Summer Haiku

Mottled color patterns
The softness of my blanket,
Spreading shadows on my paper.

At sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, I'd pack a small bundle - blanket, journal, Bible, good book - and trek to my favorite spot on our 25 acres for some being time. It was my dreaming time: I was the heroine who fell asleep and woke to the handsome hero's bemused gaze; I was the girl who sang the prettiest songs in the musical; I was the only one in my world and God was so available to hear my plans and questions about the future.

Sometimes I tried to read or write, but I never got anywhere. The feel of the breeze and the warmth of the sun distracted my focus. I would rather have listened to the birdsongs as I lay on my back, looking up at jeweled blue through the golden green of the summer trees above me.

I was a poet then. Finding that poet now challenges my grown-up perceptions as I grope for words I didn't realize I knew then. I hope for originality that seems lost to me. It seems there is always someone who thinks what I think better than I think it. (This is a recurring theme in my writing, isn't it?)

When I look up to point my daughter to the sky through the trees, I can't help remembering just a little who I was when I was younger, when the world was all mine for the dreaming. When composing haiku about sunshadows on paper I should have been filling with words was a worthy accomplishment. When I was curious and unafraid of what good plan God must have for me.

Trusting Him, I meet that poet again. I am freed to dream, to be, to be pursued by Him in this, His story about me and Him. There are dreams I dreamed as a child that never came true, and dreams I dream now that will likely never come true. But as I gaze at jeweled blue through whispering tree-tops, the words sneak in, like sun and shadows on my paper, and curious, I write them down and wonder what His good plan for me must be.

(image from sxc)