My mind is a noisy place right now. Thoughts and to-do lists billow like white sails run up on the lines of a ship. Pulled in a hundred directions by unspoken ideas and runaway thoughts, yet anchored to this place and moment in time by sticky hands and bright eyes.

It’s naptime and I’ve given myself time to write, to try to catch up with all the ideas making my brain such an exhausting place to be. But the ideas won’t be drawn out now. They defy order and keep tumbling out half-written onto the page, where they sit; obstinate, unwieldy, unyielding. But I’m here. Feeling the clock ticking. I’m here. Writing words that straggle across the screen. I’m here. Watching cold winter sunlight strike patterns on the deck through dead and crispy brown leaves. I’m here. Waiting for the cries that will call me back into the world of lists and ideas that run over and have no place to go. I’m here.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still/ no long blown hither and thither; /the last lone astor is gone;/ the flowers of the witch-hazel wither;/ the heart is still aching to see,/ but the feet question “Whither?”

Robert Frost, Reluctance