the mind is a breeding ground.

Sometimes you don’t sleep enough at night. You wake up early, you don’t even open both eyes yet, but you decide it’s time to write.

It’s moments like these when one wishes they had a typewriter. Preferably by a window. One with wainscoting. I don’t know why wainscoting came to mind, but it did, so I wrote it down. I’ve learned to do that. Write things down that come to mind. The mind is a breeding ground. Little, baby, innocent enough thoughts are born there; they grow up to be Mozart and Martha Graham and Tennyson–shedding so much light on the beauty that already exists here, but now the rest of the world can see it, too; we step out of our present darkness for a brief transcendent moment and we think, It’s so lovely here. So achingly lovely–maybe I’ll stay here forever…But then a bill that is larger than our meager bank account becomes due or a parent makes us feel very small indeed and we forget the call to think higher, to see beauty, to be free.

We forget who we are.

Until the next transcendent moment shakes us from existing within the confines of our regrets and our fears, that is.

But, right, the mind is a breeding ground.

Those little thoughts.

Those harmless thoughts; they are the tiniest grey-blue puppy pit bull with matching grey-blue eyes that I saw chained to a parking meter the other day, while walking to the gym. He was one of the prettiest things I’d ever seen and I wanted to take him with me just about everywhere. ‘Oh, there is that tall and thin girl with the puppy the color of the ocean at dawn,’ is what people would say when they saw us.

But a puppy the color of the ocean at dawn soon becomes a dog who can bite, no matter what color he is. And there is a lot of responsibility that comes with handling that potentially dangerous and lovely creature. You don’t let a dog do whatever he wants, no matter how pretty or innocent he looks; because, eventually, the dog will ruin the world–or at least the fabric of your best drapes.

Drapes and wainscoting; I must have dreamt pure Jane Eyre last night.

I did perform at Sleep No More, which was not a dream, but was so dreamy, it might as well have been. All smoky and speak-easy-like, dimly lit with lots of sparkling pieces of jewelry hanging around the throats and wrists and fingers of women who looked to have stepped right out of 1939.

But back to the mind and how it’s a breeding ground.

The puppy and how it’s innocent until it’s not.

Our thoughts and how they can grow into grace, if we let them.

Unless we don’t.

So, here’s to our thoughts growing up to be Martha Graham, Mozart, and Tennyson. Or maybe even a simple, kind farmer in South Africa that neither of us will ever know, but whose life consistently makes the world a stronger, better, safer place.

And here’s to writing our thoughts down.

Even if we still haven’t opened up both eyes. Because the morning came quickly.  Just as quickly as the night flew by while you spent it singing and rapping and talking and eating and platonically sitting on the laps of a couple of friends you’ve not been lucky enough to see for a while now. Not until last night, and on into this morning, that is.