Making Beautiful Things

All through the very merry month of May, I've wanted to create something beautiful. I see something and I want to make it pretty and make it do pretty things. Maybe it's the spring time, or all the brimming love in the air, but I have very much wanted to make awesome tiny things. Some poems have come and the novel is in full rewrite mode and swimming along in its creek bed quite loyally. But I want to paint something, or draw, or fix, or wax, or build, or photograph, or design, or something outside of the written word. I'm not sure why; I don't generally feel this way. Still, the way the moon is mooning and the fireflies are pointing out the darkness, I can't help but feel a twinge of excitement for whatever's going to happen next. We plug away and send the bucket down to the well and sometimes you come up with words, and sometimes you come up with something you can't name, still it's alive and wiggly. 

In the meantime, we welcome June in with a soft rainy day and a black eyed pea chili in the slow cooker. So many things to desire, so many goosebumps to get. It's a new youth coming, or a new age? Whatever it is, it's summer and peach juice, and lynchburg lemonade, and our new picnic table ready for the evenings of swoon and sour cherries. 

Maybe, it's that many of my girlfriends are pregnant this spring, and the desire to give the universe another big soul feels overwhelmingly in the air. But for now, I just want to give it a good book, and some poems, and something beautiful that I can't name yet.  

I miss California, but I am loving our home in the bluegrass too. Local baseball games and outdoor music, pool-side with new friends, and all the possibilities of making things matter enough to remember. 

I want to memorize more poems this season. I want to keep them in my pocket and my mouth. A little poem song for the summer air. What's next? What matters most is what's now: the smell of jalapeños heating up the kitchen, the green and gray of the high grass, the him in the next room, the here of this feeling. 

What was it that Papa said? (Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman!), "Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul."

All this to say, things are brimming up and over between my ears and I want to turn even my bruised up brain into a thing of beauty.