advice to myself

Advice To Myself

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.


- Louise Erdrich


im struggling to know where im being called these days. tonight i laid on the floor with davids head on my chest and tried to articulate how i feel, and failed. i feel like im on the cusp of something, some revelation or call. dominos are always always being lined up in my life but for what, i rarely know. but the power is not in the knowing, but in the faith and prayer that the purpose is above and bigger than i am. i am so small, i am just one life and voice and person on a oddly simple and complex journey trying to figure out where i belong. i can't will anything to happen. can't force anything either, for God would no doubt laugh at my foolish creation and pat me on the head like a Father and send me back on my way. im trying not to look at my life through the eyes of my heart, but instead through God's, davids, and i's all at once to make some sense of what seeds are being planted. again i feel disheartened to feel that i am being pulled one way and david another. i want to live in a community like the simple way and yet nothing like that is around here. honestly i feel sort of silly even admitting that and i don't know why. am i naive to believe there is something better than conventional living arrangements? every time i visit their page i find something new that leaps in my eyes and i have continual ah ha! moments.