Metaphoric Failure

It's August 31st which means that behind this window on my computer screen are open word documents sprouting kind-of-finished syllabi.

It's August 31st and 75 degrees, sun and flaking clouds, a mass of black-eyed susans waving at the boulevard in front of our house.

You're sleeping upstairs, curled around Mr. Meow, wearing a red onesie with a train puffing across the front.

The last few weeks have been so busy, such a blur, that I'll share images again:

Thisbe furiously dog paddling from the place where a white water slide dumped her to the edge of the pool, bangs pressed into a razor-straight line across her forehead, fluorescent pink suit creating its own kind of hallucinogenic light below the surface of the water.

Your right index finger, pointing.  To lights, to people, to the peach pieces you want in your mouth, to the stairs, to my nose, to the window when you want outside, outside.  Oftentimes, pointing just for the sake of pointing.  You've still got no consonant sounds, no words, so the pointing seems to be your way of marking the world, naming it through gesture.

A ramp unfolding into a dark lake, heat behind and cold ahead.

Thisbe elbowing you repeatedly as she tries to play Old MacDonald Had a Farm on the toy piano Grandma Gail and Grandpa Michael gave you for your birthday.  Each letter trapped inside a colored bubble.

Items we used to make damp wood burn: pages from Thisbe's art pad, crumpled snippets of an Ely tourist magazine, a welcome brochure from Camp Du Nord, a paper bag from the Co-op.  Fire starter, finally (thanks, Bonnie and Dan!).

The deep-throat sound you make when you push a train back and forth, the "vroom" of a corpse coming back from the dead.

The way, after standing for ten seconds on your own, you fall on your butt and promptly begin applauding yourself.

Scent of children's de-tangler in my hair and the weight of a necklace on my head ("it's a crown with golden leaves!") as I sit at Thisbe's beauty salon.  When asked where she was trained: "at the Northfield Minnesota state fair."

Cheerios filing the the tray of your stroller, Cheerios stuck to the bottom of your pants, Cheerios crushed to dust on the kitchen floor, Cheerios lining the bottom of my back pack.

Thisbe dressed in long underwear on a stage, holding up her hands as claws, roaring with a gaggle of four and five-year-olds, the lake peeled gray behind them.

Cut up canteloupe in tupperware, yogurt mixed with spinach/pear pure in tupperware, string cheese broken into bits in tupperware.  Tupperware labeled "Matteus."  A stack of diapers labeled "MJ."  A white crib with Mr. Bear inside (his ears chewed to wet, dark knobs) beside five other identical white cribs. 

Labor Day weekend feels like the longest bridge in the world.  I'd rather stay on the summer side, marking each morning with writing time, marking each afternoon with walks with you, train time at the library with iced latte in hand.  And I wish that on the far side of the bridge, Thisbe was entering kindergarten.  I thought I would feel OK with her spending another year at daycare, but I don't, not really.  I think she's ready to do the next thing--though I know if she were starting kindergarten I'd also be torn up.  You, Matteus, seem to have made the transition (to part time day care) the most effortlessly.  I'm grateful for that. 

Whether we want to be standing on the side of summer or the side of fall, Labor Day weekend feels like the longest bridge in the world.  May we have the grace to take in the view while we're here. 

I've just realized that the moral of this blog post is also the moral of "Thomas and the Big, Big Bridge." If that's not incentive to NEVER WRITE ANYTHING AGAIN, I don't know what is.  Sigh.

Summer in Segments

Summer seems to be sifting away.  It's July 21st so by the calendar, summer is only halfway gone, but for those of us who have put off doing class prep until August 1st, summer is looking decidedly shorter.

Today is the first hot day we've had in weeks.  Mostly it's been unseasonably cool, rain and clouds and wind washing through.  We've chosen to spend most of our time at home this summer, partly because Holden is closed, partly because, at eleven months, you wouldn't be a particular joy to travel with.  So the summer feels more imagistic than narrative.  When I think of the last weeks I think of...

Your two upper teeth pressing through the guns, the thin open bar of space between them.

Your bare toes, the tops dirty with grime from carpets and hard wood, now that you're beginning to crawl.

The figures of the wooden ark spread out on the carpet (anteater, peacock, the chunky elephant) and you in the midst of them while the World Cup plays on TV.  Men in a line, hands covering groins.  Men rolling on the green grass, miming pain.  The handsome former soccer players who sit behind a clean desk during the halftime break, trying to sound articulate.  The plastic wrapper of a string cheese parted, your mouth upturned for the bits Dada offers you as he watches.

Princess underwear hanging from the shower rod, from the line outside; damp princess underwear stuffed in plastic bags and sent home with your sister.

A dragonfly, briefly lighting in the middle of my chest as I pushed you in the stroller across Plum street.

Tiny cymbals in tiny hands.

A cardboard flat filled with blueberries.  A bit of bark hanging from your lip. Your sister bragging about how her bucket is way more full than mine.

Afternoon walks with you in the Ergo because your napping has been an absolute shit show.  How aware I am, as we walk, of how loud it is here in the summer.  The steady drone of cars passing, the louder gravel-growl of the motorcycles, lawnmowers ebbing and flowing, barks behind screen doors, rocks under my tennis shoes, the tapping cane of a man with Elvis sunglasses, kids yelling orders as they round the bases in Way Park, conversations drifting over porch railings.  I track each sound by the way it prompts your eyelids up again.  We move into another pocket of quiet and down they sink, that subtle shade of lavender behind the pink.  Long lashes.  Your cheek.  Mosquito bite on the bridge of your nose.

Animals in picture books with half-moons of of fake fur and fake scale and fake paw.  The tiny scratch of your fingernail across those surfaces in the dim light of 6:15am.

Your study of the holes on the child's carpenter tool box.  Working screws with primary colored heads into each open hole.  Or fitting the neon plastic shapes (orange circle, green square, pink cross) into the corresponding gaps at the top of the toy pail.

Thisbe, lying perpendicular in her bed, Minnie Mouse nightgown pulled up to reveal bug-bitten thighs and Ariel pull-up asking "Mama, what does it feel like to die?"

A hawk in the grass by the railroad tracks.  Wind ruffling its feathers.  No signs of death besides the flies crawling in its eyes.  A rabbit head on the basketball court in Way Park.  The bloody stem of the neck.

Cherries cut into bits on your white high chair tray.  Bits of banana.  Bit of bread with melted cheese.  Scrambled eggs, pale yellow on a blue plate, cut into segments, strands of steam rising.

We are lucky.  For these days of warmth.  For the time and strength to see them as they pass.

The Silver Whistle in the Throat

It's the beginning of July and unseasonably chilly.  56.  Grey clouds.  Wet patches on the pavement.  It's been a month of rain.  The Cannon River swollen over its banks, caution tape warning us off bridges, men with bows and arrows picking off carp that froth, disorientated, in the tumult.

This morning you woke at 4:15, I nursed you, and then you refused to go back to sleep, choosing to scream from 4:30 to 5:55 instead.  Midway through the scream-fest I went in to check on you, to make sure you didn't have a dirty diaper or a horn sprouting through your skull, and found you sitting up in the kalidescope light of your mobile, a mobile that you can now turn on by yourself.

You have two teeth cutting through your upper gum.  You've perfected the art of land swimming and easily navigate the space from room to room, making little squeaks of glee as you go, toes pressing into the floor and raising you up and forward.  In the last few days you've finally started to get up on your knees; you rock for a bit and then commence land swimming again.  Bananas are your food of choice, always, followed by bits of bread and cheese, other fruits, yogurt, puffs.  You'll tolerate mashed sweet potatoes only if they're spread on a banana or piece of toast first.

Yesterday we received a flyer in the mail from Rice County, the kind that tells you (with exclamation points!) which milestones to look forward to in the next few months, reminds you that you should talk to your child, instructs you not to feed him peanut butter or popcorn, and urges you not to refer to medicine as "candy."  One of the developing milestones was "begin using more words."  Which is a milestone that suggests your child already has a few words in his or her lexicon, that he or she likes to bust out a "hi" or  a "mama" or a "doggie" now and again.

What you like to bust out is a horrific, ear-piercing shriek.  It's awful.  The other day in the check-out line at Cub you shrieked and everyone within a 20-foot radius turned to look.  Your other chosen vocalization is sing-songey vowel sounds in the back of your throat.  It's quite lovely, actually.  Often you'll be sitting on the rug, happily placing plastic rings on a stick, making your little turtle dove sounds and then, all of the sudden EEEEEEEKKKKKKKK.  Daddy and I then look at each other with mild pain and disgust and rub our ears as though rubbing could ease some of the ringing within.

We've tried ignoring the shriek.  We've tried saying, firmly, "no."  We've tried offering you choices when you shriek, pretending to understand the shriek as an expression of a particular desire.  We've tried shrieking back at you.  Nothing seems to work.

And truthfully, I am getting a little tired of the whole "don't compare your children" thing.  We live by comparisons.  We love bestseller lists and super-food rankings.  We're constantly passing around graphs on Facebook that show which country has the longest maternity leave, which state has the fattest children.  We compare car seats and deck varnishes and sneakers.  Before we chose a life partner we (hopefully) put that person in an imaginary line-up with the ones who have come before.  But when it comes to children, everyone acts like comparing them is the work of the devil.  And maybe it is, but we are raised in a culture of comparison and to pretend that we should be able to shut that side of ourselves off as soon as we have a second mewling infant added to the household is total bullshit. 

Comparisons do suck a lot of the time.  They're dangerous.  But all the same, I brought up the videos yesterday of your sister at eleven months.  I watched her walk--then run--all over the house.  Watched her obediently bring me a book when asked, watched her point to pictures within the books, watched her utter a single, breathy "hi" (and then "dicka," repeatedly. No idea.)

It is very hard not to see difference as deficiency.  Not to see it as lacking.  Or slowness.  Not to see you as below the curve.  Even though I rationally know this is not the case.  Even though I know that even if you are slow or below the curve, that my call is to love you in the exact same way.  Maybe it's the strange combination of slow(er) development but the new intensity of your shrieking that has me confused.  After my former post about your lack of desire, you suddenly seem electrocuted with it, sizzling with a hunger you can only articulate with ear piercing shrieks, contained by a body that will not yet do your bidding.

I suppose thwarted desire always has that effect on a person.  As adults, thwarted desire comes out in ways that look like anger or adultery, fear or depression, violence or anxiety.  When there is a part of our inner world we can't offer to the outer world, a part of us gets mangled, injured, destroyed in trying to keep that desire contained.  Maybe your shriek is the purest version of that experience, maybe the world is filled with thousands of muffled variations of that sound.

Death by Logistics

Well, so much for blossoms and butterflies.

Yesterday was gray, rainy, and unseasonably cold.  Thisbe had a playdate in the morning but it was clear (to me, at least) that we needed a game plan for the afternoon, too.  I, for one, did not want to sit inside the house for two hours until the possibility of further diversion (via another playdate) arrived.

"Look," I said to your father, thrusting my laptop in his direction.  "It's an indoor park.  Trish says it's good."
Your father sighed and glanced briefly at the screen; then he returned to reading Redbreast, a disturbingly-named Swedish thriller.
"Should I take Thisbe and you stay home with Matteus or should we all go?"
Your father put the book down on his chest and raised his eyebrows at me. "Well," he said, "I don't really want to go.  And I don't really want to stay with Matteus."
"Do you have a better idea?" I asked, rather archly.
"Well, if we're being honest, I'd rather just have you take both of them."
(Expletives followed)

Two hours later, we were on our way home from the ironically named "Good Times Park."  We'd stopped at Leann Chin's for dinner and let your sister consume only an egg roll and fortune cookie for sustenance.  You are at the lovely stage where you pick up pieces of food and then clench them to bits in your fist before trying to deposit them in your mouth.  There were smashed bits of sweet potato smeared on your face, in your hair, and on the cleaned-only-bi-annually high chair.  The lime green, cherry, and tangerine walls combined with the MSG in the noodles and the still echoing shrieks from the indoor park worked collectively toward inspiring a mild seasickness in my gut.

Our conversation in the car turned to logistics.  Yes, the epic battle of whether it's fair to take the older child away for the weekend leaving the other parent with the baby and the duty of distributing name tags at church on her own.  Thisbe sang made up songs to you and you gurgled contemplatively, your own desire to shriek apparently diminished by your parents' ability to fill in the gaps with similar decibel levels of pissed-off.  We finally reached the Sophie's Choice of logistics in which your father asked, in a raised and steely voice, "Well, what do YOU think is more important, me taking my grandmother to a doctor's appointment or you spending time with your good friend you haven't seen for a year?"  His tone suggested that this was a rhetorical question.  I didn't take it that way.  It was quiet for a long time.

Later we hugged and talked and fell asleep by 9:30.

Today is Pentecost.  The Holy Spirit comes as wind and fire and the disciples are a cacophony of different languages, their incomprehensible uproar enough to make those outside think that they're drunk.

Oddly, our pastor told a story about a congregation he knew that had lost members because the congregation had decided to reach out to a marginalized group that the departing members didn't feel comfortable co-habitating with.  Our Pastor's point was ultimately that congregations filled with conflict and distress were bad and that congregations filled with harmony and trust were good.  And obviously, there is truth to this.

But Carroll Hinderlie, former director of Holden Village, said that the Gospel lives through controversy.  And I believe that too.  It felt strange, on a day when we celebrate the disciples' inability to understand one another, on a day we believe the Holy Spirit is possessed with tongues of fire, that we would think fondly of harmony.

Or maybe I don't want to think fondly of harmony today because sometimes marriage feels like being tiny sailboats on a wide gray sea, on good days anchored and bobbing close and on bad days drifting further apart, visible swells and invisible depths between you.

I don't mean to suggest that your father and I are on rocky ground.  (Really, we're not).  I just mean to say that today I was glad to be reminded that sometimes the Holy Spirit is a whirlwind, a tempest, a deluge, a flood. 

Pentecost is the longest season in the church year.  The other two seasons, Christmas and Easter, are intense.  Glittery and joyful and stricken and bare, filled with babies and death, angels and ghosts.  Maybe Pentecost is the longest season because it's the season of the rest of life, the parts where we have to learn to live together and talk to each other, the parts where we're commissioned with hard work, where we're expected to extend love and grace in the middle of the staid gray sea of the everyday.

Take That, Hallmark.

It's been far too long since I've written, sweet boy.  Unfortunately, I haven't written because May was such a crazy month...which means, of course, that there is much to tell.

Summer has fully arrived.  School is done, our grades our in, and the President of Estonia has come and gone (for the Olaf graduation).  We went bowling for Dada's 20th college reunion and Thisbe learned about the slippery joy of bowling shoes and the drama and glory that black lights can offer a four-year-old.  Dada and I got to dine with a group of lovely friends in honor of a book I edited and an equally large group of family members gathered to watch your sister's first dance recital.  We had our first meal of the year at the Pizza Farm and Grandma Gail introduced you to the joy of the piano (and introduced Mommy and Daddy to the names of the plants in our backyard).  Friends from Slovakia came to visit and Nanny Barb officially said good-bye (to being your weekly caretaker, at least).

Then, to top it all off, Auntie Martha gave birth to gorgeous Naomi Dorothy, a beautiful pink-skinned, dark-haired darling whose features are tiny, perfect.  Deliberately and finely drawn.  And on the day Naomi was born, the caterpillars we'd been tending for Nanny Barb hatched from their cocoons and started fanning their marvelous wings...

It is an odd feeling when the truth seems so close to a treacly Hallmark card.  But it has been this way, a little.  For a week our yard was covered in pink blossoms.  It is impossible to think in January that the day will come when the path to your car will be carpeted in petals, when your child's safety belt will click easily into place (without the burden of fifty thousand layers) and when you will go for weeks at a time without wiping a nose or sponging vomit off the floor (KNOCK ON WOOD).

And you, sweet one, you are finally learning to inch your way across the floor on your belly.  Tonight the rest of us stood in Thisbe's room and cheered you as you inch-wormed across the carpet, stopping occasionally to smile grandly.  You still don't make consonant sounds or clap, but we had a person from the Northfield public schools come out to assess you (since it was free and, it being summer and all, we had some time to kill) and it turns out you're perfectly, blissfully normal.  You've also taken to spitting your baby food back in our faces and only devouring solids that you can pick up on your own--the majority of which you then manage to drop on your lap or down the sides of your high chair where it somehow finds a way to brown and rot.  Unfortunately, you still love to shriek and still feel most comfortable clinging to your mother.

You're sleeping now.  The fan is whirring in your stuffy room and your sister is singing "Wheels on the Bus," her garage sale Princess nightgown bunched around her thighs, Dog Do her ever-patient audience.  Your father is at a Twins game with some friends.  It's the bottom of the fifth and the Twins are up, 4 to 3.  And I'm in the living room where I can see the pale sky dimming.  The cool night air is floating in the window and a few birds are still conversing. 

I know this won't last.  Not the weather or the health of ourselves and those we love, not even the good health of the earth we're living on.  I have friends who are on the other side of beauty right now, who are living through places of grief and pain, who are moving day by day because imagining an endless unfolding of time is simply too painful.  We will be there too.

But tonight I am simply full of gratitude.  Seeing tiny Naomi, as she was weighed and measured, shaking her tiny, perfectly formed appendages in the new air of our world I was reminded of you and your sister, how when Thisbe was born I wept because she was so perfect and all I could possibly do was to somehow mar that perfection with all of my failings. 

When I saw Naomi, though, I wept not out of terror for what we might do to her but out of gratitude for the gift of what she will do, what she has already done, for us. 

Mother's Day 2014: The Taste of Stolen Chicken

1. Waking up at 5:00am to your shrieks and finding, as I nursed you in the dark, the entire upper right side of your body wet from urine.  In the half chambers between sleeping and waking, trying to determine how loose your diaper was and at what bizarre angle your little penis must have been at to have achieved wetness in that location.

2. Waking at 8:00, glad to stretch and roll to my side and think at least two or three thoughts before descending into the fray.

3.  The pride on Thisbe's face as she stood in her brown fleece sleeper pajamas, gesturing with outstretched hand to the three different cards she'd made for me.  Spirals of flourescent glitter on one, a hand print on another, and a drawing of her "when she is old enough to go out on her own" looking fancy in flowing hair and crown.

4. A stainless steel mug filled with a Dunn Bros. latte that Daddy arrived with at 8:15.  The way the latte stayed warm all morning.

5. Watching you take little butt scoots across Gak and Ampa's hardwood floor.  Tracking your movement by the number of floorboards you crossed.  Three.

6. Your sister, nestled into my lap (while you slept), her pointer finger (smudged with black marker) tracking below the words as she read them: "Look, Sally, look!" or "Spot can jump. Spot can jump down."

7. Daddy entering at 10:45 with roses and words of praise about uncle John's sermon (sneaking into the State Fair, something about how Jesus is the gate, how we have to be sheep that help one another)

8. Sitting at the table with Gak and Ampa and Greg and Agnes and Michael, Big Bowl take out in front of all of us, realizing that no one had actually paid for the food (Peter thought Ricki paid over the phone--she had not).

9. The taste of stolen yellow curry chicken.

10.  A walk below the warm gray sky.  Your coos and hums floating up, the breeze catching puffs from your stroller tray and sending them flying.

11.  Gak claiming that she would NOT cook today and then setting out a fruit salad with canteloupe and pineapple and blueberries and raspberries, a coffee cake that she "just wanted" to bake three days ago, a green salad, mimosas, and bread.  In addition to the stolen food from Big Bowl.

12. A beeswax candle, violets pressed to the smooth yellow side.

13. Yehwah, Agnes's friend who Gak invited to lunch because she didn't have a mother to be with.

14. Playing with you and your sister in the late afternoon at Way park.  74 degrees and sunny skies.  Your father off buying sandwiches.  I pushed you in the swing while Thisbe jumped off the side of the slide, then the jungle gym, then the stone wall.

15. And then Thisbe said, "I'm going to ride my bike without training wheels now" so Daddy took them off.  And where, two weeks ago, she had been wobbly, certain she'd fall--today she simply got onto the bike and rode, steadily, as though something inside her had righted itself.

It is such a gift, to be a Mama to you both.  This quieter truth sometimes gets drowned out by the louder truths of exhaustion and explosive poops and whining and frustration and dirty carpets and sticky refrigerators and impatient shrieks.  Mamahood is a gift.

This weekend, we had a baby shower for Auntie Martha.  In a little book we made for her, of lullabies and blessings, I wrote for her the lyrics to the song Dumbo's Mama sings to baby Dumbo.  The song comes when the Mama has been put into elephant jail and Dumbo is feeling horribly alone.  So she sneaks her trunk though the bars of the prison and rocks him against her wrinkled grey skin.

All through the summer of 2009 and again in the summer of 2013, I sang that song to your sister and to you as I walked and walked, ("Baby mine, don't you cry / Baby mine, dry your eyes") through the heat and the waiting, ("Rest your head close to my heart") so full of desire to meet you and for our time together to begin ("Never to part / Baby of mine")

September 3rd, 2009

July 31st, 2013

The Problem with Desire

Spring has been lazy and surly this week, draping us with clouds and drizzle, scattershot snow and pane-rattling wind.  The end of the semester is in sight and we're itchy to be there.  We imagine it will be a place of sun and loosening, of gin and tonics on the back porch while Thisbe collects pine cones and weeds in a wicker basket.  Our first attempt at welcoming spring was not particularly attractive.  In my head I saw my baby giggling on the green grass while my daughter drew flowers with sidewalk chalk.  Instead I got matted brown grass, a seasonally uninspired blanket, a grumpy baby, and a daughter whose high heels and leggings made her look vaguely like a cheap hooker.  Why is she trying to balance on a rake?  I don't know.  I only know that the pictures everyone else was posting of spring on Facebook looked decidedly more attractive than our best attempts.

The best part of spring so far has been your abrupt change in personality.  You've gone from solemn to salubrious, from whiny to winsome.  You giggle and smile and sing to yourself happily for at least twenty minutes every morning.  After you go to bed at night, Daddy and I often have the kind of conversations that parents of a child can only have with one another, because they are so boring and treacly that can't be shared with others.

Me: Isn't Matteus just SO cute?
Daddy:  He is.  He's adorable.
Me: Don't you just want to gobble him up?  Don't you want to INHALE him?
Daddy: I do.  I do.

We both take sips of wine and stare into the distance and I try to convince Daddy to watch another episode of "The Good Wife."

Then yesterday we took you to your nine month appointment.

You are 18 pounds, 10 ounces; 29 inches; and in possession of a ridiculously large head.  This makes your percentiles 30%, 75%, and 92% respectively.  We were feeling particularly proud because you finally mastered rolling over this week.  You're very proud of this as well.  You sit up like a champ and are well on your way toward mastering the pincer grasp.  Also, you smile and we want to eat you up.

But as the nurse and then Doctor Amy asked us questions about your development, it became increasingly clear that you're running decidedly far behind the average on a number of counts.  You don't creep or crawl.  You don't clap.  You don't say "ma" or "ba" or "da." You don't recognize the word "no" (likely because we never tell you "no" since you can't move).  You don't clap.  The doctor thought that perhaps if you're not moving more substantially in a month we might consider taking you to a physical therapist.

It is tricky when you know in your gut that your baby is healthy, lovely, and normal but there are many outward signs that point to the contrary.  It is particularly tricky when, in your secret heart of hearts, you consider the word "average" to actually mean "primate" and "below average" to mean "protozoan."

So, rationally I know that you're doing things in your own time, that babies develop at their own rates, and that I better get over my baggage so my anxiety doesn't stunt your confidence.  But actually, as per usual, I'm freaking out a little.

Not because I'm worried that you'll never crawl.  Maybe you won't.  Who cares.  Not because I'm worried you'll never walk or talk.  You will.  No doubt.  I think my real worry stems from the fact that the reason you haven't done these things doesn't have anything to do with capability but with desire.

Your sister has no issues with desire.  Sometimes I think she is ONLY desire, covered with a thin sheen of skin and Hello Kitty paraphernalia.  Your father and I, as different as we are, both have a keen sense of our own desires (professional, personal, spiritual, sexual).  But I fear that you, sweet boy, as the only second born in our family, might not be built in the same way.  You have been more content to watch than to act, to sit than to creep, to coo than to talk.

One of the cardinal sins of writing fiction is creating a protagonist who doesn't want anything.  Someone who observes but is impotent about action.  Prufrock for 500 pages.  As parents, we can teach you a great many things: how to brush your teeth and how to practice an instrument until your fingers bleed, the language needed for an apology and the tools needed to change an electrical socket.  We can model a strong work ethic and abundant compassion.  But I'm not certain that we can make you WANT.  I'm not sure that one person can put desire in another person's heart (unless one person is the smoking hot romantic ideal of the other).

I know that an over-abundance of desire can lead to unsavory things; it's not that I want you to be just like us.  It's that I hope you find things in your life, even if they're few and far between, to want so much that you're willing to work, HARD, to obtain those things.  Maybe pulling yourself over six inches of carpet or the articulation of consonant sounds or the slapping of your hands together are not particularly worthy goals.  But I pray that there will be things--ideas or people, problems or images, words or stories that fill you with desire, that will turn the engine of your heart over and over until you have no choice but to go.