Gratitude, with a confession

I'm thankful for the sunny days and blue skies we've been seeing.

I'm thankful for the season's first crocuses.

I'm thankful my kids (apparently) made it safely to their grandparents' house in Arizona. I haven't heard otherwise.

I've been doing a little art, and I'm thankful for the courage to try even though the results never come close to what I saw in my head before I started.

I'm thankful that I've been able to spend a lot of time writing lately. My husband has been cooking dinners--and he is a wonderful cook--so that I can have those extra bits of time to work on poems. Thank you!

And I confess that I'm a little nervous. For the past eight or nine months I've been exploring poetry in a different way--longer, more fragmented, or denser and metered. Or prose poems. Sometimes long and dense and metered. Big projects of aggregation, building up and taking away.

It's been really fun, but not one of those poems has been accepted. They are all out for consideration, but… So sometimes I, having always craved approval, wonder whether any of them will get published, ever. (Then I think, "That's negative energy. Be positive," and I practice being positive.)

But I know that these are the poems I want to be writing now, and on my good days, I think "Publish, shmublish." Would I want to change what I'm writing to fit some mold? Even if I thought it would work? No way.

That's where gratitude comes in again. I'm thankful for this confidence to explore what I want to explore, to write crazy new ways even if they don't make sense--or even if they aren't crazy enough.

I'm thankful for this journey.

Open the door. Open my heart.