Lenten Musings

Saturday, February 16, 2013 • 9:21 AM • Winthrop (Bluff Street House)

I’ve gotten out of my habit of daily journaling. So disrupted, I don’t even think to do it some mornings. How odd. After all these years of starting virtually every day with some scrawling and dawdling over pages / screens, I forget to write. Puzzling and disturbing.

When I considered Lent, I thought that maybe rather than give something up, I should include a commitment to write. We are three days down on Lent and during that period, no writing at all. Are those three days like the three between Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection? I might think of it so. In that way, I could consider this a new day, a newly risen opportunity to renew an investment in the creativity of my soul. Better this, I think, than to lie under the murk and mildew of beleaguered drudgery, bemoaning reality. 

Reality. My mother restless and calling out when she wakes to find the room devoid of other humans. She seems always to need someone there. The sun breaking out of the cloud cover, lighting the snow into a bright, white coverlet besmirched with rock and evergreen. Incessant, left brain challenges, posed in the wings, waiting for entrance onto the stage of my day. Homework and studying for school. Why am I doing this? A question always riding the coattails of my nagging conscience.

Thoughts of home, distant like home itself. Life here and in this situation very moment to moment.