Monday Mission - When the stream runs dry.

We had sun today - glorious, warm April sun that melted away the inch or so of snow that fell on Saturday evening, snow that fell while the ED and her family were here for the ED's birthday dinner, snowflakes big and wet whirling down while the family went for a walk in the woods behind our house, checking out the newly opened streams and playing with the ED's birthday camera, snow that did not stick on the tarmacked roads and make their drive home slippery and dangerous. I was glad. Dangerous situations for my family are like dams against which the stream of my thoughts piles up, halts and whirls in eddies of worry thick with sticks and reeds of nervous and often unrealistic fears.

I think, in fact, that my thoughts are like the little streams that run in our bush, swollen at times with ideas from books I have read or from newspapers or from reading here in Blog land. When that happens, as when the snow melts away in the spring and the ground thaws, my mind races merrily downhill, swirling the dead leaves of other years, covering the rocks of insecurity and self doubt, bubbling, circling, dancing, carving new chanels sometimes in the soft earth of my mind. And then the spate slows, energy spent, and the things I think are tame and ordinary and quiet within the stream's new carved banks. The tips of the rocks reappear and the stream slows still more until it lies in stagnant pools crawling with larvae and green with water weed, steaming in the burning summer sun.

When there are newly opened croci in my flower bed and the robins start to sing and a swift black cloud of redwing blackbirds races across the kitchen window, you would think that my energy would grow with the spring, from the spring, that new freshets of words and images would leap from the split rocks and flow merrily along. Sometimes it even happens that way but not always, not often enough, not nearly often enough to make me feel confident in this medium I have lately adopted. I feel dry as a desert canyon tonight, dusty and cold under a gibbering moon in a sky from which it seems impossible rain or snow would ever fall. A baked mud stream bed, rocks heaving through the clay like bones, dead reeds rattling in a thin cold wind.

Sitting, fingers slack on the keyboard, hoping that the rains will come again.

This has been a Monday Mission as managed by Painted Maypole. The assignment was to write a 'stream of consciousness' post. And, as usual, I cheated.

Maypole, you think up hard ones. Love you for it!