#morningrun

You see yellow fog

slick, inexorable, insinuating;

I see God's fingertips. 

Everywhere I look, soft pools of pine pollen outline puddles in the road and puff as my feet run through the pinestraw. I made it out for a run before noon for once. My thoughts roamed.

Freedom of worship or freedom of religion. Return to fertility hormones. Pinecones, male and female He created them. Natural Law. Balance and false balance. The unexamined life. Pounding the pavement too hard. My knees. I wrote a poem. When will I die? How? Longleaf pines. "Infinite variety" as a trite phrase and a foundation shaking reality. Pink running shoes. Is it a haiku? Counting syllables. Fiddling with my stride. The necessity of nature study. Macbeth's Opinion. Reading Charlotte Mason for real. Michele Quigley. Elizabeth Foss. Pine pollen. First year pine cones. More of the poem. Could the ranger teach high school conifer study? Could we dissect pinecones? With what? Pine pollen in little polka dots on the lake surface.  

This school year I have not been pregnant. My baby is one and was breastfeeding all night until January. We are surviving, but survival mode looks very different from new baby before the new fiscal year, first freshmen in homeschool high school, #7 school aged kid learning to read. But something is lacking.

Of course I know my vices. I know where I am not excelling. These don't need reflection. What I don't know is how to combat my vices, how to overcome bad habits and begin to excel. I think about balance. Of course it is about balance. It is about balance and integrity and faith and getting up again and doing it every day. It's usually about balance. Then I thought of this picture:

It was meant to be funny, but today I think about it seriously. Because it isn't a picture about balance. It's a picture about false balance. The kids jumped so we could look balanced. Now I could take that in a million directions, but this is what I'm focusing on: "me time".

People love to ask a mom with "a lot" of kids, "How do you find 'me time'?" My response for years has been a thoughtful, "I don't think I believe in 'me time'." Because when I was a young mom with young kids, 'me time' made me resentful. It was expensive to hire a sitter or ask Bill to watch the kids for several hours so I could go be self indulgent. (And I pretty much think that if I am doing something for me, it's self indulgent.) And when I got back, I felt angry and fractious instead of renewed the way I was "supposed" to. I gave it up as a concept. I rejected the idea of 'me time'. My life was like this:

But I think I threw out the baby with the bathwater. I never considered that I was doing 'me time' wrong or that it might be different in different seasons of life. Lately I have struggled with my lack of memories. I can not remember chunks of my life. I don't feel this is a result of the sameness of every day, but a side effect of not taking the time to turn short term memories into long term ones. I have been pregnant/nursing/homeschooling/housewifing continuously for years and haven't created spaces for myself to be alone, to reflect on my experiences, to remember. I have been the river rushing forward, not the river leaving its mark on the landscape.

Briefly, I came up with these places where I messed up and should have created those spaces. I should not have allowed kids in the bathroom with me. Not to shower, not while I toileted, not when I was in a state of undress, not even talked to them from the other side of the door. I should have created a prayer time and space at home that they could not intrude in. I should have created a nursing refuge that I used once a day where I only nursed and enjoyed the baby without interruption. I should never have given up quiet time but instead turned it into uninterrupted computer time. I should have created a grading period in the school day. I should have built in teacher workdays every quarter and more. And I should have gone on a walk alone every day.

With those areas of space (perhaps this is what Elizabeth Foss wrote about when she wrote on "wide margins"? I never read what she had to say on that), I would have had opportunities to reflect on the meaning of my life experiences. I could have not only seen the world around me but observed it as I did today. I could have had the safety and peace to think for a while, to see where my thoughts would lead me and enjoy them, to work through intellectual struggles.

My run today have me that space. When I say run, I mean 20 minutes of walking and 2 5-minute wheeze and huff my way down the road. I don't have an answer for what I need to do next. I just needed to take the time to put down what I had come up with so far. To appreciate what today's morning run gave me.