for gisela

i've had this thought running through my head all week:

i have this one life.

on wednesday i went to the memorial service for gisela, my friend sandy's mom. sandy is a dear friend; i have known her since i was 17 years old and a freshman in college. sandy's parents lived about 15 minutes from my parents, and she had a car and i didn't, so many of my first memories of sandy are the rides home from college on long weekends or vacations. we'd get to her house and i'd go inside, wait to get picked up by my mom or dad, and chat with her mom. it seems so surreal that those drives, those hundreds of college experiences, those brief conversations with her mom, are already half a lifetime away. 

i sat in the back of the service, holding ruby, who has recently discovered some of the capabilities of her tongue - especially when it comes to making sound. she is quite smitten with making raspberries. loudly. often. maybe even constantly. in this quiet space for grief and remembering, the distinctive sounds of a baby playing were magnified and impossible to contain. 

at first i was embarrassed and tried to shoosh her, but i realized how much her unrestrained baby sounds were holy and a gift as we collectively remembered the fullness of a woman's life. people who knew gisela best shared stories of her life - stories that i'd never heard, stories that formed a patchwork quilt of moments spanning decades.

perhaps because as i held a wriggling, noisy baby, i represented almost an exact midpoint between gisela's 69 years and ruby's 8 months, the brevity of life seemed to be a physical weight in my arms. i've been thinking a lot this month about the coming year, about who i am as a mother and artist, about how to raise children while also maintaining my identity as a maker and painter. i've been evaluating how to love and live well, how to serve others, how to have integrity in the ways i fill my days.

i don't have any easy answers for myself. i do know that we do have this one life. we have these sacred days, and they go so quickly. it hasn't been a guilt trip for me, it has been more of a gift to savor the moments of even the most frustrating day, and to appreciate the season of life that i'm in. it is so easy, especially with all of the mind-numbing ways to entertain or fill our time, to just trudge through a year. all of a sudden another year has passed without much intention or meaning. and then another year, and another. we have the capacity for so much more than just existing and surviving. (although don't get me wrong- sometimes we are in seasons of life where all we can do is just make it through today.)

we have this one life.

how will we use it?