For the last month and a half I have been cranking out written answers to questions in kinesiology, physical therapy, and early childhood education. I am in school online and so must talk through my keyboard. It is a challenge to not get overly creative with my writing and fly off into the ether of my imagination. I must stay grounded in order to complete the assignments. So grounded I am.

I am learning a lot about how joints, muscles and bones work. I am learning how much I know about teaching young children. I am learning how to live without creating original work, which, up until recently, has been my engine for moving through my life. Now I am driven by the need for a future and survival. I am hoping at some point to bring them together into one life purpose. I am now opening up my mind to more creative pursuits because I seem to have at least a tenuous grasp of the academic and pragmatic aspects of my life. My relationships remain hopelessly muddled. I am not sure if I will ever sort out how to get past my slow processing and anxieties to relate to anyone authentically in real time. That is my goal. To be creative, functional, and have authentic real time relationships, it is like building a puzzle with living pieces that keep moving around. I must learn how to tie the pieces of my internal reality to the world and people and somehow not feel like I am being drawn and quartered. I am the puzzle and I am a part of the puzzle.  I create the puzzle I inhabit. I must lose the fear of my own life in order to truly put it all together. This all also reminds me of the complexity of joints and how they work or don’t work. If one aspect is out of alignment, it causes stress on the rest of the joint. My life is a joint in which most of the parts are out of alignment. The muscles pull at the wrong angles. The bones are grinding and popping and ligaments stretched.

Anxiety and fear are the cause of my imbalances and the barriers to smoothly moving in the world. I must find a calm space in the midst of this chaos of competing desires and fear-feeding predictions of bleak and lonely times ahead, find the eye of the storm and my pieces into place so that I can move out in the world dancing instead of limping. I will be a leaf on the wind watch me float and glide.