Karen Bjork Kubin

Friday, April 13, 2012

Running Along the Edges

When you handle a book, what about it do you enjoy touching the most? I love feeling the edges of the pages—their thickness or delicacy, pliancy or brittleness. I often find myself fingering the pages while I’m reading, measuring my physical progress through the book, feeling how close I am to the end of it.

There’s a whole lot of magic around the edges of things—the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the week leading up to a school Valentine’s Day party, sunset on the Fourth of July, the night before your birthday. The days when earth, air, and light are bursting with the transition from winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall, fall to winter.

There’s a deliciousness to expectation—to not knowing how it will all play out.

I should be asleep right now, but here I am on the brink of running my first half marathon and I am wide awake.

My first response to the suggestion that I sign up for this race was, “Yeah, right. Me?” But that’s exactly why, immediately after that response, I wanted to do it so badly.

Because maybe I actually can. Because I am not quite sure what the edges of who I am really look like, but I’m learning to go there—undiscovered territory can be wild and beautiful. I need to know I can visit some of those places and survive. Because it’s on the edges that you stretch and learn and grow.

If I had not hurt myself, and then gotten sick, and watched my training schedule completely fall apart, I might feel a little more confident. As it is, I’ve managed to hurt myself a second time. All I know at this point is that I have no idea what to expect, but I’m going forward.

But did I sign up to be this far out on the edge?

Funny how that works.

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Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The Things I Could Not Share With You

• The sound of branches knocking together on a windy day
• A robin building her nest outside our dining room window
• Rain
• The thousands of moments the light caught my eye—bending and shifting, illuminating and coloring a thousand tiny different details
• Open windows, the spring-scented wind
• The warmth of the sun
• The joy of a current read-aloud (The BFG, by Roald Dahl)
• The slowness and delicacy with which green (and yellow and pink and fuchsia and white) spread through the trees
• Every sunrise, every bud, every flower about to bloom
• The frustration of an injury, then illness (my half marathon is on Saturday. Saturday!)
• The relief of a full, deep breath (after 3+ weeks, I can finally say today that my breathing is back to normal)
• The story behind each picture
• All the imaginary conversations I had with you—all the words I wanted to pour out on you

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Sunday, April 8, 2012

And Still

Today I’m recycling a picture. I took it in April two years ago, at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo in Lincoln, Nebraska. We were there with our kids, giving them a chance to run around and take a break from an emotional visit with my grandma, who was dying. I have written before about how strongly I felt that we were in a place between worlds during that time, driving between our home and hers, moving between normal life and life-out-of-time. Facing death while the world around us was quietly exploding into life.

This white peacock struck me at the time as other-worldly, even though it was exactly something of this world. In the midst of hurt and loss, here was beauty—silent, arresting, sacred.

How much of what surrounds us is like that. The fact that anything you set your eyes on, or touch, or hear, can speak to you of something else—the fact that everything can whisper or cry out as a metaphor for something else—it is all at once soothing and heart-rending.

I wonder about myself that I think that could sound cliché.

* * *

This wordless project was at least partly an exercise in faith. Faith that I really could find something to share each day. Faith that anybody would care in the least. Faith that I would find anything to say at the end of it.

Faith, too, that finding pockets of beauty in a fallen world is not a trite exercise in denial but rather a flying into the face of darkness with complete and utter defiance.

* * *

I arrived at a grocery store once just as a person was being wheeled out on a stretcher. We passed each other in a matter of seconds—one of those things that is over before you realize what is happening. I didn’t see even if it was a man or woman, but was left only with the impression of motionlessness and gray skin. Inside, in the produce section, there was a freshly-mopped section of floor. Whatever happened there was quickly becoming invisible. And it struck me that maybe there is not even an inch of ground that we walk on all day that has not at some point in history seen the struggle between life and death.

And we go through life having no idea, most of the time, what scars we are touching.

* * *

And still the truly beautiful never ceases to be beautiful, and light never stops being light, if we can bear to keep our eyes open.

* * *

Thank you for continuing to stop by here. My readers are a small group, and I wondered if it was a mistake to do this project—if it was tiresome or silly or who knows what. I worried. I needed time to be quiet, but I did not want to stop speaking or reaching out, and this was all I could think to do. I appreciate knowing you were listening.

Happy Easter to you.

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