We name people at birth; we have to. But to reinvent our naming is the real beginning of our lives.
The wild Sondra (the one pushed out purply and alien on a rain-soaked Portland night) sometimes screams, "I want to be set free!" to which the socialized Sondra (the one trained into happiness with a socially-ordered life) replies, "from what?"
This is a question worth considering. This is the question which gnaws on the brain without satiation. We aren't made for such inhuman ruminations, for desires to cocoon ourselves in deep earth, to eat berries from the land like a wild boar.
The land is barren, anyway. Cold, purplish skies in the morning when I take out the dog. Smoke, pollution, and snow. Unhealthy air quality, the weather reports say. A common diagnosis, even in the suburbs of Utah cities.
What I am really trying to say is: I would like to spend more time in nature, which may not even be true. What is certainly true is that I need to get more sleep, and lack of sleep leads to desperation. Sophie has been screaming inexplicably nearly-non-stop, for days. I don't even know how many, since the screams have made time soupy, expandable. The morning hours before her noon nap feel like an eternity, and she is back to watching too much TV, and I am humbled back from mom-with-a-million-childcare-activities to simply coping.
Since I am sick, and Georg's schedule hasn't allowed it, we haven't done daycare this week, and I am behind on my edits. I feel like I am behind on everything, but that is also an exhaustion-induced exaggeration.
I am doing some things, some little things. In the few moments I can come back to my book, I write and edit with wild abandon. This is its own naming, a declaration of independence from anything insincere. It's a stripping away of the inessential in the sweeping motion of winter who strips away life from the trees, whose names I still don't know, because I have yet to download that nature app, because when will I find the time?
-Sondra
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