Going, going, gone...

I just read something on my good friend, Lin's blog that got me to thinking a bit. Oh, oh, huh?

She mentioned that another month is gone. I don't know why that hit me the way it did. Another month has slipped past...almost unnoticed, barely recorded in my memory. Another cluster of moments... many mis-spent, some productive, too few filled with short, yet precious snippits of time that will comfort me during snowstorms, sleepless nights, and lone, introspective walks.

I want to take the days yet unlived in February and fill them with more of those moments that will wrap themselves like tentacles around my heart. I don't know how many more breaths I will be allowed to take, but I want to breathe in the love of family and friends with every last one of them. Less time looking for cobwebs, watching mindless television programming, and sitting in a real estate office while my husband is home, walking the dog, building a snowman, or reading a book by the fire without me. Lin suggested that perhaps we are trying to leave recorded history and wisdom on our blogs much like the ancients left notes for future generations with their rock art. Am I leaving words of wisdom? I can talk wisdom fairly well now and then, so perhaps a certain number of my words may lift one of them on occasion. But, I don't live very wisely. I would like to take on the maturity that should be a part of aging and live in such a way that what they have SEEN me do would be my legacy, and not what they have heard me say...or what they have read that I've written. It's so much easier to talk and write than to live with wisdom and clarity. So... I raise my glass to better times ahead in this month of loving and lovers. I make a toast to renewed commitments.

I will strive to keep my loved ones at the center of my actions, not just my thoughts. I will try with more energy to savor the moments of solitude, to taking in and digesting new thoughts, and to finding ways to make someone else's burden a little lighter. I'm finding that opportunities for prayer are made, not stumbled upon... and that they become more important and sweeter to me with each daybreak, each nightfall. I listen more, and remain still longer, when I pray. It helps me to know that the Savior is there, at that very moment, listening and comforting and whispering what He would have me do....that He is watching over my children, that He loves them as I do... and that He will stand with them and help them find companionship and purpose, and to feel accepted and complete.

This is Cordell, standing at the shore, with his poets heart, soaking in the serenity that he finds in the myriad beauties of creation. He's not always content with his solitude, but he no longer seems afraid of it. He has reached that point at a much younger age than I. So perhaps it is he who is showing the way to live wisely. Yet another example of my children teaching and leading me as they so often do. I am always and forever grateful that each of them has been a part of this mortal existance. I suspect that they were a part of my pre-existant state as well. They are premier among all that is holy in my life.