Importance.

Sometimes, there are people who come into your life unexpectedly. These people are different than others. Important in some way...for some reason. You look at them and there is a closeness to self, a sameness. An instinctive undersatnding. Sometimes these people stay and you are able to discover just what significance they have in your life. Others go away and the memory of them fades with time. You no longer remember how you could look into their eyes and see bits and pieces of yourself mixed in with other things that were foreign, strange, exciting. Instead they just become a name from some long forgotten past life. A chance that you could have had--a choice--that passed.
There's someone like that in my life right now. I don't know why. I can't really explain it. But I just know that this perosn is important to me. It's instinctive. But what will happen? This person will move on, go away, and become someone that I used to know, once, from that one place I lived for a short time.
I wonder sometimes if people ever feel this, too. If I ever show up and someone thinks, "Wow....do I know her? I sure want to. She's important."
Maybe it's just that I haven't lived enough life, yet, to see these things come full circle. Maybe, someday, all these important people who have crossed my path will some day show themselves again and then, finally, I'll understand those feelings. Or maybe these people really do represent the opportunities that my life could have were I to make a different choice.
But what if I were to fight for some of these people? I have before. And never won. But the people who have been important (and, I mean more than familiar....more than friends. Really IMPORTANT. I don't know of a different way to describe it...) who have stayed of their own choice? Man....have they been impactful.
I don't really know where I'm going with this....except that it's interesting to wonder and think about. If yesterday could happen again and if I had been different or the situations had been somehow different...if not my own choice but that of an important person had been different, how would I be different now? ....would I be having these thoughts about how important people are to me in life? Or would I just know that, to someone, I'm that important person, too.
What-ifs are useless unless you put them into a practice for our future.

I am an island.

I told a friend today that I wished for love. Every day, at 11:11, I make a wish. I figure that, with all of those wishes floating around in the cosmos, one of them is bound to come true.
I've been thinking about that wish today. About love. About how and why I want it. About what it means.
But I know what it means. Because I have it. I can wish for it and wish for it...and it'll be like wishing for rain here in Oregon. It comes. I have it. It's not always raining...but that moisture is always there. There's always the residual. Always the effect.
I've wondered for a long time why I'm not loved. What is it about me that seems to distance myself? My own personal motto has turned into "boy did the poets ever get this wrong...man really can be his (or in my case, her) own island."
And maybe I am. Maybe I am an island. Floating there in the sea. Solitary. One to my own. But you know what that means? That means that, at night, I am the last one that to whom the sun grants his kiss. That means that I shine out on an ocean of sameness as one difference...one hope for human life. That means that, within the arms of my shores, I hold a world different from any other. That means that what and who I am is preserved--waiting and pleading and desiring to be discovered.
And love? Isn't that what love is? Hope for life. Hope for the good things in life. Hope for all those things that make us who we are?
I'm not unlovable, though I am alone. I have amazing friends and an amazing family. I have the love of those people who support me every day simply by being there when I call.
And maybe it's not everything...maybe it's not what I want. But it's something...something amazing. And for now? It's going to be enough. Because even though that island may be going through a time of drought and famine...it still represents that hope. And, someday, that hope will be mine.

I chose the images of walls as the backgrounds for my blogs very intentionally and for several reasons. One, because walls are so often accused and used as a symbol for confinement--imprisonment. So often we are stuck on being enslaved within, that we forget what is without. We use only one symbolic meaning as the iconic symbol for captivity--when really it is the symbol of our lives--our homes, a place of refuge, a new, separate world contained therein. Another reason is that walls are wise.
They not only guard us from outside elements, but they know us in our most private moments.
Walls can define us as a society--the Berlin Wall (and its toppling...), the Great Wall of China.
They also define us as individuals--with pictures hung and holes re-plastered. on these blogs I have two very different walls. Both used. Both loved, in very different ways. Both abused the same. These walls are our stories, just as these blogs are mine--different in construction, but with the same purpose.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how the poetry in my life seems to get absorbed into the every day process of simply being--living. I often have strange, funny (to me at least....), meaningful thoughts that I cherish, and want to share with others, but I don't think that they quite fit into the criteria for my other blog postings....so, here's the new one! This one is just for my thoughts. Just for me thinking like I think. Not for creativity so much as just for being a person who thinks stupid, often pointless things that she feels like she just wants to share with whomever may feel the desire to read them. :) Here's to the simple things in life.