beyond the door / 10:21 pm

So it goes... I am feeling positive again already. The moon has released me and I'm ready for a fresh start. Today began with an 8 to 9:30 early morning class, but I'm a morning person and it was very enjoyable. I grabbed my coffee and sat down to the lovely Ms. Steele, my favorite professor at OU and my music therapy role model. I love her excitement and energy, and she always gives me hope. If I can be as good of a music therapist and teacher as her someday, I will be proud. The class is about the psychology of music and how music affects the brain and body. The course explains the very roots of why music is therapeutic and brain-changing, and therefore life-changing for so many people. After eating lunch with Adam, I did my first homework assignments at the Donkey where I saw Sam, Matt, Clare, Jeff, Alice, Dan, and a few people I'm probably forgetting. Then Adam came in and I snuck up behind him and squeezed him. We ate dinner together after that and I finished a run a couple of hours ago. It felt good. Everything feels pretty good right now.

"This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in this room. Beyond the door, where the river is, where the roads are, we shall be. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun under your arm." 

These are some of the final words from Written On the Body by Jeanette Winterson, a book I read last year. The reader never learns the name or gender of the narrator and, by the end of the story, it is apparent that when it comes to love and emotional-physical-spiritual-sensual longing, name or gender don't matter. It is described as "love stripped of clichés and categories, as a phenomenon as visceral as blood and organs, bone and tissue." It's not my favorite book in the entire world, but it is worth reading and even buying. I put the quote above on a watercolor/collage piece I made Adam last year because it makes me think of hope, grabbing life by its head and fiercely holding on. Sometimes I don't know whether to grab and hold on or let go and let it carry me (riding the wave). I think a balance would be good.