We Call It Confusion

I just got off the phone with my cousin.  She is 9 and 1/2 months pregnant.  I love her. 

She doesn't know who is arriving.  Can you imagine that?  Really picture what it might be like to have a human living inside you?  Some mysterious guest you have helped grow in a wonderland of endometrial tissue and prolactin?  The uterus is an open space waiting to incubate heroic possibility.

On Valentine's day eve I danced with some beautiful women to some epic 80s beats.  A break dancing troupe occupied the dance floor, circling into an impressive performance of inverted acrobatics and pop and lock shoulder snaps.  We spun around the happy crowd, voguing in another fashion, reinforcing the monumental truth that really "girls just wanna have fun." 

Their handstands inspired us and we decided - when they left - to invert ourselves, going upside down in a headstand trio, touching our feet and creating a six-pointed star of space. 

"What do we do now?"  One asked.  And us other two giggled, not knowing.

Suddenly, a fourth woman ducked into the space created by our upside down shape and began dancing her ass off.  It was the perfect center to our flower.  Perfectly unexpected.  All we did was make space.

My friend Kat - she not only shares the name, but looks like me and cooks like me and enjoys making puppets (like me) - she just popped into the room with a gift.  It was a doll we had bought earlier at the Good Will.  When we found her she had a porcelain face, sewn into her soft body.  Attached like a mask, the rigid expression begged removal.  The doll sits next to me now, blank faced and beautiful.  A canvas for the myriad expressions that might touch the cranial architecture of a brown haired prairie girl.  Space, possibility.

It takes strength to make space.  It takes courage to hold it without agenda, a willingness to welcome the unknown.  Most of the time I call it confusion and try to escape it, to fix it, to plan over it. 

Lately (luckily) I find myself confused more often.  I find the strength, the courage, the curiosity to let confusion be.  Most of the time, it reveals itself as the fertile space for whatever I didn't know I always wanted to see.