Deep in the Woods
March 21, 2020

     What in the Sam Hill am I doing here?  

     This was just supposed to be personal challenge, a personal project.  I was going to write for forty-one days, in honor of my forty-first year of life on Planet Earth.  And then I was going to write every day I possibly could thereafter, for a year . . . or until I ran out of things to say, if that happened first.

     I knew it wouldn't be easy.  Writing is hard for me.  It's hard for me because I'm pretty good at it.  Language is my gift.  Words are my jam, remember?  Like a gifted athlete, I'm in that rarified, liminal space between being born with the capacity for producing something amazing and actually producing such a something. 

    That's a hard place to be.  It's a privileged place to be, yes, but hard too.  Hard in the sense that I didn't (and don't) want this gift to go to waste.  That would be rude.  Yeah, thanks, but no thanks, Universe.  I've got a little too much going on right now to make use of the gift you gave me.  I'll get around to it, eventually.  Maybe.  Thx!  xoxo!

     Yeah . . . no.  That's not how it works.

    So I started writing.  And I found some old wisdom that I had tucked into the folds of my soul over the years.  A bit here.  A scrap there.  A shard buried down in the bottom of a soul pocket, its rough edges rubbed smooth with age.  A pretty nugget, I thought, and useful too.  Perhaps others will find it pretty and useful as well.  Perhaps others could use some of these bits and scraps and shards and nuggets.  Look!  A chip of copper!  A penny in my pocket.  A penny for your thoughts.

    But now . . . but now . . . .

    What in the Sam Hill am I doing here?

    I don't know.  Something has changed.  Something has shifted.  The ground has rumbled.  There's a different scent in the air, and the wind just picked up.  My footing is off.  It's like I started on some kind of quaint afternoon hike, and all of a sudden, I find myself in a glade in the forest, in the presence of something serious, I don't know what.  I can't see it yet.  I can only sense it, dimly.  Is it good?  Is it bad?  Is it both?  Am I in danger?  I don't know.  I can't tell.  But I realize I'm deeper in the woods than I thought. 

    What in the Sam Hill am I doing here?