her up.

I feel that way
often
And I can't decide
if it's me
or the world
who's holding herself back
but I'm utterly thirsty. Parched. Gone too long without
a damn
drop.

Feeling in the weather patterns

It's been raining for three days
and the weather drips from my cheeks
in my own sort of downpour
you know Mother Nature and I
we're women
and we feel
and so we cry.

An old poem I wrote a few years back. I kind of like it.

Wicklow Woman

Oh woman
a ways away where I have only set foot once
from a distant land
you pull me

Your world, all lights aglow and children pitterpatter
your world of ocean waves and creeping sunrises
of crisp winter winds and
foggy, salty coasts

it pulls me.

I want to die and be reborn
in your home
in your tub

I want to walk barefoot through your old house and listen
as the boards creak like the trees in the deep forest

I want to sip coffee at your table
across from you
in the morning
and laugh with you
over dark red wine
at dinner parties

Your world is magic
and it pulls me
like the ocean pulls you
and I know it does.
To me, you are the ocean, oh Wicklow woman.
And I want to meet your shores.

Taking Back the River

Excerpts from Women Who Run With the Wolves.

Respond; that is how to clear the river. Wolves lead immensely creative lives. They make dozens of choices every day, decide this way or that, estimate how far, concentrate on their prey, calculate the chances, seize opportunity, react powerfully to accomplish their goals. Their ability to find the hidden, to coalesce intention, to focus on the desired outcome and to act in their own behalves to gain it, are the exact characteristics required for creative follow-through in humans.

To create one must be able to respond. Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from the hundreds of possibilities of thought, feeling, action, and reaction and to put these together in a unique response, expression, or message that carries moment, passion, and meaning. In this sense, loss of our creative milieu means finding ourselves limited to only one choice, divested of, suppressing, or censoring feelings and thoughts, not acting, not saying, doing, or being.

Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create on must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one's mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down. We can put out our skirts and shirts to catch as much as we can carry.

Begin; this is how to clear the polluted river. If you're scared, scared to fail, I say begin already, fail if you must, pick yourself up, start again. If you fail again, you fail. So what? Begin again. It is not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate. If you're scared, so what? If you're afraid something's going to leap out and bite you, then for heaven's sake, get it over with already. Let your fear leap out and bite you so you can get it over with and go on. You'll get over it. The fear will pass. In this case, it is better if you meet it head-on, feel it, and get it over with, than keep using it to avoid cleaning up the river.