Here I Feel My Heart Beat

Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive. - Hafiz

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am. - Sylvia Plath

Here is a fundamental truth for me: my ability to see sky and trees - but especially sky - from wherever I am is directly tied to how I feel.

I am only outdoorsy insofar as I must be able to see the outdoors, the sky, the wide world around me. As I write tonight, the thermal curtains are closed against drafts and the light is dim and warm. Sometimes this is just right, but today I have not had enough sky and I’m craving it. The pan of roasted broccoli I just pulled from the oven is the most green I’ve seen today. My city was snowed in for most of last week. The world looks silent, sleeping beneath blankets of snow crusted over with ice. It’s all gone dormant. Even the evergreens have a tinge of rust in their foliage.

Of course, it’s not just in the winter that I need sky and color in my world. In the summer, I’ll endure sticky humid days to read for a little while on my deck. In fall, the curtains are open wide and during every walk with the puppy, I stop for a second at the woods at the end of our street. His nose doesn’t leave the ground once; I pause and breathe a little deeper and softer at the wall of cedars, red buds, and maples over the tangle of brush. And spring? That scent of honeysuckle on the air, the crab apple trees bursting into the blooms that make me almost willing to tolerate their abundant, inedible sour fruit? Heaven. The blossoms, not the fruit.

The past few days, between the first draft and my return to these words, it’s been gray and cloudy more often than not. At the end of the street, the trees are bare, the ground patchy white, brown, and green, the air misty with water molecules hovering between vapor and liquid. I want to gaze into it, but the puppy is determined we continue forward in his walk.

So very often, I don’t know what to write, even though writing is one of those things that makes me feel alive (that makes me want to be alive?). And also very often, it’s gazing into the trees and up at the sky that makes the words visible again, a cloud of mist in the trees or solid flakes of snow settling on the earth. Here, I feel alive.

Here, I feel my heart beat: I am, I am, I am.

---

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Alive."

https://open.substack.com/pub/shelbiemae/p/you-are-my-sunshine?r=2chsrf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true