Journal - Lost and Found

I have several journals that I write in, including the Notes App on both my iPod Touch and iPad. I was in search of a journal entry that I wrote within the last couple of weeks. I can't find it anywhere and wonder if I imagined writing the piece I seek–or if I wrote it in my head and it never made it to the page. That's what I fear about having so many journals, that something will get lost. It's not a fear, really...it's just that I feel like even when I write little bits, if I don't do something with them sooner rather than later, they get lost, maybe never get found.

I feel that my whole life has been a process of being lost and found and there were times when the waters seemed clearer. I'm a child at heart, but sometimes I wonder if I've a bit of the Peter Pan syndrome in my bones. Sometimes I feel as though I've gone through life backwards, not so much gone through as much as my mind and my ability to accept responsibility has gone backwards. When I was a young girl, I seemed mature to people for my age. I remember having philosophical conversations with my older brother at the kitchen table in my early twenties. I was always filled with questions and would try them out on customers when I worked in a burger joint. I was attracted to older men who had experienced life, who had something to share, who were deep thinkers. I always preferred to listen in on the boy's conversations during high-school. I was never much of a small talker. I'm still not, but I appreciate the usefulness of it now–the humanness of it. 

Lost and found...I've been churning these words around in my head over the past few weeks. One day during a working team meeting, we were talking about something and it led me to share a few odd jobs that I had, and I said to them that it seems my life is a process of elimination. As I sat with those words–I thought how true on so many levels.

When I was a young girl, all I wanted to do was work. I wanted a job so bad when I was ten. I put beads on wire and displayed them on a poster board and tried to sell my jewels to my grandparents. When my brother would take me to the movie rental store, I begged to have a job there. I don't know what it was in me that wanted a job so badly. 

Now, I don't necessarily have those same feelings. I don't mind working. I enjoy a good productive day, but I sense in myself over the past ten years that something shifted inside of me, and that to a certain degree, I do not like responsibility. I would rather have my head in the clouds, enjoying life, and to a degree I feel that I've been able to do that in the simplest of ways. But of course, there are always small things that bring us to reality, rent increases, uncertainty of our jobs, uncertainty of anything and taking the setbacks as they come. 

I've done enough self-analysis over the years and it gets exhausting. I feel that I've done some good work and I still have work to do. I have issues that I still deal with that I have the opportunity to develop. There will always be growth and learning and that is wonderful. 

Right now, I am writing in real time. Another decade is fast approaching for me. I will have been on this gracious earth for four decades. I'm a quiet celebrator, preferring to go quietly into the new dawn. This one feels more real because in another decade and a little over a half I will be the age when my mother passed on. In another three years I will be the age she was when she had me, after already having two sons that were twenty years of age. In some ways, I gage my time on this earth against her clock–or rather when her clock stopped, yet I know that anything can happen in between that time and possibly afterward. I must be honest. I have no desire to live into my 90s or even my 80s. I know my body will not hold up.

This is beginning to sound depressing and it's not meant to. Another thing that I realized over the past couple of days is that I am truly happy. I love life. I love the earth, the little gifts in nature. I am a child of nature. I belong to the moon and the sun and stars, the flowers, the dirt, to the rain–and I will return one day. But what I realized is that I will always have this something inside of me, a certain small little piece of melancholy that lives inside of me, that allows me to feel as I do, allows me to cherish every single moment of my life and allows me to feel everything to my core, allows me to feel the sadness, but to especially feel the happiness and the goodness that this world offers with open arms.

Sometimes I fall, but I always pick myself up. And sometimes when I need it most, there is a sparrow that flies down and tweets, catching my eye until I can't but smile. Or a crow flies overhead, making me crane my neck and soaking him in. Always, these natural beauties make me feel alive and real and like I matter.