Seeking Inspiration

Imagine inspiration a place.  Yesterday, try as I might, I couldn't get there.  Under a hot, sweltering sun, I sat waiting for the bus bound for Inspiration.  Carefully packed suitcase at my feet, I scan the road ahead for a sign.  Only the summer sun and the high-pitched whine of summer insects answers me. 

They say, "No bus today.  All trips to Inspiration have been cancelled."

For a while longer, I sit hoping they are wrong but the sun is hot and I am tired.  This fatigue clings to me and I wear it throughout my day.  Later, when I had to leave the comfort of my recliner to search for milk, my son asks, "Can we have our ten minutes in the car?"
I say, "Sure".  But the fatigue had other plans.  My mind keeps wandering off.  At one point, I forgot about Just 10 and almost asked him not to talk to me.  His words swarmed around me like little gnats.  I couldn't catch any of them.  The arms in my mind swing like windmills trying to swat the gnats away.

My son's words stop the swatting.
"Mom, are you tired?"
I fall back to earth and reply,
"Yes, I am really tired."
"Me, too", he says.

I renew my effort to be attentive.  Knowing how to listen, knowing listening is the right thing to do doesn't keep my tired mind from drifting away again.  Too tired to resist, too tired to chide myself for my inattention, tonight, this is as good as it gets.  I surrender to the fatigue, my imperfect listening, the absence of inspiration, my imperfection.  Resistance is exhausting.  The day ends with my falling into a welcome sleep.

At night, I dream of funerals for young people.  I try to pay attention to the funeral, to what is going on, but I am too busy chasing naughty toddlers who need their diapers changed.  As I sit this Thursday morning, at the breakfast table, drinking coffee, eating a bagel and writing down my thoughts in cursive, I struggle with what this dream means.  How did my search for inspiration end with toddlers and dirty diapers?

As the warm coffee takes the edge off my grieving over the parting of self from the warmth of bed, I begin to understand.  Dirty diapers are a symbol of the baser things in life, the real stuff we can't escape.  All humans have the capacity to produce the contents necessary for dirty diapers.  Some more than others.  At a funeral, faced with the mortality that shows itself more to me with each passing year, I continue to try to clean up my "dirty toddlers".  Through mind-numbing fatigue and a lack of inspiration, I'm still involved in the substance of daily life.

At the Thursday morning breakfast table, I write of this in an old notebook.  The pages bear a few stray bagel crumbs.  Seeing them for the first time, I also realize that inspiration has found me within a dirty diaper while I slept. 

I smile to myself and think, "Thursday, bring it on.  I am ready for you."