Life

  • Darkness, Light… and Human Development

    I have the gift of being able to capture my son’s life, and his essence, in images – already I look back through them and marvel at what happens when passion, love, skill, and an observing heart & mind come together. I can see his life unfolding and see his different personality traits emerge as I look through this growing archive. It blows my heart and mind.

    Talk about bittersweet. Can’t stop, won’t stop.

    Darkness & Light
    Braden, Age 7, September 2014

     

     

    By the time I recognize this moment this moment will be gone, but I will bend the light, pretending that it somehow lingered on.
    ~John Mayer, Clarity

    *****
    © Lotus Carroll, All Rights Reserved
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  • My Heart Skips None Of These Beats

    The last bit of summer vacation is pressing in on us, and it has largely become this: the frantic run from pool to platform on repeat, a near maddening loop of frenzied obsession, the intense need to squeeze in as much flight, falling, plunge and ascension as possible before the school bell once more rings.

    He is reborn over and over again in an unrealized effort to slow the sinking of the sun.

    It is both beautiful and somehow tragic in its simple impossibility; it is all at once the sweetness of youth and his slipping grasp on it. My heart swells and tightens as I watch him hurry to soar and float once more.

    I feel him breathing life inexplicably into me as he powers through his, and I realize that I love the bittersweet pulse of this life.

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  • The Beauty of Change

    We collected a rather large batch of caterpillars that were threatening to skeletonize my sunflower garden recently. I housed them in a small plastic container with slots for air designed to hold buggies and fed them sunflower leaf rations (they turned their noses up at other types of leaves) saving most of my garden from destruction while still feeding them. After several days, they all suited up in their respective chrysalises and made with the metamorphosing. We dug witnessing this, and awaited the unfolding of their wings as they became Bordered Patch Butterflies (Chlosyne lacinia).

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    For the past couple of days, they’ve been greeting the world anew, and as they do, we open the hatch on the container and set them free into my (flower filled, butterfly orgasmic) back yard. It is an incredibly joyous feeling to watch one of them lift out of the housing and ascend into the air and off to freedom, somehow making my heart more buoyant even though it is my lungs that fill with air while I breathe in and watch them float.

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    This little flapper needed some extra time to dry its wings and visit with another creature who has been rapidly changing right before my eyes lately.

    The Beauty of Change

    I have a tender love that floats on wings of expectation and wonder for them both.

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  • His Ever Changing Face

    Every day he looks a little different. He grins up at me now with this lopsided, crazy toothed smile. Him, squinting into the sun and my lens and blowing my heart with his innocence and love.

    His Ever Changing Face

    Every day he is a little bigger, some tiny bit older, somehow new in his growing-boy-changeling ways.
    He is what all children are – a person becoming something amazing in deceptively tiny steps that are really so, so big on their insides.

    They feel big to me, and as they go by, I feel a weight turn and shift inside me. It is both a feeling of joy and sorrow, the disparity between which is one of life’s greatest gifts to experience.

    Change on, my love.

  • portrait of the author, lotus carroll, in black and white, with her hair swirling around her face as she stares at the camera

    I am a rock under the stars.

    It is dark and warm.  The cool water shimmers and swirls in front of me, calling me to fall into it.  I close my eyes and imagine my body breaking the surface and sinking like a rock, cutting through with no resistance.  The soft, surging liquid would swallow me, and I’d be gone. Just a rock with no choice in which way to fall.

    There’s a slight breeze, but it doesn’t quite push off the way it feels as though the air is actually touching me. It’s the perfect kind of warm. That is, it’s the kind of warm a girl who grew up in the country can appreciate. It is, in fact, kind of warm that used to waft through my screened windows and call me out onto the front porch to stare at the moon and dream with my eyes open.

    I’m sitting on the back deck at my parents’ house. It is not the house I grew up in. That is about 2 miles from here. It sits, full of memories and cobwebs. It sits empty, dark, and somber.

    I have not driven past it on this visit home. I haven’t driven by and seen the room off the front porch where I would sit and wait for him. The place he would often come to for me. Where I would sometimes sit alone, disappointed.

    I did, however, drive past a road I used to turn right on almost every day, literally for years. That road took me to his home and his family, of which I was made to feel a part, so many times. It took me sometimes alone, and sometimes with him. It took me.

    Like he had.

    Every ounce of my heart was siphoned away, every piece of my soul seemed to have been drawn out. I would say it was painless, because, after all, I wanted it that way. But it would be more truthful just to say I must have enjoyed the pain. Or at least, that I endured it because I knew the prize was worth it.

    I wanted it to be.

    I’m sitting out here with a chorus of crickets and other nighttime crawlies singing me the sweet song of the country on a soft, close summer night. I feel comfortable here. I can stretch out my legs and breathe in the scent of flowers growing nearby. In this moment, no one needs me. I’m at peace. Just myself, in the dark, alone. Comfortable.

    Over and over again I had put all of myself into him, willing him to be more and to somehow make me whole, as such. I piled upon him expectations and needs. I was not perfect. He was not perfect. We were not perfect. We were just us and us was foolish.

    He-I lost me-him and we were both abandoned by the ending we thought was in store for us. What I wanted was promises; conversely, he needed freedom and choices. While I needed validation and hope, he demanded space and what-ifs. I was incapable of giving him what he needed while still finding my own answer, incapable of just letting go and being me. Instead, I wanted to draw myself from him, control him, manipulate his choices.

    If I lay my head back and stare up into the sky, I see a black canvas for miles, dotted with brilliant, shiny specks of electricity and power from so far away. They gleam and sparkle; a new one seems to pop into the tapestry after every few beats of my heart. If I just stare this way for awhile, what I think I see and know changes over and over again.

    dark night sky up above, dotted with many stars from far away

    I expect it to look a certain way, but I can’t control what unfolds before me. I have ideas about what is out there in my view, but it is flowing and changing constantly, right in front of me, and there is nothing I can do about it. Some of the changes are noticeable, some are imperceptible to me. I sense that.

    It would be foolish of me to try to force the stars to stand out in the sky in a specific order. They would call me mad and lock me in padded rooms.

    I’ll never really know if it was right to part ways. I think of him from time to time and I wonder who he is now. Is he still that same person who was my best friend, or is the man he has become someone different entirely? I don’t regret those years, or the ones that have followed. I’m not sure if life has turned out exactly how I’d hoped it would after I kissed him that last time and he turned away.

    What I do hope now, however, is that he is happy. Because I love him in some way still, and that’s been true since the day I walked away. I hope he is happy with the way the sky looks when he lays his head back.

    It is possible to close my eyes and visualize the reams of paper that the story of my life stands starkly upon. As they flow through my mind, I can slow them down and inspect this and that, or speed them up to avoid things. If I choose to, I can ponder over the way the ink fell and what the story might be like if it had been different, and I can even look at the pages that lie ahead, waiting for the stab of the pen, with concern. Perhaps I could worry about those pages, or be afraid. I could try to control the pen that wants to flow on its own with fancy strokes and flourishes.

    Yet that would be silly.

    portrait of the author, lotus carroll, in black and white, with her hair swirling around her face as she stares at the cameraBecause the way the stars in the sky arrange themselves in a predictable and yet uncontrollable fashion is a beautiful thing. Every night they show up just the way they are supposed to, and they don’t need me to worry about it, or wonder if they are doing it right.

    And so, they end up where their paths intend them to, and that is that.

    Like a stone falling into cool, deep waters, effortlessly.

    Like me.

  • i close my eyes and then

    I close my eyes at night and the blackness that stares back at me from inside my eyelids is deep and dark. I know my eyelids are right there. But if I didn’t… well, I wouldn’t. And then it would just seem like… Endless Dark.

    It’s what I imagine it must be like inside a uterus.

    Disconnected from the day, and staring into the black nothingness, I can’t help but start to feel like I’m floating. You know, as if I’m in some kind of fluid.

    My thoughts drift… I realize that I have no real knowledge of what is sustaining me, only beliefs… feelings.

    I just am.

    There is a sense of someone out there – very close, but in another sense, so far still. Someone who loves me, whom I do not yet really know.  Someone who wanted me; someone who is waiting patiently to meet me.

    My heart is beating but, after some time, I start to feel very tired and weak. I have the sense I am fading.

    I still feel, but it’s so dark, and getting darker.

    Suddenly there is nothing.

    In the morning, I wake again, and I get to open my eyes, see the world around me and time marches on.

    I get to keep going, continue to be.

    I hope that they are somewhere where their eyes have opened unto the most beautiful sights they could ever dream of, and that when I get there to join them, they are bursting with stories of all the things I’ve missed while they were waiting patiently to meet me.