Just Write {173}

February 3, 2015

I woke up to my alarm. This almost never happens. Usually my children or my brain wake me long before I would need an alarm. If I ever set an alarm, I am awake and have turned it off hours before it makes a sound. Today though, I opened my eyes and wondered for a few moments, What is that music?

This actually means I have less time, before leaving for work. The hours after my brain and children wake me are usually spent getting myself and everyone ready, making breakfast, returning emails, writing up something for a freelance gig, or at least starting something until I have time between shifts, later.

It is 5 degrees out now, and still a bird is repeating this sing-song melody somewhere out there. It is a bird I haven’t heard all winter. Let’s believe this means that spring is closer than the ground hog trick seems to think. Sometimes I think spring is all we need. Thank God for the promise of it. Thank God that it doesn’t ever just completely go away, mysteriously hidden, or lost for good.

Believe it or not, snowstorms and freezing temperatures, you’re going to get hijacked.

Yesterday I heard a song about hope– “You walk in a room, you look out a window and something there leaves you breathless…you say to yourself, it’s been a while since I felt this…but it feels like it might be hope…” (Sara Groves)

For me, hope is like spring. It is a promise of something changing, since change is what we can always count on. It will feel like the dead of winter and I know, I just know, that “hope has a way of turning its face to you, just when you least expect it…”

(Sara Groves)

Reality always sets in, after chasing me down, and I have to look at it. And it twists me up and hurts a lot of the time. But hope, like spring, plants itself firmly ahead of me and crouches down to wait for it….wait for it….yell surprise. All the while, when we trudge through a Midwestern winter sore down to our bones and always chilled and lacking vitamin D, there is still beauty in the wait. This is what we have to choose, I’m starting to really get it.

Life can be exactly as terrible as it can be, and we still get to choose. We get to choose to see what we have left. When we look, really look, and open our frigid hearts, so much of the time we are multiplying those gifts. Just by looking at them. I mean, they were there all along, like all the frozen seeds, the roots, the leaves waiting to bud, underneath it all. And then we looked, and surprise, hope was there all winter.

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This is the 173rd installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {New here? Please see the details.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. (Then link back to this post in your Just Write post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.)

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?

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