Discovering Morning

ah, what a strange thing it is. the fluctuations that a person continues to endure as life itself continues. is life a separate entity or is it something i call my own? i feel like i can only claim life as being mine when i am able to find a better sense of self. and here is what David Foster Wallace stated, " the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle...our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."  and the amount of comfort i find in this statement is parallel to my terror. all of life is suffering. 

the acorn that weighted my pocket had, all that day, been on my mind. i kept it safe and secret with the intention of finding a final resting place for the little fruit so as to allow for ideal circumstances of growth. that morning i had found the punctured acorn. it was several feet astray from the canopy of its parent tree. it seemingly had fallen the hardest and the fastest at a very young age, so small it was. and it had to have just popped out of its shell because its cap was fitted crookedly at its top. mother had sent me out into the yard to hunt the season's last blackberries upon the blackberry bush that intrusively reached its branches across our farthest fence out behind the house. a fence that stopped abruptly once it reached the woods as if it expected the tree line to take over the fence's duty of protection. and the oak tree, the largest, had always released the most fascinating acorns that i lobbied into my pockets to later be stored in the drawer of my bure...

"It is never too late to gain appreciation for all you have in your life." I was telling Katherine, my hometown neighbor, about how her burgeoning adulthood was going to bring about many realizations. Few she would be able to actually comprehend. Katherine was always a very concerned individual. During my teen years, when she would have been under the age of ten, I became her curiosity confidante. Why was this thing like this? And when boys do so and so, what does that mean? Is there any real reason as to why our parents act this way or otherwise? The questions became more significant as she grew in age. And during my teen years, I felt a certain amount of pride in Katherine seeking my counsel rather than that of her own older sisters'. What I learned through the years though, is that little Katherine never acted upon my words of advice. Rather, she responded as would her peers, or she continued as she would have before I shared my thoughts on this or that matter. I r...