Spiders and Drones and Poems, Oh My

The night before I saw the spider, we were watching a show on TV that depicted drones flying around with automatic weapons on them. The drones were flying into the crowd and randomly shooting people. There was no place to escape the shots. 

I imagined how seemingly easily this could happen. There were drones taking pictures at the Color Run I’d done earlier in the year. They were kind of creepy, dipping in and out around the crowd, snapping photos.

And suddenly, sitting in my little house out in the woods, the darkness, looked so much darker. And the world felt so much scarier. 

What I realized early this morning as I sat to write in my journal was that the anxiousness about the drones shooting people and the experience of the spider hanging from his web in the tree laid bare my sense of vulnerability that I have been feeling, but not acknowledging, as I have been trying to get things together so I can see someone at MD Anderson about my cancer. The waiting and the sense of having no control over the situation are places of extreme vulnerability for me.

Yet, we are all often more vulnerable than we care to admit. When you are confronted with the death of a child, or a serious health problem, you tend to become aware of your own vulnerabilities. 

I’ve been reading a book about writing personal poetry. Sometime over the weekend, inspiration struck and I wrote a piece of personal poetry. The poem explains the photo, the scene in the photo was the inspiration for the poem. Please understand that I am allowing myself to go into dark places, and I am sharing my vulnerability with you, but I really am about as okay as I can be with my health situation. People say I am courageous. This is where I can usually agree with them—I am not afraid to go deep and explore the dark crevices. 

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. … Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. -Brené Brown

HOPE  

On my kitchen windowsill:

   watermelon seeds rest

on dried tea bag papers—

   the intentions being:

the seeds will be planted

   to grow in the darkness

of next summer’s ground

   while the tea bag papers

will be used to create a work of art

now lying

undiscovered in my heart.

   “The problem is:

you think you have time.”

   No one knows:

The seeds, the tea bag papers,

   they are my talismans,

visual and tangible symbols

   of my desperate and unspoken

hope: that I will have time.