only once

isn't it strange that we only get one life? i mean in our skin. 

it came to me, when i was reading the journey by mary oliver, 
 

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.


that we have to make choices.  choices like will we live in a place with seasons where the trees change their clothes or where they wear green all year? will we look up and see our breath in the cold crisp night air where the naked branches scrape at the sky? or will we see the southern cross and feel the warm earth holding us into the darkness?  like will we take risks? or what kind of risks will those be? will we grow roots and live with our neighbors and will our children grow up together? or only see each other on special occasions and in Christmas cards?  will we forget that we like to paint or write and then wake up and remember that there are stories and pictures inside of us? will we ever give them a voice?

maybe because i'm in the middle of my life, i feel these things.  maybe because my choices have been fairly dramatic, i know their weight.  i won't get back these years.  these years that have been with and with out.  these days that have been full and empty.  their far-away-ness.  their perpetual green.  their difference from my years of normal.  the hot sun and the hard rain.

we don't get a do over.  we sit with our choices- in their beauty and their challenge- and hopefully we open up our hands. hopefully we listen to our lives.  and learn and grow from where we have been. hopefully we remember the cold winters and the smell of wet wool mittens; and the parks full of eucalyptus and fennel; and shores of seaweed and shells.

where we are now becomes where we were and a part of who we are.  who we are now, becomes who we were and who we will be. we are all our parts and our paths and our choices and our days. we are, as buechner says, our feet- because where our feet takes us- that is who we are.  

sometimes art and words and song and the way the clouds are moving, call us to stop and look and ask- who am i, or where am i going, or where have been?  what is to be today? what path am i on? where are my feet taking me? are they to places of peace? am i walking with intention? or in pattern? or in desperation? what am i dragging behind me? am i seeing what is sitting in the moment with me?

i think the time is ripe.....

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”  buechner.