JordanCornblog

Step-by-step progress.
No single step gets you there.
Each one has its place.

For much of my adult life I’ve worked, with varying degrees of success, at growing what some call a ‘Nurturing Parent’ as a substantial part of me. Lately, I’ve had some progress on that front. And all year I’ve greatly enjoyed glimpsing Lucy Barton’s somewhat similar journey in Elizabeth Strout’s Amgash series.

Anyway, here’s what came to me as I walked in the woods this morning:

My good Mommie holds
Me now, snug as a bug in
A rug. Strong, warm arms.

Americans should
Be having more sex. So are
You doing your part?

Little sparkles come
What may. Look to see them each
Day. They’re always there.

In the twilight sun
Tree after tree leans down and
Says hello to me.

Acceptance makes hard
Things smaller and lets life be-
Come my own again.

I always thought that
I needed to endure but
Acceptance frees me.

Bracing myself as
I walk home — an old habit
I no longer need.

A small argument with Flannery O’Conner and Thomas Wolfe**

Before I made my
self Hulga and frowned all day
long, my name was Joy.

** In Good Country People Hulga, daughter or Mrs. Hopewell, had been named Joy at birth but, “as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then, she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga.”

**Echoing this rather negative sentiment about life in Look Homeward Angel, Thomas Wolfe wrote: “Finally, only thirty or forty million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of the primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant, crawled back in again.”

**HOWEVER, I take heart at the image of my joyful beginning and the knowledge that I hold it, along with everything else, right here inside of me!