We've got to start at the bottom of something. The place where our settling sounds like a bell toll is as good a place as any. Where our habits defy us into corners dark. Well intentions that none of us could carry anymore. This winter light brings wishes back to itself giving a respect for our hopeful, deep-lying selves.

Here is the place where the seeping out gets old. I see it for what it is but it seeps and sings and summons something I'm trying to get away from. Persisting with teeth of hell, back to itself. LOOK AT ME! And so I look long reassured that communications with reflections are no way to spend myself and so I forget. And on and on and on and so the command goes, and so the sin. Forgetting becomes a triumph of carrying on as it becomes the Achilles heel. And it's just me being me and me being good and on and on and on.

Broken, band-aiding fractures with good remedies. She remained unaware that the buoyancy of these breaks only repelled remedies. Salves don't multiply or last so she lasted there without a balm, cliff teetering, until the bottom broke out.

Tired of teetering she walked out on the self, of herself. She initiated a descent with her insistence of being on solid ground. Fleeting and falling into something other than self, other than other. She didn't see the shattering. Her convincing was too sure. Her persuasions too holistic but she couldn't seem to put herself back together and so she didn't. Brushing off and insisting upon peddling and paddling and moving forward she gave them what they wanted, said what they wanted to hear.

You've seen them. The injured who insist it was a bump and they'll just resume? A thorough disorientation mistaking up for down, and joy for immense sorrow and then that sorrow is mistaken for a foundation and it just wasn't true. There was nothing there on that shelf, nothing in that convincing but the work of convincing.
 
And when the bottom broke a scrambling began, instinctively wishing for fragments of foundations or pieces of goodness, swearing they were there. She swears they were there. Too many memories of it- right there, where you were sure there was something. Still. Something to slip a toe onto? Something to teeter on? Something solid to aid a throwing of diminished weight up and over into the safety that never was.

At last, it all ended with a hard, fast, and far fall that let out the hideous fluids. The murk that released soaked up the falling place and when the soaking was complete I got up and walked out with myself, walking into myself. 
 

December 1st

Tonight, with my apartment home filled with pine and lights I feel proud and content.

As I gathered the kids next to me to open our first day of advent surprise I read a few verses from Luke 2. My littles listened. I told them what a manger was. I told them it was a dirty bowl that animals ate from. I explained the nudity of Jesus, comforted with nothing but swaddling, which I used their swaddling blankets to explain.

I told them why we celebrate Jesus. That He was the best human who ever lived! He came to make change possible. I asked them if they ever do bad things. If they ever make bad choices and I assured them that I do. That daddy does and that everyone we love or ever loved makes mistakes and they want and need to change. Jesus makes that possible! Dotter reminded me that Christ also, "has a body again!" making the permanence of death quieted. As I told them I hoped for it to be true and there, in the artificial glow of plugged in strands I remembered that this is just a twinkle of truth and it feels good.