I wish I lived in the power and the light

Mother nature's daughter

I miss the days when everyone poured out their heart on epistolary MySpace blogs.  I also miss the Reagan administration, for different reasons, so that should come as no surprise.

Now we live in a world of instant Instagram selfies, and I am nostalgic for the web log of yesteryear, the Livepad courier-font blogs, where we were allotted more than 140 characters to explicate the intricacies of our lives.

So I am announcing the birth of Sagan Tomasik-Jenks, born in October, via the interwebs.  This is a photograph of her from Thanksgiving in Tennessee, in her cast-off boys' and girls' clothes.  Isn't she the most gorgeous thing you have ever seen?

I have posted twice on this blog this year and I make no apology.   The best thing about real friends is how you can pick up where you left off as if no time has passed.  I have eight minutes before midnight in 2016 and that long to catch you up on my life.  Sagan, her father, and I still live in Maine, although we were in Tennessee when we took that picture, and we are in Massachusetts for the New Year now.  Spirit, our boat, still sits in the driveway, and we plan to live aboard her.  Eventually.  Or start a micro-papermill in Bridgewater.  Or farm sheep.

But I see having a baby as no reason to stop sailing.  For reference:

http://www.bumfuzzle.com/
http://saltykisses.net/
http://zachaboard.blogspot.com/

And especially:
http://www.windtraveler.net/2013/07/on-boating-with-baby-and-being.html

It has been a year for grief and withdrawal.  K's stepfather, and also his great-aunt, more like a grandmother to him, died this year.  Also pregnancy, an experience of becoming another being's vessel.  I had thoughts about hollowness, emptiness--and the beauty of feeling a person come alive inside me.  It's hard to put all this into words.  I understand more thoroughly why there are so few mother artists, at least of the canonical variety.  This different kind of more silent art, breeding life.

It makes me think of platitudes and I feel positive loathing towards platitudes.  But of birth and death, seasons beginning and ending.  I am more conscious of the passage of time than I ever have been.  I measure weeks in the inches that Sagan grows.  Already she has outgrown the elephant onesie in the photograph.  She wore another elephant outfit today, and she may fit into it one more time.  I grieve the passage of time for which I am utterly grateful.

And my sister's second son was born yesterday.  For him I am utterly grateful, and for the gifts of God.