turning

I've been approaching this week with no small amount of fear or guilt or exhaustion or joy. Tomorrow is not one of the milestones--I'm still a few years away from joining the quarter century club and this birthday will not offer the promise of dating or a driver's license or drinking legally. And I'm aware that I'm a "baby," to quote, oh, everyone. . . everyone until I talk to my youngest sister who is 11 and who, when her Florida- and Rome-bound friends ask her where she's going for spring break, says, "We might get to go to Provo."

Brian Doyle wrote an essay titled "Credo," in which he considers the reasons he is Catholic. I've been mentally composing a similar essay, not about why I'm Mormon, but why I'm me. Tonight seems a good time to throw out some of those ideas, complete with the necessary "end without end, amen, amen, and amen."

I love. I am unabashedly and abashedly passionate about things that do or don't matter, including prayer, the Muppets, modern art, dictionaries, picture frames, earrings, music, dark chocolate, London. But I also love people, a concession I am less eager to make, because admitting that I love people is admitting that I am willing to let people hurt me.

Writing. It was a hobby--a passionate, carefully and carelessly recorded hobby. And now it is one of a few things I refuse to subtract from my life. But it's interesting to see how it winds itself around all those things that I love, including and especially people. April and Fob and inscape and my students. I love a person I've only met a few times in real life because of her writing and her intensity and her brilliance, which you can't ignore. And I love the people who've patiently watched me write to fill the silences I seem to sense without recognizing them as silences.

Maybe this is actually about love, because this paragraph follows on the heels of the other two. I love the arts, not just writing, but the arts I can't enact myself. My writing is necessarily ekphrastic because I can't divorce myself from the movement and color and sound of the world. I love film and theater and theatre and modern art and music--and I've started repeating myself. Which must mean it's important.

Okay, the last thought, I promise. We are whatever we're supposed to be right now. I'm always pushing for the next thing, the next moment. I desparately want to be in a PhD program right now and even more I want to be a professor. Add to that this damn maternal twitch I can't seem to shake, and there's a number of places in life I'd rather be than here. But being there would mean missing out on all the things I just wrote about loving. And in the end, I think love is really all we have. Love in infinite forms. . . end without end, amen, amen, and amen.