I am one month and some days away from delivering, bearing, this child who I don’t know, into the world. Into this world. People say I will know him immediately, I felt that before, when I was aware of his soul, but since he’s been growing in my womb, which doesn’t feel like mine, it feels like his apartment beneath my lungs, the mystery has obscured any recognition.
I feel it, physically, the kicks, the tightness, the churning of his body moving into and around his diving position. He is no burden, I work and work out and walk and play just like ever, I sleep, dream and don’t even realize what’s coming. Maybe that’s a blessing, ’cause even as I prepare in all the ways one must in this day and age for a human to burst onto the scene of life, as I execute my due diligence in the world of rules and regulations, I am as if getting ready to join the Navy. That may sound harsh, but it’s how my mind is, reworking songs, making better demos, compiling a strategy when I walk away from the creativity, making sure the musical is in position so I can be fully onto my album, going to as many art classes as I can so when the inevitable happens, I’ll have all this in my arsenal.
I think because freedom, I know I’m told the opposite, is at the end of the shore and the beginning of the sea. I remember him as the sun setting on the ocean, his golden yellow light spreading over the waves, that is where I first heard him, that is where I made the commitment to be his mother. Two weeks later he took me up on it.
My worry, the only one I feel allot, is that Finn will feel threatened, that Sailor won’t like him, that Huckleberry will retreat. I won’t let it be that way, and I also strategize for all of them to be integrated from the very beginning, but I know I can’t control the feelings of my fur children. The animals articulate my fear of the big change where I can’t otherwise admit it. We have right now the perfect balance, and we work at it, we rejoice in it, we guard it. Yet, it’s a hard won victory, this moment of play and creating and being around without having to go off and be the performer, it’s a sandbar we’re on, and it won’t be this way for long, or ever again. We know it. And my son, with his strong little heels in my ribs probably knows it, too. Even though he’s inside my skin, he’s here and very much a part of this early fall.
I feel everything is moving into position at the same time, my son, my album, the musical and a foundation for future explorations as a painter. I just realized this. The nature of it. I catch a glimpse of something and act, the process seems to do with me, the dedication to manifest what I sensed so clearly in an offhand millisecond demands all of me, to focus and, as I said, guard it as it grows into being. And yet, it’s to do with him, the song, the art, I’m the earth that must be tilled, the mind that must be trained, the body that must be opened to let them all come through in their time. What proves this is the fact that we do it, we go through any amount of pain and self sacrifice for the child, and the art. For the mission of whatever is one’s calling. Calling to service, not calling to self fulfillment, although, when the spiritual connection is the line through which the call comes, they are one and the same.
Well, my friends, there is talk of a tour in Spring to support the album, and so I will continue to hunker down and have much to share. We will all have much to share in the Spring, I believe. May health and perspective be yours, and mine.
Your faithful songwriter, Sophie.
