"The future is always beginning now" --Mark Strand

What did you want to be when you were little? How has that changed?
Oh, so embarrassing. Not a teacher, or a princess, or a mommy. I wanted to be a geologist. I think my fourth grade teacher told me that if I liked to be outside and play in the dirt, then geology was the way to go. Plus, I would make thousands of dollars.
I had a fine, fine rock collection, and loved to point out want different rocks contained. I thought I was just so smart. When my family would visit Litchfield Beach, there was a shop called Earthly Treasures (it's still there, I have to visit now for nostalgia sake) and I would stock up on (what I thought were) cool things like geodes, amethyst chunks, and fool's gold. My brothers were mortified with me, and called it The Rock Shop. They couldn't understand why I wanted to pay money for things I could dig up out of the ground.
This all means I have these strange stones packed away and kept on my bookcases--between Walden and Elizabeth Bishop poems are strange pieces of quartz and shale. Because what I really wanted to be was--
well, who really knows? I want to write somehow, but any sort of art does not come with health benefits, and one of the bitterest parts of growing up is learning the necessity of health insurance. A sad sad thing indeed.
As I got older, I realized that God gave me gifts and desires like colored thread, weaving in and out in all sorts of new patterns. I have a love for teenagers and for writing. I have a love for literature and God. I have a love for helping people and listening. These are all wound together, knotted into new pictures, new jobs, new calling. I am learning to enjoy the mystery.
As I named the alabaster, micha, and quartz in a piece of granite gravel, maybe the threads were already aligning. In a way, maybe all along I wanted to grow up to be a teacher.