My daughter left today to go back to New York. As a recent college graduate on the job search, she is in one of those transitional zones. Since her graduation we have spent a few nights in my childhood home in Manhattan, in Maine in the island cottage my parents nested and here in our Virginia house. We have walked city streets, high tide marks and rolling hills. In each place with my daughter at my side I feel my mother's presence in a profound way.
Often when I am in New York I read a bit of my mother's journals. I am looking for the intersection of her past with my present and her particular expression of days. Often the entries are not what I had hoped for or expected. But I feel lucky to have them to turn to as the evidence of a life lived, proof in the underlined insight and inspiration in the musical drawing. As Zoe retreated from our house this morning I took time to wander my garden and studio. I picked a garlicscape, found a vase and planted my feet in the places where I find my voice.
"A mother and daughter are an edge. Edges are ecotones, transitional zones, places of danger or opportunity. House-dwelling tension. When I stand on the edge of the land and sea, I feel this tension, this fluid line of transition. High tide. Low tide. It is the sea's reach and retreat that reminds me we have been human for only a very short time."
--Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds (p. 20)
Often when I am in New York I read a bit of my mother's journals. I am looking for the intersection of her past with my present and her particular expression of days. Often the entries are not what I had hoped for or expected. But I feel lucky to have them to turn to as the evidence of a life lived, proof in the underlined insight and inspiration in the musical drawing. As Zoe retreated from our house this morning I took time to wander my garden and studio. I picked a garlicscape, found a vase and planted my feet in the places where I find my voice.
"A mother and daughter are an edge. Edges are ecotones, transitional zones, places of danger or opportunity. House-dwelling tension. When I stand on the edge of the land and sea, I feel this tension, this fluid line of transition. High tide. Low tide. It is the sea's reach and retreat that reminds me we have been human for only a very short time."--Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds (p. 20)
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