A moment that invites you to feel as though someone has taken a box full of all you know and a box full of all that you do not want to admit and turned them over on to a table and said, "Make sense of this. Now."
A moment (or two) spent wondering what home really is and really means and why it sometimes feels like I am someone searching for home instead of seeing the home I already have.
A moment that feels as though someone holds up a mirror facing me and says, "Look. No. Really look."
A few moments I have experienced lately.
I have been a traveler walking through truth, wonderment, joy, and pain. I have been visiting the past while sitting in the present.
I have felt as though I am becoming a bit worn in a few places as if I am on a trip seeking the lessons of the wise skin horse.
And this is what it is…life. This is what real is. This is what I am to do. This is doing.
I hear the whispers of truth, "you are on your path."
But it has been a bit uncentering as this kind of traveling can be and I have felt a bit like I am up on the tightrope holding my own and someone suddenly turns off the lights in the big top. My only option? Breathe and be patient.
So that is what I have been attempting to do.
And, tonight, the lights were raised by a little music I hadn't listened to in years paired with the rhythm of moving the scissors at the cutting table.
As I sung along with Alabama and Randy Travis then George Strait and finally Ronnie Milsap, I realized that these men sing part of the soundtrack of my life. I was transported to the many trips I have made from Indiana to South Carolina and back. I found myself:
In the middle front seat of a white Bonneville singing "40 Hour Week" with my mother and cousins as we tried to find every letter of the alphabet in the signs along the Kentucky interstate.
Spotting the mountains of Tennessee and turning up "Smokey Mountain Rain" so my mother and I could sing along as my brother groaned and turned up his walkman in the backseat.
Driving alone to my grandparents' house for the first time as George Strait kept me company singing "The Fireman" and "I Cross My Heart."
Tonight, singing these songs and remembering the goodness in the past, I found my footing.
As I turned the music off and then the lights in the little room, I realized that I felt grounded in the joy and beauty of the little moments that make up this life…in the moments that make up my life.
I am blessed.
