#25

Next month (Feb 2009), I'll be participating in the Shutter Sisters creative challenge, the One Word Project. We're to pick a word that will inspire our images through the month of February. As I began to search for that perfect February theme, waiting was the first word that popped into my mind. Waiting for spring, waiting for the completion of an arduous Masters program, waiting for the move from the Boston area back to my roots in south central small town PA, waiting for a place to call home (it's been a good ten years feeling without one), waiting for space to dig and plant and grow and harvest...
But alas, I am here still. And as I recognized this, along came a second word: Being. With being I think of stillness and of patience but most importantly, I think of connection. The word "being," implies to be with, to be in relationship to all other things.

But with connection comes visibility, the next possibility for my February word search. And Visibility involves allowing myself to be seen, to be known, to be engaged...

This terrifies me. And as I sat bent over paper, a pen in hand, jotting these words one after another, I realized that I had been holding my chest tight and barely breathing. This is how I finally arrived at my word for the month of February: Breath.

From Rules for the Dance by Mary Oliver:

"Metrical poetry is about: breath. Breath as an intake and a flow. Breath as a pattern. Breath as an indicator, perhaps the most vital one, of mood. Breath as our personal tie with all the rhythms of the natural world, of which we are a part, from which we can never break apart while we live. ...It is as good as a language. We sigh. We pant. We reveal ourselves."