it is early morning here...

It is early morning here and I am trying to desperately cling to my cup of coffee and the quiet that this house will be for just another 5 minutes.

Soon the boys will be up. Breakfast will be needed and clothes to put out and on. Then its out the door. Out first is E on his bike riding, off to his school. & then, my walking companions, G & B set out with me to their school several blocks away.

The day wakes up and it's ever busy schedule begins.

I want so desperately to carve more time for myself. Time to be quiet and create and breathe. But these last few days when I seem to have a window of quiet and solitude, I fill it up with worry and anxiety and numbers and my addiction to Pinterest. I feel the quiet escaping me. The quiet of my soul. When I feel it leave, I don't even seem to have the energy to chase after it. I just fill up the quiet with more franticness.

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Last night I dreamt I was sitting in my living room.
N was playing a board game with the boys.
As I sat there, I stared out the window and watched a dark hawk and a beautiful snowy owl fighting in the branches of a bare winter tree.  In my dream I was transfixed. Unable to move as I watched them struggle.  And as dreams go, that feeling changed & suddenly I had to stop them. Immediately. So I ran outside, out the backdoor.... and the tree transformed.
It was no longer my tree, but the bare branched crab-apple tree in my parent's backyard.
And there in the snow, lay the owl, white and spotted and small.
A baby owl. Broken and bleeding. The hawk was gone, caught up by the wind or the blowing snow. And I am no longer married with children, but I am young again, maybe 10, maybe 12, maybe 15.  And I bring the young owl into the house & lay him in a small cardboard box, fitted just for him with blue blankets and clean cotton scraps. I clean up his cuts and scrapes. I set his wing, determined as I once was as a young girl, who KNOWS she will save the world, that this baby owl was sent to me to be saved.  And he was mine. He wanted to be my owl. My baby. My bird. My owl.
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This morning as I wake up I know it was just a dream. But I am haunted by the struggle in the snow and the raw knowledge that this Owl was mine to save.  And I wonder about the symbolism in this dream. The Push and the Pull. The push of the busy family life, the one I have created and filled up with all it's ins and outs. And the one that pulls at my soul, the one that is tattered and a bit broken lying in the snow. Waiting. Waiting to be saved.

XOXO