It's the autumnest of days today. Mostly cloudy, the sun god peeking through now and then (Apollo, don't leave us!), wind blowing the leaves off the trees, chilly/chili weather. I found a leaf this morning like a cubist painting--deep red, faint squared off patches of brown superimposed, a splash of yellow at the base. Beauty in very small things. The big band contest a few hours away--Greg and my boy go to spectate. I'm on my way to Kalamazoo to co-lead a church retreat. Gratitude for a trip that is just an overnight.

JBB left a comment today with a quote that is so beautiful, I need to bring it into the light. She was responding to my angst about becoming myself:

'I just came across again Parker Palmer's book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, which someone had given me earlier this year. He opens the first chapter with a poem by William Stafford about a river iced over during the winter:

[...] Ask me whether what I have done is my life. [...] I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.

Palmer then reflects on the poem: "[The poem's words] remind me of moments when it is clear--if I have eyes to see--that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. In those moments I catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath the ice." (p. 2) '

"the life that wants to live in me." yes.